City Dionysia

Dionysus himself is a god of paradoxes, the god of wine and of madness, of theater and of raw nature, of civilization and of its dissolution.

His worship included both civic festivals, the Great Dionysia at Athens, at which the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were performed, and more private ecstatic rites that ancient sources describe with a mixture of fascination and horror.

The Bacchae, Euripides' last play, written in the fifth century BCE, is the most famous ancient depiction of Dionysian worship, and it portrays the rites as overwhelming, terrifying, and ultimately irresistible.

The women of Thebes possessed by the god abandon their homes and take to the mountains.