Le festin d'Icarios

A poet receives Dionysus, drunk, accompanied by satyrs and maenads. It was thought that Icarios, an Athenian hero who used the vineyard in Greece, was recognized. Icaria was a center for Dionysiac worship and appears to have been the first community in Attica to embrace the god. The people of Icaria traced their community?s name to a (tragic) local hero, Icarios, who, according to ancient authors, befriended and offered hospitality to the young Dionysus. To express his gratitude, Dionysus gave Icarios a grapevine and taught him to make wine. Icarios in turn taught his neighbors, who subsequently drank too much of their own product, became inebriated, concluded Icarios had poisoned them, and killed him. Every autumn the people of Icaria celebrated Dionysus (and probably the story of Icarios) in a festival of drinking, feasting, singing and dancing. This country festival appears to have inspired similar rural Dionysia elsewhere and eventually, by at least 534 BC, the establishment of the City Dionysia ? a spring festival for Dionysus held in the city of Athens. Ancient Greek tradition holds that an Icarian named Thespis was the first performer to play a character in a story as an actor. The Roman poet Horace wrote in the late 1st century BC (?Ars Poetica,? 275-7) that Thespis had traveled through Attica with his fellow performers on a wagon. They performed essentially street theater in the central market (agora) of Athens but in 534 BC Thespis reputedly received an award at the City Dionysia ? the first bestowed for performance of a tragedy.