ous occasions; there were, however, sombre Dionysia, which
were celebrated by night, in the winter season, when the god was thought
to be absent or dead; because the vine was then withered and lifeless.
Such celebrations commemorated only grief and regret. At this season,
women of Athens left their homes and sought the slopes of Mount
Parnassus, to join the women of Delphi in savage rites celebrating the
sufferings of Dionysus. In these Bacchantes, religious fervor was
transformed into the wildest delirium. "With dishevelled hair and torn
garments they ran through the woods, bearing torches and beating
cymbals, with savage screams and violent gestures. A nervous excitement
brought distraction to the senses and to the mind, and showed itself in
wild language and gestures, and the coarsest excesses were acts of
devotion. When the Maenads danced madly through the woods, with serpents
wreathed about their arms, or a dagger in their hands, with which they
struck at those whom they met; when intoxication and the sight of blood
drove the excited throng to frenzy--it was the god acting in them, and
consecrating them as his priestesses. Woe to the man who should come
upon these mysteries! he was torn to pieces; even animals were thus
killed, and the Maenads devoured their quivering flesh and drank their
warm blood." In the ardor inspired by their mad orgies, these votaries
did not distinguish between man and beast, and a mother once tore to
pieces her son, whom she mistook for a young lion, and proudly placed on
the end of her thyrsus the bleeding head of her offspring. Euripides, in
his _Bacchanals_, has drawn a sombre picture of the excesses into which
the wine god led his inspired followers. Similar orgies, which took
their rise in Lydia, were held on the summits of Taygetus and in the
plains of Macedon and Thrace.

Though certain Attic women, under the frenzy of religious enthusiasm,
would join the Delphian women in their wild rites of Dionysus, this
orgiastic worship was never popular at Athens. The Athenian ladies much
preferred the worship of Demeter, the goddess of agriculture and of
domestic life.

The Thesmophoria, the festival in honor of Demeter and her daughter,
Persephone, contrasted greatly with the Panathenaea. The latter was
public and was participated in by all; the former was secret, and only
married women could take part in it. The Panathenaea celebrated the
political and intellectual supremacy of the State,