Dionysos Visiting Icarios
Unknown (Neo-Attic workshop) · 175-200 AD
The relief tells a story in two halves. On the left, under a curtain hung between two columns carrying a basin and a statue of triple Hekate, a poet reclines on a couch, stretching out his arm in welcome, while a woman lies beside him and four theatre masks are stacked beneath the couch. From the right comes Dionysos, drunk, crowned and wrapped in his cloak, leaning on a satyr while a small satyr kneels to take off his sandal. Behind him follow a dancing satyr with a thyrsus, Silenus playing the pipes, a satyr with a torch and wineskin, and a maenad.
The scene is a theoxenia, a god received as a guest, and it is traditionally read as Dionysos visiting Ikarios, the Athenian who first learned to make wine. The relief was carved in Italy in the late second century AD, in the classicising Neo-Attic manner, and is made of four fragments. It entered the Louvre in 1803 among works seized in Italy during the Napoleonic wars. A Greek relief of the same subject, carved in Athens three centuries earlier, is displayed in the room of Attic funerary monuments.
Did You Know? A small satyr is kneeling to pull off the god's sandal: in Greek custom you took your shoes off before reclining at a banquet.
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