Beschrijving

The book investigates the ancient Greek cult of Dionysos (Dionysus), exploring how ecstasy, ritual madness and shifting gender roles intersected in Greek religious life. Using the tragedy The Bacchae by Euripides as a structural and thematic framework, Evans argues that Dionysian worship provided a zone of transgression and transformation—in which normative social boundaries (including sex-roles) were temporarily suspended or inverted.

In doing so, the author shows how the Dionysian phenomenon in antiquity was not merely religious but also deeply social and psychological: it granted participants access to altered states of consciousness, subversive theatricality, and gendered reversal. The “madness” of Dionysos becomes a lens through which the author reads ancient attitudes to sexuality, power, identity and ritual.

This work is of interest to scholars of Greek religion, gender studies, ritual theory and classical literature. Its blend of close reading of texts, ritual context, and theory makes it a provocative and interdisciplinary study of how ecstasy and disturbance functioned in antiquity.