Stuart Walton on the Greek mythological figure of Ampelos, the lover of Dionysos who lends his name to the scientific study of grape varieties.
The deity disposing over wine in Greek mythology is Dionysos, a late Thracian import to the pantheon, who arrives blazing a trail of ecstatic frenzy. He is the ultimate shapeshifter, changing from antic youth to gnarled elder in a mere blink. What is less often remarked upon in the myth is that he was conventionally held to have had a love-life too, albeit a doomed one.
Dionysos’ lover is a satyr, Ampelos, who gives his name to ampelography, the scientific study of the morphology and botanical characteristics of grape varieties. In the imagination of later eras, a satyr was typically a half-formed thing, the upper part man, the lower part sometimes horse, more often goat, the head equipped with horns, the face bestially ugly, the nether parts permanently priapic. A satyr represented the carnal urges of drunkenness and sexual incontinence, and even when he became recognizably wholly humanoid, he was still at the mercy of his own unlovely impulses.
Ampelos: Gilded exception to the beastly rule
Not so Ampelos, who was the gilded exception to the beastly rule. In the Dionysiaca, the most famous of the late Greek epics, composed in the fifth century AD by Nonnus of Panopolis, and the longest complete work of Classical antiquity to have survived, Ampelos is given the kind of rhapsodic description reserved for those most favoured of the
This Article was originally published on World of Fine Wine
