May gladsome Dionysus swell the fruit upon the trees,For this reason all who reverence Osiris are prohibited from destroying a cultivated tree or blocking up a spring of water.
The hallowed splendour of harvest-time.
That Osiris is identical with Dionysus who could
more fittingly know than yourself, Clea ? For you are
ii t the head of the inspired maidens of Delphi, and
have been consecrated by your father and mother in
the holy rites of Osiris. If, however, for the benefit
of others it is needful to adduce proofs of this identity,
let us leave undisturbed what may not be told, but the
public ceremonies which the priests perform in the
burial of the Apis, when they convey his body on an
improvised bier, do not in any way come short of a
Bacchic procession ; for they fasten skins of fawns
about themselves, and carry Bacchic wands and
indulge in shoutings and movements exactly as do
those who are under the spell of the Dionysiac
ecstasies.1 For the same reason many of the Greeks
make statues of Dionysus in the form of a bull2; and
the women of Elis invoke him, praying that the god
may come with the hoof of a bull3; and the epithet
applied to Dionysus among the Argives is ‘Son of the
Bull.’ They call him up out of the water by the sound
of trumpets,4 at the same time casting into the depths
a lamb as an offering to the Keeper of the Gate. The
trumpets they conceal in Bacchic wands, as Socrates5
has stated in his treatise on The Holy Ones. Furthermore,
[p. 87]
the tales regarding the Titans and the rites
celebrated by night agree with the accounts of the
dismemberment of Osiris and his revivification and
regenesis. Similar agreement is found too in the
tales about their sepulchres. The Egyptians, as has
already been stated,6 point out tombs of Osiris in
many places, and the people of Delphi believe that
the remains of Dionysus rest with them close beside
the oracle ; and the Holy Ones offer a secret sacrifice
in the shrine of Apollo whenever the devotees of
Dionysus7 wake the God of the Mystic Basket.8 To
show that the Greeks regard Dionysus as the lord and
master not only of wine, but of the nature of every
sort of moisture, it is enough that Pindar9 be our
witness, when he says
1 Cf. Diodorus, i. 11.
2 A partial list in Roscher, Lexikon d. gr. u. röm. Mythologie, i. 1149.
3 Cf. Moralia, 299 a, where the invocation is given at greater length; also Edmonds, Lyra Graeca, iii. p. 510 (L.C.L.).
4 Cf. Moralia, 671 e.
5 Müller, Frag. Hist. Graec. iv. p. 498, Socrates, no. 5.
6 358 a and 359 a, supra.
7 That is, the inspired maidens, mentioned at the beginning of the chapter.
8 Callimachus, Hymn to Demeter (vi.), 127; Anth. Pal. vi. 165; Virgil, Georg. i. 166.
9 Frag. 153 (Christ). Plutarch quotes the line also in Moralia, 745 a and 757 f.