vineyard, stained with wine-lees, or coarser colour, will hardly
recognise his double, in the white, graceful, mournful figure,
weeping, chastened, lifting up his arms in yearning+ [41] affection
towards his late-found mother, as we see him on a famous Etruscan
mirror. Only, in thinking of this early tragedy, of these town-
feasts, and of the entrance of Dionysus into Athens, you must
suppose, not the later Athens which is oftenest in our thoughts, the
Athens of Pericles and Pheidias; but that little earlier Athens of
Peisistratus, which the Persians destroyed, which some of us perhaps
would rather have seen, in its early simplicity, than the greater
one; when the old image of the god, carved probably out of the stock
of an enormous vine, had just come from the village of Eleutherae to
his first temple in the Lenaeum--the quarter of the winepresses, near
the Limnae--the marshy place, which in Athens represents the cave of
Nysa; its little buildings on the hill-top, still with steep rocky
ways, crowding round the ancient temple of Erechtheus and the grave
of Cecrops, with the old miraculous olive-tree still growing there,
and the old snake of Athene Polias still alive somewhere in the
temple court.

The artists of the Italian Renaissance have treated Dionysus many
times, and with great effect, but always in his joy, as an embodiment
of that glory of nature to which the Renaissance was a return. But
in an early engraving of Mocetto there is for once a Dionysus treated
differently. The cold light of the background displays a barren
hill, the bridge and towers of [42] an Italian town, and quiet water.
In the foreground, at the root of a vine, Dionysus is sitting, in a
posture of statuesque weariness; the leaves of the vine are grandly
drawn, and wreathing heavily round the head of the god, suggest the
notion of his incorporation into it. The right hand, holding a great