Hymn to Dionysus Perikionios

The shortest and the most concrete of the Dionysiac hymns in the collection.

Perikionios means "he about the pillar". When Semele's chamber burned and the earth shook, the god wound himself as a vine around the pillars of Cadmus' house and held it up. The title is Theban and cultic, and behind it lies a plain picture: a vine grown round a column and holding the building together.

And then half a line turns this into cosmology. Ὃ δ᾽ ἀνέδραμε δεσμὸς ἁπάντων — and he ran up as the bond of all things. Desmos is a binding, a clamp: that by which the universe holds together. The vine that braced a house is called the thing that braces the cosmos, and the transition is made with no explanation at all, by simple apposition.

The shaking is precisely named: "when the fire-bearing blaze moved the whole earth with the whirrings of the thunderbolt". This is the lightning that killed Semele; the house does not collapse of itself but at the epiphany of Zeus, and it is saved by the son born at that same moment.

Μεθυδώτην — giver of drunkenness. The title is set beside the rescue of the house, and both capacities belong to one god: what loosens a man braces a building.