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One of those moods was on him now. He had had a drinking bout with the men who had left him, and had laughed as gayly and as carelessly, if not as riotously, as any of them at the wild mirth, the unbridled license, the amatory recitations, and the Bacchic odes in their lawless sapir, that had ushered the night in while his wines unlocked the tongues and flowed down the throats of the fierce Arab-Spahis and the French cavalrymen.
Spencer quotes that among the Bacchic orgies of many of the tribes of North America, at the inauguration of one of the Clallum chiefs on the northwest coast of British America, the chief seized a small dog and began to devour it alive, and also bit the shoulders of bystanders.
Visions of dozens of Bacchic revellers, riotous no more, but seated temperately each before his steaming bowl, rose to her delighted eyes; she saw in fancy the daughters and nieces of the reformed in smiles and white aprons ladling the nutritious and attractive compound, earning thus an honest wage; she saw a neatly balanced account-book and a triumphant report; she saw herself the respected and deprecatory idol of a millennial village.
Through the open door streams in a Bacchic procession with fauns and panthers, the drunken Pan in its midst. Brown-skinned slaves with leopard skins about their loins make mad music. Among them is one who at once makes me forget the tumult. She leans her firm, naked body surreptitiously against the pillar. Her form is contracted with weariness.
A set of harpers and pipers, Anaxenor and Xuthus, the dancing-man Metrodorus, and a whole Bacchic rout of the like Asiatic exhibitors, far outdoing in license and buffoonery the pests that had followed out of Italy, came in and possessed the court; the thing was past patience, wealth of all kinds being wasted on objects like these.
He tells us that the Cross and the Phallus were found placed in juxtaposition upon the walls as meaning one and the same thing, and he goes on to add that "This cross seems to be the Egyptian Tau, that ancient symbol of the generative power and therefore transferred into the Bacchic mysteries."
He was singing one of Victor's triolets which the poet had joined to music: "When Ma'm'selle drinks from her satin shoe, I drink the wine from her radiant eyes; And we sit in a casement made for two When Ma'm'selle drinks from her satin shoe With a Bacchante's love for a Bacchic brew!
'Nay, cried Glaucus, 'no cold and trite director for us: no dictator of the banquet; no rex convivii. Have not the Romans sworn never to obey a king? Shall we be less free than your ancestors? Ho! musicians, let us have the song I composed the other night: it has a verse on this subject, "The Bacchic hymn of the Hours".
Everything tends to show that his convalescence will be brief; and who knows whether, at our next village festivity, we shall not see our good Hippolyte figuring in the bacchic dance in the midst of a chorus of joyous boon-companions, and thus proving to all eyes by his verve and his capers his complete cure? Honor, then, to the generous savants!
It appears on the whole most probable, though it is a question of fierce dispute and great uncertainty, that not only this festive ceremonial, but also its ancient name of tragedy, or goatsong, had long been familiar in Attica , when, about B. C. 535, during the third tyranny of Pisistratus, a skilful and ingenious native of Icaria, an Attic village in which the Eleutheria, or Bacchic rites, were celebrated with peculiar care, surpassed all competitors in the exhibition of these rustic entertainments.
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