From: freek@fwi.uva.nl (Freek Wiedijk)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Can anyone tell me the source of this text fragment?  Thanks!
Keywords: penguin
Date: 26 Jul 92 16:28:55 GMT
Organization: FWI, University of Amsterdam

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the hedge.  Most of the women had come.  They had on bright
thin dresses; they were only going to dance before the god.  At
the Dionysia, when they went up from Aigai into the mountain
forests, they would wear the real maenad dress, and carry the reed
thyrsos with its pine-cone top and wreath of ivy.  Their dappled
robes and fawnskins would not be seen again, but be thrown
away with their bloody stains.  The little pelts they wore now
were softly dressed and buckled with wrought gold; their thyrses
were delicate sceptres, gilded and trimmed with jewellers' work.
The priest of Dionysos had just arrived, and a boy leading the
goat.  They were only waiting for his mother to come out.
  She came, laughing in the doorway with Hyrmina from Epiros;
dressed in a saffron robe, and gilt sandals with garnet clasps.  The
ivy-wreath in her hair was gold, its fine sprays trembled glittering
in the torchlight, whenever she moved her head.  Her thyrsos was
twined with a little enamel snake.  One of the women carried the
basket with Glaukos in it.  He always came to the dance.
  The girl with the torch carried it round to all the others; their
flames leaped up, making eyes shine, and the red, green, blue,
yellow of the dresses deepen like jewels.  Standing from the
shadows, there hung like a mask the sad, wise, wicked face of
the goat, its topaz eyes and its gilded horns.  A wreath of young
green vine-clusters hung round its neck.  With the priest and his
serving-boy, it led the way to the grove; the women followed
talking quietly.  The sistra gave soft jangles as their bearers walk-
ed.  Frogs croaked in the stream that fed the fountains.
  They went up on the open hill above the garden; this was all
royal land.  The path threaded winding, between myrtles and
tamarisk and wild olive bushes.  Behind them all, out of sight,
led by the torches, the boy stepped lightly.
  The tall dark of the pinewood loomed ahead.  He left the path,
and slipped cautiously along through the brush.  It was too soon
to be seen.
  Lying flat on the springly pine-needles, he looked out from a
sheltering hollow at the grove.  They had stuck their torches into
sconces speared into the ground.  The dancing-place had been pre-
pared, the altar garlanded, the rustic trestle set with the wine-
cups and the mixing-bowl and the sacred fans.  On his plinth,
cared-for as always, cleansed from bird-droppings, washed and
polished so that his brown-tinted marble limbs had the sheen of
youthful flesh, stood Dionysos.
  Olympias had had him brought her from Corinth, where he
had been carved to her commands.  He was nearly life-sized, a
youth of about fifteen, fair-haired, with the slim muscles of a
dancer.  He wore ornate red boots, and a leopard-skin on one
shoulder.  A long-shafted thyrsos was grasped in his right hand;
the left held out a gilt cup in welcome.  His smile was not
Apollo's, which says, `Man, know yourself; that is enough for
your little life.'  This was a beckoning smile; its secret was for
sharing.
  They stood in a ring with joined hands, and sang an invoca-
tion, before the goat was sacrificed.  It had rained since the last
blood was shed there; he came up without fear, and only when
the knife went in gave one wild lonely cry.  His blood was caught
in a shallow cup and mixed with wine for the god.  The boy wat-
ched quietly, his chin propped on his hands.  He had seen count-
less sacrifices, in the public sanctuaries and in this grove, where
in infancy he had been carried to the dancing, and slept on pine-
mats to the blood-pulse of the drums.
  The music had started.  The girls with the finger-drums and
sistra, the girl with the double flute, began softly swaying to
their own time.  Glaukos' head in his opened basket was swaying
too.  Pace and sound built up; arms blinked behind waists, the
women beat the ground with their feet, their bodies arching for-
ward and back, their hair falling loose and swinging.  They drank
neat wine, for the dances of Dionysos; after the sacrifice, they
had drunk along with the god.
  He could come out soon; he would never be sent back now.
The girl with the cymbals brought them together high over
her head in a throbbing clang.  He crept forward till he was al-
most in the torchlight; no one saw him.  Turning slowly at first,
to leave breath for singing, they were hymning the Triumph of
the God.
  He could hear most of the words, but he knew the hymn from
memory.  He had often heard it here.  After each verse the cym-
bals clanged, and they sang each time louder the chorus, `Euoi,
Bakchos!  Euoi!  Euoi!'
  His mother began the hymn, hailing the god as son of Semele,
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Freek (`frake') Wiedijk, self-appointed proof digitizer: freek@fwi.uva.nl
--
      We shall have no need to assign a meaning to  Ext  itself;
we shall only speak of its vanishing.
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books