Lecture ten. Hermes and Dionysos.
Zeus’s two youngest sons are Hermes and Dionysos. Hermes is the son of a minor goddess, Maia, and Dionysos is the son of a human woman, Semele.
- Hermes is often identified simply as the “messenger of the gods,” a description that does not do him justice.
- Like his siblings Apollo and Artemis, Hermes presides over a group of characteristics that at first glance seem unconnected. He is the patron god of messengers, heralds, merchants, thieves, beggars, travelers, and roads; cattle and cattle-herders; liars and tricksters. In addition, he is the god who conducts the souls of the dead to Tartaros.
- Hermes is often described as a god of boundaries and transitions.
- Another way of looking at him is to see him as the god of exchange and commerce.
The Homeric Hymn to Hermes, which narrates his birth story, supports the idea that Hermes is a god of exchange.
- The first thing the newborn god does is create a lyre out of a tortoise shell. This he later barters to Apollo in exchange of Apollo’s cattle.
- If we view Hermes as primarily a god of exchange, then the association with both merchants and thieves makes sense.
- His association with cattle also makes sense, because cattle are primary means of determining wealth.
- His association with messengers and heralds can be explained in two ways.
- Messengers and heralds preside over the exchange of information, which is a logical development from the exchange of goods.
- Messengers and heralds often perform other tasks having to do with the exchange of goods.
- Even his role as Psychompos, or Guide of Souls, makes sense under the rubric of exchange. The souls of the dead belong to Hades and are described as his wealth; thus, Hermes presides over another sort of exchange, from the realm of Zeus to that of Hades.
- In the Hymn, Hermes is clearly a trickster figure, who is clever, manipulative, and very good at speech. These traits, too, fit well with his role as god of exchange.
Hermes was also associated with herms, pillars that stood in the marketplace, in front of private houses, and at crossroads. This reflects his aspect as a god of boundaries.
- Hermes’s association with the herm is probably the oldest element of the god’s essential character.
- “Herm” originally meant simply “pile of stones”; the pillar gave its name to the god, not the other way around.
- Hermes very likely began as a personification of these marker-stones.
- Herms were pillars topped with the head and featuring an erect phallus.
- This is unique among Greek statues of their gods, which were usually fully anthropomorphic.
- The erect phallus is something of a puzzle. It is most obvious function would be to symbolize fertility, but this is not an aspect of hermes.
- The pillars are often describes as apostrophic, or frightening away evil spirits, but this leaves unanswered the question of why the phallus should serve that function.
- Burkert suggest suggests that this representation of Hermes has its origin in primate behavior; in certain monkey species, males who guard the group sit facing outward, with erect phalluses.
- Whatever the origin of the herms, they were important elements of public religion; defacing a herm was a serious offense in Athens.
Zeus had one more important son, Dionysos. He is a complex god whose domains include fertility of plants, wine, frenzy, irrationality, and drama.
- As a god of plant fertility, Dionysos complements Demeter.
- Demeter’s domain is grain, specially the controlled growth of grain in agriculture.
- Dionysos’s domain is the growth of fruitful, moist plants, such as grapes and figs, and the rapidly growing, luxuriant plants, such as ivy.
- Dionysos is associated with madeness, frenzy, and irrationality.
- In this aspect, he is directly opposed to Apollo. This opposition is shown in myth by the fact that Apollo leaves Delphi during the winter months each year and Dionysos takes up residence there.
- In The birth of tragedy, Friedrich Nietzshe identified the “Dionysian” and the “Apollonian” as the two main strands of Greek thought, constantly in tension with one another.
- Dionysos’s connection with frenzy is presented in myth as his possession of his followers; under his influence, they do things completely at odds with their usual personalities.
- In myth, Dionysos’s male followers are Satyrs, creatures who blend human and animal characteristics.
- His mythic female followers are the Maenads, women constantly under his influence and gifted with exceptional abilities, who rip animals apart and eat their flesh raw. Actual worship of him, so far as we know, did not include such behavior.
- The most common definition of Dionysos is “god of wine”. His association with wine unites his associations with growing plants and with irrationality and frenzy.
- Dionysos is also the patron god of theatre, though the exact reason for his connection with drama is still a matter of scholarly debate,.
- Tragedy and comedy were both preformed at festivals in homor of Dionysos.
- One theory is that tragedy and comedy both developed out of rituals in honor of Dionysos. However, the surviving plays contain little evidence of such ritual origin.
- We can say that a god whose domains include possession and behavior inconsistent with one’s normal character is appropriate for a theatrical tradition in which actors were masked.
Many aspects of Dionysos are unusual or even unique among the Olympian gods. The first such aspect is his birth from a human mother.
- Dionysos’s mother was Semele, princess of Thebes, who had an affair with Zeus.
- Hera was jealous and decided to destroy Semele.
- Hera visits Semele disguised as her old nanny.
- Hera suggests that Semele’s lover is simply a man claiming to be Zeus.
- She suggests that Semele should induce him to promise to do whatever she asks, then ask to see him as he appears to Hera.
- Semele follows her advice. Zeus reveals his true form to her, and Semele is incinerated.
- Zeus snatches the infant Dionysos from Semele’s womb and implants him in his own thigh.
- Dionyosos is later born from Zeu’s thigh, thus receiving his epithet “twice-born”
- Dioysos apparently gains his immortal status from his incubation in Zeus’s body.
Dionysos and his worship seems somehow less “given” in Greek myth than those of any other god; there are several sotries of people resisting his worship and denying his divinity. The most important of these concerns his cousion Pentheus, king of Thebes.
- Semele’s sisters did not believe that their sister could have been the mother of a god.
- In Euripides’s Bacchae, Dionysos returned to Thebes as an adult, disguised as a human priest. He had two purposes to accomplish there.
- He wanted to punish his disbelieving relatives.
- He wanted to establish his religion in Greece.
- His first step is to drive the Theban women mad.
- Pentheus, king of Thebes and Dionysos’s first cousin, refuses to accept this new god.
- His punishment is to be torn to pieces by his own mother and aunts, who think that he is a mountain lion.
- Dionysos thus proves both his power and his divinity.
Scholars used to believe that all these aspects of Dionysos’s myth, his unusual ancestry, the resistance to his worship, his general unruliness were evidence that he was, in fact, a late importation into Greece from Asia Minor.
- Evidence now shows that Dionysos was worshipped in Greece as early as most of the other Olympic gods; he is not a late arrival.
- The questions of why Dionysos is so different and why he is represented in myth as a latecomer to the pantheon are left open.
- Some scholars think that the representation of Dionysos as a latecomer reflects the Greeks’ own discomfort with and distrust of irrationality and frenzy.
- Another possibility is that Dionysos’s association with young, verdant, growing things carries over into his myth as the idea that he himself is young, i.e., recent.