![]() In one of the conflict’s epic battles, Bacchus was killed and his body torn to pieces. This struggle pitted Jupiter’s kin against the defenders of this father, Saturn. ![]() National Gallery of Art, Washington / Public Domainīacchus (or Liber) was among the early Roman gods who fought in the cataclysmic struggle known as the Titanomachy. The Infant Bacchus by Giovanni Bellini, c. This detail was an acknowledgment of the Italian wine god whom the Romans worshipped prior to adopting the cult of Dionysus. In the Roman tradition, this first incarnation of the god was called Liber. During this encounter, they conceived a child: Bacchus. Assuming the form of a snake, Jupiter slithered into the Underworld and made love to Proserpina. Jupiter became smitten with Proserpina, who was usually presented as the daughter of the great king of the gods. The first birth happened in a conventional manner for the gods. The mythology of Bacchus centers on his birth, death, and unlikely rebirth through the figure of the mortal Semele. In Roman mythology, the stories of Bacchus were neither as common nor as richly told as those of Dionysus in the Greek traditions. His aunts and uncles included Ceres, Juno, Vesta, Pluto, and Neptune, while his siblings included Mercury, Vulcan, Minerva, and even his mother Proserpina. Bacchus was later reborn with the help of Jupiter and Semele, a woman often described as his second mother.Īs the son of Jupiter, Bacchus was directly related to many Roman deities. His first father was Jupiter, and his first mother was Proserpina, Ceres’ daughter who was famously abducted by Pluto. In the mythological traditions surrounding him, Bacchus was born twice. He sometimes carried a thyrsus-a staff wound with ivy and covered in honey. Birmingham Museums Trust / Public Domainīacchus was always depicted as a young man who was usually beardless and often drunk. He controlled the growth of grapevines and guided viticulturalists through the wine-making process.Ī baby-faced Bacchus holds an ivy-covered staff in this 1867 portrait by Simeon Solomon. The god of wine, the great reveler, and the paragon of drunkenness (among other titles), Bacchus was the deity that bestowed the gifts of inebriation and altered states upon humanity. “Bacchus” could also be related to the Latin word bacca, meaning “a berry” or “the fruit of a tree or shrub.” In this context, such a word could be referencing grapes, the key ingredient in wine. In appropriating the name “Bacchus,” then, the Latins were claiming an aspect of Dionysus for their own god. That word Bakkhos was itself derived from the term bakkheia, a Greek word used to describe the frenzied, ecstatic state that the god produced in people. The Latin name “Bacchus” descended from the Greek word Bakkhos, an epithet of the god Dionysus. Ultimately, the Roman version of Bacchus was a freewheeling lover of revelry who gave wine and granted drunkenness to all who wished for it. The figure of Bacchus emerged from the blending of two distinct deities: Dionysus, a Greek deity who lent his mythology to Bacchus in the second century BCE, and Liber (“The Free One”), an Italian wine god who would later appear as part of the “plebeian” Aventine triad. Museo Del Bargello, Florence Italy / CC BY-SA 4.0 His grape-like hair represents his ties to wine and viticulture. He holds a kylix of wine in one hand and a cornucopia in the other, and his fellow reveler Pan can be seen standing behind him. With rolling eyes and an unsteady stance, Bacchus appears to be in an inebriated state. The Romans believed that Bacchus operated through inducing a state of drunkenness into his vessels this state freed the inebriated from social conventions and allowed new ways of thinking and acting.īacchus by Michelangelo (1497). Also known as Eleutherios (“liberator,” in Greek), Bacchus represented the spontaneous and unrestrained aspects of life. ![]() The Roman god of wine and viticulture, Bacchus was the bringer of ecstasies and inducer of frenzied states such as creativity and religious devotion. Originally the Roman festival held in honor of Bacchus, bacchanals and bacchanalia have come to mean any occasion of wild and drunken revelry.
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