Dionysos Slain

Dionysos Slain (1979) by Marcel Detienne concerns the enigmatic Orphic myth in which Titans slaughter and consume the child god Dionysos. However, you have to power through the first half of the book before you actually get any discussion of this fascinating myth, although I found that the analysis of the myth and its role in a religious movement that challenged the Ancient Greek state system of sacrifice was worth the wait. The first chapter is occupied by a long mediation on structuralism that mostly went over my head, as well as a somewhat eye-roll inducing paean to Ancient Greek exceptionalism (the chapter is entitled “The Greeks Aren’t Like the Others”), while the second chapter is a long discussion of the hunt in Greek myth and society that, while not uninteresting, is not what I was looking for in this book. It may be worth skipping directly to chapter three, when Detienne begins to discuss the slaying of Dionysos in earnest. I was first interested in this odd myth due to its potential influence on Christianity, as it concerns the death, consumption, and resurrection of Dionysos, who is both a god and the son of a god. The book doesn’t have any more than a passing mention of that connection here. However, I ultimately found Detienne’s discussion of the four anti-state religious and cultural movements that emerged in Ancient Greece—Pythagoreanism, Orphism, Dionysiac religion, and Cynicism—to be even more intriguing. For example, while I only knew Pythagoreans as quirky vegetarians, Detienne convincingly argues that their vegetarianism was a subversive rejection of the state-run system of animal sacrifices, and thus a rebellion against the politicoreligious system in which the state controlled people’s relationship with the divine. Detienne does make some conclusions without clearly showing his work, and the language can become unnecessarily flowery, especially in the first chapter. But if you want to know about the slaying of Dionysos, Orphism, or rebellions against state-controlled Ancient Greek religion, definitely check out (the second half of) Dionysos Slain.

The accompanying image is © The Trustees of the British Museum, released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. The child Bacchus (the Roman counterpart of Dionysos) is depicted on this c.140-160 CE sarcophagus.

The child Bacchus (the Roman counterpart of Dionysos) is depicted holding a bunch of grapes and falling back drunkenly on this c.140-160 CE sarcophagus.