Dioniso e la pantera profumata

by Marcel Detienne, Mario De Nonno (Translator)

Il sacrificio, l’attrazione, la morte, eros e thanatos: in un classico degli studi sulla cultura greca, Marcel Detienne scava negli abissi inquieti della violenza barbarica e dell’erotismo ambiguo, intrecciati nelle storie mitiche di dei ed eroi ai piedi dell’Olimpo. Nella sua interpretazione rigorosa e affascinante il mondo antico perde la sua classicità di maniera e svela il proprio lato oscuro.

Genres: Mythology, Nonfiction

164 pages, Paperback

First published February 4, 1977

About the author

Marcel Detienne was a Belgian historian and specialist in the study of Ancient Greece.

Reviews

[Emma Hastings]

Dionysos Slain is about the enigmatic Orphic myth in which Titans slaughter and consume the child god Dionysos. However, you have to power through the first half of the book before you actually get any discussion of this fascinating myth, although I found that the analysis of the myth and its role in a religious movement that challenged the Ancient Greek state system of sacrifice was worth the wait. The first chapter is occupied by a long mediation on structuralism that mostly went over my head, as well as a somewhat eye-roll inducing paean to Ancient Greek exceptionalism (the chapter is entitled “The Greeks Aren’t Like the Others”), while the second chapter is a long discussion of the hunt in Greek myth and society that, while not uninteresting, is not what I was looking for in this book. It may be worth skipping directly to chapter three, when Detienne begins to discuss the slaying of Dionysos in earnest. I was first interested in this odd myth due to its potential influence on Christianity, as it concerns the death, consumption, and resurrection of Dionysos, who is both a god and the son of a god. The book doesn’t have any more than a passing mention of that connection here. However, I ultimately found Detienne’s discussion of the four anti-state religious and cultural movements that emerged in Ancient Greece—Pythagoreanism, Orphism, Dionysiac religion, and Cynicism—to be even more intriguing. For example, while I only knew Pythagoreans as quirky vegetarians, Detienne convincingly argues that their vegetarianism was a subversive rejection of the state-run system of animal sacrifices, and thus a rebellion against the politicoreligious system in which the state controlled people’s relationship with the divine. Detienne does make some conclusions without clearly showing his work, and the language can become unnecessarily flowery, especially in the first chapter. But if you want to know about the slaying of Dionysos, Orphism, or rebellions against state-controlled Ancient Greek religion, definitely check out (the second half of) Dionysos Slain.

[Hagar]

“In the tale of Dionysos's murder, the powers that take part are at once gods and men: gods, because like them they precede the human race, but also men because the affinities of these personages with a certain earthly substance, quicklime, qualify them to play the role of ancestors to a race as deeply rooted in the soil as the "eaters of bread." In a whole series of traditions as marginal as the preceding ones, the human race, which Hesiod's Theogony represents enjoying the gods' table before being separated from it by the sacrificial division, instead makes its appearance either by emerging from the entrails of the earth or by being brought to life under the fingers of a demiurge who fashioned it by mixing earth and water, according to some, or earth and fire, as others claim. Orphic belief resuscitates on purpose a whole section of narratives circulating at the margins of official tradition, and it reorganizes them in a theological myth whose composite character the Greeks themselves recognized by condemning it as a forgery of Onomakritos, who supposedly—according to Pausanias—adapted the holy rites of Dionysos, borrowed the name Titans from Homer, and thought up the idea of making these characters the source of Dionysos's woes. Though the analysis I have just made leads to other sources than the text of Homer, it also seems to show more clearly the Orphic origin of this myth, since the Titans, Dionysos's murderers, usher in immediately the centerpiece of Orphic theology, its anthropogony: from their ashes men will be born. Furthermore, the Titans coated in gypsum are not just the ancestors of the human race; they also, by virtue of their status as primordial beings and their half-earthly, half-fiery nature, dramatically prefigure the first human beings. By slaughtering Dionysos, by cutting up his limbs before cooking them in the cauldron and on the spit, and finally by feeding on him, the Titans are already men who perform the ritual acts of the blood sacrifice and savagely assassinate the innocent victims they will feast upon.”

“It had to impose on Dionysos the violence of a split necessitated by its abhorrence of bloodshed as well as the fundamental choice of Orphism in favor of the pure man, by which is meant masculine purity. The enactment of Dionysos's murder by the Titans was designed to exorcise the cannibalistic frenzy that haunted the sacrificial act. The pathetic victim of a monstrous crime, Dionysos found himself abducted from his murderous orgies now abandoned to Bacchants and Mainads. He was reborn child sovereign of the gods, charged with inaugurating the reign of remade unity in the absence of wild cries and bodies ripped to pieces. In this way, Orphism modified a part of Dionysiae religion, and it doubtless contributed to its tendency to become a salvation religion. Furthermore, it succeeded in bridging the theological gap of a movement that seems to have been richer in initiation rites than in exegetic discourse, as opposed to Orphisn;, each of whose initiation rites, or teletaî, took the form of a narrative of theological character, a text written in the margins and recesses of another, to such an extent that its voice swelled to that "tumult of books" that gave Plato a laugh.”

[Berenice]

Il saggio è interessante, ma è scritto in modo tortuoso: l'autore dà per scontate molte nozioni e ciò rende la narrazione poco chiara e la lettura complessa e poco piacevole.

[Ela]

Ammetto di essere una fan di tutto ciò che ha a che fare con Dioniso dal momento in cui ho studiato le Baccanti di Euripide a scuola: quando ho trovato questo libro, non ho potuto evitare buttarmici a capofitto.
La valutazione non eccellente è dovuta al fatto che l'abbia trovato un po' troppo complesso, sopratutto il primo capitolo.
Facendo un riassunto:
-se andate a caccia non potete sposarvi
-non arrostite la carne dopo averla bollita
-VIETATISSIMO MANGIARE LE FAVE, GUAI A VOI.

[Paolo P.]

Saggio più che interessante su due figure della mitologia greca: pantera e Dioniso a cui Detienne, storico delle religioni, nella sua analisi mitico/religiosa accosta una di carattere politico/sociale in particolare per Dioniso. L' analisi a partire dal cruento sacrificio del dio compiuto dai Titani permette a Detienne di tracciare le linee di 4 movimenti: orfismo, dionisismo, cinismo e pitagorismo e il loro rapporto con il sacrificio animale e l' atto di mangiare carne che sia cruda o cotta.