It is to these that Euripides refers in the _Bacchae_[209]. Diodorus speaks of them thus: ... In many towns of Greece every alternate year Bacchanalian assemblies of women gather together, and it is the custom for maidens to carry the thyrsus and to revel together, honouring and glorifying the god; and for the (married) women to worship the god in organized bands, and to revel in every way to celebrate the presence of Dionysos, imitating thereby the Maenads who from of old, it is said, constantly attended the god[210]. The male correlatives of Maenads, or rather Thyiads, are the Kouretes, who took their part in the Orphic mysteries. They were the young population considered as worshipping the young male god, the Kouros; they were “mailed priests” because the young male population were naturally warriors. They danced their local war-dance over the new-born child, and, because in those early days the worship of the Mother and the son was not yet sundered, they were attendants (_prospoloi_) on the Mother also ... they are divine (_theoi_), and their dancing is sacred[211]. Clement of Alexandria refers to them thus: The mysteries of Dionysos are wholly inhuman; for while he was still a child and the Kouretes were dancing their armed dance about him, the Titans stole upon him, deceived him with childish toys, and tore him to pieces[212]. A typical instance of myth regarded as reality. We are only dealing here, however, with a _few_ examples of the ecstatic dance among the Greeks. Those given will suffice for present purposes. It will have been noticed that all these examples present the ecstatic dance in its milder form; it is comparable with the dance of the Israelite prophets, not with that of the Syrian prophets of Baal. The fact is that this latter form of worship was not popular among the Greeks. It is true, the worship of Attis, in which the ecstatic dance in its most barbaric form figured prominently, is mentioned in Pausan. VII. xvii. 9, XX. 3; but this is quite exceptional, for the rites, of Syrian origin, which were performed in honour of Kybele and Attis were un-Hellenic and did not appeal to the Greeks. “The barbarous and cruel character of the worship, with its frantic excesses, was doubtless repugnant to the good taste and humanity of the Greeks, who seem to have preferred the kindred but gentler rites of Adonis. Yet,” continues the same writer, “the same features which shocked and repelled the Greeks may have positively attracted the less refined Romans and barbarians of the West. The ecstatic frenzies, which were mistaken for divine inspiration, the mangling of the body, the theory of a new birth, and the remission of sins through the shedding of blood, have all their origin in savagery, and they naturally appealed to peoples in whom the savage instincts were still strong[213].”