Hello and welcome to Literature and History, Episode 97, Blood and Ivy.

In this episode we will read the second half of Knowness's epic poem, The Dionysiica,

produced sometime in the 400s CE, likely along the central Egyptian Nile and written in Greek.

We read the first half of this long story in the previous episode, so that's the place

to start if you'd like to hear the tale from the beginning.

For our present purposes, let's just review some of the important details of this massive

epic before jumping back in.

The Dionysiica is a 48-book long epic poem about the god Dionysus's journey to the east,

to bring wine to foreign nations and to subdue them militarily.

Dionysus, as we learned last time, was not just a plump spokesman for wine in the ancient

Greek imagination, but also a deity associated with transformation, insanity, and animalistic

violence.

Some of his epithets can be translated as roaring, howling, and eater of raw flesh.

And in addition to this surprising dark side to the familiar wine god, there was an entirely

secondary Dionysus as well, worshiped by the Greek orfic cult, Dionysus Zagreus, a primordial

son of Zeus who had been massacred before he could even come of age.

So the deity Dionysus, in the epic that we're currently reading, was a god with several

different faces, jovial, certainly, but also terrible and savage, and even having a mysterious

link to an older version of himself who died an awful death back when the world was still

young.

The protagonist of our epic for today was thus complex, as too is the epic itself.

The Dionysia, as you hopefully recall, began with a lengthy preamble that told us about

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