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The women’s rites of Dionysus were ecstatic spiritual experiences that went well beyond
the confines of state religion and were viewed with suspicion by the male religious estab-
lishment. The participants were known as Maenads (mainades or “mad women”), suggest-
ing strong masculine disapproval (Figure 7.7). Little is known about their activities, but
the wearing of animal skins, the use of wands or thyrsoi (staffs tipped with pine cones),
ritual chants, and “frenzied dancing to the music of drums and flutes” were probably typi-
cal elements.^34 In contrast to the masculine rites of Dionysus, little drinking seems to have
occurred during the women’s Dionysian rites. Symbolic sexuality in the form of a sacred
marriage was a part of the Athenian Anthesteria, and, in some Dionysian festivals attended
by both men and women, phallus- shaped objects were carried in street processions. For men
and for women, the rites of Dionysus afforded a socially acceptable release from the oppres-
sive restrictions of everyday life.
Just as Demeter was said to have brought grain cultivation to the Greeks, Dionysus was
credited with teaching the Greeks the art of wine- making. According to the poet Nonnus,
Dionysus fell in love with a beautiful satyr youth named Ampelos. Ampelos was killed when
the bull he was riding was stung by a gadfly, but the Fates transformed him into a grape
vine, from which Dionysus is said to have squeezed the first wine. In Ovid’s version of the
myth, Ampelos was killed when he fell from an elm tree while attempting to pick grapes that
had grown on its branches.^35 Ampelos thus belongs to that class of minor dying young male
vegetation deities who avoid the Underworld by being transformed into flowers or fruits.
Ampelos’s identity as an immature, feminized boy is suggested both by his pederastic rela-
tionship with Dionysus and by his unheroic death caused by falling either from a bull or
a tree.Figure 7.7 Offerings made before the image of Dionysus: Attic vase from Campania, fifth
century bce.
From The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.