Red-figure Column Krater: Men Celebrating the Komos

Dionysus was not only the god of wine but also of revelry, creativity, instinct or impulse, and ecstasy, as well as madness, violence and savagery. He is a reminder of the highs and lows the ancient Greeks associated with chaos, anarchy and a world with a lack of self-control. Grouping into one individual the seemingly opposing character traits of ecstatic and blissful abandon on the one hand, and savagely brutal violence on the other, have been a subject of interest for modern philosophers, including Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche believed that by cultivating our own tragic disposition, like Dionysus, only then can we reach our true capacity to achieve human greatness. The Komos procession, pictured here, was a ritualistic procession performed by drunken revelers without any script or leader.