![]() ![]() It is said that he was mocked by the Titans who gave him a thyrsus (a fennel stalk) in place of his rightful sceptre. A jealous Hera again attempted to kill the child, this time by sending Titans to rip Dionysus to pieces after luring the baby with toys. Diodorus' sources equivocally identified the mother as Demeter. In the Cretan version of the same story, which Diodorus Siculus follows, Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Persephone, the queen of the Greek underworld. In this version, Dionysus is born by two "mothers" (Semele and Zeus) before his birth, hence the epithet dimētōr (of two mothers) associated with his being "twice-born". A few months later, Dionysus was born on Mount Pramnos in the island of Ikaria, where Zeus went to release the now-fully-grown baby from his thigh. Zeus rescued the unborn Dionysus by sewing him into his thigh. Therefore, he came to her wreathed in bolts of lightning mortals, however, could not look upon an undisguised god without dying, and she perished in the ensuing blaze. Though Zeus begged her not to ask this, she persisted and he agreed. Curious, Semele demanded of Zeus that he reveal himself in all his glory as proof of his godhood. Hera pretended not to believe her, and planted seeds of doubt in Semele's mind. Appearing as an old crone (in other stories a nurse), Hera befriended Semele, who confided in her that Zeus was the actual father of the baby in her womb. ![]() Zeus' wife, Hera, discovered the affair while Semele was pregnant. ![]() His mother was a mortal woman, Semele, the daughter of king Cadmus of Thebes, and his father was Zeus, the king of the gods. When the Olympian gods defeated the titans in the titanomachy, the titans were destroyed and Mount Olympus was made.ĭionysus had a strange birth that evokes the difficulty in fitting him into the Olympian pantheon. Dionysus is a deity, previously a demigod and the son of Zeus and Semele. ![]()
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