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Truly Intense Vengeance Stories From Greek Mythology

Khalid Elhassan June 14, 2021 35 min

The twelve major Olympian gods. Pintrest

A marble relief, circa 100 AD, depicting a Maenad and two satyrs in a Dionysian procession. British Museum

7. A King Who Forced a God to Flee For His Life

When the Maenads, the wine god’s disciples, threw a festival in his honor atop the sacred mountain of Nyseion in Lycurgus’ kingdom, Dionysus took on human form and attended as the guest of honor. When Lycurgus heard that his command had been defied and that Dionysus was in his kingdom, he flew into a rage. He rushed to Mount Nyseion to break up the festival. Lycurgus used an ax to slay a Maenad who had nursed Dionysus as a child, and chased everybody out with an ox goad.

Dionysus was forced to flee to save himself from the livid Lycurgus and had to leap into the sea to escape the wrath of the angry king. There, Dionysus was rescued by the sea nymph Thetis, who kindly received the wine god and sheltered him in an undersea cave. In the meantime, Lycurgus set out to purge his realm of Dionysus’ followers and Dionysian rites. He carried out persecution in which the Maenads and others who worshiped the god of wine were arrested and imprisoned.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.