Representation of Maenads on Archaic Red-Figure Vases

Abstract

There have been two works of major importance dealing with the characteristics of Greek maenadism, separated by seventy years of rapid advance in the study of comparative religion. The first, which appeared in 1872, is Rapp's detailed study ‘Die Mänade im griechischen Cultus, in der Kunst und Poesie’. This has remained valuable long after the contemporary theories of nature-symbolism have been abandoned, and the distinctions he drew between the ‘artificial’ maenads of poetry or art and the actual cult-practice of Dionysiac religion in historical Greece is still on the whole valid. The second work is E. R. Dodds' article ‘Maenadism in the Bacchae,’ published in 1940, which has supplemented, but not basically altered, Rapp's principles by showing that, although it may be doubted whether anything very much like the ecstatic possession depicted in the Bacchae took place in classical Greece, sufficiently strong parallels exist between the presentation of maenads on vases and in the Bacchae on the one hand, and historical and clinical descriptions of hysterical excitement on the other, to suggest that the maenad had been at some time more than an imaginary creature; and in fact Bacchic practices of some types, apparently traditional, can be proved to have occurred in Hellenistic times. Somehow, it seems, some practical knowledge of religious hysteria reached Euripides and the vase-painters of the late sixth century, either surviving from the past or brought in from other parts of the Greek world.

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