Apollo (called Apollo by Romans also, often called the Far-darter or far-shooter, from his use of arrows as weapons, and the "Pythian one", from his killing of the dragon/snake Pytho; also often referred to as "Phoebus Apollo" or simply "Phoebus")

Attributes: cithara or lyre, the bow, the laurel wreath, sometimes the tripod (used by the priestess at Delphi) and the fawn; often represented together with his sister Artemis

Iconography

Apollo and Artemis: Niobid Painter, ca. 460-450 B.C. (bow, laurel)

Artemis, Apollo, and Hermes: Barclay Painter, ca. 450-440 B.C. (lyre, laurel)

Apollo of Piombino: Late Archaic bronze, ca. 480 B.C.

More images of Apollo (from the University of Victoria)

Characteristics of Apollo

1. sun (Apollo Helios)
2. sickness (esp. sickness involving a high fever)
3. artistic creation (the Muses: inspired poetry, music, thought, and much of the finer aspects of "culture")
4. prophecy (the "voice of Zeus"):
• oracles at Delphi and Delos helped to give the Greeks a sense of shared identity (e.g. atonement not revenge for murder, a Delphic decree that was basic to the sense of a Greek morality different from the morality of neighboring peoples)
• prophecy given in poetic form, in riddles: divine wisdom is a riddling wisdom, "higher" than our human wisdom, often hard for us to understand

Light: powerful divine light (refined, brilliant): brilliance, purity, order, morality, wisdom; to be sure, within the cult is a mantic (inspired, "mad") seer, the "Pythian" priestess at Delphi, but that too is a non-madness in its madness, for the madness is strictly controlled by the god, and the mantic offerings -- the poetic, riddling prophecy -- serves rational ends

Dionysus (or Bacchus, called Bacchus or Liber by the Romans)

Attributes: drinking vessel, ivy wreath, grape (or ivy) vines, the thyrsus (a long fennel stalk wound with ivy leaves and topped with a large pine cone), long eastern-style locks and beard; usually accompanied by his followers, the Bacchantes / Maenads (female) and/or the satyrs / Sileni (males with goat features & horse tails)

Iconography

Dionysus: the eery face of the god. Red-figure amphora ca. 525 B.C.

Dionysus on a ship. Exekias painter, ca. 540 B.C.

Dionysus in the beginning. Alkimachus painter, ca. 460 B.C.

Dionysus and Ariadne. With sons Oinopion and Staphylos. Black figure amphora, ca. 525 B.C.

Dionysus with his followers, on a ship. Black figure amphora, ca. 510 B.C.

Dionysus with 2 dancing Maenads. Amasis painter. ca. 530 B.C.

The Sileni boogie down. Amasis painter. ca. 525 B.C.

Dionysus with satyr. ca. 480 B.C.

Other images of Dionysus, from the Univ. of Victoria.

Apollo and Dionysus

Frederich Nietzsche first identified the opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian as quintessential to classical Greek thought

• Apollo: order, harmony, individualism, rational
• Dionysus: disorder, rampant group experience, irrational
• But, as Nietzsche understood, this opposition is a way of describing a totality, a way of defining the opposites -- opposites which exist TOGETHER, uneasily, but together nonetheless -- in the Greek culture and person

Who is Dionysus?

Homeric Hymn to Dionysus (7th c. B.C.): a strange image, haunting, eery: Powell. p. 252. D. is a god who (1) comes among men (he does not "shoot from afar" like Apollo), and (2) causes weird things to happen

Dionysus brings us the wine: the "god of many joys" (polygethes), the "giver of riches", the "benefactor". Pindar (5th c. lyric poet): "the soul grows great, overcome by the arrow of the vine."

The discovery of wine: a dark myth. Ikarios - neighbors - now one, now another falls and collapses - villagers beat him to death - body in a well - Erigone (daughter) finds him and then hangs herself

Story of Dionysus' birth: Semele, thunderbolt, thigh: born from death

Dionysiac cult: Compare Demeter: Dionysus also has mysteries, initiates, etc. He like Demeter is a fertility god. But unlike the sedate & matronly goddess of the dry grain, whose followers are initiated into the blessings of the afterlife through a vision of rebirth by death as symbolized in the seeds of grain. For Dionysus is the god of wet fertility (wine, blood, milk, honey, semen). City Dionysia: procession of young maidens carrying a huge statue of a phallos.

The "woman-maddening" god (Dionysius Eirophiotes): wine, dancing, music, s.t. sex

sparagmos: the tearing apart of a live animal (goat)

homophagia: the eating of the raw flesh, often thought of as the "eating of the god" [later, wine and bread are substituted!]

inversion festivals (e.g. the Roman Saturnalia): oppression of women in antiquity: release valve for the under classes, an opportunity, within a limited time and in a controlled context, for the women to "run wild" on the mountains: an intoxicated time of license, a controlled riot

Dionysus and inversion

birth of Dionysus: destruction yields creation

Agave and Pentheus: mother's role is its terrible opposite

Women act like men (fighting, defeating with the thyrsus men armed with iron), and men act like (or at least dress like) women

Dionysus among and even IN US: wine is something we ingest

enthousiasmos ("having the god in us", compare "enthusiasm": en="in", thou="god", compare "theo" in theology)

ecstasis ("standing outside of ourselves", compare ecstasy): an important aspect of the GROUP experience

Dionysian ecstasy is a mass phenomenon and spreads almost infectiously. This is expressed mythically by the fact that the god is always surrounded by his swarm of followers. Everyone who surrenders to this god must risk abandoning his everyday identity and becoming mad: both god and follower can be called Bacchus (!)

Dionysus brings to the fore (when he is "in us" and causes us to "stand outside ourselves" with the group) the irrational side of our nature, unlike Apollo who stands aloof as a symbol of the higher, refined cultivation to which we mere mortals can only aspire

But what is essential, and quintessentially Greek, is that these two sides -- both the Rational and the Irrational, the Apollonian and the Dionysian -- are not something that defines now one person, now another: rather they BOTH exist with us all, and it is the god that brings to the fore now the part that delights in Homer, and now the part that delights in ripping live goats apart.

Dionysus and the Bacchae of Euripides

The play clearly at times shows an interest in exposing the absurdity of the Bacchic madness, even as it also captures -- vividly! -- the allure of running to the mountains, of yielding to that power, the dangerous power of the irrational that lurks within all of us.