Message from the gods
AS BACCHUS UNCOVERED: ANCIENT GOD OF ECSTASY (BBC4) began, I found myself thinking of my elder brother. Eight years older than me, he and his mates were deeply, earnestly into prog rock in the late Seventies. Serious young men, reeking of Brut and roll-ups, would troop up our stairs carrying double albums with titles of the Bacchus Uncovered variety, like sacred books. Roving from Aegean islands to urban graffiti, ancient Jordan to the Vietnam War, historian Bettany Hughes argued that Bacchus, classical god of wine, went back further than the ancient Greeks and still has meaning today.
The Greek myths are pretty far out but the origin story of Bacchus, or Dionysus as he was originally called, contains important clues. The offspring of Zeus and a mortal woman, Bacchus was grown inside his father’s thigh, carried to a far-off land, dumped on a mountainside and reared by nymphs. Human and god, Greek and foreign, he proves how complex humans really are.
In ancient times, vast feasts and wine binges marked the festival of Dionysus. Cross-dressing partygoers ended the celebrations by going to the theatre to watch plays which hammered the point home. In The Bacchae, written around 405BC, a king decides to jail Bacchus because all the city’s women have gone up the mountain to party with him.
Stern law-giver he might be, but the king still can’t resist going up the mountain to have a peek. His mother, off her head among the party crowds, thinks her son is a lion and kills him. (They must have been drinking some pretty strange cocktails up there.) We’ve all got a wild side, the play suggests.
Deny it at your peril. Today the word “symposium” implies dull speeches and Powerpoint but in the days of the philosopher Plato, it meant something more like “think and drink”. Greek noblemen gathered to discuss hefty issues, alongside singing hymns to Bacchus and downing jugs of vino.
In some Cypriot mosaics from around 400 AD, Professor Hughes found an intriguing transit point between the pagan and Christian worlds. The tiled frescos in a merchant’s villa showed the god of wine as a baby, with a halo, on a woman’s lap, three figures kneeling before him like Magi, or perhaps a bit too tipsy to stand up. It was an idea that just wouldn’t go away.
Covering every bit of modern Bacchism from the German romantics of the 19th century to the experimental (aka awful) New York fringe theatre production “Dionysus in 69”, it was a shame Professor Hughes didn’t go right up to present day. As the impulsive, alcoholic sidekick to the quiet, thoughtful Inspector George Gently, surely DS Bacchus proves the god lives on in our television sets.
But can you have fun without booze? A lovely encounter on FIRST DATES (C4) suggested you could. Sporting the sort of hairdo that would get him excluded from school if he was 20 years younger, the outgoing Lee laughed his way into Abby’s affections.
He teased her about drinking cups of tea throughout their dinner, but she liked it. She seemed to like him, too, and the romantics among the audience were all dreaming of this perfect union of opposites, the shy Abby calming Lee down a bit, party boy Lee encouraging Abby to live a little. Then he dumped her. Lee liked Abby, I guess, but he loved Bacchus.