Dolley.] ll^ [Feb. 17, 



added to the original cult by the Plirysiaiis and Phoenicians ;* moreover, 

 Euripides lays the scene of tlie Bacchanals in Thebes, a Phoenician set- 

 tlement. Creuzer* derives the word from the Piioenician and the Hebrew 

 7^23 {bachah). The religious ideas of the Phrygians were impressed 

 directly upon the Greeks, but originally derived from the SyroPlioeni- 

 cians. With the Greeks the Dionysos cult had taken form and symbol 

 long before the taste for artificially flavored wines arose, and. in fact, 

 before wine became a common drink. The symbols came along with the 

 cult, but having to a certain extent lost their original significance, so plain 

 to the dwellers of Asia, the Greeks endeavored to account for them, as 

 numerous writers have since, by giving them new and varied meanings. 

 Thus the tall, slender fennel stalk, with a cluster of male date flowers 

 fastened at the tip, as used by the Assyrian priests in the process of palm- 

 ification, became the symbol of fructification in its widest sense. Carried 

 in processions in honor of the deity of fruitfulness, it gave its name first to 

 its bearers, and then to the god himself, and finally, when, far from its 

 original home, the cult had lost its primitive purity, and its celebration 

 had degenerated into the orgies of a frantic mob, the name {^dy.yo<; = rod) 

 came to signify the frenzy of intoxication. 



But to revert to our oltjections to the plea that the pine cone was sacred 

 to Dionysos because emploj'ed in flavoring wines, we find that the resinous 

 taste was not by any means imparted to wines by means of the products 

 of cone-bearing trees alone ; on the contrary, Theophrastus^" in his chap- 

 ter on resins^^ refers to the relative values of tlie different varieties of 

 gum resins, and places, far in advance of all others in public esteem, that 

 produced by the terebintli (the turpentine tree of the Bible, PiHtaclda 

 terebinthus L., or Tipp.v^fU)^ of Theoph.), a tree common in the Greek 

 islands and in Palestine, Egypt and North Africa, and belonging to an 

 order of plants totally distinct from the conifers. The modern product 

 of this tree is known in commerce as Chian turpentine, and comes mostly 

 from the island of Chios, which excelled in the quality and quantity of 

 this product in the time of Dioscorides and ancient liorae. The specific 

 name had been changed, at the time of Dioscorides, from riptu/^'h)^ to 

 zsf)ilirAht<;, and that writer refers to it as e?.aci» /jAarr/ov. According to 

 Pliny" the terebinth was used in wine making, by boiling the new wood 

 with the must. The same writer'^ quotes Plautus as stating that the 

 wines most highly esteemed among the ancients were those perfumed 

 with myrrh, a product of two distinct plants, neiiher of them conifers. 

 On the other hand, while the pitchy flavor was, without doubt, frequently 

 produced by the resin of cone-bearing trees, such wines were not specially 

 popular, nor were they considered wholesome, judging from the follow- 



« Gerhard., MythoL, i, 495. 

 ^Symbolik d. MylhoL, iii, 125. 

 '"ix, 2, 7 and 3, 1. 



" Cf. Koch, Bdume und Strducher des alien Griedienlands, pp. 26 and 31. 

 '2iVa^///•6■^, xiv, 19. 

 '^xiv, 15. 



