Bacchus: A Biography

"The story of the God Bacchus, also known as Dionysos, begins on the banks of the River Asopos at Thebes, where Zeus, all-seeing king of the gods, caught sight of the beautiful mortal Semele and vowed to make her his. The baby Bacchus was the result of their brief affair, delivered, it is said, from a womb fashioned in his father's thigh and with tiny horns protruding from his head." "Thus a strange beginning was to lead to even stranger tales, passed down through generations of dramatists, poets, story-tellers, and historians, until today they may seem to be mere myths from a long-ago world. Pieced together here, they tell of Bacchus's youth spent on Mount Nysa among the nymphs and Satyrs: of his relentless pursuit by the goddess Hera, consumed with fury at her husband Zeus's waywardness; of Bacchus's victory over India and other lands while still a mortal; and of his many love affairs, most famously with Ariadne, whom he rescued from the shores of Naxos after her cruel abandonment by Theseus." But Bacchus is perhaps best remembered for his gift to humanity of wine. With it he brought pleasure, but also savagery and death - witness the tragedy of Pentheus, torn apart at the hands of his own mother and her fellow Maenads in the midst of a Bacchic frenzy. With many other such intriguing episodes drawn from an astonishing range of sources - even including obscure and fragmentary records detailing the very songs chanted by initiates at such secret rites - this biography brings the strangely powerful wine god to life as never before.