Dionysus between Sāsānian Iran and Roman allusions

Abstract

lot can be said about religious notions in the late Roman Empire, but further to the east the picture is quite different. Until today even sketching the religious evolution within the Arsacid and the Sāsānian World remains problematic. A substantial amount of the most central Zoroastrian texts are incomplete and what we do find preserved is often mirrored through redaction after the Islamic conquest. About other central textual sources the only thing we know for a fact is that they existed. The situation with other cults not belonging to the Zoroastrian state church is even worse. Of course, this is also true when it comes to the interpretation of related archaeological material. Many of the themes we find depicted on toreutics, seals or stucco are hard to explain, while other representations are strongly reminiscent of cults known from the Roman World but somehow oddly adapted. In this contribution I will try to examine one of these cults — the worship of Dionysus. Since information about the Dionysian Cult in the east is quite scarce, it might prove useful to pay attention to a differentiation emphasized by Martha Carter. She stressed the difference between the term ‘Dionysian’, written with capital-D as related to the god, and ‘dionysian’ seen as a general mode to express a relation to wine or ecstatic behaviour, not necessarily connected to the cult of the god.1) For both terms we find comparable visual vocabulary, like scenes of vintage with erots or various animals between vine branches etc. In the specific case of the Late Roman beholder there likely was a connection between both perceptions, but the further east we go with an analysis the more difficult is to say what the actual content was. In Gandhāra and