Dark Dionysus Trivia Quiz

Answer: Zeus raped his mother, Semele.

Hera, the sister wife of Zeus, struck Semele with a (fatal) lightning bolt before Dionysus could be born, in order to pay Zeus back for his infidelity. Zeus rescued him and brought him to term in his thigh. A shrine was set up by Cadmus at Dirce to honour his mother where she was killed, which pleased Dionysus.

Answer: Because they have lost their minds.

When Dionysus arrives in Thebes, the people refuse to acknowledge his divinity, though he has reached manhood. They have slandered his mother, saying she was unchaste and bore him to a mortal. He is offended his own relatives have done this. He mercilessly punishes the kin of his mother.

Answer: Thyrsi

A thyrsus is a wand/staff crowned with a conical ornament (usually a pine cone). Ideally it is decorated with vines. It symbolises hedonism, fertility and wealth and Dionysus expects his followers to use it in their Bacchic rituals.

Answer: Dionysus supernaturally frees them.

Dionysus is a powerful God, as evidenced by his enduing the earth on Mount Cithaeron with pure, delicious milk and honey that springs forth when the women pierce the ground. His form is not limited to the anthropomorphic one in which Pentheus meets him.

Answer: No

Pentheus meets Dionysus in his human form and derides his feminine paleness, soft skin and long luscious hair. (He accuses him of being seductive.) He does not recognize this man as his cousin and has him taken into custody for dissidence. He berates Cadmus for dancing and praising Dionysus, and declares nothing is due to him and he is not to be feared.

Answer: Tiresias

Tiresias is a blind seer. The things he sees are truer, arguably, than things Pentheus does. When Pentheus sees Tiresias worshipping Dionysus he is perturbed and displeased and scared; he permits the old men to dance but insists they are deluded.

Answer: They are made to commit an atrocity

Dionysus' aunts, Agave and Ino, lead the mad, involuntary maenads on Mount Cithaeron. Agave does not recognise her own son, Pentheus, when he reveals himself to her to deter her from hurting him; and she rips him arm out of its socket. Ino hurts him too. (Pentheus is Agave's only child and she dotes on him.)

Answer: He is exiled.

Dionysus is revealed ultimately to lack humanity and empathy, and to be a huge egoist. Cadmus, though he acknowledged Dionysus' divinity and honoured his mother, was not spared the punishment Dionysus wreaked on Thebes.

Answer: He was torn apart by the maenads.

Dionysus cunningly humiliated Pentheus by telling him the maenads would kill him if he went up Mount Cithaeron unless he was disguised as a woman. Did Pentheus want to see what the depraved naked wild women were up to? He did. So Pentheus dressed as a girl and skipped up the mountain.

He couldn't see the women properly, so he climbed a tree to spy on them. Dionysus alerted the women to his presence and they bent and shook the tree until they could get their hands on him. They ripped him apart. His mother paraded his head through the town, crying she'd killed a lion.

Answer: Religious ecstasy, fertility, wine and viniculture and ritual madness

According to myth, Dionysus traveled around Greece and inflicted punishment wherever he or his cult was rejected. Cult members were called the Bacchae or maenads (who were all female). As the god of wine, he is associated with certain qualities induced by intoxication such as loss of self-governance and euphoria.