But how came it that in the character of a single people such extravagance of emotion was combined with a fast-bound and regulated equilibrium of temper and behaviour? The answer is that these opposing features sprang from two {256} different sources. They were not originally combined in Greece. The Homeric poems hardly give any hint of that overflowing of religious emotion which later Greek peoples knew and honoured as a heaven-sent madness. It spread among the Greeks themselves in the train of a religious agitation, we might almost say revolution, of which Homer records, at most, only the first faint essays. It had its origin in the religion of Dionysos, and in company with this religion enters as something new and strange into Greek life. The Homeric poems do not recognize Dionysos as belonging to the gods of Olympos, but they are aware of his existence. It is true they nowhere plainly[3\8] refer to him as the wine-god honoured in joyful festivals, but we read (in the narrative of Glaukos' meeting with Diomedes) of the "frenzied" Dionysos and his "Nurses" who were attacked by the Thracian Lykourgos.[4\8] The _Mainas_, the frenzied woman of the Dionysos-cult, was such a well-known phenomenon, so familiar in men's minds, that the word could be used in a simile to explain the meaning of something else.[5\8] In this form the worship of the god first came to the notice of the Greeks; this was the origin of all the other festivals of Dionysos that later Greece developed in so many different directions.[6\8] They learnt to know Dionysos Bakcheios, "who makes men frenzied,"[7\8] as he was worshipped in his own country. That the original home of Dionysos-worship was in Thrace, that his cult, popular among many of the Thracian peoples,[8\8] was particularly honoured among the southernmost of the Thracian stocks who were best known to the Greeks and lived on the coast between the mouths of the rivers Hebros and Axios and in the mountainous country behind--to all this the Greeks themselves bore frequent and manifold witness.[9\8] The god whose name the Greeks knew in its Greek form "Dionysos" had, it appears, among the numerous and divided Thracian peoples various appellations of which those most familiar to the Greeks were Sabos and Sabazios.[10\8] The Greeks must have known and remarked on the nature and worship of the god at an early period of their history. They may have met with him in Thrace itself. At all periods they had an extensive and varied intercourse with this country and must in the early days of their wanderings have passed through it on their way to their future home. They may have had further opportunities of knowing it from the Thracian races or tribes who, according to a few isolated legends, had dwelt in primitive times in certain localities of Central Greece. The ethnographical material of these {257} legends was regarded as founded on fact by the great historians of the fifth and fourth centuries.[11\8]