Dionysos Comes to Thrace: The Metaphor of Corrupted Sacrifice and the Introduction of Dionysian Cult in Images of Lykourgos’s Madness

A small group of Attic vases from the fifth century b.c.e. depict the murder of the young Dryas by Lykourgos, the mythical king of Thrace.² The scenes vary in details but adopt a similar formula to show the boy’s death: driven to madness by Dionysos, whom he had expelled from the country, the king lunges at his son with an axe while the god and his followers look on (Apollodorus Bibl. 3.5). The earliest certain examples of this subject appear on two mid-century vases, a column krater in a private Italian collection³ and a hydria in Krakow (Figure 1).⁴ In both scenes, the boy sits on an altar and gestures futilely at his father,⁵ who advances from the left. Dionysos stands at the right holding a thyrsos and, on the Krakow hydria, a vine. Dancing bacchantes appear in both images, and the Krakow scene also includes a satyr and a mourning woman, most likely the boy’s mother (Beazley 1928.45). The third image of the murder, more elaborate than the others in composition, appears on a hydria from the later fifth century (Figure 2).⁶ Here Dryas has already been beheaded, and he sinks to his knees before his father. The two are surrounded by dancing bacchantes, one of whom holds the boy’s head; the rest carry swords, thyrsoi, a small animal, and a child. There is no altar in this scene, but the setting is clearly a sanctuary—two statues stand by the spot where Dryas falls, and Dionysos and Ariadne preside over the scene, reclining in the center of the upper register.⁷

This scant fifth-century visual record is a poor witness to the importance of the Lykourgos myth in antiquity. The king’s madness was the subject of Aeschylus’s Edonoi,⁸ and Pausanias reports that Dionysos’s oldest sanctuary in Athens displayed paintings of Lykourgos and Pentheus being punished for their offenses against the god (ταυ̑τά τε δὴ γεγραμμένα εἰσὶ καὶ Πενθεὺς καὶ Λυκου̑ργος ὡ̑ν ἐς ∆ιόνυσον ὕβρισαν διδόντες δίκας, 1.20.3).⁹ At best, these accounts suggest the bare outlines of the Lykourgos myth as it was known in classical Athens, although Apollodorus’s much later summary provides additional information. The mythographer tells us that when Dionysos arrived in Thrace, Lykourgos expelled him and took his followers captive, and the god punished him with madness: Λυκούργῳ δὲ μανίαν ἐνεποίησε ∆ιόνυσος. ὁ δὲ μεμηνὼς ∆ρύαντα τὸν παι̑δα, ἀμπέλου νομίζων κλη̑μα κόπτειν, πελέκει πλήξας ἀπέκτεινε, καὶ ἀκρωτηριάσας αὐτὸν ἐσωφρόνησε (“Dionysos drove Lykourgos mad. And in his madness, he struck his son Dryas dead with an axe, imagining that he was lopping a branch of a vine, and when he had cut off his son’s extremities, he recovered his senses,” Bibl. 3.5).¹⁰ The general features of this version are consistent with the fifth-century vase paintings—there, too, we find the murder, the axe, and the vine—but numerous gaps remain, and a detailed understanding of the vase paintings has remained elusive. Previous scholarship on the scenes has tended to follow two lines of inquiry, the first of which stresses the influence of the Edonoi on the images.¹¹ It is certainly possible that some aspects of the images were inspired by Aeschylus’s play, but such a hypothesis does not take us very far toward understanding the specific presentation of the myth on the vases—and not only because the relationship between image and theater is now understood to be less straightforward than was once believed.¹² The Edonoi is extremely fragmentary, so the manner in which it handled Dryas’s death is a matter of conjecture, but the event would certainly have occurred offstage and could not have provided direct visual inspiration for the vase paintings (cf. Beazley 1928.46).

A different approach to the images emphasizes their Thracian features,¹³ since two vases (Figure 1 and the privately owned krater) show the king in patterned zeira (“mantle”) and embades (“boots”), clothing typically associated with that region.¹⁴ Despoina Tsiafakis suggests that the king’s ethnicity is the key to interpreting the imagery, since his brutish behavior would have been understood as a consequence of his...