Dionysus of the Vine: Vintage, New Wine and the Feast of Flowers

In September the lanes of a wine village smell of crushed fruit and wasps. Baskets come in from the terraces on shoulders and on mules, and in the old stone treading floor, the patitiri, people climb in barefoot and tread until their legs are purple to the knee. Homer put a scene very like it on the shield of Achilles: young men and girls carrying sweet fruit in wicker baskets through a vineyard, while a boy plays the lyre and sings, and the rest stamp along in time with shouts and dancing. Close to three thousand years later, the rhythm of the vintage has hardly changed. It has always belonged to Dionysus.

Born twice

Dionysus had the strangest birth on Olympus. His mother, Semele, was a daughter of Cadmus, the founder of Thebes. Zeus loved her, and Hera, jealous as ever, persuaded her to ask her lover to show himself in his true form. Zeus had sworn to grant whatever she wished. He came as lightning, and Semele burned. Zeus snatched the unborn child from the fire, sewed him into his own thigh and, when the months were complete, gave birth to him a second time. That is why the Greeks could call him dimētōr, ‘of two mothers’, and why this site calls him the twice-born.

The boy had to be hidden from Hera. Apollodorus says Hermes took him first to Semele’s sister Ino and her husband, and then, disguised as a young goat, to the nymphs of Nysa, a mountain that ancient writers placed in many different lands. Euripides opens the Bacchae with the grown god arriving at Thebes, angry that his mother’s own sisters deny he is a god, and determined to make the city recognize him. It is the story of a god who comes from outside and demands to be let in, and that is how Greek farmers treated the new wine every year: as a powerful guest.

The first jar of wine

Several places claimed to have received the vine first. Calydon in Aetolia told of its king, Oeneus, whose very name sounds like the Greek word for wine. In Attica the honour went to Ikarion, a village on the north-eastern slopes of Mount Pentelikon. Apollodorus and Hyginus tell how Dionysus came there as a guest and taught a farmer named Ikarios to make wine. Generous with his new gift, Ikarios poured it for some shepherds, who drank it unmixed, felt their heads spin and decided they had been poisoned. They killed him. His daughter Erigone, led by their dog Maira, found the body and hanged herself from a tree in grief. The Athenians later swung on ropes in her memory, and that swinging rite, the Aiora, became part of the spring feast of the new wine.

The tale is full of country sense. Wine was a farm craft that had to be learned, and every vintner knew it was dangerous drunk neat. Hesiod, who saw nothing romantic in farming, gives the grape harvest its own exact instructions.

When Orion and Sirius have climbed into mid-heaven and rosy-fingered Dawn looks on Arcturus, then, Perses, cut all the clusters and carry them home. Lay them in the sun ten days and ten nights, in shade for five, and on the sixth draw off into jars the gifts of Dionysus, giver of joy.

Hesiod, Works and Days (our rendering)

Three days of the Anthesteria

The wine pressed in autumn spent the winter fermenting in big clay jars. Then in Anthesterion, the month of flowers, roughly our February, Athens opened them. The Anthesteria lasted three days, and each had a name.

The first was the Pithoigia, the Jar-Opening. The new wine was broached, and some of it was carried to the old sanctuary of Dionysus in the Marshes, a shrine opened only at this festival, to be mixed and offered before anyone drank. Thucydides calls this the more ancient of the Athenian festivals of Dionysus. The second day, the Choes or Jugs, was a drinking match with odd rules: everyone had a jug of their own and drank in silence. The Athenians explained the custom with a myth about Orestes arriving polluted from his mother’s murder and being served apart, so that no one shared his cup. Children around the age of three were given small jugs of their own, and many of these little vessels, painted with toddlers playing with carts and dogs, have been found in children’s graves. On the same day the wife of the magistrate who oversaw the city’s ancestral rites was ritually married to the god.

The third day, the Chytroi or Pots, turned toward the dead. A pot of boiled mixed seeds was set out for Hermes of the underworld, and the spirits who had wandered the city during the festival were sent away with a saying that ancient dictionaries preserve: ‘Out of the door, Keres, it is no longer Anthesteria.’ Some ancient scholars read the word not as Keres, spirits, but as Karians, foreign household slaves who had shared the feast. In the farmer’s calendar, joy and the grave stood very close together, as they still do in the countryside. Our Festival Calendar places the Anthesteria among the other feasts of its season.

The god in the village square

Dionysus was a city god too, with his great spring festival and its tragedies. But his oldest home was the village. In the winter month of Poseideon, each Attic community held its own Rural Dionysia on a day of its choosing. Aristophanes shows a farmer named Dikaiopolis celebrating one privately in the Acharnians: his daughter carries the basket of offerings, his slave holds up the phallus pole, and he sings a cheerful, bawdy hymn as his tiny procession passes. Virgil, looking back from Italy, pictured the sons of Theseus offering prizes around the villages and crossroads and leaping, merry with wine, on greased wineskins in the soft meadows.

In 1906 the archaeologist R. M. Dawkins described a Carnival play he had watched in a Greek village in Thrace, the Kalogeros. It involved masked men in goatskins and bells, a mock bride, a pretend killing and lament, and a ritual plowing and sowing, and Dawkins asked whether it might preserve something of the old cult of Dionysus. Scholars still argue about that, and caution is wise. Yet anyone who has stood in a village square at Carnival, or watched the vintage end with music beside the treading vat, or tasted the new wine when the barrels are opened in autumn, will see why the question keeps being asked.

The seasons that shaped Dionysus also shaped his neighbour in the calendar, Demeter, whose bread shared every table with his wine. Read about her year in the Eleusinian Mysteries, and about the wild country god who first delighted him on Olympus in Pan of Arcadia.