Demigods and Monsters (8 page)

C
ould there be a more bizarre choice for director of Camp Half-Blood than Dionysus?

Rick Riordan has a gift for playing with the Greek myths. He delights in taking the gods and their stories and giving them just enough of a twist to make them completely believable in our world while still retaining the essence of the ancient beliefs. His Dionysus, more safely referred to as Mr. D (names are, after all, powerful
things), takes the image of the Greek god of wine and revelry and twists it into a believable contemporary portrait: If you spent most of your time drinking and partying like Mr. D, there's a good chance that by the time you reached middle age, you too would be overweight, badly dressed, and not care a fig about anything except when you could get your next drink. You certainly wouldn't be thrilled by having a bunch of “brats” foisted on you. And there's a good chance you wouldn't be the most responsible guardian.

Certainly this is Percy Jackson's take on Mr. D when Percy first arrives at Camp Half-Blood. But first and even fifth impressions don't tell the whole story when dealing with the Greek gods, who are complex deities. Most of them are multitaskers. Dionysus is not only god of wine and the vine, but the god of fertility, who rules all growing things. (You see this side of Mr. D in Camp Half-Blood's strawberry fields, which grow so effortlessly and fruitfully that the camp is able to pay all its bills by selling its strawberries to New York restaurants.) He's also the god of madness, revelry, and theater, as well as the god of joy and divine ecstasy. In the first four books Riordan describes some of these facets and hints at others. How much of Mr. D, I found myself wondering, was actually part of what the Greeks believed about Dionysus? And what do the stories featuring Dionysus tell us not only about Mr. D but about Camp Half-Blood?

Percy is not impressed when he's first introduced to the camp director. Mr. D is short, pudgy, and tends to dress in either loud Hawaiian shirts or tacky running suits featuring tiger or leopard prints. Thanks to Smelly Gabe, his mother's repulsive husband, Percy immediately knows that Mr. D has a serious acquaintance with alcohol. He looks like a middle-aged drunk going rapidly to seed. What Percy doesn't immediately pick up on is that he's facing a god. He doesn't understand why Grover seems so frightened of Mr. D—until Mr. D allows him a glimpse of his true nature:

This is a very accurate description of some of Dionysus' favorite methods for punishing those who've angered him. These include trapping the poor mortals with suddenly sprouting grape and ivy vines, turning them into animals, and driving them completely mad. The Greek stories of Dionysus often depict a frighteningly cruel, vengeful god, yet the images of him almost always show either a beautiful youth surrounded by grapevines or a handsome man with curling, black hair and a luxurious beard. In fact, this image is so consistent that Dionysus is remarkably easy to identify on the vases and urns that have survived from Ancient Greece. The classic Dionysus looks nothing like Riordan's pudgy, bleary Mr. D. I think there may be a couple of reasons that Riordan's version of Dionysus is so unattractive. The first goes back to the myths. Like his father Zeus, Dionysus was a master of disguise and often appeared to mortals in other forms. He was known to show up as a ram, a lion, or even a young girl; he was easy to underestimate. I also suspect his incarnation as Mr. D is a warning of sorts on Riordan's part; no one meeting that unappealing little man could possibly imagine that drinking is a good idea.

You might think that the god of joy and revels would at least guarantee a good time at camp. But no. Beyond his slovenly appearance, Mr. D's also got an attitude problem. He's snarky and sullen and contemptuous of both humans and half-bloods. Though he
obviously knows the campers' true names, he makes a point of pretending he can't remember them. One of the running jokes of the series is Mr. D referring to Percy as Peter Johnson. Chiron explains that Mr. D is unhappy because he “hates his job.” Zeus, it turns out, is the one who ordered Dionysus to run Camp Half-Blood, as a punishment for chasing an off-limits nymph. Not only is Dionysus essentially grounded on Earth for a hundred years, but he's forbidden to drink his beloved wine. His mission is to keep the young heroes safe. And he's not happy about any of it.

On the surface, choosing Mr. D to run the camp is so ridiculous, it's comic. It may even be Riordan's sly acknowledgment of the fact that sometimes the adults who are put in charge of kids are the most inappropriate for the job. Nearly everyone has had teachers who range from inept to damaging to occasionally downright scary. Mr. D seems to be all of those rolled into one.

Percy takes an instant dislike to the whiny camp director, and you can hardly blame him. Even though Mr. D is supposed to be keeping the half-gods safe, he doesn't seem to care about any of them and he certainly doesn't bother to help or train them. All of that boring detail he leaves to the centaur Chiron. In the third book,
The Titan's Curse
, Mr. D even confesses that he doesn't like heroes. He married Ariadne after the hero Theseus abandoned her, and he's held a grudge against heroes ever since. He considers heroes selfish ingrates who use and betray others. To Percy (and yours truly), Mr. D's description of the heroes sounds more like a description of most of the gods. What Riordan doesn't tell us, though, is that Dionysus also had a bit of history with the original Perseus, the hero who defeated the Gorgons and Medusa. According to Robert Graves's
The Greek Myths
, Perseus fought Dionysus when the wine god came to Argos, killing many of his followers. Dionysus retaliated by driving the women of Argos mad, to the point that they began to eat their own children. Perseus finally had the good sense to appease the god
by building him a great temple. So in addition to not liking heroes, Dionysus might simply dislike Percy because of his name.

Moody and difficult as he is, Mr. D is the first god whom Percy confronts directly, and I can't help thinking that's significant. Mr. D defies expectations. He's not beautiful or even likeable. He's the embodiment of divine indifference—a god who barely notices that mortals exist. Percy meets him at a point when he, Percy, doesn't believe in gods, and yet there's Mr. D, undeniably real and scary. The wine god is irrefutable evidence of the new truths that Percy must accept: that not only are the Greek gods real and still messing with mortals, but that one of them is his father. Shortly after meeting Mr. D, a confused Percy asks Chiron:

It is indeed. The gods want to know because they've got a prophecy to contend with, and Percy needs to know because what he discovers at Camp Half-Blood is the key to his identity. That question is really the one that Percy has come to Camp Half-Blood to answer. And the more I look at the myths, the more I believe that of all the gods, Dionysus is the perfect choice to preside over the place where questions like Percy's get resolved.

To really understand what Riordan does with Dionysus, it helps to look at the myths about the wine god. The most popular version of his story starts with his mother, Semele, who was not a goddess but a princess, the daughter of Cadmus, King of Thebes. Zeus fell in love with the young princess and swore by the River Styx that he would do anything she asked. But falling in love with Zeus never works out
well for mortals. When Hera, Zeus' wife, found out about the romance, she disguised herself as an old woman and persuaded the princess to ask Zeus to prove his love by showing himself to her as he showed himself to Hera, in his undisguised divine form. Zeus, knowing that no mortal could survive such a sight, begged the girl to ask for something else. Semele, already six months pregnant and wanting to know the truth about her child's father, refused. Bound by his own oath, Zeus showed himself in his true form, an immense, glorious vision blazing with thunder and lightning. I suspect this was the equivalent of looking at a nuclear blast up close. Semele was by some accounts frightened to death; by others, she was incinerated on the spot. What nearly all versions of the myth agree on is that in the moment before she died, the god managed to rescue the child she was carrying. Zeus hid the unborn child by sewing him into his own thigh and only undid the stitches when Dionysus was ready to be born.

One interesting thing about Dionysus' birth is that, of the twelve great Olympian gods, only Dionysus had a mortal parent. Dionysus, though fully divine, is the only god who started life as a half-blood. Which gives him a rather unique qualification to run the summer camp.

I think it's fair to say that Dionysus had a difficult childhood. According to one version of his story, Hera, not content with destroying his mother, ordered the Titans to seize the infant. What happened next was not only violent but seriously gross. The Titans tore the baby to pieces then boiled the pieces in a cauldron. A pomegranate tree sprang from the place on the earth where the infant's blood had fallen, and Rhea, Dionysus' grandmother,
¹⁴
somehow brought the child back to life.

Realizing that Olympus was not the safest place for the child, Zeus put Dionysus in the care of King Athamas and his wife Ino, who was one of Semele's sisters. They hid the young boy in the women's quarters, where he was disguised as a woman (which may account for some of the descriptions of Dionysus as having a feminine appearance
¹⁵
). This arrangement lasted until Hera found out about it and drove both the king and his wife mad. The king in his madness even killed his eldest son, thinking him a stag.

Zeus then put Hermes on the case. Hermes disguised Dionysus as a young ram and managed to get him safely into the care of the five nymphs who lived on Mount Nysa. They were more successful guardians, raising the young godling in a cave, feeding him on honey. Zeus, grateful to the nymphs, set their images in the sky as stars and called them the Hyades. These are the stars that are believed to bring rain when they are near the horizon. As Edith Hamilton puts it in
Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes
:

Dionysus managed to survive childhood and apparently even made his first wine on Mount Nysa. According to Robert Graves's
The Greek Myths
, soon after Dionysus reached manhood, Hera recognized him as Semele's son. Never one to give up a grudge, Hera promptly drove Dionysus mad. It was at this point that he began his wanderings, accompanied by his tutor Silenus and an extremely rowdy bunch of followers who terrified nearly everyone they met. These followers include satyrs and the dreaded Maenads, possessed women who worshipped Dionysus and had a nasty habit of getting
drunk then dismembering and devouring wild animals or the occasional unfortunate human. Dionysus' followers were also known to tear apart and eat goats and satyrs, which may be why Mr. D makes Grover so nervous.

Dionysus traveled to Egypt, India, and throughout the Aegean, bringing the vine with him and teaching wine-making. In most of these places he was welcomed and worshipped, which was clearly the safest approach to Dionysus.

Not everyone was thrilled to host such a riotous god. Dionysus returned to his birthplace, Thebes, because he'd heard that the king's mother, Agave, was denying that Dionysus was the son of Zeus. Essentially, they were dissing him, saying Dionysus wasn't a god. Even worse, Pentheus, the king,
¹⁶
vowed to have Dionysus beheaded if he entered Thebes. Dionysus and his followers entered the city anyway, and Pentheus ordered them shackled. But Dionysus is, among other things, a master of illusions, and Pentheus, who was already beginning to lose his mind, wound up shackling a bull. The Maenads escaped the king's guards and went dancing up a mountain where they tore a calf to pieces. Then Pentheus' mother and sisters joined the Maenads. When Pentheus tried to stop them, the Maenads, led by Agave, Pentheus' own mother, tore the king to pieces. She too was caught in the insanity of the wine god's illusions and believed it was a lion she was killing when she was really murdering her own son. As Percy discovers, the gods have a tendency to take it very personally when they're opposed.

Pentheus' attempts to protect his city from the wine god's influence were understandable but also futile. Anyone who knows anything about the Greek gods would think he should have known better. Yet others made similar mistakes. When Dionysus, disguised
as a young girl, invited the three daughters of King Minyas to join his festival, they refused, choosing instead to stay at home and spin wool. Again, Dionysus summoned illusions that destroyed the mind. He drove the daughters of Minyas mad by filling their spinning room with phantom beasts and turning their threads to vines. One sister, in desperation, offered her own son as a sacrifice, and all three sisters in a wine-induced frenzy wound up tearing apart and devouring the boy.

One of the best-known stories about Dionysus, and the source of those visions Percy gets when he first meets Mr. D, tells of how a bunch of sailors mistook Dionysus for a young prince. Thinking he'd be worth quite a ransom, they kidnapped him. But once they got him aboard and tried to tie him up, the ropes fell apart. Only the helmsman realized they'd captured a god, and he pleaded with his shipmates to release the young man. Ignoring him, the captain ordered the crew to set sail. Strangely, though the sails filled with wind, the ship wouldn't move. Instead, grapevines sprouted from the ship, winding across the rigging and sails; ivy covered the masts; the oars turned into serpents; and red wine streamed across the decks. At this point the captain realized something was wrong. He ordered the helmsman to return to shore. But it was too late. Dionysus turned himself into a lion, and the terrified sailors leapt overboard—where all but the helmsman were changed into dolphins.