The philosophy of excess
Bettany Hughes tells us why she’s speaking up for the god of wine in her new documentary
Bacchus Uncovered TV BBC Four Scheduled for Thursday 29 March
Think of Bacchus, aka Dionysus, and, as Bettany Hughes puts it: “You probably think of the fat god of wine with vine leaves in his hair.” Or perhaps you think of Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae, in which a follower of Dionysus “rips off the head of her son not realising who it is, thinking he’s a lion because she’s been so infused with the madness of the god”.
Neither image shows the deity of wine, fertility, theatre and religious ecstasy in a good light. Yet, as Hughes argues in her latest documentary, perhaps it’s time we reinvestigated what we think we know about Bacchus.
“What’s fascinating to me is that he’s the god both of allowing us to lose our inhibitions, but also of getting together, so he’s actually a very communally spirited god in many ways,” she says. “Because of that, the ancients also called him Bacchus the Liberator, or Bacchus the Saviour, or Bacchus the God Who Gives Men’s Minds Wings.”
This doesn’t mean the ancients didn’t recognise both Bacchus and the fermentation of grape juice as potentially problematical. “[The Greeks] have this big idea of nothing in excess,” says Hughes. “You always hold on to just enough reason or control to pull yourself back from the edge.” It’s an attitude embodied in the role of the symposiarch – the master of a symposium, the part of a banquet that took place after a meal when men talked and drank – whose job was to manage the flow of grog.
In the Roman era, Bacchic cults were outlawed because of the risks of their members holding allegiance to “a parallel state”. Nonetheless, the great and the good of Rome approved of quaffing. “Wine itself becomes a form of reason or control,” says Hughes. “You have these quotes from Tacitus and Julius Caesar saying that it’s fantastic that subject populations love drinking wine so much because it basically makes them subservient.”
Bacchus had staying power, and Hughes’s film also explores the interplay between the worship of Christ and the worship of Bacchus, figures united in reaching out to all kinds of people, in the early Christian era. As Hughes says of Bacchus: “He’s a god who blurs boundaries between male and female, between rich and poor, between classes.”
“Romans like Julius Caesar and Tacitus saw wine as a form of reason or control”