Bacchus, Liber, and the Power of the Vine

Bacchus is the Roman name of the Greek god Dionysus, the deity of the vine, of wine and its intoxication, of vegetative fertility, and of ecstatic release. At Rome the incoming Greek god was assimilated to an older Italian deity, Liber Pater, the Free Father, a god of fertility, the vine, and free growth who was worshipped with Ceres and Libera in a plebeian triad on the Aventine.

Through this fusion Bacchus/Liber carried a double character: the genial patron of the vineyard and the wine-cup, giver of the vintage and of a certain liberating abandon, and, at the same time, the god of a powerful and unsettling mystery-religion whose rites promised transformation and whose myths told of dismemberment, rebirth, and the breaking of ordinary bounds. The god is shown young and beautiful, ivy-crowned, with the wine-cup and the thyrsus, attended by satyrs and by the frenzied female worshippers called maenads or Bacchae.