Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

In Homer, Diomedes warns against fighting gods and recalls Lycurgus son of Dryas, who once chased the nursing women of mad Dionysus over sacred Nysa. The terrified god plunged into the sea, where Thetis received him in her bosom; the nurses dropped their thyrsi. The gods who outlive easy death hated Lycurgus: Zeus struck him blind, and he did not last long, hated by all the immortals. Apollodorus expands the Edonian (Thracian) king’s war on the new cult: Lycurgus drove Dionysus into the sea to Thetis (or imprisoned him), and imprisoned or killed the Bacchants and Satyrs. Dionysus drove Lycurgus mad; in his frenzy he killed his son Dryas with an axe, mistaking him for a vine stock that must be pruned, then recovered enough to know the crime. The land grew barren; an oracle said fertility would return only when Lycurgus was dead. The Edonians bound him on Mount Pangaeum (or gave him to horses to be torn), and Dionysus destroyed him. Sophocles’ brief choral allusion keeps the “eddying rocks” and the taming of the king’s fury. The myth is the northern doublet of Pentheus: mortal king resists the god of wine and ecstasy, violates the nurses, and pays with blindness, filicide, and sparagmos or binding—while the infant or youthful Dionysus finds refuge with Thetis in the Homeric core.