In World War II,
London was pounded by the bombs of Hitler's Luftwaffe.
After the war, buried deep beneath the chaos and devastation,
archaeologists made an astounding discovery.
An 1,800-year-old ancient Roman temple.
In its final years, this underground temple,
right at the very heart of the city of Londinium at the very edges
of the Roman Empire, couldn't have been dedicated to a more
appropriate, and frankly, exciting god.
Because this was once the haunt of Bacchus,
the god of ecstasy and wine,
the god who blurred the boundaries between human and divine,
between women and men, between the wild and the tamed.
A god who seemingly sat at the edges of society, but that I'd argue
was right at the very foundation of civilisation itself.
This was a god worshipped by every class,
from citizen to slave, in heady orgiastic rituals.
I'm going in search of Bacchus,
to explore his exotic eastern roots and his prehistoric origins...
This pot, it's from 8,000 years ago.
8,000 years ago?! 8,000, yes.
..witnessing extraordinary ritual celebrations -
evidence that Bacchus's spirit still endures to this day.
That is really strong. My ears are actually buzzing.
And as I uncover his story,
I'll reveal how the god's charisma meant he reigned
across the ancient world...
..and why the dangers of ignoring this wild and ecstatic force
have resonated throughout the centuries to this day.
I think that understanding Bacchus and the liberating, intoxicating
qualities that he unleashes in us,
is key to understanding the human story.
Not just then...
..but now.
To start my exploration, I've come to Athens.
2,500 years ago,
the ancient Athenians worshipped a myriad of gods and goddesses
who they thought intervened in all aspects of their lives.
This reproduction from Athens' most iconic monument, the Parthenon,
originally depicted key players in the great pantheon -
Aphrodite, Hera, and Zeus.
And lounging here in the corner, the god of wine, Bacchus.
Or, as the Greeks more often called him, Dionysus.
Now, the story goes that Dionysus came into being when Zeus
turned himself into an eagle so that he could have his wicked way
with a mortal called Semele. And not that surprisingly,
Zeus's wife Hera was a little bit miffed about this,
and the long and short of it is that Semele was burnt to a crisp.
But Zeus didn't want to lose his unborn son,
so he plucked him from the charred remains of his mother and popped
the little unborn baby into his thigh.
Now stay with me, because the Greek myths do get a bit weird.
Zeus then carried the unborn Dionysus overseas
where he was reared on a mountainside by nymphs
and goat-legged satyrs.
Today the god's backstory may sound preposterous,
but for the ancient Greeks,
it encapsulated their feelings towards him.
Dionysus was a god who was mortal but divine, civilised and wild,
Greek and also foreign.
A god who crossed boundaries on every level.
Here's Dionysus on this lovely sculptural relief.
He's carrying an amphora of wine and he's holding a wine cup in his hand.
But what really strikes you is how his pose mirrors almost exactly
that of the woman next to him.
And, overall, he's pretty effeminate.
He's got a smooth chin, without a beard,
he's got these lovely, cascading curly locks,
and it even looks as though he's got breasts.
Time and time again,
Dionysus is described and portrayed as being androgynous.
But more than that, he's also talked about as being transgender.
So Dionysus is brilliantly difficult to pigeon-hole.
And for the ancient Greeks, that seems to have made him even more popular.
Now, Dionysus was the party god supreme.
A third of all the festival days in the year were dedicated to him,
and the mother of all festivities was the Great City Dionysia.
The winter months of the year were sacred to Dionysus,
and this festival celebrated the end of his season.
It was a truly mammoth extravaganza.
Women and men alike were garlanded with flowers and the streets were
jam-packed with people.
One contemporary tells us that 300 bulls were sacrificed at one time.
So that would have been enough to feed 70,000 people.
Over four days and nights, the City Dionysia's feast was,
of course, accompanied by rather a lot of wine and merriment...
You've got to try and get it in?
In there, rather than on the table, guys.
..like the ancient drinking game of Kottabos.
Hopeless.
Basically, it's very silly, messy,
and, if played for too long, bound to get you legless.
You seem to be getting worse rather than better.
Could it be the wine possibly?
I'm getting drunk. You're getting drunk, you are.
There were lots of versions,
but originally a target was put in between party-goers.
They then flicked their wine at it...
Aww... Just so hopeless.
..and if they failed, they had to take a drink.
Have a go, have a go.
If the ancients were anything like these guys,
I'd say they'd have been taking a swig pretty often.
LAUGHTER
Like any drinking game, Kottabos often ended pretty messily.
There was one Greek playwright who said that if you have around
three mixing bowls' worth, then men stay sensible.
But, by the tenth, there is madness, stupor, and unconsciousness.
For the Greeks, the City Dionysia was much more than just
an extended drinking binge.
Festival-goers cross-dressed
and danced and sang in ritual processions
until the celebrations climaxed in a grand dramatic competition,
here, at the Theatre of Dionysus.
Like the other Greek gods and goddesses,
Dionysus was multifaceted.
He wasn't just a god of wine and ecstasy, but also of theatre.
Now, quite rightly,
drama is celebrated as one of the most brilliant legacies
of Golden Age Greece,
and it almost certainly developed as a religious ritual.
For instance, the name "tragedy" probably comes from tragos,
a billy goat who was sacrificed in honour of the god Dionysus himself.
From the moment the original theatre was built around 469 BC,
Athenians of every class - some a bit worse for wear -
would scramble to get a seat during the festival.
Munching on nuts and chickpeas and figs,
people would have crushed into this theatre.
Some of them had been queuing overnight so they got the best seats.
We are told that passions ran high and there were fistfights and beatings.
This experience really mattered to people.
This was a state-organised affair that intended to bring the community
together, each play exploring the nature of being human.
One of the most powerful surviving examples was a tragedy
that immortalises the god's name -
The Bacchae.
Euripides wrote this play, The Bacchae,
because he wanted exactly to deal with this amazing god
and the power he has over the lives of the human beings.
I mean, it is a disturbing play. It's a very visceral play.
Yeah, The Bacchae
is a story of the god Dionysus, who is very,
very popular amongst the folk people and the simple people.
He comes marching with his followers to Thebes,
and all the women go to the mountains to worship him.
But the young ruler, Pentheus,
represents the side of our existence that deals with logic and with
everything under control.
So he wants to put Dionysus in jail, but because of his arrogance,
being a young ruler, he goes beyond the limits.
He wants to see the rituals of the women and he's lured by Dionysus
to the mountains and there, his mother,
not realising that he is her son - she thinks that he is a young lion -
she tears her son to pieces.
So I suppose the message of the play is that we deny Dionysus
at our peril. You have to accept that that is a part of our lives.
Exactly, that there are two sides of life.
It's accepting the coexistence of the opposites.
Wearing a mask in a theatrical performance, getting drunk on wine,
and being enraptured by dance and music were all elements
of the City Dionysia that the Athenians revelled in.
All seeking the same key experience - ecstasy.
The word ecstasy derives from the ancient Greek ekstasis,
literally to stand or to be outside yourself.
Now, that encapsulates a really big idea -
that by losing your mind, by getting off your head,
you give yourself enough distance to stand back
and work out who you really are.
What's remarkable is that vestiges of this ancient festival experience
can still be found in parts of Greece today.
I'm taking the ferry from the mainland across the Aegean Sea
to the tiny island of Skyros...
..where the spirit of Dionysus is still very much alive.
Once a year, the ancient and modern worlds collide
when the local inhabitants stage their annual Goat Festival.
What's brilliant is that this festival takes place on exactly the
same days of the year as an ancient Greek festival in honour of Bacchus
that celebrated the gift of wine to mankind and the start of the spring.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Over three days, festival-goers, children and adults, all classes,
just as in ancient times -
some lubricated by the gods' gift of wine -
are transported by the spectacle and join together in dance and song.
But for me, what really captures the spirit of the god in this festival
are the men who dress as the geros, or ancient ones.
Why not? Thank you, yamas.
Where is yours? No...
OK, but don't let me stop you. So what do you put on first?
We're going to put this one first. Yeah, OK.
I'm not going to watch, it's OK.
I'm going to focus on my drink instead.
Tell me when you're ready.
Are you wearing all of those bells?
Yeah.
How heavy is that?
It's around 60-65 kilos.
OK, my goodness.
These were the bells that the sheep wear, used to wear.
The sheep? Yeah. OK.
So you're sort of, well, you're kind of a mixture between a shepherd and
a sheep. Yeah. You know, man and animal when you wear them.
HE SPEAKS GREEK
This is the skin of a premature-born goat that died,
and we put it on our face.
Wow. That's quite...niche. Yeah.
Religion is a part of this.
Yeah. It was added to the uniform as a tribute to god Dionysus,
the ancient god.
So you wear this goat mask to conceal yourself in honour of the god Dionysus?
Yes, we do. Still, in the 21st century.
That shows how strong he is as a god, isn't it?
Yeah. How does it make you feel when you put the mask on?
It makes you feel really cool, because nobody knows who you are,
and you can do anything you want,
and with no consequences.
CHUCKLING
And do you ever... Do you misbehave, do you do things...?
Not really, but, OK, sometimes, maybe.
BELLS RATTLE
So what's going to happen now? We're going to have a trial.
A trial? Yeah. OK.
So am I OK here? You have to stand back. Stand back?
Yeah. OK, OK.
That is really strong, my ears are actually buzzing. Wow.
For me, the connections to the ancient world are remarkable.
By donning the goat mask,
the geros blur the boundaries between man and animal,
just like the goat-legged satyrs who mythically accompanied Dionysus
in his revels.
And they're also playing on the god's gender fluidity.
Yep, those veiled women - well, apparently,
some of them are men in drag.
The origin of this current Bacchic celebration is unclear.
It could date back 25 centuries.
But there is a fascinating possibility that it might be
much, much older still.
Archaeological evidence of the worship of Dionysus predates
the Greek classical age by nearly 1,000 years.
Archaeologists working in Crete discovered what they'd call
linear B tablets. They show a Bronze Age form of early Greek,
and the original of this one dated to around 1300 BC.
Now, what these symbols down here say is "di-wo-nu-so".
And this tablet tells us that gifts of amphorae of honey were given
to the god Dionysus.
Over 3,000 years old,
early writing tablets give us our first written reference to Dionysus,
and our first association between the god and wine.
But although these proto-Greeks may have been the first to give the god a name,
they weren't the first society to celebrate communal wine drinking
as a unifying religious experience.
To investigate, I've travelled east to Georgia in the Caucasus between
the Caspian and the Black Seas.
In prehistory,
this wild landscape is believed to have been home to the world's first
natural grape varieties.
And recent findings here suggest that worshipping the fruits of
Dionysus helped to bring people together
right at the very start of civilisation.
Archaeologists working here have made quite a remarkable discovery.
What they've identified is the oldest extant evidence of pure
grape-wine making, right at the very beginning of society itself,
when our prehistoric ancestors were making the transition from being
nomadic hunter-gatherers to forming stable, settled communities.
Archaeologists have been digging the Stone Age villages in the region.
At Gadachrili Gora, in summer 2017,
they discovered a series of round pits containing pottery.
Analysis of residues in this pottery revealed astounding results.
I'm meeting one of the scientists who worked on the finds,
at the Georgian National Museum.
I mean, what an amazing pot.
Are those grapes decorating it? Yes, yes.
So they're producing wine all those years ago,
and they're still doing it using the same method today.
So how old is this one, how old is this pot?
8,000 years ago? 8,000, yes.
Wow.
So if this is 8,000 years old,
that will make this the oldest pure grape wine in the world so far.
Fruit flies are always around vines, aren't they?
What's really remarkable to me, is that life is very tough then.
This is a hard world, and yet, these women and men,
they're bothering to take the effort to make wine.
So it must show how important wine is to their society.
It is very important.
Really? So they're really central to what society is.
Yes, it's central, yes. Amazing to have it right in the house.
It's good drinking, yes.
8,000 years ago, though, enjoying the drinking.
It is very, very delicious, yes.
That's true.
The pots are extraordinary evidence that winemaking was in the hearts
and homes of our early ancestors.
And as fragments of wine pots from other nearby contemporary Stone Age
sites show, they were producing it to satisfy more than just
a craving for alcohol.
This little figure that turns up on the wine pots of the time
is a clue as to why those Stone Age men and women took such an effort to
make wine. That gesture is a really typical gesture of prayer,
with the arms bent, and the hands outstretched.
So, clearly, wine made them feel good about themselves,
but it obviously also made them feel closer to the spirit world,
and to their gods.
The fact that wine seems to have been produced here for 8,000 years,
pretty much in the same way, is brilliant.
But what's really significant
is that it shows our need for ecstasy and transcendence
and intoxication.
For the power of Dionysus to break down boundaries between individuals
and to bind people together,
isn't just some kind of side effect of civilisation,
it's there, right at the very foundation of society itself.
Revealingly, Gadachrili Gora isn't the only place that's beginning to
provide proof of worshipping with wine.
Discoveries in sites from Armenia to Iran, Turkey, Egypt,
China and Sicily all show the use of wine in prehistoric rituals.
But, crucially, as the ancient Greeks believed,
Dionysus's gifts could also stimulate progress by allowing
the intellectual and creative juices to flow.
Dionysus was the god of revelry, the bringer of joy.
He was also called Dionysus the Erect.
Probably best to leave that one to the imagination.
What I think was really significant was that here in 5th century Greece,
where art and ideas flourished, he was known as Dionysus the Liberator.
And some even gave him the name Dionysus Psilax -
he who gave men's minds wings.
philosophical thinkers of all time rubbed shoulders -
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.
We're told that Athens' intelligentsia would often bump into each other here in the Agora,
the hub of the city, while taking a morning stroll.
While debate might be sparked here in the public space of the city,
we're told that more hard-core philosophical discussion took place
in a rather more Dionysiac environment,
in a private soiree known as the symposium.
Symposia were intellectual gatherings,
but they were in no way dry.
Even in Plato's lofty meeting of minds,
it was Dionysus's gift of wine that helped men think outside the box.
Plato's Symposium, one of the great works of Western literature.
And as its title suggests, it's all about the symposium,
a drinking together.
And it's one of our very few insights into what it was actually
like to participate in a real life, men-only, adult male citizen-only,
drinking party. It's interesting how structured these were.
They weren't free-for-alls, were they? Not at all free-for-alls.
We think of a party, drinking party, let it all hang out.
Actually, they had rules. They elected a leader,
somebody who would decide how many and how much each of the wine cups
would fill. Whether it was to be this mixture of water and wine,
also how many guests there should be sitting where -
not sitting, but reclining on couches.
And one should say that right to begin with,
after the man who is going to be the symposiarch,
sometimes called the king, after he's decided the rules,
then they pour a libation.
Who do they pour it to?
The god of wine, either Dionysus or Bacchus.
Then they sing a hymn, and this is before they're well lubricated.
So, yes, very structured indeed.
Because I suppose what these things do, is they do allow us to do
something absolutely essential to humans - to exchange ideas.
Yes. To let our minds run freely.
The "sym" bit means "with".
The "posium" bit, posium in Latin, means "drinking".
So it's the communality of it, the joining together,
the exchange of ideas, of both thoughts and passions.
It's a very striking fact that the Greeks somehow thought you could
both think and drink at the same time.
Of course, for sensible thought to flourish,
drinking had to be tempered.
The Greeks watered down their wine, acknowledging the dangers of excess.
For them, the gifts of Dionysus were considered a burden for mankind
as well as a joy.
But in the ancient world
not every civilisation had such a congenial relationship
with the god of wine.
When the Romans appropriated the Greeks' god of wine,
they preferred to call him by his cultic nickname, Bacchus.
Now, the assimilation of Bacchus into Roman culture should have been
relatively straightforward.
After all, they had their own home-grown god of wine and ecstasy,
Liber - his name hinting at his liberating qualities.
But things didn't go so well for Bacchus.
Ironically, the problem stemmed from the god's appeal.
Under his new Roman masters,
the Bacchus cult was attracting a growing following,
especially amongst women.
The historian Livy painted a particularly vivid picture of one Bacchic festival.
This is what he wrote.
"When they were heated with wine and with the nightly liaisons of men
"and women, debaucheries of every kind commenced."
It's really interesting how anxious the Romans were about what happened
when women drank and when they indulged in the worship of Bacchus.
It was absolutely no coincidence that when the rebel slave Spartacus
revolted, some of his female followers were said to be infused
with the fervour of Bacchus.
In 186 BC, the Senate of the Roman Republic had put its foot down,
passing a decree punishing the worship of Bacchus throughout Roman lands.
The Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus
is a rather lengthy document.
There's a lot of flowery legalese,
and then it boils down to this -
unless you have the specific permission of the Senate,
then you can't host a Bacchic shrine on your land,
you can't lead others in Bacchic worship,
you can't worship Bacchus either in public or in private, in the city,
or the countryside, and, if you are allowed,
then any Bacchic gathering can only have a maximum of five people
at any one time.
The paterfamilias has power over his wife.
The Bacchic cult is a cult where women are in charge.
We have, for example, the priestess Paculla Annia, the high priestess,
who legislates that no man over the age of 18 can be initiated.
So that turns the whole thing on its head -
rather than having women in the control of the men,
this cult is putting young impressionable men
under the control of women. It's like every Roman nightmare rolled into one. Absolutely. You've got
potent women, influential women, women letting their hair down
and having a drink. Absolutely, yes. It couldn't get worse.
It couldn't get worse, yes. And is there any reason why the Romans are
particularly jumpy at this time?
If you look at the senatorial legislation,
it very much seems that what they're bothered about is the organisational
dimensions of the Bacchanalian cult, rather than anything to do
with the god Bacchus himself.
There is a danger, particularly with increasing numbers,
that what we might have here is a parallel state within a state.
I suppose that's one of his great strengths -
because he encourages people to get together,
he can either be a very great friend or a really worrying foe.
Absolutely, so you want to be on the right side of him.
As London's very own temple that ultimately honoured Bacchus shows,
the Roman authorities could never completely ban the god -
he was just too popular.
But they could turn his popularity to their advantage.
They even employed Bacchus and his gifts as agents of control.
Some personally allied themselves with the god to further
their imperial ambitions.
This coin was minted by the Roman general and power-monger, Mark Antony.
Here he is, crowned by grapes.
And then, on the other side,
you've got Bacchus standing on a kind of sacred chest that was used
in the mystery cult encircled by entwining snakes.
Now, it seems to me that something rather intimidating happens
to Bacchus under the Romans.
They aggressively promoted the culture of wine drinking to some
of their new subject populations.
Julius Caesar himself recognised that booze helped to keep conquest
nations submissive and subservient.
And one Roman author wrote that wine overcame native barbarians
as easily as if they'd been attacked by weapons.
Bacchus and his gifts could be found throughout the Empire.
From Londinium, the capital of Rome's northernmost frontier
of Britannia, to the eastern wilds of Georgia...
..where, beneath these empty fields,
was once a trading boom town called Dzalisa.
In the dining room of one of its most prestigious dwellings,
Bacchus's myth decorates the entire floor.
And in the Middle East, where some believed the god had been born,
the mystical nature of his cult had proved massively popular.
In fact, he was the region's premiere god.
But it was in the east that Bacchus would face his greatest challenge yet -
the arrival of a new man-god and a new cult.
I've come to Jerash in Jordan,
where evidence of the tussle between the ancient god and his new rival
can still be seen within the stunning remains of the Roman city.
until the 4th century AD,
when Roman rulers swapped allegiance to the young religion
with its one, all-powerful god.
First the Emperor Constantine had converted to Christianity.
And then, pretty quickly, things got even tougher for the old gods.
One of his successors, Theodosius I, outlawed paganism.
Theodosius's name means God-given.
And for him, there was only room in the world for one true God.
At Jerash, Bacchus was ousted from his temple.
This triumphant archway and monumental staircase
marked an entrance to a massive church,
built slap-bang on top of the god's sanctuary.
The figure of Bacchus and his fervent adulation by his followers
posed a serious threat to the burgeoning Christ cult.
Interestingly, not because the two were wildly different,
but actually because they shared remarkable similarities.
Just listen to this.
"Drinking his wine, we drink of him.
"Through this gift, man is made new again."
Now, that's not actually a quote from the New Testament,
even though it sounds like it.
It's a description of Bacchus from the Euripides play, The Bacchae.
Descriptions of Bacchus in ancient myths and Jesus in the New Testament
had striking similarities.
We are told both performed miracles, like changing water into wine.
Both had immortal fathers and human mothers.
And Bacchus was said to have been killed by Titans,
before being born again.
With so many parallels between Jesus and Bacchus,
a fiercely-fought popularity contest ensued.
Archaeological finds from Cyprus,
just a day's sailing away across the Mediterranean,
seemed to show how Bacchus's faithful hit back at their rival...
..by playing with Christian iconography.
The evidence is located in the city of Nea Paphos,
in the 4th century House of Aion.
This is a really remarkable find.
Basically, what you have here is a whole bevy of Greek gods
and goddesses and deities and spirits.
They've all very handily got their names above them.
Here's the lovely heavenly Nectar, here is gorgeous Ambrosia,
and in the middle there, there's the god Hermes with the little wings
on his helmet, and he's cradling the baby Bacchus in his lap.
Now, of course, we're used to Jesus being represented as a kind of
divine baby. And it's being made crystal clear here
that Bacchus is super-special,
because he's got the halo around his head.
Also, just have a look at these three figures to the side.
They're kneeling down and paying their respects to the baby Bacchus,
just as the three Magi came to adore the baby Jesus in Bethlehem.
At this time, Bacchus is being honoured
at his shrines and altars that are dedicated to the father and the son.
And, increasingly during his cult,
the fact that he is a bringer of life after death
is being celebrated.
I think that here
you have nothing less than Bacchus being sold to the world
as the saviour of mankind.
As a god who crossed boundaries, part mortal, part divine,
Bacchus was believed to move between the realms of the living and dead.
Like Jesus, he even offered access to an afterlife.
Not surprisingly, from the birth of Christianity,
Christians were keen to show who was boss.
For me, this is a real clincher.
It's John's Gospel, chapter 15, verse one.
And in it, Jesus declares, "I am the true vine."
Now, just think of that statement in relation to winey, viney Bacchus,
who's been romping around the known world for centuries.
It seems as though the Christians are urgently saying,
"It's Jesus Christ who is the truth, the light, the way forward."
Not outdated, fake Bacchus.
With the might of Rome behind Jesus, Bacchus didn't stand a chance.
And in the ancient world his following all but disappeared.
But in the modern world, the god would enjoy a new lease of life.
In the 18th century, there was a rather surprising Bacchic revival...
..at the dawn of a new age of reason and scientific progress,
the Enlightenment.
The Age of Enlightenment saw a hands-on interest
in the classical world, when the great and the good of Europe's elite
embarked on the Grand Tour -
basically, a culturally-themed gap year -
in order to rediscover the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome.
Painshill Park is a landscape garden created in 1738.
Taking 35 years to complete,
its owner Charles Hamilton described it as a landscape
of living paintings.
Before acquiring Painshill,
Hamilton, the ninth son of the sixth Earl of Abercorn,
went on a Grand Tour. In fact, he enjoyed it so much he went twice.
And he came back enlightened,
not just by feasting his eyes on the treasures of the ancient world,
but by pocketing a few for posterity.
Including this monumental sculpture of Bacchus.
Back home in Surrey, Hamilton wanted to recreate the classical experience
that had inspired him on his travels,
and Bacchus was central to his vision.
He didn't just plant his stature here,
he planted a vineyard, and even built a Bacchic temple.
Hamilton's grand design actually bankrupted him and, over 200 years,
the temple fell into ruin.
But now, the current trustees of the park are recreating the original
edifice from scratch, with painstaking attention to detail.
This is the most genius thing, absolutely beautiful.
How did you jigsaw puzzle together the evidence to work out what you
should put here then?
Well, the trust employed an archaeologist and an archivist
and they worked together to decipher the grounds.
And paintings turned up like this one.
Gosh, fantastic. So this is it? Yes.
That's brilliant. So hilarious really, isn't it, that you've got
this Greco-Roman construction in the middle of the English landscape.
Yes. Do we know what would have been in there originally?
Inside, Hamilton would have had his statue of Bacchus,
which he brought from Italy on his Grand Tour.
He was convinced that it was a Greek original.
But we found, fairly recently, much more interesting results really.
Bacchus is what's called a composite statue -
the feet and some of the leg and the head are Roman,
but the in-between bits are 18th century.
So it's been composed for possibly the grand tourist.
How funny. So then it would have been kind of palmed off to him as being an original,
but actually, they just sort of stuck it together.
Possibly, yeah. And the other interesting discovery was that
the head was a goddess. So he was a bit transgender, even then.
Totally appropriate.
And, you know, you've got this kind of lovely theatrical setting.
Do we know what he's using the temple for?
We think he entertained, but on a very quiet level.
There are no stories of raucous parties or bacchanalian revels
or anything. But he would have entertained family and close friends here.
Interesting, so it's not actually very bacchanalian. No.
Hamilton was certainly paying homage to Bacchus.
But this ordered pleasure park is a world away from the god's untamed,
unpredictable home turf.
And Hamilton's refined dinner parties were hardly
transcendental experiences.
It feels to me as though Bacchus here has been kind of tidied up
and sorted out and un-paganed.
The god, of course, had many qualities,
but the one thing he never was, was genteel.
Hamilton's sanitisation of the god isn't altogether surprising.
In his enlightened age, driven by science and logic,
one word was held in particular contempt - enthusiasm.
In Greek, "entheos" literally means possessed by a god, the sublime.
To be enthusiastic, to be Bacchic, went against reason.
But in the late 18th century,
as Britain built its Empire and strengthened its presence in India,
there was more enthusiasm for the god's exotic qualities.
In ancient myth, Bacchus was known as the traveller god,
often depicted with elephants and tigers.
He, himself, was said to have conquered India.
The parallels hit home, and the East India Company began building
their gargantuan new HQ here in Leadenhall Street.
The East India Company's grand new building was actually demolished
in the 19th century, but the original was so vast,
it was called the Monster of Leadenhall Street.
Now, in 1803 there was construction work round here and this rather
fabulous 2nd century AD Roman mosaic was discovered.
It depicts Bacchus conquering India, and we know that because the god
is riding triumphantly on the back of a tiger.
For the East India Company, this felt like great karma.
Just as Bacchus had conquered India, now Britain was conquering the East.
Of course, the discovery itself was nothing more than a chance find,
with the Bacchic image an historical coincidence.
But this association between Bacchus's mythical conquest of India
and the West's imperial ambitions in the East,
cemented a reconnection with the god.
I've to come the Royal Asiatic Society in London to find out
how one of its founding members, an employee of the East India Company,
sparked a new chapter in the god's story.
One of the early Britons to arrive in India in the 1780s
was William Jones,
who is a really fascinating, charismatic personality.
He was one of the great Orientalists.
As it says here. As it says. Sir William Jones, the celebrated...
He was indeed THE most celebrated Orientalist of his time.
He was also a gifted linguist - according to one account,
he knew more than 20 languages.
And over the course of his lectures,
he developed a theory of common Indo-European culture.
In one of his lectures, on the gods of Greece, Italy,
and India, which he delivered in 1785,
he talks about the various parallels between the gods of antiquity
in the Mediterranean and the Hindu gods.
So he suggests there is a parallel between Dionysus and Rama.
Jones noted how the Hindu god Rama, like Bacchus,
was born in the wild on a mountain,
and that both were believed to be traveller gods,
who conquered India accompanied by an army of beasts.
There are other parallels between Bacchus and Shiva -
the emphasis on dance, on force, on power.
Dionysus is connected with elephants and with other animals that we would
typically associate with India, for instance, tigers and lions.
I mean, this is really interesting in scholarly terms.
But does it have actual impact in the wider world?
Oh, yeah, Jones was extremely influential and he had a wide
readership. The Romantics really took to what he was saying,
were inspired and influenced by him.
Byron, Shelley, read his writings.
Their poems reflect this interest in the East and the Orient.
Jones's parallels between Bacchus and the Hindu deities didn't just fascinate the poets.
His observations on the god's ecstatic qualities were avidly
taken up by some of the greatest Western thinkers of the day.
And one totally captivated was the 19th century German philosopher
and professor of classics, Friedrich Nietzsche.
For Nietzsche, Western civilisation wasn't on the crest of a wave,
it was in crisis,
shackled to Christianity and infatuated with scientific progress.
By subduing the irrational, the chaotic, the disordered,
he thought that our lives were denuded and dampened.
In fact, not even worth living.
Finding a model for progress in Ancient Greek society,
in 1872 Nietzsche wrote The Birth Of Tragedy,
his seminal philosophical treatise.
In his book, The Birth Of Tragedy,
Nietzsche argued that the Greeks had got it right.
In their art and architecture, they celebrated order embodied by Apollo.
But through tragedy and the ecstatic experience, they also embraced
the deviant, the disordered, the chaotic,
the Dionysian.
As he'd go on to write...
..Intoxication.
Nietzsche had championed the value of Bacchic ecstasy in the modern world.
And since he promoted the idea of a godless universe,
his Dionysian ideas were eagerly taken up throughout the 20th century
by those who raged against the establishment,
both Church and State.
One of the greatest examples played out at the height of the
counterculture movement in the 1960s,
when Euripides' Bacchae got a revival.
Dionysus In '69 was originally a New York stage performance,
then filmed by Brian de Palma.
CHANTING ON FILM
Just as the original play had highlighted the perils of ignoring
Bacchus in ancient Greece, this version was a cautionary tale
for the modern age.
Good evening, sir. May I take you to your seats?
Drawing on the hippy mantra of free love, in its makers' eyes,
ignoring Bacchus had led to the brutality and violence
of the Vietnam War and civil rights injustices.
Dionysus In '69 really is an extraordinary,
wild piece of performance.
It actually follows the original narrative fairly closely,
and it aims to evoke a sense of release and of Dionysiac excess.
There is a lot of guttural moaning, groaning, and chirping.
Then the actors strip naked and writhe around to portray
the ecstatic intoxication experienced by Bacchus's followers
in the original play...
MOANING
..before, in a frenzied attack,
they chase the King Pentheus to rip him apart.
GROWLING AND WHOOPING
In the final moments, the actor playing the god leaves everyone
in no doubt as to the relevance and critical importance of the Dionysian
in the contemporary world.
As anti-presidential banners are unfurled from the ceiling,
the actor playing Dionysus encourages all of us
to embrace Dionysus, to vote for him for President.
And with that, the entire cast and audience break out of the theatre,
continuing their Bacchic revelry onto the streets and into the night.
You have nothing to lose but your chains!
As the counterculture movement grew, millions turned on, tuned in,
and dropped out.
And the Bacchic ethos looked set for a revival.
But rather than being a unifying force,
it highlighted a divide between, on the one hand, those who embraced
Dionysiac subversion, and on the other
the forces of order and conservatism,
what Nietzsche had called the Apollonian.
So, for example, take the viewpoint of the Russian-American
writer-philosopher Ayn Rand,
who's firmly on the side of Apollo, by the way.
For her, the modern epitome of the Bacchants
are the scummy savages who roll around in the mud at Woodstock.
And she doesn't stop there. The Apollonians were exemplified
by those who attended the launch of Apollo 11.
Yeah, it's all pretty literal.
These were responsible individuals rather than the stampeding herd,
the manipulated mob.
For Rand, the Dionysiac was the realm of liberal intellectuals
rather than the majority of regular, clean-living Americans,
Those who were reality-orientated, common sense-orientated,
technology-orientated.
Three, two, one.
Today, how we think of Bacchus and his gifts still informs debates
on drugs, drink, gender and subversion.
It's at the core of tensions between the natural world
and urban development, between chaos and control.
The god may belong to a far-gone age,
but the issue of how to approach the freedom of spirit that he nourishes
in us and how to balance that with the ordered and rational in our lives,
well, that looks set to run and run.
Maybe, as is so often the case,
the Greeks got it right 2,500 years ago.
They recognised the dangers of denying, of exiling Bacchus,
of shutting ourselves off from one another rather than delighting
in the shared experience.
But they also realised there was a danger in letting go completely, irretrievably.
Written over the great sanctuary of Delphi,
sacred to Dionysus for the winter months of the year,
and where the man-god was said to be buried, were written the words,
"meden agan" -
nothing in excess.
Well, that seems pretty much like it to me.
I mean, sure, go wild,
find the animal in you so you know who you truly are,
but always keep just enough control to be able to pull yourself
back from the edge,
so that ecstasy isn't toxic,
but intoxicating.