The Greek Dionysus and the Roman Bacchus are known as the gods of wine, but they are not gentle gods.

The Roman Bacchus is associated with Liber Pater, an ancient Italian god of wine and fertility who was celebrated at festivals. (They carried giant phalluses through the streets.) And Bacchus became, more or less, the Roman equivalent of Dionysus. In Ovid’s epic, Metamorphoses, the frenzied Bacchantes, without Bacchus’s permission, murder Orpheus because of his chastity.

A brief precis of Orpheus’s history:  Orpheus visits the underworld to plead for the return of his wife, Eurydice, who has died of a snake bite at their wedding.  Hades has one condition: Orpheus must not look back on the path to the upper world.. But Orpheus does look back: he can’t resist. And his hubris results in the loss of Eurydice a second time.

Ovid’s Bacchantes are not avenging the death (twice) of Eurydice.  They regard Orpheus as their contemptor: he must feel contempt because he declines to participate in their sexual rites.  Orpheus leads the life of a mourning poet, singing songs, playing the lyre, and charming animals and rocks with his music and poetry. But the Bacchantes loathe him.

Below is my prose translation of Ovid’s introduction to the Bacchantes.

And behold!  the Bacchantes, married women of Thrace. their maddened breasts covered with the skins of wild animals, stand on the top of a hill and watch Orpheus marrying song to the strings of his lyre.

The Bacchantes throw rocks, clods of dirt, and branches at him but the weapons are “conquered” by Orpheus’s songs. Even the rocks become his inanimate friends. Then the Bacchantes frenziedly drown out his song with noise: ululations, clapping, playing the pipe, etc.. The rocks and branches no longer hear his music, and the missiles strike Orpheus. The murder of Orpheus is one of the most violent scenes in Ovid’s poetry.

After the murder, the animals mourn Orpheus.  Again, this is my prose translation:

The sorrowing birds, the wild animals, the hard rocks, and the trees cried for you, having been charmed by your music  A tree mourned you, Orpheus, by cutting her hair, shaking off her leaves.

Unlike Dionysus in The Bacchae, Bacchus does not incite the violence of the women. He is disgusted by their murder of Orpheus, and they are punished. Bacchus transforms the women into into trees. Terrified, they scream, cry, and struggle while their feet become rooted.

The metamorphosis of women into trees is a common motif in Ovid’s poem. It can be a gift or a punishment from the gods. In Book I of the Metamorphoses, Daphne, a nymph, begs her father to turn her into a tree so she can escape Apollo’s pursuit of her and determination to “marry” her. Thus, she obtains sexual independence and is the first laurel tree..

Ovid’s Bacchantes resist their metamorphosis into trees.  And I wonder if their fear of growing roots – of being rooted – is partly the reason for joining Bacchus’s cult. Perhaps they they were bored housewives, longing to escape their limitations in a sexist society. Beware the Bacchantes!