Bromius () in
ancient Greece
Ancient Greece () was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity (), that comprised a loose collection of culturally and linguistically r ...
was used as an epithet of
Dionysus
In ancient Greek religion and Greek mythology, myth, Dionysus (; ) is the god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre. He was also known as Bacchus ( or ; ...
/Bacchus. It signifies "noisy", "roaring", or "boisterous", from , to roar. According to Richard Buxton, Bromius (Bromios) is another name for a fundamental divine figure that precedes Ouranus and Night in Orphic myth. This alternative view to
Hesiod was discovered by a fragmentary papyrus discovered in Derveni, Macedonia (Greece) in 1962, which is referred to as the
Derveni papyrus.
Mythology
Bromius is another name for
Dionysus
In ancient Greek religion and Greek mythology, myth, Dionysus (; ) is the god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre. He was also known as Bacchus ( or ; ...
, the son of
Semele and
Zeus
Zeus (, ) is the chief deity of the List of Greek deities, Greek pantheon. He is a sky father, sky and thunder god in ancient Greek religion and Greek mythology, mythology, who rules as king of the gods on Mount Olympus.
Zeus is the child ...
. Zeus' jealous wife Hera discovered the affair and contrived to influence Semele to request that Zeus revealed his true form to her. Once Zeus has promised his lover that he will grant her any wish, she asks to see him in his godly appearance (an event referred to in antiquity as an
epiphany). Semele's mortal frame cannot withstand the overwhelming spectacle, accompanied by lightning and fire, and she is destroyed. Since all sexual intercourse with gods is procreative, Semele was pregnant at the time, and Zeus plucks the child from its mother's womb and puts him in his thigh until he is ready to be born.
Despite his half-mortal heritage, Bromius is a true god as opposed to a demi-god on account of being born from Zeus – the “twice-born god”.
References
Epithets of Dionysus
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