Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/38

 20 THE CONNECTED WORSHIP OF DIONYSUS, Venetian Doge annually married the sea, and she alone was ad- mitted to gaze on the mysterious emblems of the god's worship, on which the welfare of the State was supposed to depend, namely, the sacred serpent and the Phallus It is impossible not to recog- nize in this usage some connexion with the story of Theseus and his Cretan expedition. For Ariadne, whom the Athenian hero carries away from Crete and leaves at Naxos, becomes the bride of Dionysus. And the fourteen victims of the Minotaur reappear in the fourteen yepaipat, and in the noble youths and maidens sacri- ficed to the sacred serpent of Bacchus'^. As Semele represents the earth ^, Dionysus appears not only as her son, but also as her hus- band; for in his original form he is the main representative of the fructifying power of heaven. These oscillations in the persons of the sacred allegory need not create any difficulty, for the free play of fancy has combined and recombined the elements of the picture, like the changing figures of a kaleidoscope. The forms of elementary worship, in which the powers of the sky and earth were personified, and which we have thus traced from their Semitic origin, were established among the Pelasgian tribes of Greece long before the epoch called the return of the Heracleids, which marks the establishment of a Dorian, or purely Hellenic, race in the country which we call by their generic name. According to the ethnographic results which we adopt as most probable*, the Dorians or Hellenes, properly so styled, were ultimately the same race as the Persians. And they had from the earliest times a sun-god of a very different character from that of the Semitic tribes. The Ormuzd of the Persians was a god of light and purity, an archer-god, the giver of victory and empire, the charioteer of heaven, or the rider of the heavenly steed ^; and the Apollo of the Dorians possessed many of these attri- butes. But although, as an essentially warlike people, and averse from agricultural employments, which they considered the proper occupation of those whom they had conquered with the spear®, ^ Gerhard, Myth. 450, i. ^ Id. Anthester. notes 43, 44. ^ "Semele denotes the ground, not only according to Diodorus, lii. 61, but also according to the certain derivation of the name, as defx^Xrj, O^ixedXou (of. rjvde/Ji^dXios) ; Welcker, Gotterlehre, i. p. 536." Gerhard, Anthest. note 96. ^ Varroniann^, p. 61, ed. 3. ^ See the spirited drinking song by Hybrias, the Cretan, Athen. p. 695 F, and cf.
 * New Cratylus, § 92. Compare Gladstone, Homeric Studies, i. pp. 545 sqq.