For the people of Attica, he comes from
Boeotia, a country of northern marsh and mist, but from whose sombre,
black marble towns came also the vine, the musical reed cut from its
sedges, and the worship of the Graces, always so closely connected
with the religion of Dionysus. "At Thebes alone," says Sophocles,
"mortal women bear immortal gods." His mother is the daughter of
Cadmus, himself marked out by [24] many curious circumstances as the
close kinsman of the earth, to which he all but returns at last, as
the serpent, in his old age, attesting some closer sense lingering
there of the affinity of man with the dust from whence he came.
Semele, an old Greek word, as it seems, for the surface of the earth,
the daughter of Cadmus, beloved by Zeus, desires to see her lover in
the glory with which he is seen by the immortal Hera. He appears to
her in lightning. But the mortal may not behold him and live.
Semele gives premature birth to the child Dionysus; whom, to preserve
it from the jealousy of Hera, Zeus hides in a part of his thigh, the
child returning into the loins of its father, whence in due time it
is born again. Yet in this fantastic story, hardly less than in the
legend of Ariadne, the story of Dionysus has become a story of human
persons, with human fortunes, and even more intimately human appeal
to sympathy; so that Euripides, pre-eminent as a poet of pathos,
finds in it a subject altogether to his mind.
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