A novel about the reappearance of the Greek god Dionysus in the modern world in the aspect and form of Priapus. Imagine the combined Wellesley and Smith College Field Hockey teams as his Baccantes. The novel, in sequences, is indebted to the play, The Baccae, by Euripides.
Laetitia Lowell, a philologist at Wellesley College, on a solo field trip to the ruins of Pompei and Herculaneum, on the slopes of Vesuvius, lost, she falls in with a procession of dreamy-eyed women dancing to the music of tambourines, flutes, drums and cithars, in barbaric dress of blue chitons, bare legged, bare breasted, and holding what appears to be a thyrsus. Bacchantes! After two thousand years! She follows what she believes to be masquerades, hoping to find her way back to Pompeii. Suddenly, she is hemmed in by the hennaed and kohl eyed women, to witness what appeared to be a rite. When the troop stops before a grotto, a venerable man who appeared to be a high priest, summons a young man from the grotto who is attired in a golden robe. His hair is Doric blonde. A magnificent Greek kouros. The young man sits on a plinth at the entrance of the grotto. The women chant choral dithyrambs out of the Bacchae of Euripides.
He opens his robe to disclose a huge flaccid male member that gradually becomes erect with the intensity of the dancing and singing -- then with a moan he ejaculates, spurting semen in a fountain spray in which the women dip kerchiefs and phallic ornaments to empower the objects as symbols of fertility.
The young man is imprisoned in the grotto. Later, she escapes with the young man, Demetrius Angeli, who is worshipped by this recondite and remote sect in time, as Dionysus in the aspect of Priapus.
For his sanity and safety, she brings him to the USA. He and his Wellesley and Smith College new world bacchantes (field hockey players) are then persecuted as a dangerous cult by a lady Attorney General. What ensues is the eternal confrontation and dynamism of Dionysan and Appollonian opposites.
* * * Myths have no life of themselves. They wait for us to give them body. Let but one person in the world respond to their call, they offer us their vitality unimpaired.
From Albert Camus, 1946.
