Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. This series was rather cheesily entitled Dodgy Deities, and they don't come dodgier than die. He was an ancient Greek god. That statement, seemingly self-evident, actually conceals a fundamental truth about him. We have been certain since the 1990s that his name appears on the Linear B tablets from the Bronze Age of Greece, dating from the 14th century BCE. The point here is that some other major deities of the better known classical age of Greece, like Aphrodite, don't. Their cults entered Greek culture later, but were then fully accepted into its pantheon of beloved Olympian deities. In that later classical age, by contrast, Dionysus was still always treated as a newcomer and a stranger. He was never quite welcome. In other words, even though he'd been part of Greek religion since prehistory, the Greeks were never really comfortable with him and never accepted him fully among them. Homer, in the earliest Greek literature, dealt extensively with the other goddesses and gods, including the newcomers, but marginalized and rather scorned Dionysus. The most obvious reason for this conundrum is that he stood uniquely among the deities for something that humans found at once indispensable and disturbing, and which they often felt that they should perhaps do without. This is alcohol. Specifically, it's wine, a form of alcohol which can be delicious and is potent in quite low quantities. Socially, its consequences can be either splendid or catastrophic. As an individual stimulant and relaxant, it can be equally superb, but it's also essentially toxic. This 17th-century portrait of him looking at once debauched and rather queasy sums that up. Dionysus is the patron god of anybody who has looked haggardly into a mirror in a morning with a throbbing head and roiling stomach and asks, Why do I do this to myself? He is equally the one of anybody who rolls over in bed at the same hour and in the same condition and asks wearily and with nausea of the other person in the bed, who are you? The rest of this talk will be devoted to exploring the implications of this uneasy relationship. I propose not to do so in the mythology or literature embodying Dionysus, that's a vast subject. But with respect to his actual cult in the ancient world, I should only refer to literature art or myth when that cult is concerned with them. There'll be some serious casualties of this approach. There will, for example, be no mention of his wife, Ariadne, however devoted to her I am personally. She's prominent in his mythology, literature, and art, but not in his worship. I'm concerned here with how people did worship him and interact with him, and what this says about his nature. A number of aspects of that and of human attitudes to it immediately become clear. The first is that, like a great many ancient deities who came to embody complex human needs, desires, and ambitions, he was originally based in hard economic reality. This was the need to cultivate vines once people had acquired a taste for wine and were prepared to pay for it. Dionysus is therefore, in some respects, a dying and returning vegetation god of the kind so beloved of the Victorian scholar Sir James Fraser, author of the Golden Bough. One of Dionysus's titles was Dendrites, Tree Being. He's a kind of ent. Maximus of Tyre recorded that peasants venerated him in their fields as a cut-down tree trunk. Images of him in temples were also sometimes made of wood. I think this Roman mosaic portrayal sums up that aspect nicely. Indeed, he didn't have as many actual temples as most major gods, his shrines often being caves or woodland groves. And the caves themselves were sometimes described as green, that is, hung with or surrounded by foliage. Two aspects of him derive from the botanical truth that vines were once are harvested and cut back severely, and then grow again verdantly and become fruitful even more. One, which will be considered later, is that Dionysus is a god who conquers death. The other is that he's a youthful and energetic deity, associated especially with the spring, when vines start to grow again. An anonymous late Greek song about him runs We will sing Dionysus in the sacred days, who has been away for a year. Present is his season and all the flowers. So this is a Dionysus time now. Spring starts earlier in the Mediterranean than elsewhere in Europe. And the first of the gods' annual festivals in ancient Athens, and the oldest there, was held in late February. It's called the Amphesteria and celebrated the opening of the new wine that had been laid down in the autumn. Dionysus, represented either by an image or by a man in costume, was carried into the city in a chariot disguised as a ship. Again, the point was being made that he was a foreigner arriving from overseas. About a month later, the next festival of his was held to confirm his provisional acceptance into the Athenian community. It was called the city Dionysia. Finally, in the autumn, the Oscophoria celebrated the bringing home of the grapes. The twinning of spring and autumn festivities both marked practical economic processes and highlighted the god's nature as a deity of life and death. His season is therefore restricted to the time of year when vegetation grows. And on Roman mosaics like this one, he's especially associated with flowers and fruit. The festivals to him held in other cities paid further testimony to his role as a bringer of abundance. At Ellis in the Peloponnese, three pots were sealed up in his temple and the next day found brimming with wine. On the island of Andros, wine seemed to flow spontaneously from the gateways of the temple there down the steps to the thirsty people. Alcohol can also provide a very effective focus and stimulus for social activity, as in this Baroque painting. And so the second abiding aspect of Dionysus's nature is that of a unifying and reconciling force within a community. Ancient Greeks were so aware of the damaging potential of alcohol that they normally restricted its consumption to adult male citizens. I know in the early 20th century women were banned from a lot of pubs in England, but in ancient Athens they were banned from alcohol altogether most of the time. And even the adult males usually mixed it with water to lessen its impact. But at the Anphesteria, women, slaves, and strangers were all encouraged to join in the drinking of the new wine. Children were admitted to it as well and got their first experience of it under proper supervision during the celebration. When the Oscophoria festival brought home the grapes in the autumn, landowners joined the labourers in the same work of doing so. Class was annihilated. The Athenian philosopher Plato and the orator Demosthenes agreed that the god came for everybody in the city without distinction. He was the great leveller. It was a time for the release of prisoners and the freeing of slaves. More snootily, the Greek-speaking Egyptian queen Arsinoe, was said to have called the crowd at one Dionysiac festival a mixed-up mob. Dionysus was also a great reconciler of rival communities. Hey, let's talk about it over a glass of wine. And his temple on the island of Lesbos was at the disposal of all its five warring cities. As a classic outsider, he was splendidly positioned to arbitrate between people and reunite them. He was the Greek god most concerned with us, with humanity, and likely to intervene in its affairs. He was nicknamed Epiphanes because he appeared among humans so often. Plato called him our companion of the festival. As part of this sociability and conviviality, he was also the only god who was a gang leader. He travelled everywhere with a retinue of lesser non-human beings of both sexes, spreading revelry everywhere they went. We'll return to those in a moment. I chose this modern portrait to bring that out. This is clearly related to the unpredictable effects of alcohol and its propensity for causing disorder and bad behaviour, including fights. When a wooden mask was found floating in the sea off ancient Lesbos, which seemed to the islanders at once divine and alien and disturbing, they decided at once it must represent Dionysus. Pagan deities often have traumatic and dramatic family histories and life stories. Dionysus outdoes the lot in this respect. A horrific violence runs constantly through his mythology and starts even while he is a fetus. A lot of deities, hey, like a lot of people, come from broken homes. No other god, however, had a father who casually burned his pregnant partner alive, following which the quick-witted Hermes had to form an emergency caesarean on the charred corpse to save the baby. Dionysus was then placed in an incubator consisting of his father's thigh for the remaining three months of gestation. As a toddler, he was then kidnapped by Titans, who dismembered, cooked, and ate him before he was regenerated by his grandmother Rhea from his heart alone. With this background, no wonder he was disturbed. This theme of destruction and rebirth, of course, relates to the reality of farming. That vegetation is butchered by being harvested and then regenerates. Whenever Dionysus' mythology leaked into his cult, however, it generally added a darker touch to the celebration. At the Amphisteria, for example, young girls were swung around by their arms to commemorate Origone, the young daughter of a local peasant called Icaros. Icarios was shown how to make wine by Dionysus and shared it with his neighbors. Experiencing their first ever sensations of drunkenness, they became convinced that Icarius had poisoned them and they lynched him. Erigony then hanged herself. All in all, it's an everyday Dionysic story of country folk. One can imagine the god standing by shaking his head and exclaiming, I was only trying to help. A lot of the time, however, Dionysus is not trying to help, but destroying the old in human affairs in order to create the new. His whole mythical entourage is dangerous. Indeed, for much of the time, it functions not so much as a bunch of new age travellers, but as an army. His second in command is the guy at the top of the screen, his boyhood tutor Silanus, who's like Friar Tuck gone to seed. He's fat, drunken, debauched, and generally irresponsible, the reverse of the conventional teacher. His followers consist of two kinds of being, both neither human nor amenable. The males are satyrs, half human and half animal, with male bodies, horses' tails, and enormous libidos. They are the antithesis of civilization, professional troublemakers. The female entourage is exactly equivalent. It consists of minads who are not human women, but a demented and violent variety of nymph. Apart from dancing, reveling, and screaming, their favourite alleg pastime is to tear animals to pieces and eat them raw. They're in the lower part of the screen. There are animals thought to be favoured by Dionysus, but they're generally the most dangerous examples of either wild or domestic beasts. His favourite among the wildlife is the leopard, which can easily kill or eat humans, and was common in the countryside around the Greek cities of Asia Minor. It survived in Turkey until the late 20th century and may do still. I was born in India and grew up in an Anglo-Indian Melia, and human eaters were still discussed in my childhood. The general ratio was that a human-eating tiger was generally shot after it had eaten an average 20 people. A leopard would eat an average 200. His equivalent favourite from the farmyard was the bull, by far the most dangerous kind of human livestock, and one that annually still kills people in the United Kingdom. The god was not only accompanied by such beasts, but was at times believed to transform himself into one of them. He was sometimes represented as one in cult. The Maynads were customarily depicted as wearing the skins of baby deer forms, which shared with the leopard the quality of being spotted. They therefore echoed the big cat, and also the hides were useful spin-offs from the routine work of dismembering and devouring the animals inside, again like leopards. Nymphs would often feature in mythology for ideal figures for male erotic fantasies. Guys with my ads just say no. Their figures out of horror stories instead, their humanoid counterparts to leopards, as Satyrs were to stallions. Both, like Dionysus himself, collapsed all kinds of being, deity, human, and animal, into one. This leads us to the next aspect of the god, as the greatest of divine transgressors. There he is on a Greek vase dancing with a myelad. He's a natural breaker of barriers, boundaries, and rules, in many ways the ideal revolutionary deity, the Chaguevara of the Greek divine pantheon. The manner in which his oldest Athenian festival was associated with jailbreaks, freedom from slavery, and giving alcohol to children immediately signals that he had a particular habit of privileging women, the sex who in ancient Greece were generally excluded from public life and confined to the household. Dionysus arrived for the Athenian amphisteria in a ship on wheels, as said, accompanied by men costumed as rowdy pipe-playing satyrs. At the heart of it, however, was a rite conducted in secret by fourteen women on behalf of the whole city, in front of an image of the god consisting of a mask on a post that was swathed in a robe. We know the ritual included a sacrifice, an oath, and allegedly some kind of ceremony in which somehow the leading woman symbolically mated with Dionysus. At Brise in the Peloponnese, there were two statues of him kept in the temple, one on display to wall worshippers. The other was hidden deeper in the building, and only women were allowed to see it. Increasingly, in the ancient world, from the classical period onwards, into the Hellenistic period of Greek expansion across the Middle East, and then that of the Roman Empire, exclusively female clubs formed in many Greek cities. They were devoted to the worship of the god and left the city itself in groups to do so. Now remember, Greek women are supposed to be mainly confined to the home. So this is role-breaking on an enormous scale. They were devoted to the worship of the gods, so men couldn't argue with them, and they left the city in groups to do so. They went off into the countryside, preferably into wild places such as woods and mountains. What they did there is, of course, not known for certain. It was secret. It's often supposed to consist of, and was portrayed on vases as being, a medley of wild dancing, drinking of wine, normally as said forbidden to women, and rituals of worship. This modern surrealist painting captures their atmosphere. The worship included singing of hymns to the god and sacrifices to him. These women were at first known as Bacchi or Bacchants, after the god's alternative Greek name of Backoi. By the Roman period, however, they're increasingly called Minads, taking on the name of his mythical and superhuman female followers. In fact, they seem to have been an ancient example of what's now called ostention, when human beings act out a myth or a legend in reality. In this case, the script was provided by one of the greatest and most famous Greek plays, Euripides the Baccae, which became famous throughout the ancient world and beyond. The women were acting out the behavior of the Phoebe women in the play, or at least were believed to be doing so. They were said to dress in fawn or leopard skins, go barefoot and with loosened hair instead of tying it up demurely as Greek women were supposed to do, wear ivy crowns, enter frenzies and altered states of consciousness, and even tear wild animals to pieces. The historical geographer Diodorus Siculus was more precise, stating that the maidens in the party would carry ivy-covered staffs and engage in frenzied revelry, shouting avoi. The married women would conduct the sacrifices and sing the hymns. The truth of all this may be correct, or male fantasy, or something between. We shall simply never know what went on. Certainly, such groups could at times be mixed sex, though still led by women. There is an inscription from the ancient Greek city of Magnesia, recording the arrival of three women from Thebes in mainland Greece to found Bacchet clubs in the city. They were allowed to do so if each paid a fee to the established senior priestess of Magnesia. Two of the resulting clubs would be all female, and the third mixed sex. Unhappily, when one was founded at Rome at the opening of the third century BCE, it was mixed sex and held its rights in the city itself. At first it was accepted, being made the subject of a good-natured joke in a play. But in the year 186, the government turned savagely on it and banned it. This is a modern interpretation of it, but far more polite than actually what went on. As a secret society which was growing at a rapid rate, it would probably have hit trouble anyway. However, it does seem to have been too much in the Romans' face. Occupying the open streets, with men prophesying in fits of madness with jerking bodies, and women dressed as minads running with flaming torches to plunge them in the river Tiber. It would be hundreds of years before the Romans allowed Dionysic clubs back into Rome itself or into much of their Western Empire. And then they were to take, as shall be seen, a different form. Another major aspect of Dionysus was his ambiguity, mirroring the positive and negative aspects of alcohol. And that's why I have chosen this modern representation, which is at once grim and dignified. Reasonable people made the point that his gifts could best be enjoyed by exercising self-restraint, responsibility, and moderation, in effect, watering the wine, as every civilized Greek did. The god could even therefore be credited with teaching these qualities. The philosopher Socrates, at least according to his friend Plato, calls Dionysus a divine helper in the search for a well-mixed and well-balanced life. One of the gods' common epithets was dimorphous, dual-formed, which could be a reference to his double birth from his mother and his father, and the fact that he could bring joy or misery, help or harm. The scholar Plutarch said that well-mannered Athenians always poured wine with a prayer that it would not harm them before they began to drink it. They were acutely aware of the risks. Plato found a positive consequence of the god's gift of frenzy by suggesting it was related to creative inspiration. To Plato, Dionysus could thereby be regarded as one of the patrons of poets, a giver of the quality that the medieval Welsh bards would call Arwen, moments of spontaneous and intense creativity. The god was certainly the patron of Athenian drama, one of ancient Greece's great gifts to the world. In the sixth century, when a revolution at Athens deposed and exiled the city's despotic ruling family, the March festival of the city Dionysia was either established or much embellished to provide one of the leading democratic celebrations of Athens. It started as a procession singing hymns, then became a performance of the hymns on a stage at the conclusion of the procession, that in turn developed into plays, and these became the core of the festival, effectively representing its main ritual. Playwrights now competed to put on productions for the festival, which blossomed into a full-blown creative industry by the fifth century. The result was the first enduringly famous and popular body of drama in the world. The Athenians knew that they had Dionysus to thank, and when his image was carried into their city at festivals, it was taken not to a temple, but to the theatre. Part of his appeal was his essential dynamism. In ritual, he never stayed in the city long, but visited it for festivities, and then departed again for the countryside. His mythology shows him moving restlessly from one land to another, even once taking the hippie trail to India, not with a backpack, however, but with his armed and aggressive followers, wreaking havoc wherever they went. A graffito on a wall at the Mesopotamian frontier town of Dura Europos from the third century CE or AD calls him earthquake and invites him to come laughing. The Greek word for triumph, thriambos, was first associated with him. His habit of entering splendidly into cities and countries from outside was made a pattern for ancient human conquerors. Demetrius the besieger and Marc Antony were both hailed as human counterparts of the god when they were received grandiloquently in Sicities submitting to their rule. And poignantly the story was told that when Marc Antony's career was finally on the skids after he had taken up with Cleopatra and the Romans had turned against him, and his former partner Octavian Augustus had destroyed Antony's army, as the enemy closed in on Alexandria and Antony prepared to resist in it. The sound was heard from the air in the middle of the night of Dionysus and his Maynads and Satyrs leaving town, abandoning Antony to his fate. And it said that was the point when Antony ran a sword into himself instead of mounting a resistance of the city. The two most famous stories about Dionysus from ancient Greece, one traditional, one literary, reflected often in his cult, both testify to this dynamic and scary aspect of the god. One is one that appears very often in art and sometimes in cult, which is that he was kidnapped by pirates who took him off to sell him into slavery. And Dionysus, of course, found this highly amusing. And after a while he decided to flex his divine muscles, and so grape vines began growing all over the ship and running up the masks and the ribbing, and wild beasts suddenly appeared from the holds beneath, and the pirates found themselves swimming for the nearest land, followed by Dionysus's mad laughter. Much more famous, since I've cited it already, and adapted for a direct inspiration for cult, is Euripides' play The Bacchae, which remains one of the most stunning pieces of ancient drama and one of those most familiar to people at the present day. I've seen it performed everywhere from the top London theatres to school groups in the provinces, and always with a twist in the tail. If there is anybody here who doesn't know the plot, it's of the arrival of Dionysus from outside at the city of Thebes, where there's a spoiled teenage brat of a king, Pentheus, in charge. And the women who know better leave town to worship Dionysus. And the old guys, the geriatrics, also find their youth again by following Dionysus. And Pentheus, meanwhile, is throwing a tantrum and claiming he's not going to have anybody rule this city except him. He actually jails Dionysus, assuming that this guy is simply a kind of missionary and not realizing he's a god. And Dionysus, in that lazy way of his that sprouts vines over pirate ships, gets inside Pentheus's mind and convinces him that to check out what's really happening, he needs to spy on the women at their revels in the forest and mountains outside Thebes. So off goes Pentheus in disguise to do so. And the women go into a Bacchic frenzy and tear him to pieces. His own mother, this is one of the most tear-jerking parts of the play, still in a state of holy dementia, is carrying her son's severed head around, thinking it's that of a bear. The point of the story is pretty clear that gods may be dreadful, but you don't get in their way. The final aspect, which I shall consider, is as the focus for an ancient mystery religion. Such religions had deep roots in ancient Greece, the most famous the Eleusinian mysteries, probably going back into prehistory. They proliferated both in number and popularity, however, throughout the classical and Hellenistic Greek periods, and especially in the Roman Empire. What mystery cults did was to focus on a particular deity or divine couple and offer an intimate, personal, and lasting relationship with that divinity or those divinities, they also offered personal transformation and growth, and an ultimate prospect of a better existence after death. It must be observed immediately that the charismatic, dynamic Dionysus, the natural gang leader, with his penchant for breaking barriers, transforming identities, and offering death and rebirth, was tailor-made for such a form of religion. Mystery cults were based on small closed groups of members who had been through initiatory rites that were themselves intense experiences of trauma, survival, renewal, and acceptance. They met secretly and privately for most of their activities. As these closed initiatory groups, attached to a common devotion, spread through the Roman Empire, they provided networks equivalent to Freemasonry or Hare Krishna temples in modern times. The mystery religion of Dionysus, most famously represented in panels like this one from the Villa of Mysteries at Pompeii, is first securely attested in the 5th century BCE, but by then it's already found from one end of the Greek world to another. It's apparently recorded on bone plaques from a colony on the north shore of the Black Sea, which mention the god's name and seem to be initiation certificates. It's simultaneously found at Cumae on the west coast of Italy, where an inscription reserves a burial ground for those who are made Bacchic. It seems that initiates wanted to be together in death as well as meeting in life. We naturally know very little of what went on in the cult ceremonies. There was a widespread impression that initiation into it was particularly gruelling. The Christian apologist Origen believed that apparitions and other fearful things manifested in them, but necessarily knew very little about what these were. These may be linked to the fact that an author of a book about the meaning of dreams, Artemidorus, thought that a dream of Dionysus was to be released from terrible things. Less spectacularly, it was said that the initiation ceremony included the repetition of set prayers dictated by a priest. It almost certainly included the removal of sacred objects from a special basket and their display to the initiate, rather like the display of ceremonial tools in modern Freemasonry. This fresco from the Villa of the Mysteries shows that. The Greek poet Theocritus wrote that the objects were placed on an altar after being shown. Certainly the basket of artifacts and the showing of them to the initiate is depicted quite often in villa wall paintings and mosaics and on terracotta plaques and sarcophagi. It seems central to the whole cult. One of those objects, often pictorially represented, was a model erect phallus, representing the power of the renewal of life and the ecstatic release of lovemaking. These objects were always associated with Dionysus. They were carried in the civic procession of the Athenian city Dionysia, as the god formally re-entered Athens. The fourteen Athenian women who conducted the secret ritual at the other spring festival of the god, the Anphisteria, were said to handle sacred artifacts. The basket of them used in the mysteries clearly went back a long way. The Roman comic playwright, Plautus, said that initiates had special signs and passwords, like modern Freemasons. The Roman historian Livy recalled that effeminate men were especially attracted to the cult. That may have been hostile invective. The Dionysian mysteries were still forbidden in Rome when Livy was writing. But it does fit with the generally transgressive nature of the god, and also with a part of his mythology that he was brought up disguised as a girl. Dionysius could quite legitimately be a deity of LGBTQ. Dressing up in general was a part of his mysteries. The carvings on sarcophagi show people wearing masks, and some apparently costumed as Selenus and other characters from the divine entourage. What happened to initiates of mystery religions after death was of course even more important than what happened to them during life. They were often buried with inscribed gold leaves. These appear not to have been initiation certificates, but calling cards to present the powers of the underworld, giving them a right to better accommodation there. A typical one from northern Greece reads, You have died and been reborn upon this day, O blessed one. Tell Persephone that Bacchus himself freed you, but you jumped into milk. Ram, you jumped into milk. You have wine as your source of joy, and the other blessed ones await you with ritual beneath the earth. As a god who cared for the dead, Dionysus had two evident qualifications. One was that he'd been there, he had died himself and been resurrected by his grandmother. Another was his classic habit of breaking boundaries, in this case, between worlds and states of existence. Paintings and carvings often show him in the company of the king and queen of the dead, Hades and Persephone. One showed him shaking hands with Hades. The Roman poet Horace called him the only being on whom the terrifying three-headed dog who guarded the entrance to the underworld, Cerberus, actually forms. The notion of Dionysus petting Cerberus, rather like Hagrid in the Harry Potter stories, and calling him Fluffy, is an especially compelling one. As a balance, I chose this majestic modern representation of him as a god of the dead. There seems to be a very common idea that initiates of his cult were given entrance to a region of flowering meadows as their home in the afterlife. There they would drink and dance upon the grass. An inscription to a dead boy in Macedonia described this wonderland with vivid extra detail, such as that it was wandered by nymphs carrying baskets filled with mystical objects. The mystery cult of the living was expected to continue among the dead. That cult spread through the Roman Empire, including Britain, when the shrine of another mystery religion of the god Mithras was decommissioned in London in the 4th century CE. It was converted to the worship of Bacchus. The Romans usually employed that name for the god, probably because although Greek, it sounded more Latin than Dionysus. They also, however, identified him with their own archaic god of vineyards and wine, Liber Parter. He's the chap in the statue, and his name means literally Father Freedom, and testifies against the liberating value of alcohol. In the imperial period, the mystery cult was admitted to Rome, because, in contrast to the earlier Bacchic Club, it was much quieter, more private, and more respectable. Indeed, most of the many inscriptions that survive from it in the imperial period deal with membership fees, not drunken frenzy. Nevertheless, we should probably not underestimate its enduring ability to provide ecstasy, altered states, and the radical transformation of both consciousness and identity. Plato had said that initiates were expected to pass through a kind of madness. Dionysus, the god of primal scream therapy. Roman commentary. Like Varro remarked that Bacchus was the god who purged the soul and set people free. It's entirely possible that even in its imperial Roman, respectable form, it was in part a kind of possession cult, like Voodoo, Santeria, or Santo Daime. It's time to conclude. Clearly, Dionysus is one of the most complex, ambiguous, and multifaceted of Greek deities, which is why I've chosen this elegant modern sculpture as a last illustration. In the ancient world, he had several hundred epithets attached to his names, most of them restricted to particular localities. Ancient commentators themselves were unsure whether these were all forms of the same god, or whether at least some of them were different deities. The Roman politician and intellectual Cicero made one of the characters in his book about the nature of the divine declare that there had to be at least five different gods called Dionysus. In essence, his enduring appeal is that his worship encourages drinking, wild dancing, wild music, and wild sex. We have to ask what's not to like. The answer, of course, is all of the above, because all of them, and especially the drink, can lead to trouble. He will therefore remain not only the patron deity of some of the greatest nights of one's life, but of the morning after the night before. At least his present-day activities seemed to concern individual people. In his mythology, it was entire kingdoms and dynasties that ended up wasted when he passed through. This is a case where we can be really glad of the gap between myth and reality.