Dionysos Visiting a Banqueting Poet
Unknown · 2nd century BC
Dionysos, drunk and unsteady, arrives at a banquet on this relief. Beardless, with long hair, in a tunic, cloak and soft boots, he holds a ribboned thyrsus and leans on a satyr who steadies him. To the right a man reclines on a couch, crowned with a wreath and identified as a poet, while a woman in a sleeved chiton sits at the foot of the couch. In front of them a round table on animal legs holds cakes, fruit and grapes, and a snake coils around it. A small naked cupbearer raises his arm as he pours from a jug.
The subject is a theoxenia, a meal offered to a god who comes as guest. Myth tells how Dionysos visited Ikarios in Attica and taught him to make wine, and this scene has long been read in that light, though the reclining figure may simply stand for any poet honoured by the god. Carved in Athens in the second century BC, it is the Greek forerunner of the much larger Roman version displayed in the Salle des Caryatides. The relief was found in Athens, is broken in two and rejoined. The Louvre bought it in 1880.
Did You Know? A snake coils around the table leg: in Greek votive reliefs the snake often stands for the protecting spirit of the house or of the dead.
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