him. According to Clemens Alexandrinus[1] and other authorities, the Titans won his heart with toys, including the bull-roarer or turn-dun of the Australians.[2] His enemies, also in Australian fashion, daubed themselves over with pipeclay.[3] By these hideous foes the child was torn to pieces, though, according to Nonnus, he changed himself into as many beasts as Proteus by the Nile, or Tamlane by the Ettrick. In his bull-shape, Zagreus was finally chopped up small, cooked (except the heart), and eaten by the Titans.[4] Here we are naturally reminded of the dismemberment of Osiris, Ymir, Purusha, Chokanipok, and so many other gods and beasts in Egypt, India, Scandinavia, and America. This point must not be lost sight of in the controversy as to the origin and date of the story of Dionysus Zagreus. Nothing can be much more repulsive than these hideous incidents to the genius, for example, of Homer. He rarely tells anything worse about the gods than the tale of Ares' imprisonment in the large bronze pot, an event undignified, indeed, but not in the ferocious taste of the Zagreus legend. But it need not, therefore, be decided that the story of Dionysus and the Titans is later than Homer because it is inconsistent with the tone of Homeric mythology, and because it is found in more recent authorities. Details like the use of the "turn-dun" (ῥόμβος) in the Dionysiac mysteries, and the bodies of the celebrants daubed with clay, have a primitive, or at least
- ↑ Admon., p. II; Nonnus, xxiv. 43; ap. Aglaoph., p. 555.
- ↑ Custom and Myth, p. 39.
- ↑ Cf. Demosthenes, Pro. Or., 313; Lobeck, pp. 556, 646, 700.
- ↑ Proclus in Crat., p. 115.
