but Hermes knew better than to argue with the boss.
“Got it,” he said. “Off I go!”
Hermes had no trouble finding the baby’s Aunt Ino and Uncle Athamas. They agreed to raise Bacchus with their own children, and the boy grew up at a normal human rate—not super-accelerated, like a god. Everybody decided he must be a demigod, but that just made Zeus more fearful that Hera would try to rip the kid apart.
As requested, Ino and Athamas dressed Bacchus in girl’s clothing to keep his identity secret. The first few years of his life, Bacchus was very confused. He wasn’t sure why his foster parents called him “he” in private and “she” in public. At first he thought all kids were treated that way.
Then, when he was three years old, Hera struck. Somehow she discovered where the baby was living, and she flew down from Olympus, intent on revenge. By the time Zeus found out what was happening, he only had a few seconds to act. He managed to zap Bacchus into the form of a goat so that Hera wouldn’t notice him, but Bacchus’s foster parents weren’t so lucky. Hera spotted them and inflicted them with a violent form of madness.
Uncle Athamas thought his oldest son, Learkhos, was a deer and killed him with a bow and arrow. Aunt Ino thought their younger son, Melikertes, needed a hot bath—a really hot bath, so she drowned him in a basin of boiling water. Then Ino and Athamas realized what they’d done. In despair, they both leaped off the side of a cliff and plummeted to their deaths.
That Hera…she’s all about wholesome family values.
Zeus managed to retrieve Bacchus and turn him back into a child, but the experience haunted Bacchus. He learned that madness could be used as a weapon. He’d learned that goats were good. (In fact, the goat became one of his sacred animals.) And he learned that you couldn’t hide who you were just by putting on different clothes. Later on, he became the god of anybody who felt confused about his or her own gender, because Dionysus could relate.
Anyway, Zeus looked around for a new set of foster parents. Big shock: not many people volunteered after hearing what Hera had done to Ino and Athamas. Finally Zeus flew to Mount Nysa on the Greek mainland and convinced the nymphs there to raise Bacchus. Zeus promised to make them immortal if they just did him this favor, and that was a hard deal to refuse. Young Bacchus became known as “the godly son of Zeus who lives on Nysa,” which got shortened to Dios (god) of Nysa, which eventually became his new name: Dionysus, though he was still called Bacchus, the noisy one, especially after he ate beans or cabbage. Which is way more than you wanted to know.
Dionysus grew up on Mount Nysa with the nymphs as his foster mothers and the satyrs as his foster fathers. Satyrs are pretty wild and chaotic (no offense to my satyr friends), so it’s no surprise Dionysus turned out a little out-of-the-ordinary.
Occasionally he played with mortal kids from the nearby farms, and Dionysus became popular for his magic tricks with plants. He discovered early on that he could produce drinkable nectar by crushing any kind of plant matter—twigs, leaves, bark, roots, whatever. Cypress-tree syrup? No problem. Fennel juice? Yum!
The other kids would challenge him, like, “Bet you can’t make a drink out of that thorn bush!” Dionysus would pick up a rock, smash some branches, and golden sap would flow from the wounded plant. Dionysus would collect it in cups, mix some water, add miniature umbrellas, and voilà, iced thorn-bush spritzers for everyone.
An entertaining trick—but none of Dionysus’s early recipes caught on. Fennel juice just wasn’t that popular, after all.
Then one day Dionysus was out in the woods with his best friend, a young satyr boy named Ampelos. They spotted a thick vine curled around the branch of an elm tree about twenty feet above their heads. Dionysus froze in his tracks.
“What is it?” Ampelos asked.
“That vine up there,” Dionysus said. “What kind of plant is that?”
Ampelos frowned. The vine didn’t look like anything special to him. It was thick and bristly, with wide green leaves and no fruit or flowers that he could see. “Well, it’s not ivy. Or honeysuckle. Dunno. Never seen it before. Come on!”
But Dionysus stood transfixed. There was something important about that plant—something that could change the world.
“I have to get a closer look.” Dionysus