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Marble relief of Roman age (120-140 A.D.), copy from a Greek original attributed to the V century B.C., representing a dancing Maenad, now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. Figure on the right: Relief similar to the preceding one, dating to from 27 B.C. to 14 A.D., now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
With
the term Maenads (“mad women”) were indicated the followers
of Dionysus, who were led by the god in a state of frenzy and ecstatic
possession, of communion with the divinity. Emblem of the cult adepts
was the thyrsus, a staff with entwined ivy and vine branches and surmounted
by a pine cone or a tuft of foliage. The thyrsus seems, thus, a symbol
of fertility and it can be associated with the phallomorphic representations
of Dionysus, who was also called Thyrsotináktes (“Shaker
of the thyrsus”). In an Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, the “ivy-crowned”
god leads a procession of Nymphs “through the woody coombes”,
while “the boundless forest was filled with their outcry”
(Homeric Hymn XXVI to Dionysus, v. 1-10).
Such elements constituted the mythic pattern for the celebration of
Dionysian feasts, which generally were conducted outside the urban settlements.
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