Agrionia

Abstract

A festival celebrated principally at Orchomenos but also at Chaeronea, both in central Greece. Plutarch in the second century CE provides the main details in an account of a specific celebration at Orchomenos (Plut. 'Mor'. 299e-300a). In the myth of the festival, three sisters, daughters of Minyas of Orchomenos, became subject to 'mania' (madness), the particular area of the god Dionysos. They craved human flesh and ripped apart alive and consumed one sister's son in a situation that parallels the depiction in Euripides' 'Bacchae' of the women followers of Dionysos at Thebes, in which the maenads tear apart live animals and the king of Thebes with their bare hands.