Pausanias[999] when he was at Panopeus was puzzled to know why Homer spoke of the ‘fair dancing grounds’ of the place. The reason he says was explained to him by the women whom the Athenians call Thyiades. He adds, that there may be no mistake, ‘these Thyiads are Attic women who go every other year with the Delphian women to Parnassos and there hold orgies in honour of Dionysos. On their way they stopped to dance at Panopeus, hence Homer’s epithet.’ Of course this college of sacred women, these Thyiades, were provided with an eponymous ancestress, Thyia. She is mythological. Pausanias[1000] says in discussing the origin of Delphi that ‘some would have it that there was a man called Castalius, an aboriginal, who had a daughter Thyia, and that she was the first priestess of Dionysos and held orgies in honour of the god, and they say that afterwards all women who were mad in honour of Dionysos have been called Thyiades after her’ (ὅσαι τῷ Διονύσῳ μαίνονται Θυιάδας καλεῖσθαί φασιν ὑπὸ ἀνθρώπων). If ‘those who are mad in honour of Dionysos’ are not substantially Maenads, it is hard to say what they are. It is fortunate that Pausanias saw and spoke to these women or else his statement[1001] that they raved upon the topmost peaks of Parnassos in honour of Dionysos and Apollo would have been explained away as mere mythology. Plutarch was a priest in his own Chaeronea and intimately acquainted with the ritual of Delphi, and a great friend of his, Klea, was president (ἀρχηγός) of the Thyiades at Delphi[1002]. He mentions them more than once. In writing to Favorinus[1003] on ‘the First Principle of Cold’ he argues that cold has its own special and proper qualities, density, stability, rigidity, and gives as an instance the cold of a winter’s night out on Parnassos. ‘You have heard yourself at Delphi how the people who went up Parnassos to bring help to the Thyiades were overtaken by a violent gale with snow, and their coats were frozen as hard as wood, so that when they were stretched out they crumbled and fell to bits.’ The crumbling coats sound apocryphal, but the Thyiades out in the cold are quite real. You do not face a mountain snow-storm to succour the mythological ‘spirits of the spring.’