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His ecstatic worship, characterised by wild dances, thrilling
music, and tipsy excess, appears to have originated among the rude
tribes of Thrace, who were notoriously addicted to drunkenness. Its
mystic doctrines and extravagant rites were essentially foreign to
the clear intelligence and sober temperament of the Greek race. Yet
appealing as it did to that love of mystery and that proneness to
revert to savagery which seem to be innate in most men, the religion
spread like wildfire through Greece until the god whom Homer hardly
deigned to notice had become the most popular figure of the
pantheon. The resemblance which his story and his ceremonies present
to those of Osiris have led some enquirers both in ancient and
modern times to hold that Dionysus was merely a disguised Osiris,
imported directly from Egypt into Greece. But the great
preponderance of evidence points to his Thracian origin, and the
similarity of the two worships is sufficiently explained by the
similarity of the ideas and customs on which they were founded.


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