Dionysos Mystes" by G

"Dionysos Mystes" by G. Rizzo; Zagreus, Studi sull' Orfismo by V. Macchioro Review by: E. Douglas van Buren The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 9 (1919), pp. 221-225 Published by: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/296011 . Accessed: 18/06/2014 02:54 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Roman Studies. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 02:54:30 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NOTICES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS. 221 in the old system was that in its exclusive cult of memory it starved thought to death; the result of all the Virgilian paraphrasing, all the dictiones ethicae and artificial dis- putations, had been an extraordinary dearth of men able to concentrate on any real or new problem. The Church, by forcing men to think, restored a living interest in thought. It also brought history back into an honest connexion with fact; the first ecclesiastical chronicles were dull, but they were history, and neither mythology nor panegyric. There were other respects in which the old academic teaching was humanized. The monastic training brought handicrafts within the sphere of education. This probably helped forward an appreciation of art by the decoration of church buildings with mosaics and frescoes, and by the illumination of books, much as the development of choirs was good for music. The merit of the wide views held by the greater churchmen was the higher in that the adoption of so much from pagan culture was not carried without a struggle. In the end the men of broader minds, a Jerome, an Augustine, an Ennodius, a Hilary of Poitiers triumphed; but most centuries had their Tertullians and their Martins ready to declare the way to polite learning the broad path to damnation. The Church, by using humanism in the service of its ' forwardideals,' drew it from the slough of retrospection, and set it on the path, rough but firm, along which progress in the barbariankingdoms was alone possible. By doing this the monastic schools redeemed much of their own seeming barbarism; the humanities owe more than is commonly acknowledged to mediaeval monkish Latin. Many subjects are discussed in these pages which can here receive no more than a bare mention: the extent to which the Visigoths and Franks were affected by Roman culture ; the education of women ; discipline in schools; the authors read and the teaching of Greek; the Celtic background in the Gauls ; the favourable position of the province in the fourth and fifth centuries, which gave it a leading place in the Roman system. All these things the reader will find sufficiently treated within the limits per- mitted in a small volume. The work of a Rhodes scholar now on the teaching staff of the University of Capetown, the book is one among many signs of the benefits conferred by the Rhodes Trust on the higher education of the empire. " DIONYSOS MYSTES " (in Mem. Accad. arch. Napoli, iii, I918). By G. Rizzo. pp. 39-102. ZAGREUS, STUDI SULL' ORFISMO. By V. MACCHIORO.pp. 269. Bari, Laterza, I920. Price It. lire i6.50. The paintings of the Villa Item at Pompeii appear to furnish endless material for discussion. They were first made known to readers of this Journal by Miss Mudie-Cooke (7.R.S. iii, I913, pp. 157-174, pl. viii-xiv) whose valuable observations pointed out the line of investigation which other scholars have since carried further with remarkable results. Professor Rizzo believes that these pictures illustrate the education of Dionysos and depict him especially as the first, the typical initiate. To prove this interpretation he draws upon a vast store of literary and figurative material, relying largely upon the description furnished by Nonnus, amplified by representationson gems, vases and reliefs. Thus in the first scenes Mystis herself reveals ra &eLKv/4ceva to the young Dionysos; the threads or narrow ribbons hanging from the fingers of the woman in B must be the woollen K&6KLVOL rTzoVes, symbolical of purification. Rizzo considers that the winged figure is about to chastise the kneeling woman who sacrilegiously uncovers the liknon and that the scene in F is quite separate from E. The last three panels G, H, I are mere genre scenes, the usual quiet close to the passion and movement of a Greek drama. Professor Macchioro, on the contrary, thinks one should begin with these scenes, the first of a series illustrating the whole sequence of rites of the Lesser Mysteries performed at Agrae as an introduction to the Greater Mysteries at Eleusis. He points out that if one enters straight from room I6 (see his plan) by the small door in the corner, the first scene which greets the eye is that on the wall opposite, G of Rizzo's enumeration: the This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 02:54:30 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 222 NOTICES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS. beginning of a chain linked together in almost every instance by a figure on the extreme right who does not participate in the action depicted within the same panel but moves or looks towards the scene which comes next in order. The argument is as follows: the whole cycle tells the story of one woman, she who in G is robed as the mystic bride, for she wears the sindone, and the myrtle with which many of the figures are crowned was a nuptial plant; she approaches the reading child in A; passes on to B carrying a dish; flees thence in terror at what she sees or hears in D; uncovers the liknon in E; hides her face in the lap of the priestess in F and finally dances as a Bacchant. It is therefore a human story, and all the acts and facts are human; but it is presented as a sacred drama, and the Silenoi and Satyrs are merely actors disguised in these roles. The only non-human beings are Dionysos and Kore, conceived as invisibly watching the mime which is performed before them. An important detail is the plinth found in almost all these scenes, strange in shape and without architectonic or decorative elements. These plinths are frequent in Eleusinian and Dionysiac rites, and the single plinth must derive from the ayXac-7ro5 precpa of Demeter, probably a stone used from the earliest times with magic intent, which served as thronosin the initiation ceremonies of which the p6povwoLwas the first. The double plinth-upon which sits the Seilenos in D and the woman in F-was Dionysiac, as is shown by the numerous vase paintings where Satyrs sit upon a double plinth (Reinach, Rep. Vases ii, p. 201, 2; p. 303, I and 5; Macchioro, figs. 8-12). The Andania inscription (I.G. v. I390) teaches us that the headdress worn by the seated woman in B and the kneeling figure in E is the ritual 7rZXos. B shows the agapewhich precedes the initiation; C signifies the communion or rebirth of Zagreus: Euripides in the Bacchae, 699 ff., describes such a scene. The Satyr and Satyriska are seated upon a plinth and she is intent upon suckling a fawn which here symbolises the child Dionysos attracted by the sound of the mystic syrinx, thus typifying by an allegory the rebirth of the initiate. In D is a scene of katoptromancy, not lekanomancy, for the bowl is white to denote silver, like a poculum in shape, similar to those mirrors dedicated in the temple at Smyrna (Plin. N.H. xxxiii, I29). A mirror was often used to foretell the future, but Nonnus (Dion. xxiv, 129 ff. ed. Koechly) relates that Dionysos was slain by the Titans while gazing in the mirror at his distorted face-obviously a concave mirror, the monstrificum of Pliny. Here the Satyr sees, not himself, but the mask shown in Dionysiac scenes upon altars, etc., as a sign that the god was present. The Seilenos who holds the bowl repeats the message to the terrified maiden, and this annunciation is the most important of the ceremonies, for by its means the initiate becomes conscious of her destiny. The youth approaches the magic mirror in the expectation of the supernatural and beholds-not himself-but a Seilenic mask which gazes at him strangely. He believes he is about to be transformed into the Seilenos, that he is no longer man but god. The neophyte kneels before the winged figure in E and by her action in uncovering the liknon implores the sacred union with the god which, however, can only be obtained by suffering, and the rod falls upon the back of the initiate who is the same person, resigned to her fate. Whosoever was flagellated in the mysteries of Zagreus died like him, and was, like him, reborn. The winged divinity is Telete herself, daughter of Dionysos and Nikaia, per- sonification of the mystic ceremonies and following of Dionysos (Nonnus, Dion.

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