'See Dittenberger, Syll. 83, 39; 200, 21 ; C.I.G. ii. Add. 162oc; Ephem. archaiol. (1886), rev. 3; Heberdey in Festschrift fiir Benn dorf, p. 3, Taf. 4; Von Prott in Athen. Mittheil. (1899), p. 262.
passage of Herodotus (viii. 65), who describes the procession of the mystae as moving along the sacred way from Athens to Eleusis and as raising the cry "Ictxxc. We find Iacchus the theme of a glowing invocation in an Aristophanic Ode (Frogs, and described as a beautiful "young god"; but he is first ex plicitly identified with Dionysus in the beautiful ode of Sophocles' Antigone (1 I 19) ; and that this was in accord with the popular ritualistic lore is proved by the statement of the scholiast on Aristophanes (Frogs, 482) that the people at the Lenaea, the winter-festival of Dionysus, responded to the command of "Invoke the god!" with the invocation "Hail, Iacchus, son of Semele, thou giver of wealth!" We are sure, then, that in the high tide of the Attic religious history Iacchus was the youthful Dionysus, a name of the great god peculiar to Attic cult, and this is all that here concerns us to know.
We thus see that Iacchus was an Athenian, not an Eleusinian, god; his abiding-place was Athens, and he merely visited Eleusis for the mysteries. We may indeed conjecture that his votaries
read Dionysiac interpretations into Eleusinian dromena. But all this is conjecture. The interpretation of what was shown would naturally change somewhat with the changing sentiment of the ages; but Demeter and Kore, Te) Ofe.), and no one else, are the paramount figures at Eleusis from the "Homeric" hymn to Alaric's invasion. Triptolemus the apostle of corn-culture, Eubouleus—originally a euphemistic name of the god of the under-world, "the giver of good counsel," conveying a hint of his oracular functions—these are accessory figures of Eleusinian cult and mythology that may have played some part in the great mystic drama that was enacted in the hall.
As to the history of the Eleusinian mysteries', the legends concerning the initiation of Heracles and the Dioscuri imply that originally they were closed to strangers, which, as they probably were in origin local rites in honour of local deities, is exactly what we should expect. But the "Homeric" hymn implies that they are open to all; with this we may connect the sagas of the conquest of Eleusis by Athens (see EumoLPus) and the early unification of Attica under Theseus (see CONSTITUTION OF