Note 56.1 — Chapter III · THE SECOND PERIOD, 900-500 B.C.

Introduction of worship of Dionysos.—As early as the tenth century B.C., and probably earlier, a new religion with a new and imposing divinity was intruding itself into Hellenic lands from Thrace and Macedonia.56.1 Dionysos and the Thracian ritual-legend of Lykourgos are known to Homer; but the poems suggest that he was not yet definitely received into the Hellenic pantheon. Yet there are reasons for believing that Bœotia had received the alien worship in the ‘Minyan’ epoch, before the incoming of the ‘Boiotoi’; and Attica before the Ionic emigration; while in the Peloponnese the Argive legend associates the advent of the god with the names of Perseus and the Prœtid dynasty. In spite of local opposition and its natural antagonism to the nascent spirit of Hellenism, which was now tending to express itself in certain definite and orderly forms of mood, thought and feeling, the new religion won its way victoriously, taking Thebes for its Hellenic metropolis, and some time afterwards securing its position at Delphi, where the priesthood and the Apolline oracle become its eager champions. It was distinguished from the traditional Hellenic in regard to its idea of divine personality, its ritual and its psychic influence, that is to say, the mood that it evoked in the votary. In the first place, the figure of Dionysos belonged indeed to personal theism, certainly in Hellenic cult and probably in the Thracian; but he was less sharply defined as a concrete individual than was, for instance, Apollo or Athena; he was vaguer in outline, a changeful power conceived more in accordance with daimonistic, later with pantheistic thought, incarnate in many animal-shapes and operative in the life-processes of the vegetative world; and an atmosphere of nature-magic accompanied him.