vines, and moving in the wind, to scare the birds. That garland of
ivy, the aesthetic value of which is so great in the later imagery of
Dionysus and his descendants, the leaves of which, floating from his
hair, become so noble in the hands of Titian and Tintoret, was
actually worn on the head for coolness; his earliest and most sacred
images were wrought in the wood of the vine. The people of the
vineyard had their feast, the little or country Dionysia, which still
lived on, side by side with the greater ceremonies of a later time,
celebrated in December, the time of the storing of the new wine. It
was then that the potters' fair came, calpis and amphora, together
with lamps against the winter, laid out in order for the choice of
buyers; for Keramus, the Greek Vase, is a son of Dionysus, of wine
and of Athene, who teaches men all serviceable and decorative art.
Then the goat was killed, and its blood poured out at the root of the
vines; and Dionysus literally drank the blood of goats; and, being
Greeks, with quick and mobile sympathies, [22] deisidaimones,+
"superstitious," or rather "susceptible of religious impressions,"
some among them, remembering those departed since last year, add yet
a little more, and a little wine and water for the dead also;
brooding how the sense of these things might pass below the roots, to
spirits hungry and thirsty, perhaps, in their shadowy homes. But the
gaiety, that gaiety which Aristophanes in the Acharnians has depicted
with so many vivid touches, as a thing of which civil war had
deprived the villages of Attica, preponderates over the grave. The
travelling country show comes round with its puppets; even the slaves
have their holiday;* the mirth becomes excessive; they hide their
faces under grotesque masks of bark, or stain them with wine-lees, or
potters' crimson even, like the old rude idols painted red; and carry
in midnight procession such rough symbols of the productive force of
nature as the women and children had best not look upon; which will