(M2) The god Dionysus or Bacchus is best known to us as a personification of the vine and of the exhilaration produced by the juice of the grape.(1) His ecstatic worship, characterised by wild dances, thrilling music, and tipsy excess, appears to have originated among the rude tribes of Thrace, who were notoriously addicted to drunkenness.(2) Its mystic doctrines and extravagant rites were essentially foreign to the clear intelligence and sober temperament of the Greek race. Yet appealing as it did to that love of mystery and that proneness to revert to savagery which seem to be innate in most men, the religion spread like wildfire through Greece until the god whom Homer hardly deigned to notice had become the most popular figure of the pantheon. The resemblance which his story and his ceremonies present to those of Osiris have led some enquirers both in ancient and modern times to hold that Dionysus was merely a disguised Osiris, imported directly from Egypt into Greece.(3) But the great preponderance of evidence points to his Thracian origin, and the similarity of the two worships is sufficiently explained by the similarity of the ideas and customs on which they were founded. (M3) While the vine with its clusters was the most characteristic manifestation of Dionysus, he was also a god of trees in general. Thus we are told that almost all the Greeks sacrificed to “Dionysus of the tree.”(4) In Boeotia one of his titles was “Dionysus in the tree.”(5) His image was often merely an upright post, without arms, but draped in a mantle, with a bearded mask to represent the head, and with leafy boughs projecting from the head or body to shew the nature of the deity.(6) On a vase his rude effigy is depicted appearing out of a low tree or bush.(7) At Magnesia on the Maeander an image of Dionysus is said to have been found in a plane-tree, which had been broken by the wind.(8) He was the patron of cultivated trees;(9) prayers were offered to him that he would make the trees grow;(10) and he was especially honoured by husbandmen, chiefly fruit-growers, who set up an image of him, in the shape of a natural tree-stump, in their orchards.(11) He was said to have discovered all tree-fruits, amongst which apples and figs are particularly mentioned;(12) and he was referred to as “well-fruited,” “he of the green fruit,” and “making the fruit to grow.”(13) One of his titles was “teeming” or “bursting” (as of sap or blossoms);(14) and there was a Flowery Dionysus in Attica and at Patrae in Achaia.(15) The Athenians sacrificed to him for the prosperity of the fruits of the land.(16) Amongst the trees particularly sacred to him, in addition to the vine, was the pine-tree.(17) The Delphic oracle commanded the Corinthians to worship a particular pine-tree “equally with the god,” so they made two images of Dionysus out of it, with red faces and gilt bodies.(18) In art a wand, tipped with a pine-cone, is commonly carried by the god or his