Cook, Arthur B.: Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 1): Zeus god of the bright sky (Cambridge, 1914)

The Origin of Tragedy 675

same Leukothea, a-caldron was used to effect a ritual divinisation1.
It might also be observed that at Tenedos infants were sacrificed
to her son Palaimon2. Supported by the evidence of actual cult
and embedded in this context of archaic rites, the statement of
Apollodoros that Dionysos himself became a kid is not to be
laughed out of court. Again, Ovid says that, when the gods fled
into Egypt to escape Typhoeus, the son of Semele was turned into
a goat3. And even Ovid, facile though he was and frivolous though
he may have been, did not invent his Metamorphoses wholesale.
Recent research is in fact tending towards the conclusion that he
did not invent them at all4. And we have twice had occasion to
accept as based on definite cult-practice transformations presup-
posed by this very Ovidian narrative5.

In the tale told by Apollodoros we detected certain remnants
of Dionysiac ritual—the caldron of apotheosis and the young god
transformed into a kid. I should conjecture that there was a
version of the Dionysos-myth, in which the god boiled in a caldron
and subsequently devoured was done to death not as a bull, but as
a kid. I am further inclined to think that his worshippers, by way
of identifying themselves with him, took the name of ' kids' and
actually pretended to be seethed like him in a caldron. This may
seem a rash guess. But it is not entirely unsupported by evidence.
Hesychios informs us that a man who performed the rites of
Adonis was known as a ' kid6.' And we have seen that the Cretan
Zeus, whose death and resurrection were annually enacted, was at
the first hard to distinguish from Adonis7. Possibly, therefore,
Kuster was not mistaken when he interpreted this strange gloss of
some Dionysiac rite8. Again, if Dionysos was worshipped • as
Erzpkios, the " Kid-god,' at Metapontum, we might look to find
some trace of the fact in Orphic formularies. Now A. Dieterich9
with his habitual acumen pointed out that the lines engraved on

1 Supra p. 419 n. 10.

2 Lyk. Al. 22g ff. /ecu 8r] YiaXaifxwv depKerai. fipecpoKrovos \ ^eovaav aidviaicri tt\€kt<xvo-
aroXoLs | ypalav ^ijvevvov 'tiyevov TiTyvida (the wording is curiously reminiscent of the
Titanic caldron !) with schol. ad loc. Ha\ai/j.wv 6 MeXtKepTrjs, 6 rrjs 'Ivovs vios. ovtos
<T(p68pa eTLfxaro £i> rrj Te^eSy, '4vda /ecu fipecp-q avrcS edvcriafov.

3 Ov. met. 5. 329 proles Semelei'a capro.

4 See the careful and critical summary in Gruppe Myth. Lit. 1908 pp. 171 —185.

5 Supra p. 370 n. 1 (Zeus = ram), p. 445 (Hera = cow).

6 Hesych. s.v. ' K^wviarris' tpupos.

7 Supra p. 157 n. 3, p. 530 n. 2, p. 645.

8 See J. Alberti's n. on Hesych. loc. cit.

9 A. Dieterich de hymnis Orphicis Marpurgi Cattorum 1891 p. 30 ff. ( = Kleine
Schriften Leipzig and Berlin 1911 p. 91 ff.), id. Eine Mithrasliturgie2 Leipzig and
Berlin 1910 p. 214.