Semachos Explained

In Greek mythology Semachos was a doublet of Ikarios, the recipient of Dionysus' gift of wine, who welcomed Dionysus to Attica, with a tragic outcome. Semachos was the founder-hero of the Athenian priestesses of Dionysus, the Semachidai.^[1]

The name could be given a Hellenic twist by linking it with machia, "battle", but M.C. Astour^[2] recommended a derivation from a Northwest Semitic word, represented by the Hebrew šimah, "made to rejoice".^[3]

Dionysus was welcomed by the women of Semachos' oikos. His daughter received the gift of a deer skin (nebris), which Karl Kerenyi identified as the bestowal of the rite of maenads in rending limb from limb the animals they sacrificed to Dionysus: "nebrizein also means the rending of an animal."^[4]

The date of the introduction of wine making to Greece, which certainly occurred during the Bronze Age, was given the confident precision of 1497 BCE by Jerome in his adaptation of Eusebius' Chronicon.^[5]

An inscription^[6] records the site of the heroon of Semachos, which lay along the pathway that led to Laurion.

References

• Stephanus of Byzantium, Stephani Byzantii Ethnicorum quae supersunt, edited by August Meineike (1790-1870), published 1849. A few entries from this important ancient handbook of place names have been translated by Brady Kiesling. Online version at the Topos Text Project.

Notes and References

1. [Stephen of Byzantium]
2. Astour, Hellenosemitica: an ethnic and cultural study in West Semitic impact on Mycenaean Greece 1967:195, noted by Karl Kerenyi, Dionysos: Archetypal image of indestructible life 1976:146 note 44.
3. Semachos, as a plural of simchah, "joyous occasion", appears in the euphemistically titled Talmudic Tractate Semachos, which deals with customs of death and mourning.
4. Kerenyi 1976:147.
5. Under year 1497 Dionysus verum non ille Semelae filius, cum in Atticam pervenisset, hospitio receptus a Semacho filiae eius capreae pellem largitus est; Jerome makes this distinction between the "true" Dionysus and that born of a virgin Semele, under year 1387 Dionysus, qui Latine Liber pater, nascitur ex Semele.; noted in Kerenyi 1976:143 note 32.
6. Inscriptiones Graecae II part 2, 1582, lines 53f, noted by Kerenyi 1976:147 note 45.