The scene of the Dionysiac revels was the broad table-land which lies, more than three thousand feet above the level of the sea, between the Shining Rocks and the peaks of Parnassus. Here amid the wooded ravines and open meadows the flashing, flowing Dionysus, god of all ardent life, lord of the ichor of spring, held one of his many courts. It is significant of the unparalleled inclusiveness of Greek ideals that not only on “the topmost heights of Caucasus” and in the “vales of Lydia,” but also above Apollo’s temple where were inscribed in letters of gold the maxims of the seven sages, “Know thyself” and “Nothing too much,” the god of mad impulse and unchartered freedom should have been seen to leap and dance, and give “to his female followers the note for the Bacchic tune.” Every two years, “when spring flashed out for the first time” and sorrow might be swallowed up in joy, a torch festival was held in his honour by women of the surrounding country. Even from Attica women made their way to join in the celebration, travelling over the same “Sacred Way” by which the Athenians periodically sent their offerings to Delphi, and which Apollo had taken on his civilizing march through the wild places of men, escorted with great reverence by the road-making people of Athens. The passionate desire for the mad nocturnal revels which awaited the Bacchantes at the end of their long journey was attributed by Euripides, who must often have seen the procession starting out from Athens, to Tyrian women on their way to the service of Phœbus at Delphi. Detained in Thebes by the civil war of Œdipus’s sons, they tease their imaginations with visions of the rock that flasheth a splendour of light and the cloven tongue of the torches’ flame, of the vine that each morning offers up its giant cluster to brim the cup of the mystic ritual, of the snow-smitten, lonely ridges where, with souls unafraid, they might be wreathing the happy dance.[26] Footnote 26: Cf. Way’s translation of the _Phœnissæ_, 219 ff.