The god the Greeks called Dionysus and the Romans called Bacchus is the same god — and the story of how one name slowly became the other runs through Bronze Age clay tablets, drinking songs, Athenian tragedy, a Roman scandal, and some of the greatest paintings and poems in the Western canon.
Written by Ken Wytsma. Researched and fact-checked against independent sources with AI assistance, and verified for accuracy before publishing.
Ask who the god of wine was and you will get two answers — Dionysus if the answerer is thinking of Greece, Bacchus if they are thinking of Rome. Both are right, and neither is the whole story. Bakchos (Βάκχος) was in Greek a cult title of Dionysus (Διόνυσος), an epithet tied to the ecstatic side of his worship, and only later did the Romans adopt it as the god’s standard Latin name.[1] Tracing when each name appears in the surviving record is a tour through nearly three thousand years of poetry, drama, and art — which is exactly what this article does.
A Name Pressed into Clay
The oldest written trace of the wine god is not in a poem at all. It is scratched into Mycenaean clay tablets in the Linear B script — the syllabic writing of Greek’s Bronze Age ancestor — where the name appears as di-wo-nu-so. Tablets from Pylos on the Greek mainland and Khania on Crete, dating to roughly the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC, carry the name; the Khania tablet even records offerings of honey to Zeus and Dionysus together.[2] That single archaeological fact quietly demolished an old scholarly theory that Dionysus was a late foreign import into the Greek pantheon. He was there, receiving offerings, some seven centuries before Homer.
Who Was the Greek God of Wine?
To the Greeks he was Dionysus (Διόνυσος): son of Zeus and the mortal Semele, god of the vine, of wine, of theater, and of ecstatic release. In Homer he is a minor presence — the Iliad tells briefly how the Thracian king Lycurgus attacked the young god and was blinded for it — but the archaic age soon gave him one of its most beautiful stories.[3] The seventh of the so-called Homeric Hymns, composed most likely in the seventh or sixth century BC, tells how Tyrrhenian pirates seized a handsome youth standing on a headland, not knowing who he was. When they bound him aboard, the bonds fell away, and then, in the hymn’s words:
“First of all, sweet, fragrant wine ran streaming throughout all the black ship…”
— Homeric Hymn 7 to Dionysus, trans. Evelyn-White
A vine spread along the sail, ivy wound up the mast, the god became a lion — and the pirates who leapt overboard in terror were turned into dolphins.[4] Around 530 BC the Athenian potter-painter Exekias set exactly that scene inside a drinking cup: the god reclining in his ship, the mast heavy with grapes, dolphins circling. It is one thing to read the hymn; it is another to realize a Greek drinker saw this image surface at the bottom of his cup as he drained his wine.
The Poets of the Symposium
It was the lyric poets, singing at the symposium — the Greek drinking party — who made Dionysus a god of verse as much as of vine. The earliest is the soldier-poet Archilochus of Paros, around 650 BC, boasting that he could lead the dithyramb (διθύραμβος), the choral hymn of Dionysus, when the wine had done its work:
“I know how to lead off the fair song of lord Dionysus, the dithyramb, my wits thunder-struck with wine.”
— Archilochus, fragment 120
A century later on Lesbos, Alcaeus urged a friend to drink because Zeus had given wine to make men forget their sorrows; and at the courts of Samos and Athens, Anacreon of Teos (c. 575–490 BC) perfected the pose of the urbane drinker — wine, garlands, music, and love, enjoyed in civilized measure.[5] One famous fragment orders the wine-boy about with cheerful impatience: “Bring water, bring wine, boy, bring us garlands of flowers — for I would try a bout with Love” (φέρ᾽ ὕδωρ, φέρ᾽ οἶνον, ὦ παῖ…).[5] In another, Anacreon asks for ten ladles of water to five of wine, “that I may once more play the Bacchant with decorum” — drunkenness with hubris, he says in the same song, is “Scythian drinking,” fit for barbarians.[6]
Notice what Anacreon’s Dionysus is not: he is not the wild god of mountain frenzy. He is the patron of conviviality — of exactly the well-ordered pleasure the symposium was designed to produce. That civilized register would echo for two and a half millennia, as we will see.
Modern writers often assume Bacchus is simply the “Roman name.” The truth is finer-grained. Bakchos is Greek — but it is striking that the word is absent from the surviving archaic record: not in Homer, not in Hesiod, and not in the genuine fragments of Anacreon, which invoke the god as Dionysus or by his deeds. The epithet surfaces in our surviving texts in the fifth century BC.[1] The wine-and-roses poems that do toast “Bakchos” freely under Anacreon’s name are the Anacreontea — some sixty imitations composed between roughly the first century BC and the sixth century AD, and mistaken for the real thing until the nineteenth century.[7] So the historically careful sentence is: Anacreon celebrated Dionysus; his later imitators celebrated Bakchos; and Rome turned Bakchos into Bacchus.
Where Did the Name Bacchus Come From?
Bakchos belonged first to the god’s ecstatic worship — ancient authors connected it with the ritual cries of his devotees, and with the frenzy (baccheia, βακχεία) the god was said to send.[1] Tellingly, the same word was applied to the worshipper: an initiate transformed by the god’s presence became a bakchos (βάκχος), a female devotee a bakche (βάκχη). Bone tablets from the Greek colony of Olbia on the Black Sea, scratched with Orphic-Dionysiac formulas in the fifth century BC, and a burial inscription at Cumae in Italy reserving a grave for “one who has become a bakchos,” show the title alive in the mystery cults of the age.[8] Plato was quoting a proverb of these mysteries when he wrote, in the Phaedo:
“Many are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the bacchoi.”
ναρθηκοφόροι μὲν πολλοί, βάκχοι δέ τε παῦροι— Plato, Phaedo 69c
Meaning: many carry the god’s wand in procession; few are truly possessed by the god. On the Athenian stage the epithet went mainstream. In Sophocles’ Antigone (c. 441 BC) the chorus hails Dionysus as the “god of many names” (πολυώνυμε) — and Bakchos is among them.[9] Then, in 405 BC, Euripides’ Bacchae — staged after the playwright’s death, and winner of first prize at the City Dionysia — put the god himself on stage under that title, returning to Thebes in disguise to punish a king who denied his divinity.[10] The play’s very name means “the women of Bakchos.” It remains the most terrifying portrait of the god ever written: the giver of wine’s “painless joy” and the destroyer of those who refuse him, in one person.
How Bacchus Became Roman
Rome did not so much borrow the god as merge him. Italy already had a native god of wine and male fertility, Liber Pater — “the Free Father” — honored every March 17 at the Liberalia, the festival at which Roman boys traditionally put on the toga of manhood.[11] As Greek culture flowed north through the Greek cities of southern Italy, Liber absorbed the myths, the iconography, and finally the Greek cult title of Dionysus: Bakchos, Latinized as Bacchus. Rome’s earliest surviving literature already knows him by it — Plautus could title a comedy Bacchides (“The Bacchis Sisters”) around 189 BC, its two courtesan heroines carrying an unmistakable echo of the god’s own name.[12]
Then came the scandal. In 186 BC the Senate, alarmed — so the historian Livy tells it — by reports of nocturnal initiations, conspiracy, and crime spreading through Italy under cover of the god’s rites, suppressed the Bacchanalia in one of the most dramatic religious crackdowns in Roman history. Thousands were arrested; the stated penalty for the cult’s leaders was death.[13] We still possess the Senate’s actual decree — the Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus — engraved on a bronze tablet found in Calabria in 1640, the oldest surviving senatorial decree in Latin. It did not abolish the god; it regulated him, capping gatherings at five people in all — no more than two men and three women — and requiring the approval of the urban praetor and the Senate for any exception.[13]
Livy’s account of the affair reads like a novel: the whole investigation began, he says, when a freedwoman named Hispala Faecenia revealed the cult’s secrets to protect the young man she loved from initiation. The Senate rewarded her with money and unprecedented legal privileges — including the right to marry a freeborn man.[13] Whatever the truth behind Livy’s melodrama, Roman anxiety about the god’s power was real. The mysteries themselves survived — privately, and in art.
A century and a half later, on the wall of a villa outside Pompeii, someone commissioned the most haunting Dionysiac images that survive from antiquity: the great frieze of the Villa of the Mysteries, c. 70–60 BC, in which a bride — or an initiate — moves through the god’s rites among life-size figures on Pompeiian-red ground.[14]
Bacchus in the Golden Age of Latin Poetry
By the age of Augustus, Bacchus was simply the god’s name in Latin verse — and the old Greek epithet had come full circle, back into poetry. Virgil’s Georgics invokes Bacchus as lord of the vineyard; Ovid retells the pirate story and the fatal homecoming to Thebes in the Metamorphoses; and Horace, the supreme poet of the well-mixed cup, claims in his odes to have seen the god himself among the crags, teaching songs to his nymphs — a poet’s way of saying that wine and inspiration flow from the same source.[15] Horace even worries, charmingly, about where the god is dragging him: “Whither, Bacchus, dost thou hurry me, full of thy power?”[15]
The Romans kept the whole Greek inheritance — Dionysus’ myths, his leopards, his ivy, his theater — under the new name. When the name Dionysus appears in Latin at all, it is as a learned flourish; when Liber appears, it is as a native archaism. Bacchus won.
The Long Afterlife: Bacchus in Art and English Verse
That Roman victory is why the Renaissance rediscovered the wine god as Bacchus. Michelangelo carved him tipsy and swaying (1496–97); Titian painted Bacchus and Ariadne (1522–23) for a duke’s private chamber — the god leaping from his leopard-drawn chariot at the sight of the abandoned princess, in some of the most expensive ultramarine blue ever laid on canvas; Caravaggio, around 1596, handed us a flushed teenage Bacchus offering a glass of red with dirty fingernails.[16]
English poetry inherited the same name. Milton gave Bacchus a son, the enchanter Comus; and when John Keats, in the Ode to a Nightingale (1819), resolved to fly to his nightingale on the wings of poetry rather than on wine, the refusal itself was a Bacchic image:
“Away! away! for I will fly to thee, / Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards…”
— John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale (1819)
The old poet of the symposium had one more trick to play. In 1770s London, a gentlemen’s music club called the Anacreontic Society — named for Anacreon — opened its concerts with a constitutional song, “To Anacreon in Heaven,” whose chorus vowed to “entwine the myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine.” In 1814 Francis Scott Key set his poem about the bombardment of Fort McHenry to that very tune. It became “The Star-Spangled Banner” — which means the melody of the United States national anthem began life as a drinking song toasting Bacchus and the Greek god of wine’s favorite poet.[17]
From a Bronze Age scribe’s di-wo-nu-so to a national anthem’s borrowed drinking tune: few words have traveled further than the wine god’s names. It is a perfect specimen of what we mean by wine history — the way wine keeps turning up a quarter-turn away from everything else in Western civilization, from clay tablets to Keats. You can wander the whole arc in our timeline of wine history, or go deeper into the wine cultures of ancient Greece and wine’s long career in literature and art. And these are exactly the stories our guides love to tell between tastings — there is always a seat for you on a Willamette Valley wine tour.
- c. 1300 BC
- Linear B tablets at Pylos and Khania record di-wo-nu-so — the oldest written trace of Dionysus.
- 7th–6th c. BC
- Homeric Hymn 7 tells the pirate story; Archilochus leads the dithyramb; Anacreon sings of Dionysus at the symposium.
- c. 530 BC
- Exekias paints the Dionysus Cup — the god, the vine, and the dolphins in one image.
- c. 441 BC
- Sophocles’ Antigone hails Dionysus as the “god of many names,” Bakchos among them.
- 405 BC
- Euripides’ Bacchae premieres posthumously in Athens and takes first prize.
- 186 BC
- The Roman Senate suppresses the Bacchanalia; its bronze decree survives.
- c. 60 BC
- The Dionysiac frieze is painted in the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii.
- 1522–23
- Titian paints Bacchus and Ariadne.
- 1814
- Francis Scott Key sets his verses to the Anacreontic Society’s Bacchus-toasting tune.
- 1819
- Keats declines the chariot of “Bacchus and his pards” in the Ode to a Nightingale.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was the Greek god of wine?
Dionysus (Greek Dionysos) was the Greek god of wine, the vine, theater, and ecstatic release — son of Zeus and the mortal Semele. His name is far older than classical Greece: it appears as di-wo-nu-so on Mycenaean Linear B tablets from Pylos and Khania, written around the 14th–13th centuries BC.
Is Bacchus Greek or Roman?
Both. Bakchos was originally a Greek epithet of Dionysus tied to the ecstatic side of his worship, appearing in the surviving record in the fifth century BC — in Sophocles, Euripides’ Bacchae, and mystery-cult inscriptions. The Romans then adopted it, via the Greek cities of southern Italy, as the god’s standard Latin name and merged him with their native wine god Liber Pater.
Why did the Romans ban the Bacchanalia?
In 186 BC the Roman Senate suppressed the Bacchanalia — nocturnal rites of Bacchus — citing conspiracy and crime, as told by the historian Livy. The Senate’s bronze decree, the Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus, survives and is the oldest senatorial decree in Latin. It regulated rather than abolished the cult, capping gatherings at five worshippers without Senate approval.
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Dionysus”; Oxford Classical Dictionary, s.vv. “Dionysus” and “Liber Pater” (Bakchos, Dionysus’s cult title, “adopted by the Romans as Bacchus”); Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Harvard, 1985), 161–67; R. Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Brill, 2010), s.v. “Diónysos.” oxfordre.com
- Mycenaean di-wo-nu-so on the Linear B tablets PY Xa 1419, PY Ea 102 and KH Gq 5: DĀMOS (Database of Mycenaean at Oslo); M. Ventris & J. Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1973); ed. pr. of the Khania tablet in E. Hallager, M. Vlasakis & B. P. Hallager, “New Linear B tablets from Khania,” Kadmos 31 (1992): 61–87 (honey offerings to Zeus and Dionysus). damos.hf.uio.no
- Homer, Iliad 6.130–140 (the Lycurgus episode), trans. A. T. Murray (Loeb), Perseus Digital Library. perseus.tufts.edu
- Homeric Hymn 7, To Dionysus (the Tyrrhenian pirates), trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (Loeb, 1914), Perseus Digital Library. perseus.tufts.edu
- Anacreon fr. 396 PMG, in D. A. Campbell (ed. and trans.), Greek Lyric II (Loeb Classical Library 143, Harvard, 1988), 81.
- Anacreon fr. 356 PMG, quoted at Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 10.427a–b (trans. C. D. Yonge). attalus.org
- Anacreontea: M. L. West (ed.), Carmina Anacreontea, 2nd ed. (Teubner, 1993); D. A. Campbell (ed.), Greek Lyric II (Loeb 143, 1988), introduction — some sixty poems written in imitation of Anacreon between the first century BC and the sixth century AD.
- Fritz Graf & Sarah Iles Johnston, Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2013); the Olbia bone tablets = L. Dubois, Inscriptions grecques dialectales d’Olbia du Pont (Geneva, 1996), nos. 94a–c; for the Cumae inscription, L. H. Jeffery, The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, rev. ed. (Oxford, 1990). routledge.com
- Sophocles, Antigone 1115–1154 (the choral ode hailing Dionysus “of many names”), ed. and trans. R. C. Jebb, Perseus Digital Library. perseus.tufts.edu
- Euripides, Bacchae, trans. T. A. Buckley, Perseus Digital Library; on the posthumous premiere at the City Dionysia of 405 BC (produced by Euripides the Younger) and its first prize, E. R. Dodds, Euripides: Bacchae, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1960), introduction. perseus.tufts.edu
- Ovid, Fasti 3.713–790 (the Liberalia, 17 March), trans. J. G. Frazer (Loeb), Perseus Digital Library; Oxford Classical Dictionary, s.v. “Liber Pater.” perseus.tufts.edu
- Plautus, Bacchides (“The Two Bacchises,” named for its two courtesans), ed. J. Barsby (Aris & Phillips, 1986), dated c. 189 BC from its allusion to that year’s triumphs; on Plautus as the earliest complete surviving Latin literature, Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. “Plautus.” britannica.com
- Livy, Ab urbe condita 39.8–19 (the Bacchanalian affair and the informer Hispala Faecenia), trans. E. T. Sage (Loeb), Perseus Digital Library; the surviving bronze decree = CIL I² 581 = ILS 18 = ILLRP 511 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, inv. III 168), found at Tiriolo in 1640 — the oldest surviving Roman senatorial decree in Latin; S. A. Takács, “Politics and Religion in the Bacchanalian Affair of 186 B.C.E.,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100 (2000): 301–10. perseus.tufts.edu · khm.at
- Parco Archeologico di Pompei (official), “Villa of the Mysteries”; E. K. Gazda (ed.), The Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii (Kelsey Museum, 2000). The Dionysiac megalography is in the Second Pompeian Style (mid–first century BC). pompeiisites.org
- Horace, Odes 2.19 and 3.25 (“Quo me, Bacche, rapis…”), trans. J. Conington, Perseus Digital Library; Virgil, Georgics 2; Ovid, Metamorphoses 3 (the Pentheus episode). perseus.tufts.edu
- Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520–3 (National Gallery, London, NG35); Michelangelo, Bacchus, 1496–7 (Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence); Caravaggio, Bacchus, c. 1596–8 (Uffizi Gallery, Florence). nationalgallery.org.uk · uffizi.it
- Smithsonian, National Museum of American History, “The Star-Spangled Banner”; U.S. National Park Service, Fort McHenry, “To Anacreon in Heaven” — Francis Scott Key’s 1814 lyric set to John Stafford Smith’s melody for the London Anacreontic Society. si.edu · nps.gov
Want to read more?
Books we drew on and recommend for going deeper.
The Story of Wine: From Noah to NowHugh Johnson
Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of ViniculturePatrick E. McGovern
9000 Years of Wine: A World HistoryRod PhillipsAs an Amazon Associate, Wine History Tours earns from qualifying purchases. This supports our research at no extra cost to you.
