Dionysus

Dionysus was the Greek god of wine, theatre, ecstatic worship and altered states. Myths of his travels and resistance to his cult often end in the collapse of rulers who refuse to recognise divine power, most famously in Euripides’ Bacchae.

In Euripides’s The Bacchae and Other Plays, the Bacchae follows Dionysus’ return to Thebes and the destruction of Pentheus, while the surrounding plays show Euripides using myth to question power, belief, gender and violence. Ovid’s Metamorphoses places Dionysus within the wider historical setting developed by the novel.