Dionysius or Bacchus

Description

Dionysus was the only one of the gods to be the son of a mortal woman, Semele, daughter of the king of Thebes Cadmus and his wife Harmonia. He was the god of wine and drunkenness. The Romans called him Bacchus. According to myth, Semele, pregnant with Zeus' son, was the victim of a deception by "Hera," Zeus' jealous wife. "Hera," in fact, in revenge, persuaded Semele to ask Zeus to show himself in all his power, and Semele died as a result of the fall of lightning. Zeus then extracted the child from the womb of the mother who was burned alive and kept it sewn to her thigh for two months to carry the pregnancy to term. This, according to some, is the origin of the name Dionysus, or "born twice," and the fact that in the Greek world the god became, among other attributes, the protector of fetuses. When he was born, to escape the wrath of "Hera," Dionysus was entrusted to his maternal aunt Ino and her husband Atamanthus (later driven mad by Hera). He was then turned into a child by his father and entrusted to the nymphs of Mount Nisa and raised by the centaurs Chiron and Ampheus. Again to escape Hera, Dionysus traveled widely; during one of his journeys he met and married Ariadne, who had been abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos. Several children were born from his union with Ariadne; he also had a father with Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and love, the god Priapus.