the ardour of procreation and conception.  The women upheld the religion of passion as an end in itself; bacchantes, men in female attire, emasculated priests, sacrificed to the blindly bountiful gods.  We are told that Dionysus conquered even the Amazons and converted them to his worship.  Euripides described in the Bacchantes—­the subject of which is the war between the uncontrolled sexual impulse and the new order of things—­how Dionysus traversed all Asia and finally arrived in Hellas accompanied by a crowd of abandoned women.  But his religion was more than a cult of wine and sensual pleasure, it embraced a gentle worship of nature, throwing down the barrier between man and beast—­impassable by the spirit of civilisation—­and lovingly including every living creature.  We read in the Bacchantes that the women who had fled from the town to follow the irresistible stranger, Dionysus, dwelled in the mountains, binding their hair with tame adders, carrying in their arms the cubs of wolves and the young deer, and feeding them with the milk of their breasts; that milk and wine welled up when they struck the earth with the thyrsus; and so on.  Dionysus implores Pentheus, the representative of the Hellenic masculine system, not to venture undisguised among the maenads:  “They’ll murder you if they divine your sex,” and, knowing the secret of the male and female temper: 

      . . . . . . . . .  First let
     His mind be clouded by a slight disorder
     For, conscious of his manhood he will never
     Wear women’s garb; insane, he’s sure to wear it.

Pentheus, recognising in Dionysus the foe of a more spiritual conception of the law, the effeminate stranger who had driven the women to madness, is torn to pieces by the frenzied bacchantes who fall upon him, led by Agave, his mother, and sacrificed to the bull-god Dionysus.  At the conclusion of this strange and profound epos, Agave recovers her senses and curses the acts which she has committed in her madness ... women submit to the new spiritual dispensation.  We realise now why Hera, the tutelary goddess of the newly introduced monogamous system, hated Dionysus and attempted to kill him before he was born.

The subject treated in the beautiful myth of Orpheus is the relationship between the primitive sexual impulse and its individualisation on a single personality.  For seven months Orpheus bewails the death of Eurydice and regards all other living creatures with indifference.  This loyalty offends and infuriates the women of Thracia, who divine in it a spirit inimical to a life in harmony with nature.  One night, during the celebration of the Dionysian rites, they attack the poet—­the representative of the higher Hellenic poetical ideals—­and rend him limb from limb.  But as the head of the murdered singer floats down the river, the pale lips still frame the beloved name:  Eurydice!  It is certain that in those remote legendary days such love did not exist.  But the prophetic Greek spirit contrasted promiscuous intercourse with love for a single woman.