Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/40

22, but that they at first consisted only of the two branches of the family of Ægimius, the Dy manes and the Pamphylians, and that the Heracleids were not till afterwards incorporated among them. However this may be, the fact is certain ; there were two leading divinities in the Dorian religion. Now in the elementary worship of the Pelasgians and Achseans there were also two divinities similarly related. These were the Sun and the Moon, worshipped under the related names of Helios and Selene, and by the Pelasgian old inhabitants of Italy, as well under appellations connected with the Greek, as under the names of Janus or Dianus, and Diana. In Greece, however, the original denominations of these divinities fell into disuse at an early period, and were rather employed to designate the natural objects themselves than the celestial powers whom they were supposed to typify; and Dionysus or Bacchus was adopted as a new name for the sun-god, and Deo or Demeter for the goddess of the Moon. These divinities, as we have seen above, were Phoenician importations; and, connected as they were in many of their attributes with the old elementary worship of the Pelasgians, they soon established themselves as constituent parts of that worship, and were at length blended and confused with the gods of the country. For Dionysus was the wine-god, and Deo the fertile earth from which the vine sprang up. How natural, then, was the transition from the god who gave wine to mortals, to the Sun to whose influence its growth was mainly owing! But if he ascended from earth to heaven, it was necessary that his sister deity should go with him; and as his bride Ariadne shone among the stars, so might Demeter, Thyone, or Semele, his mother, sister, or wife, be also translated to the Moon, and rule amid the lights of night. Indeed, Bacchus himself is sometimes represented as a night-god, and in Sophocles he is invoked as the choragus, or choir-leader, of the