Dionysus and Adonis: a Contribution to the Study of the <i>Orphic Rhapsodies</i>

Abstract A hexameter text of ‘Dionysiac’ subject, recently discovered in a late-antique palimpsest in the Monastery of St Catherine on Mt Sinai, and arguably the first fragment of direct transmission of the famous Orphic Rhapsodies , offers a very remarkable story. Aphrodite raises a divine child on Mt Nysa; the child disappears during an absence of the goddess, who looks for him through the whole universe. She eventually finds him in the Underworld, where he is in the charge of Persephone, who relates an oracle about him and his offspring. Aphrodite and the child remain in the Underworld until he grows to puberty, and they beget Hermes Chthonios. Many features of this tale find parallels in various versions of the story of Adonis. The child of the new poem, though, is identified as Dionysus. In this article, making use also of previously neglected Neoplatonic sources, I show that the identification between Dionysus and Adonis was an important feature of the last chronological stage of the Theogony narrated in the Orphic Rhapsodies , where Adonis was one of the ‘images’ of Dionysus, which played a key part in the creation of the mortal world.