On the Months

2. The servants of Dionysus The Greek god of wine and theater, also known as Bacchus called the ritual procession a Triumph original Greek: Thriambon, deriving the name from the thyrsi ritual staffs tipped with pine cones and the iambs satirical verses or "jests", as if it were a "thyrsi-iamb." Alternatively, according to Plutarch, the name comes from the word "to shout aloud" original Greek: throein.

3. The Lydians An ancient people of western Asia Minor, they say, discovered wine; and not only wine, but also the cultivation of the fig tree.

4. The Romans knew wine as Must original Latin: mustum, because the people of Sardis the capital of Lydia were the first to call it a "mystery," as if it were an initiate original Greek: mystēn into sacred rites.

page 2. 5. Sabinus was named appropriately after the cultivation of wine; for the name "Sabinus" signifies a sower and a planter of wine.

6. Messapia, which is Calabria the "heel" of Italy, is named after Messapus.

7. They call Lucania "the most wooded"; for the Romans call a grove a lucus by way of "privation" a linguistic term where a word is derived from the absence of a quality, because it is "lacking light" original Greek: aphenges, just as they call a forest "timberless" original Greek: axylon.

chapter II. 8. The myth that Erylus—who lived in Italy and whose land was seized by Evander, the son of the prophetess Carmentis—was born with three souls, is a most philosophical riddle; for it suggests the soul has three distinct powers...

For the explanation of this fable, see below, IV. 48. middle. (Roether)

2. Triumph — to shout aloud] Hesychius, in his entry for "Triumph," is not far removed from our author: "Triumph: a procession, a display of victory, a Dionysian hymn, an iamb." Differing slightly from the Plutarch passage excerpted by Lydus is the Etymologicum Magnum a 12th-century Greek encyclopedia under "Triumph," page 455: "or from thorein (to leap), for Dionysus is a leaper." Otherwise, see Scaliger’s Conjectures on Varro, page 89, and compare Wesseling on Diodorus Siculus, IV. 5. page 250. See also Suidas under the same entry, page 206, edited by Kuster, and Creuzer’s Dionysus, page 264, who discusses our passage. — Instead of

"they used to call" original Greek: ōnōmazon, the Paris Manuscript incorrectly reads "they used to consider" original Greek: enomizon. (Roether)

3. The Lydians — wine] Hence Euripides, in the Bacchae (lines 460–490), teaches that the mysteries of Bacchus originated in Lydia. See also Creuzer’s Symbolism, volume III, page 119. (Roether)

4. Must — they knew] Manuel Moschopulus in his Lexicon to Philostratus a late 13th-century Byzantine grammarian cited by Du Cange: "gleukos is new wine, commonly called moustos." — The verb "to know" original Greek: gignōskō is to be understood here in the same sense as the Latin nosco (to be acquainted with) used in Apuleius’s On the World, 721, page 313, Leiden edition: "Zephyrus, whom the Roman tongue knows as Favonius." (Roether)