Semele
Princess of Thebes
Goddess of the Bacchic frenzy
Member of the Theban Royal Family
Jupiter and Semele (1894-95)
by Gustave Moreau
Other namesThyone
AbodeThebes, Mount Olympus
Personal information
ParentsCadmus and Harmonia
SiblingsAutonoë, Agave, Ino and Polydorus
ConsortZeus
ChildrenDionysus

Semele (/ˈsɛmɪli/; Ancient Greek: Σεμέλη Semelê), or Thyone (/ˈθaɪəni/; Ancient Greek: Θυώνη Thyônê) in Greek mythology, was the youngest daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, and the mother[1] of Dionysus by Zeus in one of his many origin myths.

Certain elements of the cult of Dionysus and Semele came from the Phrygians.[2] These were modified, expanded, and elaborated by the Ionian Greek invaders and colonists. Doric Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC), born in the city of Halicarnassus under the Achaemenid Empire, who gives the account of Cadmus, estimates that Semele lived either 1,000 or 1,600 years prior to his visit to Tyre in 450 BC at the end of the Greco-Persian Wars (499–449 BC) or around 2050 or 1450 BC.[3][4] In Rome, the goddess Stimula was identified as Semele.

Etymology

According to some linguists the name Semele is Thraco-Phrygian,[5] derived from a PIE root meaning 'earth' (*Dʰéǵʰōm).[6] Julius Pokorny reconstructs her name from the PIE root *dgem- meaning 'earth' and relates it with Thracian Zemele, 'mother earth'.[7][8][9][10] However, Burkert says that while Semele is "manifestly non-Greek", he also says that "it is no more possible to confirm that Semele is a Thraco-Phrygian word for earth than it is to prove the priority of the Lydian baki- over Bacchus as a name for Dionysos".[11]

Etymological connections of Thraco-Phrygian Semele with Balto-Slavic earth deities have been noted, since an alternate name for Baltic Zemyna is Žemelė,[12][13] and in Slavic languages, the word seme (Semele) means 'seed', and zemlja (Zemele) means 'earth'.[14] Thus, according to Borissoff, "she could be an important link bridging the ancient Thracian and Slavonic cults (...)".[15]

Mythology

Jove and Semele (1695) by Sebastiano Ricci

Seduction by Zeus and birth of Dionysus

In one version of the myth, Semele was a priestess of Zeus, and on one occasion was observed by Zeus as she slaughtered a bull at his altar and afterwards swam in the river Asopus to cleanse herself of the blood. Flying over the scene in the guise of an eagle, Zeus fell in love with Semele and repeatedly visited her secretly.[16]

Zeus's wife, Hera, a goddess jealous of usurpers, discovered his affair with Semele when she later became pregnant. Appearing as an old crone,[17] Hera befriended Semele, who confided in her that her lover was actually Zeus. Hera pretended not to believe her, and planted seeds of doubt in Semele's mind. Curious, Semele asked Zeus to grant her a boon. Zeus, eager to please his beloved, promised on the River Styx to grant her anything she wanted. She then demanded that Zeus reveal himself in all his glory as proof of his divinity. Though Zeus begged her not to ask this, she persisted and he was forced by his oath to comply. Zeus tried to spare her by showing her the smallest of his bolts and the sparsest thunderstorm clouds he could find. Mortals, however, cannot look upon the gods without incinerating, and she perished, consumed in a lightning-ignited flame.[18]

Zeus rescued the fetal Dionysus, however, by sewing him into his thigh (whence the epithet Eiraphiotes, 'insewn', of the Homeric Hymn). A few months later, Dionysus was born. This leads to his being called "the twice-born".[19]

When he grew up, Dionysus rescued his mother from Hades,[20] and she became a goddess on Mount Olympus, with the new name Thyone, presiding over the frenzy inspired by her son Dionysus.[21] At a later point in Dionysiaca, Semele, now resurrected, boasts to her sister Ino how Cronida ('Kronos's son', that is, Zeus), "the plower of her field", carried on the gestation of Dionysus and now her son gets to join the heavenly deities in Olympus, while Ino languishes with a murderous husband (since Athamas tried to kill Ino and her son), and a son that lives with maritime deities.[22]

Impregnation by Zeus

There is a story in the Fabulae 167 of Gaius Julius Hyginus, or a later author whose work has been attributed to Hyginus. In this, Dionysus (called Liber) is the son of Jupiter and Proserpina, and was killed by the Titans. Jupiter gave his torn up heart in a drink to Semele, who became pregnant this way. But in another account, Zeus swallows the heart himself, in order to beget his seed on Semele. Hera then convinces Semele to ask Zeus to come to her as a god, and on doing so she dies, and Zeus seals the unborn baby up in his thigh.[23] As a result of this Dionysus "was also called Dimetor [of two mothers] ... because the two Dionysoi were born of one father, but of two mothers"[24]

Still another variant of the narrative is found in Callimachus[25] and the 5th century CE Greek writer Nonnus.[26] In this version, the first Dionysus is called Zagreus. Nonnus does not present the conception as virginal; rather, the editor's notes say that Zeus swallowed Zagreus' heart, and visited the mortal woman Semele, whom he seduced and made pregnant. Nonnus classifies Zeus's affair with Semele as one in a set of twelve, the other eleven women on whom he begot children being Io, Europa, Plouto, Danaë, Aigina, Antiope, Leda, Dia, Alcmene, Laodameia, the mother of Sarpedon, and Olympias.[27]

Locations

The most usual setting for the story of Semele is the palace that occupied the acropolis of Thebes, called the Cadmeia.[28] When Pausanias visited Thebes in the 2nd century CE, he was shown the very bridal chamber where Zeus visited her and begat Dionysus. Since an Oriental inscribed cylindrical seal found at the palace can be dated 14th-13th centuries,[29] the myth of Semele must be Mycenaean or earlier in origin. At the Alcyonian Lake near the prehistoric site of Lerna, Dionysus, guided by Prosymnus or Polymnus, descended to Tartarus to free his once-mortal mother. Annual rites took place there in classical times; Pausanias refuses to describe them.[30]

Though the Greek myth of Semele was localized in Thebes, the fragmentary Homeric Hymn to Dionysus makes the place where Zeus gave a second birth to the god a distant one, and mythically vague:

"For some say, at Dracanum; and some, on windy Icarus; and some, in Naxos, O Heaven-born, Insewn; and others by the deep-eddying river Alpheus that pregnant Semele bare you to Zeus the thunder-lover. And others yet, lord, say you were born in Thebes; but all these lie. The Father of men and gods gave you birth remote from men and secretly from white-armed Hera. There is a certain Nysa, a mountain most high and richly grown with woods, far off in Phoenice, near the streams of Aegyptus..."

Semele was worshipped at Athens at the Lenaia, when a yearling bull, emblematic of Dionysus, was sacrificed to her. One-ninth was burnt on the altar in the Hellenic way; the rest was torn and eaten raw by the votaries.[31]

A unique tale, "found nowhere else in Greece" and considered to be a local version of her legend,[32] is narrated by geographer Pausanias in his Description of Greece:[33] after giving birth to her semi-divine son, Dionysus, fathered by Zeus, Semele was banished from the realm by her father Cadmus. Their sentence was to be put into a chest or a box (larnax) and cast in the sea. Luckily, the casket they were in washed up by the waves at Prasiae.[34][35] However, it has been suggested that this tale might have been a borrowing from the story of Danaë and Perseus.[36][37]

Semele was a tragedy by Aeschylus; it has been lost, save a few lines quoted by other writers, and a papyrus fragment from Oxyrhynchus, P. Oxy. 2164.[38]

Drawing from an Etruscan mirror: Semele embracing her son Dionysus, with Apollo looking on and a satyr playing an aulos

In Etruscan culture

Semele is attested with the Etruscan name form Semla, depicted on the back of a bronze mirror from the fourth century BC.

In Roman culture

In ancient Rome, a grove (lucus) near Ostia, situated between the Aventine Hill and the mouth of the Tiber River,[39] was dedicated to a goddess named Stimula. W.H. Roscher includes the name Stimula among the indigitamenta, the lists of Roman deities maintained by priests to assure that the correct divinity was invoked in public rituals.[40] In his poem on the Roman calendar, Ovid (d. 17 CE) identifies this goddess with Semele:

"There was a grove: known either as Semele's or Stimula's:
Inhabited, they say, by Italian Maenads.
Ino, asking them their nation, learned they were Arcadians,
And that Evander was the king of the place.
Hiding her divinity, Saturn’s daughter cleverly
Incited the Latian Bacchae with deceiving words:"

"lucus erat, dubium Semelae Stimulaene vocetur;
maenadas Ausonias incoluisse ferunt:
quaerit ab his Ino quae gens foret. Arcadas esse
audit et Euandrum sceptra tenere loci;
dissimulata deam Latias Saturnia Bacchas
instimulat fictis insidiosa sonis:"[41]

Roman sarcophagus (ca. AD 190) depicting the triumphal procession of Bacchus as he returns from India, with scenes of his birth in the smaller top panels (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland)

Augustine notes that the goddess is named after stimulae, 'goads, whips,' by means of which a person is driven to excessive actions.[42] The goddess's grove was the site of the Dionysian scandal[43] that led to official attempts to suppress the cult. The Romans viewed the Bacchanals with suspicion, based on reports of ecstatic behaviors contrary to Roman social norms and the secrecy of initiatory rite. In 186 BC, the Roman senate took severe actions to limit the cult, without banning it. Religious beliefs and myths associated with Dionysus were successfully adapted and remained pervasive in Roman culture, as evidenced for instance by the Dionysian scenes of Roman wall painting[44] and on sarcophagi from the 1st to the 4th centuries AD.

The Greek cult of Dionysus had flourished among the Etruscans in the archaic period, and had been made compatible with Etruscan religious beliefs. One of the main principles of the Dionysian mysteries that spread to Latium and Rome was the concept of rebirth, to which the complex myths surrounding the god's own birth were central. Birth and childhood deities were important to Roman religion; Ovid identifies Semele's sister Ino as the nurturing goddess Mater Matuta. This goddess had a major cult center at Satricum that was built 500–490 BC. The female consort who appears with Bacchus in the acroterial statues there may be either Semele or Ariadne. The pair were part of the Aventine Triad in Rome as Liber and Libera, along with Ceres. The temple of the triad is located near the Grove of Stimula,[45] and the grove and its shrine (sacrarium) were located outside Rome's sacred boundary (pomerium), perhaps as the "dark side" of the Aventine Triad.[46]

In the classical tradition

In the later mythological tradition of the Christian era, ancient deities and their narratives were often interpreted allegorically. In the Neoplatonic philosophy of Henry More (1614–1687), for instance, Semele was thought to embody "intellectual imagination", and was construed as the opposite of Arachne, "sense perception".[47]

In the 18th century, the story of Semele formed the basis for three operas of the same name, the first by John Eccles (1707, to a libretto by William Congreve), another by Marin Marais (1709), and a third by George Frideric Handel (1742). Handel's work, based on Congreve's libretto but with additions, while an opera to its marrow, was originally given as an oratorio so that it could be performed in a Lenten concert series; it premiered on February 10, 1744.[48] The German dramatist Schiller produced a singspiel entitled Semele in 1782. Victorian poet Constance Naden wrote a sonnet in the voice of Semele, first published in her 1881 collection Songs and Sonnets of Springtime.[49] Paul Dukas composed a cantata, Sémélé.

Genealogy

Argive genealogy in Greek mythology
InachusMelia
ZeusIoPhoroneus
EpaphusMemphis
LibyaPoseidon
BelusAchiroëAgenorTelephassa
DanausElephantisAegyptusCadmusCilixEuropaPhoenix
MantineusHypermnestraLynceusHarmoniaZeus
Polydorus
SpartaLacedaemonOcaleaAbasAgaveSarpedonRhadamanthus
Autonoë
EurydiceAcrisiusInoMinos
ZeusDanaëSemeleZeus
PerseusDionysus
Colour key:

  Male
  Female
  Deity

Music

Notes

  1. ↑ Although Dionysus is called the son of Zeus (see The cult of Dionysus : legends and practice Archived 2007-10-11 at the Wayback Machine, Dionysus, Greek god of wine & festivity, The Olympian Gods Archived 2007-10-02 at the Wayback Machine, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology Archived 2013-10-17 at the Wayback Machine, The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2007, etc.), Barbara Walker, in The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, (Harper/Collins, 1983) calls Semele the "Virgin Mother of Dionysus", a term that contradicts the picture given in the ancient sources: Hesiod Archived 2008-01-06 at the Wayback Machine calls him "Dionysus whom Cadmus' daughter Semele bare of union with Zeus", Euripides Archived 2008-07-24 at the Wayback Machine calls him son of Zeus, Ovid tells how his mother Semele, rather than Hera, was "to Jove's embrace preferred", Apollodorus says that "Zeus loved Semele and bedded with her".
  2. ↑ Martin Nillson (1967).Die Geschichte der Griechischen Religion, Vol I. C. H. Beck Verlag. München p. 378
  3. ↑ Herodotus (2003) [1954]. Marincola, John (ed.). Histories. Translated by de Sélincourt, Aubrey (Reprint ed.). New York: Penguin Books. p. 155. ISBN 978-0140449082. But from the birth of Dionysus, the son of Semele, daughter of Cadmus, to the present day is a period of about 1000 years only; ...
  4. ↑ Herodotus, Histories, II, 2.145
  5. ↑ Kerenyi 1976 p. 107; Seltman 1956
  6. ↑ Martin Nillson (1967).Die Geschichte der Griechischen Religion, Vol I. C. H. Beck Verlag. München p. 568;
  7. ↑ Julius Pokorny.Indogermanisches Etymologisches Woerterbuch: root *dgem. Compare Damia and "Demeter" (mother earth).
  8. ↑ Compare Žemyna (derived from žemė – earth), the goddess of the earth (mother goddess) in Lithuanian mythology, and Zeme, also referred to as Zemes-mãte, a Slavic and Latvian goddess of the earth. In: Ann, Martha and Myers Imel, Dorothy. (1993). Goddesses in World Mythology. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
  9. ↑ Gimbutas, Marija. "The Living Goddesses".
  10. ↑ Mallory and Adams suggest that, although Semele is "etymologically related" to other mother Earth/Earth goddess cognates, her name might be a borrowing "from another IE source", not inherited as part of the Ancient Greek lexicon. In: Mallory, James P.; Adams, Douglas Q. (1997). Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. London: Routledge. p. 174. ISBN 978-1-884964-98-5
  11. ↑ Walter Burkert (1985), Greek Religion, p. 163
  12. ↑ Laurinkiene, Nijole. "Gyvatė, Žemė, Žemyna: vaizdinių koreliacija nominavimo ir semantikos lygmenyje". In: Lituanistika šiuolaikiniame pasaulyje. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2004. pp. 285–286.
  13. ↑ Jones, Prudence; Pennick, Nigel (1995). A History of Pagan Europe. Routledge. p. 175. ISBN 978-1-136-14172-0.
  14. ↑ Laurinkienė, Nijolė. "Motina Žemyna baltų deivių kontekste: 1 d.: Tacito mater deum, trakų-frigų Σεμέλη, latvių Zemes māte, Māra, lietuvių bei latvių Laima, Laumė ir lietuvių Austėja" [Mother-Goddess Žemyna in the context of Baltic deities]. In: Liaudies kultūra Nr. 2 (2007). p. 12. ISSN 0236-0551.
  15. ↑ Borissoff, Constantine L. (2014). “Non-Iranian Origin of the Eastern-Slavonic God Xŭrsŭ/Xors" [Neiranskoe proishoždenie vostočnoslavjanskogo Boga Hrsa/Horsa]. In: Studia Mythologica Slavica 17 (October). Ljubljana, Slovenija. p. 22. https://doi.org/10.3986/sms.v17i0.1491.
  16. ↑ Nonnus, Dionysiaca 7.110-8.177 (Dalby 2005, pp. 19–27, 150)
  17. ↑ Or in the guise of Semele's nurse, Beroë, in Ovid's Metamorphoses III.256ff and Hyginus, Fabulae167.
  18. ↑ Ovid, Metamorphoses III.308–312; Hyginus, Fabulae 179; Nonnus, Dionysiaca 8.178-406
  19. ↑ Apollodorus, Library 3.4.3; Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 4.1137; Lucian, Dialogues of the Gods 9; compare the birth of Asclepius, taken from Coronis on her funeral pyre (noted by L. Preller, Theogonie und Goetter, vol I of Griechische Mythologie 1894:661).
  20. ↑ Hyginus, Astronomy 2.5; Arnobius, Against the Gentiles 5.28 (Dalby 2005, pp. 108–117)
  21. ↑ Nonnus, Dionysiaca 8.407-418
  22. ↑ Verhelst, Berenice. Direct Speech in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. 2017. pp. 268-270. ISBN 978-90-04-33465-6
  23. ↑ Fabulae 167.1
  24. ↑ (Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 4. 4. 5, quoted in the Theoi.com collection of Zagreus sources])
  25. ↑ Callimachus, Fragments, in the etymol. ζαγρεὺς, Zagreos; see Karl Otfried Müller, John Leitch, Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology (1844), p.319, n.5
  26. ↑ Nonnus, Dionysiaca 24. 43 ff — translation in Zagreus
  27. ↑ Nonnus, Dionysiaca 7.110–128
  28. ↑ Semele was "made into a woman by the Thebans and called the daughter of Kadmos, though her original character as an earth-goddess is transparently evident" according to William Keith Chambers Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion, rev. ed. 1953:56. Robert Graves is characteristically speculative: the story "seems to record the summary action taken by Hellenes of Boeotia in ending the tradition of royal sacrifice: Olympian Zeus asserts his power, takes the doomed king under his own protection, and destroys the goddess with her own thunderbolt." (Graves 1960:§14.5). The connection Semele=Selene is often noted, nevertheless.
  29. ↑ Kerenyi 1976 p 193 and note 13
  30. ↑ Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.37; Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 35 (Dalby 2005, p. 135)
  31. ↑ Graves 1960, 14.c.5
  32. ↑ Holley, N. M. “The Floating Chest”. In: The Journal of Hellenic Studies 69 (1949): 39–40. doi:10.2307/629461.
  33. ↑ Beaulieu, Marie-Claire. "The Floating Chest: Maidens, Marriage, and the Sea". In: The Sea in the Greek Imagination. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. pp. 97-98. Accessed May 15, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt17xx5hc.7.
  34. ↑ Pausanias (1918). "24.3". Description of Greece. Vol. 3. Translated by W. H. S. Jones; H. A. Ormerod. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: Harvard University Press; William Heinemann – via Perseus Digital Library.-4.
  35. ↑ Larson, Jennifer. Greek Heroine Cults. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. pp. 94-95.
  36. ↑ Larson, Jennifer. Greek Heroine Cults. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. p. 95.
  37. ↑ Guettel Cole, Susan. "Under the Open Sky: Imagining the Dionysian Landscape". In: Human Development in Sacred Landscapes: Between Ritual Tradition, Creativity and Emotionality. V&R Unipress. 2015. p. 65. ISBN 978-3-7370-0252-3 DOI: https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737002523.61
  38. ↑ Timothy Gantz, "Divine Guilt in Aischylos" The Classical Quarterly New Series, 31.1 (1981:18-32) p 25f.
  39. ↑ CIL 6.9897; R. Joy Littlewood, A Commentary on Ovid's Fasti, Book 6 (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 159.
  40. ↑ W.H. Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie (Leipzig: Teubner, 1890–94), vol. 2, pt. 1, pp. 226–227.
  41. ↑ Ovid, Fasti, 6.503ff.
  42. ↑ Augustine, De Civitate Dei 4.11.
  43. ↑ Described by Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 39.12.
  44. ↑ Littlewood, A Commentary on Ovid, p. xliv. See particularly the paintings of the Villa of the Mysteries.
  45. ↑ Littlewood, A Commentary on Ovid, p. xliv.
  46. ↑ Michael Lipka, Roman Gods: A Conceptual Approach (Brill, 2009), pp. 18–19.
  47. ↑ Henry Moore, A Platonick Song of the Soul (1647), as discussed by Alexander Jacob, "The Neoplatonic Conception of Nature," in The Uses of Antiquity: The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition (Kluwer, 1991), pp. 103–104.
  48. ↑ Dean, Winton (1959). Handel's dramatic oratorios and masques. London: Oxford University Press. p. 365. ISBN 0-19-315203-7.
  49. ↑ Naden, Constance (1894). The Complete Poetical Works of Constance Naden. London: Bickers & Son. p. 137.

References

  • Burkert, Walter (1985), Greek Religion, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-36280-2
  • Dalby, Andrew (2005), The Story of Bacchus, London: British Museum Press, ISBN 0-7141-2255-6 (US ISBN 0-89236-742-3)
  • Graves, Robert, 1960. The Greek Myths
  • Kerenyi, Carl, 1976. Dionysus: Archetypal Image of the Indestructible Life, (Bollingen, Princeton)
  • Kerenyi, Carl, 1951. The Gods of the Greeks pp. 256ff.
  • Seltman, Charles, 1956. The Twelve Olympians and their Guests. Shenval Press Ltd.

See also

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