At the end of my Λεξικὸν τῶν Ἐπιθέτων καὶ Ἐπικλήσεων τοῦ Διονύσου (“Lexicon of the Epithets and Cult-Titles of Dionysos”) there is a brief list of dialectical variants of the name Dionysos:
- Δεονῦδος = Abdera
- Δεονῦος = Thasos
- Δεονῦς = Erythrae
- Δεόνυσος = Samos
- Δεύνυσος = Miletos
- Διένυσος = Amorgos
- Δίνυσος = Olbia
- Δίννυς = Chios
- Δίννυσος = Cumae
- Διοννυσίαν = Eleutherna
- Διόννυσος = Tyrnavos
- Διόνουσος = Boeotia
- Διονῦδος = Colophon
- Διόνυξος = Byzantine lexicographical tradition
- Διονῦς = Alexandria
- Διόνυσος = Athens
- Διονυτᾶς = Teos
- Διωνίουσος = Boeotia
- Διώνουσος = Boeotia
- Διώνυσος = Homeric
- Διϝόνυσος = Argos
- Ζόννυσος = Mytilene
- 𐌐𐌖𐌘𐌋𐌖𐌍𐌔 = Puplonia
- 𐀇𐀺𐀝𐀰 = Pylos
- ⲇⲓⲟⲛⲏⲥⲟⲥ = Hermopolis
- Dionysus = Rome
- Tinunuś = Magliano
Watching Dionysos travel from Linear B 𐀇𐀺𐀝𐀰 through digamma and its loss, a bunch of different regional dialects of Greek, then Etruscan, Latin and Coptic, ending up preserved in Byzantine lexicography feels less like linguistic history and more like the God refusing to leave the stage.
But one of these is not like the others.
There’s something beautiful and sad about that odd variant Διόνυξος. The other entries are all rooted in places, but Διόνυξος only survives in antiquarian books written by at least nominal Christians. (With sporadic outbursts of Bacchomania, but that’s chronicled elsewhere.)
Every other entry can be pointed to on a map:
Pylos. Argos. Athens. Chios. Thasos. Miletos. Olbia. Mytilene. Hermopolis. Rome.
A community spoke the name there. Someone carved it into stone, scratched it onto a vessel, wrote it on papyrus, invoked the God in public, prayed to him in private, named a child after him. Each variant belonged to a particular place inhabited by a particular people.
And then: Διόνυξος = Byzantine lexicographical tradition.
No sanctuary.
No city.
No living dialect we can confidently point to.
Just books.
But that’s still a kind of place.
Someone copying a manuscript encounters Διόνυξος and decides not to normalize it into the familiar Διόνυσος. Someone compiling a lexicon judges the strange form worth recording. Another manuscript gets copied. The word passes from hand to hand while the religious world that originally produced it disappears.
The name becomes, in a sense, Χωλός.
Its original context is missing. Its provenance is damaged. It doesn’t move through history in the normal way anymore.
But, as one of the aphorisms in New Wine says:
οὐ πᾶν τὸ χωλὸν ἀτελές ἐστιν.
Not everything that limps is incomplete.
The name survived.
And there’s something profoundly Dionysian about survival through altered form. The cult can disappear; temples can fall; languages can change; manuscripts can burn; scribes can become Christian; the name can lose the people who once understood precisely what it meant.
Yet somebody writes:
Διόνυξος.
And somebody else copies it. And somebody else. And somebody else.
Until centuries later a contemporary polytheist reads it and asks, “Who called him that? Why did this variant survive when so many others did not? I wonder what happens when I use it in ritual?”
We don’t know the answers to the first two questions, but we know someone did.
That may actually make it one of the most beautiful, if poignant, entries in the appendix. Everything before it demonstrates the multiplicity of the living name.
Διόνυξος demonstrates the persistence of the remembered name.
Or as New Wine says:
ὁ ὕμνος μιμνῄσκεται ὧν ὁ ὑμνῳδὸς ἐπιλανθάνεται.
The hymn remembers what the singer forgets.
Apparently sometimes the lexicon does too.
And the answer to the third question can only be discovered through trial and error.
The House of Vines 