Gods rise and die—and rise again, despite the contrary opinion of an eminent Chicago professor of history of religions.1 Gods, at least the gods of paganism,2 have a body. They drink, eat, copulate, and with advancing years they waste away, stricken with the infirmities of old age. The place where the most pagan of all the gods of Mediterranean paganism— Dionysus-Bacchus—might have liked to spend his third age, without renouncing his most deeply ingrained habits,3 can ideally be identified with Campania: a land of intrinsically orgiastic nature given the effervescence of its soil (the Vesuvius, the Flegrean Fields) and the ebullience of its inhabitants (the whirling tarantella dance, the Satyric and Phlyacic figure of Pulchinello).4 It is a fact that in Campania, the worship of Dionysus is recorded over a period of a thousand years, from the mid-sixth century BCE (Cumae) to the mid-fifth century CE (Nola). During this time span, of a length seldom reached in the other regions of Magna Graecia or of the eastern periphery or of the motherland itself, the cult of Dionysus presents itself in the various, seemingly contradictory forms that characterize the god’s ethos.
In previous research (Casadio 1995), I dealt with the conditions under which the worship of this god spread across the other areas of Magna Graecia (Bruttium, Lucania, Apulia-Calabria), and I concentrated my attention on the literary and archaeological evidence relative to Tarentum, Metapontum, Siris-Heraclea, Sybaris-Thurii, Croton, Rhegium, and Locri. Finally, in the wake of important contributions by eminent specialists of Greek religion (and sometimes in disagreement with them), I wondered if the forms—undoubtedly peculiar—of Bacchic worship in ancient Italy were so varied as to suggest the effects of an acculturation determined by the meeting of the Greek invaders with the natives. My response was cautiously positive,5 for it is presumable that in Campania, too, the meeting of the Greek settlers with the native Oscans and with other immigrated peoples of complex civilization, such as the Etruscans and the Romans (who themselves, as we know, experienced cultural colonization by the more refined Greeks), produced significant results in terms of cultural morphogenesis.6
Campania evidently derives its name from the people (Campani) who originally inhabited the Ager Campanus, that is, the territory surrounding Capua, the town most representative of Campania’s original civilization and the capital of the Etruscan settlement in the area.7 In ancient times, the region was famous for exceptional fertility (felix Campania: Pliny 3.5.60; terra pulla, loose, black, volcanic earth, Cato De agricultura 34), certainly due to the predominantly volcanic nature of its soil. It is therefore little wonder that this region, most notably the area between Cumae and Pompeii (around Neapolis and the Vesuvius), has always been one of the most densely populated in the world. Very populous it certainly was in the first century CE, one of the most brilliant periods in its history, when Campania (after being merged with Latium to form the first Augustan regio) not only enjoyed great economical prosperity thanks to its manufacturing activities and an agricultural production among the best in the whole Roman Empire (grain, wine, oil), but also had become the favorite holiday destination for Rome’s aristocrats (especially Baiae, Bauli, Surrentum, and Capreae).8 One of those aristocrats was Petronius Arbiter, the author of the Satyricon, who chose one of those places as the backdrop for his novel. The sentence that Petronius puts in the mouth of Quartilla, a priestess of Priapus, is extremely eloquent if regarded from an ecology-of-religion perspective:9 “Utique nostra regio tam praesentibus plena est numinibus, ut facilius possis deum quam hominem invenire” (Satyricon 17.5). The mentioned regio is without doubt the area around Neapolis, regardless of what town is identifiable with the Graeca urbs that provides the background to a large part of the novel.10 This land, so abundant in human beings (as the flippant Roman writer puts it), is even more abundant in divine beings, all of them available, helpful, and efficient (just as helpful and efficient as today’s numberless saints and madonnas). Among those deities, one of the closest (praesens)11 to the hearts of the Campanian people — even though his role is less official than that played by Apollo (the tutelary god of the apoichiai ) or by the other dii patrii (Artemis, Hera, Demeter) whom the Greek settlers had brought along from their native island of Euboea—is undoubtedly Dionysus, alias Bacchus, or, in the interpretatio latina, Liber Pater.
Petronius’ contemporary Pliny the Elder, a man of immense learning who spent the last part of his life on the Campanian coast, did not fail to notice (NH 3.60) the harmonious relationship that typically linked the Campanian environment with the Dionysian numen embodied by the god. The undulating vitiferi colles that enliven the coastal area from the Gulf of Gaeta to the Gulf of Naples—through Ischia, the Vesuvius, and the peninsula of Sorrento — and the ensuing temulentia nobilis (a state of drunkenness elevated to an almost spiritual level, as in the celebrated Horatian example) are emblems of the Campanian landscape. But contrasted with those hills are the fields of wheat that extend as far as the eye can see over the flat area called Terra di Lavoro, anciently known as campi Leborini (probably from lepus, “hare,” turned into terra laboris through a process of popular etymology). So here we have the ideal place for a meeting—a contest, even—between Dionysus and Demeter, between grapes and grain, between wine and bread. As the ancients noticed ( ut veteres dixere, undoubtedly the Greeks of southern Italy), Campania provides the setting for a summum Liberi Patris cum Cerere certamen. And the names of two gods are no mere metonyms; as we shall see, the antagonism between the two and ultimately their dialectical coexistence will be transferred to a cultic level. This conflict, unlike the Athenian one between Athena and Poseidon, comes to an end at last without a winner, but remains confined to a state of tension between two divine worlds — a tension that reflects also a gender tension between the two sexes.
In order now to have a first piece of evidence relative to the cult of Dionysus in Campania, it will be useful to proceed in a north-south geographical direction that (not by accident) roughly corresponds to the chronological path followed by the cult in its propagation. It was from north southward and from the coastal area inward that the region was first settled by the Greeks and was later conquered by the Romans. We find in fact the oldest traces of the Dionysiac cult in Cumae, the most northern of the Greek colonies.
The founders of Kyme (Cumae) were natives of the towns of Chalcis and Eretria (on the island of Euboea) who had previously colonized the island of Ischia (Pithekussai) off the Campanian coast. Judging from the archaeological evidence, and contrary to the widespread tradition, which regarded Cumae as the oldest Greek town in Italy and Sicily, the settlement took place in the mid-eighth century BCE.12 In the early 1900s, an inscription was unearthed in the town’s necropolis that proved to be a real brain-teaser for its interpreters ever since it was published in 1905. The writing was inscribed on a tuff slab used as roofing material for a rectangular tomb of large dimensions. The date of the inscription, easily determinable from the shape of the letters and accepted unanimously, can be placed in the mid-fifth century BCE, certainly before the Samnite invasion that in 420 BCE stripped Cumae almost entirely of its Greek features. After Comparetti’s brilliant intervention (1906), there is no longer any doubt about the correct interpretation of the inscription: Οὐ θέμις ἐν-τοῦθα κεῖσθ-αι ἰ (= ει) μὲ (= μὴ) τὸν βε-βαχχευμέ-νον (“Lying buried in this place is illicit unless one has become bakchos [i.e., has lived like a bakchos]’)13 Still open to question, instead, is the meaning of bakcheuesthai, that is, the action of behaving ritually like a bakchos14
The facts that can be inferred from this inscription are in my view so indisputable as to be hardly susceptible to any complicated interpretation. In fifth-century Cumae, as elsewhere in the Greek world in different epochs, individuals of both sexes were customarily allowed to join the family of bakchoi, or sectatores Liberi Patris, by a procedure unknown in its ritual details but intimately familiar to us in its essence through the literary evidence (Herodotus and Euripides in the first place). This community (koinon), sometimes specifically called thiasos15 or bakcheion, used to reserve for itself a communal burying place (communion in death as well as in life), from which, though, was excluded everyone who was not affiliated to the cult.16
In a masterly article, which is really an interpretative essay on the controversial issue of the relationship between orphica and bakchica, R. Turcan collected all the details that supported an Orphic interpretation of the Cumaean laws: “La défense d’ordre religieux (Οὐ θέμις) et l’exclusive (ἰ μέ) qu’elle exprime en termes de prohibition absolue; 2) l’application funéraire (κεῖσθ-/αι) de cette interdiction catégorique liée à des interdits qu’ignore le dionysisme; 3) l’exigence d’une mutation volontaire, personnelle, intérieure, totale et définitive que postule… le parfait médio-passif βεβαχχευμέ-/νον.”17 A reply to this preeminent Dionysus scholar came from his younger fellow countryman, J. M. Pailler, arguably the leading expert on the dossier concerning the Dionysus of southern Italy. Pailler re-examined the whole dossier thoroughly, took a stand on Turcan’s and J.-P. Vernant’s divergent views, and came to a fivefold conclusion (“passivité,” “vêtement,” “dionysisme,” “au-delà,” “continuité”) that I find absolutely convincing (except for the passive-form issue).18 Of his reasoning, nearly always supported by a strong awareness of the role of historical realities and by a strict philological method, it is worth underlining the central statement: “Il faut renoncer à la chimère d’une césure radicale entre dionysisme et orphisme.” In other words, if there is—and it is beyond question—a boundary that marks the limits between Dionysism (a concrete reality) and Orphism (a much more nebulous reality), we are unable to determine where that boundary lies exactly. In the specific case of the Cumaean inscription (but the same is true of the Orphic tablets from Hipponium, Thurii, and Petelia, as well as of vase iconography), too much contextual evidence is still missing for us to be able to make a clear-cut distinction (the steadfastness of an ascetic life devoted to spiritual training versus the ephemeral exaltation of an orgiastic ritualism performed as a sacramental tool) based on a semantic-grammatical reasoning supported by argumenta e silentio.
One fact of sociological nature remains incontrovertible: “La ségregation des morts procède sans doute d’une dissidence des vivants,”19 as Turcan cogently puts it. But such dissidence can be defined only insofar as it proceeds from a ritual practice or exercise, where “ritual” (in the sense that historians of religions give to this word) denotes a complex of stereotyped actions (the -εύο denominative indicates the practice of an activity) that are ends in themselves (as shown by the use of the middle form) and have a strong symbolic connotation (characterized in this case by the prohibition).20
Very little knowledge can be gained from the remaining traces — few and controversial—that Dionysus left at Cumae.21 More fruitful is a piece of information (not usually associated with the worship of Dionysus) that, if interpreted correctly, may help to increase the scanty evidence of bakchika in Campania’s Chalcidian settlements and may also provide a background to the practice referred to in the Cumaean inscription. Among the few facts ascertained about the Euboean colony in the first three centuries of its existence, pride of place is taken by the deeds of Aristodemus (also called Malakos), a character well known to Roman historians because he gave hospitality to Tarquinius Superbus after his expulsion in 495 BCE.22 That the tyrant of Cumae was nicknamed “effeminate” by his fellow citizens (and by the barbarians as well) not in the sense of “cowardly wimp” is evident—and was evident to ancient historians as well—from the following circumstance: in the battle of Cumae (524 BCE), against the overwhelming forces of the Etruscans, who had joined forces with other Italic peoples, Aristodemus as a horse-soldier had killed—unaided—the enemy’s general and many of his guard. Twenty years later, he repeated his exploits in the still more decisive and uneven battle of Aricia (504 BCE). Soon afterward, capitalizing on the glory earned on the battlefield and profiting from the dissatisfaction of the demos, he overturned the aristocratic government and made himself tyrant of his town. His style is that of a Peisistratus or of any of the chieftains who in those times were active in the Greek motherland, in Ionia, and in Sicily. A few years later, the exiled sons of the aristocrats came back for revenge: they slew the tyrant together with his family and comrades (taking advantage of their delirious state following a wine-based banquet, undoubtedly a bacchanal) and reestablished the oligar chic government (490 BCE). In the light of further details available from the sources, it is arguable that in this case, the term malakos (which Dionysius finds in the sources: μαλακὸς εἰς ὀργήν) denotes one affected by Dionysian mania, that is, one who compulsively indulges in the ritual frenzy typical of Bacchic religiousness.23 Likewise, exactly in the same period of the Cumaean inscription (around the mid-fifth century), the philhellenic Scythian king Skyles used to revel in a Bacchic fashion (bakcheuein) as he walked—delirious under the god’s influence—in a thiasus along the streets of the Greek town of Olbia.24 Evidently, in the easternmost and westernmost Greek colonies, the rulers themselves were keen to be initiated (telesthai is the exact term used by Herodotus) into Dionysian rituals, and they did not hesitate to exhibit in public the emblem of their membership in an esoteric group.
Let us now revert to Aristodemus. Besides his uncontrolled—but ritual— wine-drinking habit, which proved his undoing in the end, another indication of his membership in the bakchoi brotherhood comes from an explicit insinuation made by those same local historians from whom Dionysius of Halicarnassus derived his information: as a boy he once acted as femminiello (a Neapolitan word sounding like “drag queen” and corresponding exactly to the Greek thelydria) καὶ τὰ γυναιξίν ἁρμόττοντα ἔπασχεν, which is an explicit exegesis of the particular initiation to which the god himself had been subjected in the mythical-ritual complex of Lerna25 and to which were also subjected (with varying degrees of enjoyment) the Roman youths involved in the so-called Bacchanalia affair. The affair in question, which in 186 BCE (in the aftermath of the Punic War) greatly alarmed the Senate and offended the sense of decency of Rome’s high society,26 had its origins precisely in Campania. In fact (as the squealer Ispala revealed to the consul), it was a Campanian woman—Annia Paculla—who raised the scandal by introducing a “reform” that legalized nocturnal clandestinity and promiscuity. And it was in Magna Graecia, especially in Bruttium and Apulia, that bacchanals enjoyed—until 181 BCE— a short-lived revival that was ruthlessly suppressed by the praetors, whom the consuls had sent in situ and invested with full powers to implement the sanctions (vincula or death penalty) imposed by a senatus consultum dated 7 October 186. (A bronze replica of the decree was lodged in agro Teurano—the modern Tiriolo, near Catanzaro—where it was found in 1640.)27
Three centuries before that event—which disrupted the Bacchic life of the southern Italian peoples and brought to an end that state of exhilaration determined by an unsteady balance between genuine mystical enthusiasm, transgression, ritualism, and deliberate abuse—the tyrant Ari-stodemus had tried to give a Dionysian impetus to the life of the surviving young aristocrats of his town (obviously also with a view to foiling any possible opposition to his policy of democratic levelling)28 by realizing a project that predates by a few centuries the political-religious experiments of the Hellenistic monarchs or of a Marcus Antonius (and prefigures certain trends of the jeunesse dorée of all times). With the aim of emasculating the boys, Aristodemus ordered them to wear their hair long, gathered up and adorned with flowers. And he ordered them to wear long garments and supple cloaks and to live as retiringly as the girls of the aristocracy. He consequently closed down the schools and gymnasiums where the young men used to train their minds and tone their bodies and ordered instead the opening of special schools where the young would be taught orgiastic music and dances and the other arts cherished by the Muses. At the head of those schools he placed fashionable ladies, who—armed with parasols and fans, and carrying combs, mirrors, and ointment containing alabastra —were in charge of accompanying the young men to the baths. All this continued until the youths reached the age of twenty, when they were allowed to play roles more congenial to manhood (though it is easy to imagine what a wealth of experience they had acquired). The foregoing is what Dionysius of Halicarnassus reports (Ant. Rom. 7.9.3-5). Another source speaks of similar regulations applicable to girls: while the boys were forced to wear long hair and gold ornaments, the girls had to cut their hair very short and wear men’s garments.29 We are in the presence of nothing less than the ritual realization—by typical Dionysian procedures well known to us through other textual and figurative sources — of an “inverted world” within the sphere of gender roles.30
At a figurative level, the best-known example is offered by a series of representations on the so-called Anacreontic vases (S. Karouzou, J. Beazley), mostly red-figure vases of Attic provenance produced between 510 and 460, ergo contemporary with the exploits of Aristodemus. Depicted on the vases are male and female characters who wear masks and thereby reverse their respective sex roles. Most of the women are represented as players of instruments, notably strings (kithara, barbiton) and, more often, winds (the Dionysian aulos); and it is clear from their postures that it is they who actually direct the musical performance and the dance: “Il semble bien que le point focal de l’image soit la flûtiste et que la circulation des danseurs s’organise autour d’elle, comme s’ils tournaient et se déplaçaient par rapport à elle.”31 As the present writer once pointed out,
La pratique du komos anacréontique est exclusivement masculine. La femme y figure seulement comme instrumente accessoire. Les hommes profitent de cette occasion pour se faire “autres,” un peu femmes, ou mieux des êtres bisexués, dépassant la distinction du sexe, un peu orientaux ou barbares, sans jamais toutefois outrepasser les barrières de la décence et de la mesure. Le dieu qui préside à cette pratique, travesti par excellence, c’est Dionysos.32
This ritual procedure, of which there is evidence in the late-sixth-century Attic environment, must surely have been familiar as well to the neighboring Chalcidians, who presumably exported it to their Cumaean colony. There the ritual circulated surreptitiously (as usually happens with Dionysian practices) and re-emerged only when historical circumstances allowed it to circulate again in a political key and with almost grotesque overtones, without ever losing, though, its original mystical and liberating character. After the overthrow of the tyrant Malakos, who was undoubtedly an object of sharp criticism by Hellenistic historians (who had great familiarity with other models of Neoi Dionysoi advocating tryphē and abrosynē but were nonetheless reluctant to rewrite history on the basis of stereotyped models), a certain type of ritual transgression incurred political condemnation and consequently either went underground again (only to re-emerge in 186 BCE) or was remodelled into milder forms on a higher mythological and eschatological level.
In fact, one or two centuries after the glories of Aristodemus’ tyranny, the various mirrors, parasols, fans, and bottles of perfume revert into the hands of their rightful female owners, in the luxuriant iconography of vases from Apulia (but also from Lucania, Campania, and Paestum). Although the pictorial language of late-fourth-century Italiot iconography has not been fully deciphered yet—mainly for the lack of a comprehensive and systematic study drawing on such different disciplines as epigraphy, classical philology, history of religions, and, obviously, archaeology33— there is no doubt that the dominant divine figure in this imagerie imbued with “eschatogamy”34 is that of Dionysus-Bacchus “in his triple capacity of god of wine, drama and the mysteries.”35 This dream world—a sort of ideal archetype of the paradise described by Muhammad in the Koran—is alive with seductive, daintily attired girls in amorous pursuit of young men who are dressed only in a heroic nudity, who are inclined to assume erotically passive attitudes,36 and who are not averse to handling cosmetic stuff now and then.37 This process of feminization, which involves at first the activities of the male sex and then progressively also the forms of the male body, is reserved exclusively for winged Eros figures, which are omnipresent and are of course indispensable in a world dominated by women.38 This is presumably the last phase in a process of successive rearrangements and functional re-adaptations of an ethos that regards inversion and androgyny as coincidentia oppositorum, an ethos whose origin can be traced back to the tragicomic parades that Aristodemus Malakos in his devotion to Dionysus imposed on the boys and girls of the Cumaean aristocracy. To quote Plutarch about the rules laid down by the tyrant (Mul. Virt. 26.261f-262a), “It was the will of the god that adolescent boys should wear their hair long, adorned with gold jewels; and he forced the girls to cut their hair short and to wear boys’ garments and scanty petticoats.”
* I thank my learned friend Paola Ceccarelli (Università di L’Aquila and University of Durham), who generously supplied me with precious information concerning bibliography. The current state of affairs of scholarship makes it impossible for the generalist historian of religions to carry out a research work without ad hoc advice from a specialist.
1. Jonathan Zittel Smith in various interventions, of which the most assertive is Smith 1987. A further contribution to the discussion—well thought-out (though not entirely convincing) and up-to-date (though neglecting D. Zeller’s and G. Casadio’s works) — is by another Smith (M. S. Smith 2001: 104-131). My views on this issue converge with Mettinger 2001.
2. This term, though it was and is still used with manifestly polemical overtones by supporters of monotheist religions, deserves to be preserved in scientific debate. The analogous form “polytheism” is a late scholarly creation (introduced by Jean Bodin in 1580, it seems) and for this reason an anemic word lacking the vitality of everyday language: we would hardly call anyone a “polytheist” to indicate his or her materialism, hedonism, and so on. In addition, the very notion of polytheism has been so harshly criticized recently that using it has become extremely problematic.
3. The attribution of human characteristics to a fictitious entity such as a Greek deity may certainly seem a decadent mannerism but has in fact a hermeneutical justification if one bears in mind the approach taken by the most ingenious interpreter of Greek religion of the twentieth century, Walter Friedrich Otto. As Veyne observes (1998: 114), “Si l’on veut bien voir la religion grecque telle qu’elle était (et que Walter Otto la voyait), les présents considérations sur la personnalité d’un dieu paraîtront peut-être moins hypothétiques qu’il ne semble” (emphasis mine). It is symptomatic that the most deconstructionist of all French historians should have endorsed W. F. Otto’s divine ontology, which had been so intensely disliked by the leading comparative historical methodologists of the first half of the twentieth century (a veritable damnatio memoriae was enacted against him by two such dissimilar exegetes as M. P. Nilsson and H. Jeanmaire). Veyne (1998: 299 n. 287) suitably underlines the tendency (in his view, developed in the first place by the “School of Leiden”: Versnel, Pleket, Van Straten) to center the history of religions “sur la relation métaphorique entre hommes et dieux.”
4. A. Dieterich (1897) demonstrates that the ambivalent, melancholy, scurrilous ethos of this character derives from the fabulae satyricae of Greek-Oscan origin. Bacchus, especially the Italiot Bacchus, is more appealing than any other gods. “Il jouit d’une véritable popularité, c’est une star parmi les stars; alors qu’on ne disait pas, des autres dieux, qu’ils sont ‘populaires.’ Il est brillant, il est séduisant, d’où cette popularité que n’ont pas d’autres dieux qui sont respectés pour leur sérieux ou leur puissance” (Veyne 1998: 114).
5. Casadio 1996a. Cf. Casadio 1995: 81. This particularist, anti-unitarian view of the development of Greek religion (dissenting from that of A. Brelich and G. Pugliese Carratelli) does not require that we appreciate the pretentious title — in point of fact a mere label not supported by pertinent arguments—of a recent summary of the religion of the ancient Greeks written by a specialist of the religions of the Roman empire (Price 1999). That it is mere labelling is proved by the fact that the author fails to give his own views—exactly where he is expected to—on the polymorphism of Greek religion, in time as well as in space. Cf. F. Mora’s review in the journal Polifemo (vol. 1 [2001]: 21-24; http://homepage.mac.com/polifemo/), complaining—among other things — about the lack of “ein Vergleich zwischen der griechischen Religion in dem Mutterland und in den kolonialen Gebieten (mit nicht-griechischer Unterschicht)” (p. 24).
6. A point of view confirmed by the results obtained independently (and by a completely different methodology) by Luraghi (1994: 111): “La complessità di questi rapporti acculturativi, che oggi è possibile cogliere solo in modo estremamente limitato, è tale da suggerire già di per sé che non si sia trattato di un processo ‘a senso unico,’ in cui l’elemento greco svolgesse solo un ruolo attivo, e del resto la documentazione stessa, ancora una volta nel campo delle pratiche funerarie, sembra confermarlo.” (“The complexity of these acculturative relationships, which today can be explained only to a very small extent, is such as to suggest— already in itself—that this was not a one-way process in which the Greek component played only an active role; in any case, the evidence itself—once again in the field of funerary customs — seems to confirm this.”) Metalwork (in particular, fibulae used by women) acknowledged to be of native origin and found as grave goods at Greek sites (Pithekoussai and Syracuse) seems to suggest a direct correlation between the origin of the objects and their owners, and consequently it would support the case for intermarriage between native women and the Greek settlers. (See the accurate and prudent analysis in Shepherd 1999). For a further argument based on an analysis of the socio-political and military customs of the Greeks in Campania, cf. Luraghi 1994: 118.
7. Campanus from kapv-ano through the form kappano appearing on some Oscan coins. In addition to Livius 22.15 and Polybius 3.912, cf. G. Radke, s.v. “Campania,” in Der kleine Pauly (Munich, 1975), 1031-1032 (with bibliography); C. Marcato, s.v. “Campania,” in Dizionario di toponomastica (Turin, 1990), 123.
8. For a detailed picture of the economic activities, see Levi 1967-68: 155-159. For tourism, cf. Peterson 1919: 84-85, 303, 315.
9. “Ecology of religion is the investigation of the relationship between religion and nature conducted through the disciplines of religious studies, history of religion, and anthropology of religion” (A. Hultkrantz, “Ecology,” in M. Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion [New York and London, 1987], 4:581-585, 581). While geography of religion studies the impact of religion on the environment, ecology of religion studies more specifically the relationship between environmental factors and religious morphogenesis.
10. Probably Neapolis itself: Peterson 1919: 36 n. 3 (with bibliography); or Puteoli: Salanitro 1992: 202 (Puteoli in concurrence with the Etruscan-Oscan Capua as site of the Cena Trimalchionis) and 190 n. 11 (with annotated bibliography); M. von Albrecht, Storia della letteratura latina, trans. Aldo Setaioli (Turin, 1995), 3:1214 (with bibliography). No specific identification is suggested by A. La Penna, “Aspetti e momenti della cultura letteraria in Magna Grecia nell’età romana,” in La Magna Grecia nell’età romana, Atti Taranto 15 (Naples, 1976), 387-438, esp. 431.
11. One should bear in mind either Horace’s hierophany evoked in three Bacchic odes or Ovid’s Met. 3.658-659: “nec enim praesentior illo / est deus” (“Praesens deus ist der Gott, der mit seiner Macht als gegenwärtig offenbart, was in den allgemeineren Begriff wirksamer Macht übergeht”: M. Haupt, ad locum, in P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphosen, 10. Aufl. [Zürich and Dublin, 1966], 189, postulating parallel uses in Ovid himself and in Cicero). Cf. Veyne 1998: 116.
12. Cf. Ciaceri 1928: 66-81 (discussion of the problem) and 317-319 (sources); W. Johannowski, s.v. “Cuma,” in Enciclopedia dell’arte antica (Rome, 1959), 970; H. Comfort, s.v. “Cumae,” in Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites (1976), 250. The latest excavations confirm the dating: A. Gallina, in Enciclopedia dell’arte antica, suppl. 1970 (but actually appearing in 1973), 274.
13. Contrary to what I suggested many years ago (Casadio 1983: 137) in the wake of Liddell and Scott, s.v., I find it impossible here to attribute a passive value to the verb bakcheuein, in agreement with Turcan (1986: 232), contra Pailler 1995: 113. Cf. notably the German translation by Burkert 2004: 99: “Wer nicht Bacchos geworden ist,” and the English one by Seaford (2006: 51): “‘Made bacchic’ in some sense.”
14. Of the huge bibliography on this subject, I only mention: Sogliano 1905 (wrong reading but correct dating); Comparetti 1906 (fundamental); Peterson 1919: 70-71 (Orphism); Pettazzoni [1921] 1954: 122; Cumont [1906] 1929: 197 and 306 n. 17 (he does not give his view); Macchioro 1930: 277 (Orphism); Bruhl 1953: 63; Nilsson 1957: 12 and 120; Sokolowski 1962: 202-203 (drawing important epigraphic parallels and reporting the evidence of burials reserved for members of a religious association); Bianchi 1976b: 89-90 (rejecting the Bacchic-Dionysian nature of the bakchoi ); Cole 1980: 231; Henrichs 1984: 85 n. 63 (distinguishing, without solid arguments, bakcheuein from mainesthai ); Turcan 1986 (thorough and accurate, but not acceptable in toto); Casadio 1989: 301; Bottini 1992: 58-61 (on the basis of E. Gabrici’s publication, he corrects Comparetti’s hypothesis that the inscription was supported by a stela); Pailler 1995: 111-124 (well-founded criticism of Turcan’s Orphism); Frisone 1999: 45-55 (an exhaustive examination of the historical, epigraphical, and archaeological evidence).
15. E.g., in inscription no. 126, Sokolowski 1962: 210-212, which requires adherents to take part in the funerals of the members of the association (thiasotai ).
16. Cf. Comparetti 1906: 16-17, an illuminating report on the historical context; Frisone 1999: 51, offering a rich documentation of parallel cases in which burial rights were reserved exclusively for members of politico-religious associations.
17. Turcan 1986: 243.
18. Pailler 1995: 119. But cf. Casadio 1989: 301, which implicitly anticipated the same point of view.
19. Turcan 1986: 228. Similar reflections are made by Bottini (1992: 60-61), although his reasoning is flawed by the typical mechanicalness of the Italian socio-archaeological approach. Frisone (1999: 55) points out that in this case — differently from the case, analogous in some other respects, of Hipponium—the “volontà di distinzione” seems to border on “autoisolamento.”
20. Possible Eleusinian connections of this cultic milieu have recently been suggested by I. Leventi 2007: 107-141, esp. 135-137.
21. Cf. Peterson 1919: 71; Turcan 1986: 243.
22. Dionys. Halic. 7.2.4-12.2. For further sources (Livius, Diodorus, Plutarch), see Ciaceri 1928: 322-323; Ciaceri 1940: 53-54, 276-281; and esp. Caccamo Caltabiano 1984.
23. So argues Caccamo Caltabiano 1984: 277-278, with insight and the support of suitable linguistic evidence. Contra Luraghi (1994: 98-99), who, in a legitimate attempt to refute the hypercritical attitude of G. de Sanctis and his followers, opts for a rather convoluted alternative interpretation (malakos as antipais: “One who looks like — but is no more — a boy”). As concerns the debate between historians of the hypercritical tradition (which goes back to Niebuhr) and hyperconservative historians — represented in Italy by, e.g., Pareti (in his later orientations)—there is a methodological point to clarify: ancient sources (Dionysius, in this particular instance) must certainly be taken into account when supplying data, but must be regarded with skepticism when offering interpretations (especially in the domain of etymology).
24. Hdt. 4.79. Cf. Casadio 1999a: 107 n. 54; and A. Corcella in his commentary on Herodotus: Le storie, vol. 4 (Rome and Milan, 1993), 297-298. Obviously, in this case nobody speaks of Orphism, despite the presence in Olbia of the famous—but enigmatic — bone tablets (for an up-to-date bibliography, see Bottini 1992: 151-157 and 178; but shamanic interpretations à la C. Ginzburg must be regarded with suspicion).
25. Clem. Alex. Protr. 2.34.4: “In fulfillment of the vow to his lover Dionysus hastens to the tomb and feels lust to be penetrated.” (Note the interesting use of the desiderative-intensive form πασχητιάω. Cf. Casadio 1994: 295-312.)
26. Cf. Casadio 1992: 210-211 (with bibliography).
27. Livy 39.13. Cf. Peterson 1919: 30; Bruhl 1953: 92-93; Casadio 1995: 81-82, with further sources and bibliography.
28. The connection between Dionysian propaganda and the people-oriented policy of tyrants (Cleisthenes of Sicyon, Cypselus of Corinth, Peisistratus of Athens, and maybe Gelon of Syracuse, whose pro-Demeter sentiments are well known) was highlighted several times by, among others, Dabdab Trabulsi 1990: 59-102 (with insightful arguments, despite a certain Marxist stiffness); cf. Casadio 1992. The best summary of Aristodemus tyrant of Cumae is, without comparison (despite an excess of rationalization), the one offered by Luraghi (1994: 79-118), who is always in complete control of the bibliography (both primary and secondary).
29. Plut. Mul. Virt. 26.261ff. Cf. Caccamo Caltabiano (1984: 274-277), who takes credit for valorizing this source (previously neglected or misinterpreted) and rightly speaks of a “process of feminization of men” enhanced by the project of attributing an outstanding role to the female element. Less fruitful is the articulate—not to say convoluted — interpretation offered by Luraghi (1994: 100-105), who assumes that a “thick stratification of literary motives, cultural influences and fashions” (the tryphē of Ionicized aristocracies that tyrants supposedly try to make their own) was devised in Timaeus of Tauromenium’s historiographical workshop and interprets Aristodemus’ tactics as an “anti-ephebic” operation. The supposed result of this practice is the adoption of the “orientalizing lifestyle of the archaic aristocracy” cherished by the regime that he himself had overthrown. Such lifestyle would subsequently “assume a negative connotation” in the eyes of that same social class by which it had been invented and imposed, and would be ultimately associated with tyranny. But even if we take for granted that life and history are so extremely complicated, such complication must be substantiated by solid arguments (absent in this case).
30. Cf. Casadio 1999a: 113-123, indicating the sources and the relevant bibliography and suggesting an interpretation.
31. Frontisi-Ducroux and Lissarrague 1983: 25. The description, although seemingly a faithful replica of the report by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (the women as teachers of dancing and music), is in fact absolutely independent of that text, unknown to the two specialists of iconography.
32. G. Casadio, in Mentor: Guide bibliographique de la religion grecque (Liège, 1992), 381-382, where I follow up the conclusions reached by Frontisi-Ducroux and Lissarrague 1983 in an article that partly incorporates—but is also a brilliant improvement on — the “oriental” interpretation offered by J. Boardman in an essay issued in 1986 but already known to the mentioned authors before its publication (cf. Frontisi-Ducroux and Lissarrague 1983: 12 n. 3 and 17).
33. Besides the well-known works by K. Schauenburg, G. Schneider-Hermann, A. D. Trendall, A. Cambitoglou (and the exhaustive summaries by Trendall 1989, where one can find the relevant bibliography), still indispensable is a study by H.R.W. Smith (1972), who, despite the improbability of most of his interpretations and the obscurity of his style, remains the only author to have attempted a classification of “chattel symbolism.”
34. A term suitably coined by H.R.W. Smith (cf. Keuls 1976: 444).
35. Trendall 1989: 256. In the words of the great Australian iconologist: “He is probably to be identified with the youthful male figure, holding thyrsus, phiale or bunch of grapes, who is to be found on so many South Italian vases; here we should see him in his role as god of the mysteries, offering his initiates a better life in the hereafter, where he will be in mystic communion with them.”
36. Cf. Veyne 1998: 111: “La femme n’est pas seule et c’est elle qui prend l’initiative amoureuse.”
37. For example, in the bell-shaped crater—reproduced by Smith 1972: pl. 29b—at the Museo Provinciale in Lecce, the handsome young man dressed in a tight bodice and wearing a curious sugarloaf headdress holds a bronze mirror, usually reserved for women.
38. Cf. Keuls 1976: 444-446, pointing out the androgynization process undergone by Eros figures in late-fourth-century Apulian pottery.