‘O thou with golden mitre band, Named for our land, On thee in this our woe I call, thou ruddy Bacchus all aglow With wine and Bacchant song. Draw nigh, thou and thy Maenad throng, Drive from us with bright torch of blazing pine The god unhonoured ’mong the gods divine.’ Sophocles just hits the theological mark, Ares _is_ a god but he is unhonoured of the orthodox gods, the Olympians. Euripides[958] too lets out the kinship with Ares. He knows of ‘Harmonia, daughter of the Lord of War,’ Harmonia, bride of Kadmos, mother of Semele, and though his Dionysos is at the outset all gentleness and magic, his kingdom scarcely of this world, Teiresias[959] knows that he is not only Teacher, Healer, Prophet, but ‘of Ares’ realm a part hath he. When mortal armies mailèd and arrayed Have in strange fear, or ever blade met blade, Fled, maddened, ’tis this god hath palsied them,’ and though the panic he sends is from within not without, yet the mention is significant. Dionysos, for all his sweetness, is to the end militant, he came not to bring peace upon the earth but a sword, only in late authors his weapons are not those of Ares. On vase-paintings he is not unfrequently depicted doing on his actual armour, but Polyaenus[960], in the little treatise on mythological warriors with which he prefaces his _Strategika_, notes the secret armour of the god, the lance hidden in ivy, the fawn-skin and soft raiment for breastplate, the cymbals and drum for trumpet. To the end the god of the brigand Bessi was Lord of War. Art tells the same tale, that the Thracian Dionysos succeeded where the equally Thracian Ares failed. Among the archaic seated gods on the frieze of the treasury of Cnidos recently discovered at Delphi[961] Ares has found a place, but a significant one, at the very end, on a seat by himself, as though naïvely to mark the difference. Even on the east frieze of the Parthenon, where all is softened down to a decent theological harmony, there is just a lingering, semi-conscious touch of the same prejudice. Ares is admitted indeed, but he is not quite at home among these easy aristocratic Olympians. He is grouped with no one, he leans his arm on no one’s shoulder; even his pose is a little too consciously assured to be quite confident. It is abundantly clear that the remote Asiatic origin of Dionysos is emphasized to hide a more immediate Thracian provenance. The Greeks knew the god was not home-grown, but he was so great, so good, so all-conquering, that they were forced to accept him. But they could not bear the truth, that he came from their rough north-country kinsmen the Thracians. They need not have been ashamed of these Northerners, who were as well born as and more bravely bred than themselves. Even Herodotus[962] owns that ‘the nation of the Thracians is the greatest among men, except at least the Indians.’ * * * * *