Macedonia is not Athens, but the reforms of Epimenides allow us to divine that Athenian brothers and husbands also had their difficulties. Plutarch[1022] again is our informant. Athens was beset by superstitious fears and strange appearances. They sent to Crete for Epimenides, a man beloved of the gods and skilled in the technicalities of religion, especially as regards enthusiastic and mystic rites. He and Solon made friends and the gist of his religious reforms was this: ‘he simplified their religious rites, and made the ceremonies of mourning milder, introducing certain forms of sacrifice into their funeral solemnities and abolishing the cruel and barbarous elements to which the women were addicted. But most important of all, by lustrations and expiations and the foundings of worships he hallowed and consecrated the city and made it subserve justice and be more inclined to unity.’ The passage is certainly not as explicit as could be wished, but the words used—κατοργιάσας and καθοσιώσας—and the fact that Epimenides was an expert in _ecstatic_ rites, that they gave him the name of the new Koures, the special attention paid to the rites of women, though they are mentioned in relation to funerals, make it fairly clear that some of the barbarous excesses were connected with Bacchic orgies. This becomes more probable when we remember that many of Solon’s own enactments were directed against the excesses of women. ‘He regulated,’ Plutarch[1023] tells us, ‘the outgoings of women, their funeral lamentations and their festivals, forbidding by law all disorder and excess.’ Among these dreary regulations comes the characteristically modern touch that they are not to go out at night ‘except in a carriage and with a light before them.’ It was the going out at night that Pentheus could not bear[1024]. When he would know what were the rites of Dionysos he asks the god: ‘_P._ How is this worship held, by night or day? _D._ Most oft by night, ’tis a majestic thing The Darkness. _P._ Ha, with women worshipping? ’Tis craft and rottenness.’ DIONYSOS LIKNITES. The Maenads then are the frenzied sanctified women who are devoted to the worship of Dionysos. But they are something more; they tend the god as well as suffer his inspiration. When first we catch sight of them in Homer (p. 368) they are his ‘nurses’ (τιθῆναι). One of the lost plays of Aeschylus bore the title ‘Rearer of Dionysos’ and Sophocles[1025], here as so often inspired by Homer, makes his chorus sing: ‘There the reveller Dionysos with his nursing nymphs doth go.’