_Diffusion of Dionysos-worship_.--Another religious phenomenon, pregnant of consequences for the spiritual history of Hellenism, is the diffusion of the worship of Dionysos. Faint, though indubitable traces of this can be discerned in the prehistoric period, but it only begins to be palpable and important in the early historic. Its significance has already been indicated in general outlines.[80.1] Having entered Attica from Bœotia and been adopted into the Attic state-religion some time before the Ionic migration to the Asia Minor coast, {81} it gradually, in the eighth and seventh centuries captured most of the States of the Peloponnese, of the islands and the more distant colonies. The Hellenic culture of Dionysos forms one of the most interesting chapters in the spiritual career of Hellenism; for the taming of the wild Thracian God, the transformation of him into a civic deity, the disciplining and the adaptation of the thiasoi of the Maenads to the uses of an orderly state-religion, were not the least among the achievements of the Hellenic genius. And as the state-religion of these centuries had no eschatologic theory, so it seems to have discarded everywhere whatever eschatologic promise the Dionysiac religion proclaimed on its entrance into Greece. Yet, in spite of the chastening influence of the civic spirit, the worship preserved much of its distinctive tone and religious power; evoking a special mood unknown in the other cults; while even the savage form of sacrament, in which the God was devoured in his human or animal-incarnation, survived with some modifications in Tenedos and Chios down to a late period. The history, then, of the Dionysiac religion concerns the account of the development of the sacramental idea in the Mediterranean. It concerns also the history of Hellenic culture; for one of its modes of expression was a peculiar type of emotional music, accompanying the Dionysiac hymn known as the dithyramb, which has been regarded, though probably erroneously, as the parent of Attic tragedy. Its main contribution to the polytheism of Greece was its stimulation of a warmer and stronger religious faith; and its special later service to popular religious theory was the refining and {82} brightening of men’s thoughts and sentiments concerning the life after death and the powers of the lower world, with whom the mild and genial God was generally identified or associated.