Page:The Tragic Drama of the Greeks (1896).djvu/24

12 in features. The hair is confined with a female head-band, instead of a crown of ivy; the dress consists of a woman's flowing garment; the attitude is lively and unconstrained. This androgynous representation of the deity no doubt came from Asia Minor, being brought into Greece at a later date than the original introduction of the Dionysiac worship. It was apparently adopted by Aeschylus in his Lycurgeia, where the half-male half-female appearance of the god, with his 'sword in one hand, and his looking-glass in the other,' excites the ridicule of Lycurgus.

The final class of statue, which eventually prevailed over the others, represented Dionysus as a handsome and beardless youth, such as he is described in the Homeric hymns, where this altered conception of his figure and appearance occurs for the first time. The new type was fashioned into perfect artistic form by Praxiteles, whose famous Dionysus became the model of a whole series of similar sculptures, of which numerous specimens are to be found in the various museums. In these works (fig. 2) the god is depicted in the full bloom of youthful beauty. His face, with its soft and slightly effeminate features, has a pensive, half-bewildered half-inspired expression, emblematic of the influence of the god of wine and poetry. The interval between this graceful and idealised creation and the rude images of antiquity is significant of the intellectual and artistic progress of the Athenians, and offers an exact parallel to that contemporary development which transformed