Maenads Descend on U.S. Capitol

Some myths seem perpetually ripe for reinterpretation. The female devotees of the Greek god Dionysus, known as bacchae, or maenads, have been the subject of artists and writers for nearly 3000 years (click HERE for a gallery of historical examples). Perhaps the most famous work based on the myth is the playwright Euripides' ancient tragedy, The Bacchae. Written in a time of war and plague, it explored the dangers of unconscious possession and the horrors of instinctual passions unleashed. Euripides' play was the inspiration for my thriller, Night of the Furies, which imagined similar irrational passions recurring in contemporary times.

But maenads have only rarely been viewed as savage hellions of horror; more often their unconsciousness is portrayed as a kind of innocence, a playful, joyful freedom.

Dancing Maenad and Satyr, Pompeii.

~

An exhibit entitled "Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples," which recently opened at the LA County Museum of Art, shows several superb examples of these docile, dancing maenads, recovered from the ashes of Mt. Vesuvius. Most of the works date from the 1st century BC to the year of the eruption, in 79 AD. Although Rome had conquered Greece in the sack of Corinth in 146 BC, the Romans adored Greek art and culture and adapted its myths and themes as their own.

Dionysos with kantharos (drinking cup) and maenad holding a sacred thyrsus.

Mask of maenad, from the House of the Gilded Cupids, Pompeii.

Relief panel of Maenad and Satyr, in procession with Dionysus, the Lord of Liberation, draped in an animal hide and holding a pine-cone thyrsus. From Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples.

Some 18 centuries after it was buried, this delicate fresco of a floating maenad, recovered from the House of Ship in Pompeii, inspired a distant descendant of the ancients, Constantino Brumidi.

The Greek-Italian artist, born and trained in Rome, emigrated to the United States in 1852, and three years later was hired to create murals in the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. (Only in America!)

His paintings for the Naval Affairs Committee Room (since 1912 the Senate Appropriations Conference Room) are based on his study of Pompeian wall decoration and, specifically, the fresco of the floating maenad.

As you can see in this close-up, Brumidi's angelic, Pompaeian maenad has exchanged her sacred Dionysian thyrsus for a star-studded American flag. Over two millenia, she's gone from hysterical madwoman to patriotic nymph.

But beware: In the shadowy corridors of Congress, you never know when a possessed maenad will succumb to the dark side again.