The Gods: Apollo vs. Dionysos
“Apollo has often been described, not without reason, as the ‘most Greek of the gods’” (Walter 143). Greek’s youth was raised to its own ideal. From its stunning military and cultural advances, Apollo was always the backbone of their culture. “It gives Greek culture as a whole its peculiar character; purified and elevated...the god of this culture is Apollo” (Walter 143).
The worship of Apollo is spread throughout the Greek history and can be seen in many if not all aspects of Greek research. “Important and notably early temples and cult statues belong to the god; theophoric names such as Apelles, Apollonius, Apollodorus, are exceedingly common” (Walter 143). The several temples and statues that were dedicated to the gods are preserved today. “Sanctuaries dedicated specifically to the Delian or the Pythian god are found in many places, often next to one another” (Walter 143). It was during a great rise in colonization that “Apollo the Leader” gained popularity being worshiped “from Sicily in the west to Phasis on the Sea of Azov, and far from a few cities were named Apollonia” (Walter 144).
Apollo and Greek culture had been diffused by the time records of literature had started to appear; Apollo was one of the most important gods in the epics.
“Already in the first book of the Iliad Apollo is introduced in a double role: night-like he comes to send the plague, the arrows clatter across his shoulders and the string of his bow clangs terribly. Animals and men are felled until at last the god is appeased. But on Mount Olympus in the company of the gods, Apollo himself plays the ‘all-beautiful phorminx’, the stringed instrument, and the Muses sing alternately with beautiful voices. The plague god is at the same time master of the healing hymn this association of bow and lyre is crystallized into a single image: the bow sings and the lyre sends forth sound...
Apollo remains the ‘God from Afar’; man knows himself in the Iliad. Poseidon and Apollo meet in the battle of the gods, but Apollo refuses to take up the challenge: ‘Shaker of the earth, you could not say I was sound of mind if I were to go to war with you for the sake of pitiful mortals who now like leaves break forth full of fire, feeding of the fruits of the earth, and then waste away, heartless. With this gesture of infinite superiority the god turns away from all mankind, pious and impious, pure and impure alike. But men who are mindful of this god in awareness of their own misery venture forth on something higher, something absolute; recognition of the limit signifies that the limited portion is not all. Even the all-too-human receives light and form from that distance. It made manifest sense, although it was also a constriction, when, from the fifth century onwards, Apollo began to be understood as a sun god” (Walter 148-149).
“Dionysos can seemingly be defined quite simply as the god of wine and of intoxicated ecstasy. Intoxication as a change in consciousness is interpreted as the irruption of something divine. But the experience of Dionysos goes far beyond that of alcohol and may be entirely independent of it; madness becomes an end in itself. Mania, the Greek word, denotes frenzy, not as the ravings of delusion, but, as its etymological connection with menos would suggest, as an experience of intensified mental power. Nevertheless, Dionysian ecstasy is not something achieved by an individual on his own; it is a mass phenomenon and it spreads almost infectiously. This is expressed in mythological terms by the fact that the god is always surrounded by the swarm of his frenzied male and female votaries. Everyone who surrenders to this god must risk abandoning his everyday identity and becoming mad; this is both divine and wholesome. An outward symbol and instrument of the transformation brought by the god is the mask. The merging of god and votary which occurs in the metamorphosis is without parallel in the rest of Greek religion: both votary and god are called Bacchus...
This blurring of the contours of a well-formed personality makes the Dionysos cult stand in contrast to what is justly regarded as typically Greek. How these two aspects, the Apollonian and Dionysian, nevertheless belong together as a polarity is a question which was posed in an inspired and wilful way by Friedrich Nietzsche” (Walter 161-162).
“The wine god became exceedingly popular in sixth-century Attic vase painting for the decoration of wine vessels, and it was here that the iconography of the Dionysos thiasos found its classical form, reflecting also the development of the Dionysos festivals and later especially that of the satyr play. The presence of Dionysos is announced by vine and ivy tendrils and by the thyros, a springy wand (nebis) over the shoulder, dance in a trance, with heads bowed or thrown back. The appearance of the satyrs with their mixture of human and animal features is to understood as a form of masking: a flat-nosed mask with a beard and animal ears conceals the identity of the wearer, and a loin cloth holds the very often erect leather phallos and the horse tail. Satyrs masked in this way are known to have appeared in festivals, not only in the standardized chorus in the satyr play, just as real women entered a state of frenzy as maenads or thyiades by force of the god. The significance of the phallos is no procreative - the maenads always fend off the advances of the satyrs, if need be with the help of the thyrsos wands. It is arousal for its own sake, and also a symbol of the extraordinary: the Dionysia also involved a procession with a gigantic phallos...
The god himself has many forms. In the simplest one he may be represented by a mask which is hung on a column an arrayed with a piece of cloth, almost like a scarecrow; the mask could presumably also be worn by men who would dance and rave as the god. On Naxos there are two kinds of masks of the god, the mask of the frenzied god, Bacchus, made from vine and wood, and the mask of the mild god, Meilichios, made from fig wood, which may also point to the underworld ” (Walter 166-167).