when they talk about things like Dionysian orgies in Ancient Greece, did they mean like… literal orgies? like sex parties? were those a thing in the ancient world and why? is it true that Alexander would participate in those types of things? (i ask with no judgment btw, i’m just genuinely curious. i hope this isn’t a stupid question)
Dionysiac Orgies….
…one of the weirder inventions of both ancient Roman and early modern Christian imagination, with a little help from ancient Greek fancy.
First, what the Greeks showed on pottery was not necessarily what they were DOING. It might represent what they’d like to do, but not necessarily even that. And when divine figures and nature spirits (such as satyrs) got involved, well, the realm of the gods didn’t run by the same rules as normal human life.
So, for instance, Zeus was married to his sister (Hera, and arguably Demeter before that). Greeks were hardly inclined to permit brother-sister marriage because Zeus and Hera did it. Ergo, we must recognize that the Greeks did not model human behavior on divine behavior.
Second, a Dionysiac thiasos (see above) was not an orgy. It was “exstasis” or ecstatic experience (an expression of zoë) where one was enveloped by divine mania. And while this mania could be good or bad, it wasn’t inherently sexual. Note that in Euripides’s Bakkhai, the maenads (Dionysos’s female worshipers) go out onto the mountain to dance in crazed fashion as punishment.
THAT ISN’T MEANT TO BE NORMAL.
They refused to recognize the god. So, he sent them mad (mania).
And sex wasn’t a part of it at all.
The play is called Bakkhai after Dionysos’s epithet, Bakkhaios, the Dark God. But Dionysos had dozens and dozens of epithets. That’s just one.
Some Dionysiac worship in ancient Greece was gender segregated, but public festivals weren’t, such as Greater and Rural Dionysias, or Anthesterias, etc. At these, the whole community would be present. And if Greater Dionysias at least had giant penis floats (I’m not joking, see below), they were not orgies. They were spring fertility festivals. It was at the Greater Dionysia in Athens that new plays for that year would be presented.
That said, some Dionysiac worship, including the Mysteries, were gender segregated. Women worshiped apart from men. That doesn’t mean they acted crazy while doing it. We have epigraphic evidence from (mostly) Hellenistic periods and later suggesting a great deal of regulation surrounding one’s role as a maenad—with threat of fines for misbehavior.
It certainly wasn’t about women running half-nude on mountainsides fucking anything that moved. 😉 That said, the entire point of Dionysiac worship was to take one out of one’s self for a while. It seems that many of these rites occurred in large worship halls with guarded doors (to keep men/others away). Although there is also evidence of worship outside in groves sacred to Dionysos, it still wasn’t a mixed crowd.
Also—of interest—according to our evidence, women did NOT drink at these. They danced themselves into ecstasy. (Men did drink.)* Women may well have used snakes (at least in Epiros and Macedon), but snakes occupied a curious place in Greek thought. Zeus Ktesios was the “house snake” meant to guard the larder. And temples to Asklepios, god of medicine, often had snakes (and dogs) present to assist with patient healings. Snakes wrap the medical caduces. To have a snake “lick” one’s face or ears was a GOOD thing, indicating the favor of the god, and among oracles, a snake might be the voice of the god. So snakes aren’t auto-bad, for Greeks.
Furthermore, nobody was eating meat raw at these Dionysiac festivals. There would have been an animal sacrifice, but any raw pieces were tossed into a special bowl before an altar for Dionysos. The women (or men) didn’t eat it.
Again, we can’t confuse MYTH with reality and actual worship.
Does this mean sex was never involved? Look at all those penises in Dionysiac worship!
Probably there was sexual activity, but it, too, was ritualized. Take the yearly Anthesteria festival. On the second day (Choës), the Basileus (king) of Athens (or of any Ionian city of Asia Minor) would be carried through the streets in a special “boat” float, meant to symbolize the coming of Dionysos to Naxos, where he’d find (and marry) Ariadne. By the historical era, the “king” was a magistrate office chosen by lot, not an actual king; his job was purely religious. Recall that kings had a role as priests, which separated them from later Greek tyrants.
Anyway, the king-as-Dionysos was taken into the Bouleuterion (the Athenian congress) in the agora or marketplace, where he underwent marriage to the basileia as Ariadne…who was his wife (already). This may be an echo of the ANE Sacred Marriage rite where the king and priestess played the roles of god and goddess (albeit for different deities). It could even date back into the Mycenaean period; we’re unsure, except that it’s very, very old. We’re also not sure they had sex, but probably so. Still, notice how the myth has been made proper via actors who are, in fact, already married (and could be in their 50s or 60s). It’s symbolic. Also, in Greek art of Dionysos and Ariadne, even if their nature spirit attendants are going crazy, the GOD never is. In fact, he's rarely even shown with an erection, as per below, from the Derveni Krater. It's his wedding night, but he's pretty languid as Ariadne removes her wedding veil. (I'd argue that's what the krater is about: good/divine marriage wrapping around to complete lack of control: bad mania.)
So where did this notion of orgies arise?
Romans.
Dionysos entered Italy via the Greek cities of S. Italy, and also via Etruria (as Fufluns). He reached Rome in the middle Hellenistic period, with the Bacchanalia, which they no longer seem to have celebrated gender segregated, either through deliberate choice or via misunderstanding.
The Romans had a horror of people off doing unregulated things. Oh, no! “Secrets” (like Mysteries) were therefore a problem. Romans didn’t like Greek morals (or institutions), even if they liked their art. Romans also liked to make up shit about their enemies. So between Greek pottery of Dionysiac thiasoi involving satyrs and maenads (e.g., not real worship but myth—more from the Derveni Krater below), and mixed-gender worship in Italy, the Roman Senate had a bit of a freak-out in 186 BCE, and tried to put Bacchanalia under senate control. I’m no Romanist, nor do I have time to chase down all the details from papers I wrote in grad school, so I won’t try. Find Balsdon, Romans and Aliens. Also MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order. As I recall, both discuss Bacchants, astrologers, Christians, and other (Eastern) groups/beliefs that Proper Romans looked down on (and feared).
The upshot is that Bacchic orgies are a Roman moral fiction. They may have had some basis in Roman attempts to appropriate Greek Things Done Badly, but don’t reflect Greek practice.
Early Christianity added another layer of demonic sinfulness, as Dionysiac Mysteries were one of Christianity’s great rivals. That moral fiction, combined with artwork and imagination, was picked up post-Renaissance to create new fantasies where men and women got wildly drunk and fucked like bunnies in a romanticized countryside. Or in a more sinister twist, got wildly drunk, tore apart poor innocent animals which they ate raw, then fucked like bunnies. Modern authors such as Donna Tartt in her The Secret History, pull on the same legends for modern Bacchanalias with wine, sex, murder, and mayhem. (I enjoyed the novel, but it’s not based on real ancient Greek Dionysiac Mysteries so much as on mid-century Gothic.)
Anyway, all that muddled mess is very far from actual Dionysiac worship in ancient Greece, even the “wild” Macedonian version.
So no, Alexander would not have been engaging in wine-soaked sex-parties.
At the end of Dancing with the Lion: Becoming, I wrote an initiation scene to the Mysteries of Dionysos, based on what I know of that, Orphaic cult, and mystery cults generally. It was fun to do but, as I always note, if informed by history, it’s fiction. Nonetheless, sex is nowhere in it. 😊
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*Throughout Greece, “nice” women didn’t drink wine, or not without the wine being heavily watered (1/4 or less wine to water). Drinking was only for hetairai and other prostitutes, as wine was strongly associated with the symposion, or drinking party, where proper women were not to show their faces—but prostitutes regularly did. Now, whether this ideal was anything close to the actual, your guess is as good as mine. I suspect that then, as now, some women were “good little girls,” while others thought, “Screw that, I need a drink!”