Dancing Maenad 27 BCE - 14 CE Roman copy of a Greek original attributed to Kallimachos circa 425-400 BCE at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City

Dancing Maenad 27 BCE - 14 CE Roman copy of a Greek original attributed to Kallimachos circa 425-400 BCE at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Maenads were mythical women inspired by the god of wine, Dionysos, to abandon their homes and families and roam the mountains and forests, singing and dancing in a state of ecstatic frenzy. This figure, wearing an ivy wreath and carrying a thyrsos (fennel stalk) bedecked with ivy leaves and berries, moves forward, trancelike, her drapery swirling about her. Maenads became popular as art subjects in the late fifth century B.C.E. with Euripides portrayal of the manic devotées of Dionysos in his play the Bacchae. In the play, King Pentheus bans the worship of Dionysus then the king's cousin lures him into the woods where he is torn apart by maenads including his own mother, Agave, who, in a trance tears off his head believing it to be that of a lion. The rites associated with the worship of Dionysus (Roman Bacchus) were characterized by maniacal dancing to the sound of loud music and crashing cymbals, in which the revelers, called Bacchantes, whirled, screamed, became drunk and incited one another to greater and greater ecstasy. The goal was to achieve a state of enthusiasm in which the celebrants’ souls were temporarily freed from their earthly bodies and were able to commune with the god and gain a glimpse of eternity. The rite climaxed in a performance of frenzied feats of strength and madness, such as uprooting trees, tearing a bull (the symbol of Dionysus) apart with their bare hands, an act called sparagmos, and eating its flesh raw, an act called omophagia, similar to communion in which the participants assumed the strength and character of the god by consuming his symbolic incarnation.


Image: Dancing Maenad 27 BCE - 14 CE Roman copy of a Greek original attributed to Kallimachos circa 425-400 BCE at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City courtesy of the museum.

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