Dionysos is made to come from without, not as an immigrant stranger but as an exile returned. Moreover, if historical tradition be true, he is made to come from the wrong place. He comes also attended by a train of barbarian women, Asiatic not Thracian. They chant their oriental origin[942]: ‘From Asia, from the day-spring that uprises, From Tmolus ever glorying we come,’ and again[943]: ‘Hither, O fragrant of Tmolus the golden.’ Yet Euripides wrote the play in Macedonia and must have known perfectly well that these Macedonian rites that so impressed his imagination were from Thrace; that, as Plutarch tells us[944], ‘The women called Klodones and Mimallones performed rites which were the same as those done by the Edonian women and the Thracian women about the Haemus.’ He knows it perfectly well and when he is off his guard betrays his knowledge. In the epode of the third choric song[945] he makes Dionysos come to bless Pieria and in his coming cross the two Macedonian rivers, the Axios and Lydias: ‘Blessed land of Pierie, Dionysos loveth thee, He will come to thee with dancing, Come with joy and mystery, With the Maenads at his hest Winding, winding to the west; Cross the flood of swiftly glancing Axios in majesty, Cross the Lydias, the giver Of good gifts and waving green, Cross that Father Stream of story Through a land of steeds and glory Rolling, bravest, fairest River E’er of mortals seen.’ Euripides as poet can afford to contradict himself. He accepts popular tradition, too careless of it to attempt an irrelevant consistency. It matters nothing to him _whence_ the god came[946]. The Theban birth-place, the home-coming were essential to the human pathos of his story. But for that we should have missed the appeal to Dirce[947]: ‘Acheloüs’ roaming daughter, Holy Dirce, virgin water, Bathed he not of old in thee The Babe of God, the Mystery?’ and again[948]: ‘Why, O Blessed among Rivers, Wilt thou fly me and deny me? By his own joy I vow, By the grape upon the bough, Thou shalt seek him in the midnight, thou shalt love him even now.’ He came unto his own and his own received him not. [Illustration: FIG. 115.]