of his mother, dead in childbirth, and ignorant of the glory of her
son; in shame, according to Euripides; punished, as her own sisters
allege, for impiety. The death of Semele [45] is a sort of ideal or
type of this peculiar claim on human pity, as the descent of
Persephone into Hades, of all human pity over the early death of
women. Accordingly, his triumph being now consummated, he descends
into Hades, through the unfathomable Alcyonian lake, according to the
most central version of the legend, to bring her up from thence; and
that Hermes, the shadowy conductor of souls, is constantly associated
with Dionysus, in the story of his early life, is not without
significance in this connexion. As in Delphi the winter months were
sacred to him, so in Athens his feasts all fall within the four
months on this and the other side of the shortest day; as Persephone
spends those four months--a third part of the year--in Hades. Son or
brother of Persephone he actually becomes at last, in confused, half-
developed tradition; and even has his place, with his dark sister, in
the Eleusinian mysteries, as Iacchus; where, on the sixth day of the
feast, in the great procession from Athens to Eleusis, we may still
realise his image, moving up and down above the heads of the vast
multitude, as he goes, beside "the two," to the temple of Demeter,
amid the light of torches at noonday.

But it was among the mountains of Thrace that this gloomier element
in the being of Dionysus had taken the strongest hold. As in the
sunny villages of Attica the cheerful elements of his religion had
been developed, so, in those [46] wilder northern regions, people
continued to brood over its darker side, and hence a current of
gloomy legend descended into Greece. The subject of the Bacchanals
of Euripides is the infatuated opposition of Pentheus, king of
Thebes, to Dionysus and his religion; his cruelty to the god, whom he