THE RELIGIONS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD.
151
was incomplete unvotary reached an advanced stage of intoxication. Dionysiac festivals were fortunately not of frequent recurrence, and were not everywhere celebrated in the same way. At Athens women took no part in the Dionysia ; and with men intellectual contests, and the witnessing of them, held Still 'he place of the rude revels elsewhere too common. occasions, and the worship of the deity less the
the influence of Dionysiac worship on Greece generally must be regarded as excessively corrupting, and Dionysus must be viewed as, next to Aphrodite, the most objectionable of the Greek divinities.
Leto, or Latona, as the Romans called her, when they adopted her into their pantheon, was, on the contrary, one She is wife of of the purer and more elevating influences. Zeus by a title quite as good as that of Hera,* and is a model of motherly love and wifely purity. Separate and peculiar function she has none, and it is difficult to account for her introduction among the Olympians. Perhaps she is to be Silent, unobregarded as ideal womanhood. trusive, always subordinating herself to her children, majestic,
chaste, kindly, ready to help and tend, she is in Olyrnwhat the Greek wished his wife to be in his own home,
Kus er very shadowiness according with the Greek notion of womanly perfection.! Mr. Gladstone suggests that she is a traditional deity, representing the woman through whom man's redemption was to come; J but there scarcely seems sufficient foundation for this view, which is not supported by any analogies in the mythologies of other nations.
Persephone, the
Roman
Proserpine, was the queen of
far more than her shadowy husband, Hades, the real ruler of the infernal realm. She was represented as
the dead
;
severely pure and chaste, even having become a wife against her will, and as awful and terrible, but not cruel. She occupied no very important post in the religion, since her sphere was wholly the nether world, which only very Hades, or sliirhtly engaged the attention of the Hellenes. Aidoneus, had a high rank, as the brother of Zeus, and in * Hesiod says that she hecame the wife of Zeus before Hera ("Theogony,"!!. 918-221). t Cyinpare the line of Sophocles O woman, silence is the woman's crown." (Aj ax, I 293.) " Hoiner and the Homeric } Age," vol. ii. p. 153. '