The joys of Dionysus had an extremely wide range, from the simple pleasures of the country bumpkin, dancing a jig on greased wineskins, to the ὠμοφάγος χάρις of the ecstatic bacchanal. At both levels, and at all the levels between, he is Lusios, “the Liberator”— the god who by very simple means, or by other means not so simple, enables you for a short time to stop being yourself , and thereby sets you free. That was, I think, the main secret of his appeal to the Archaic Age: not only because life in that age was often a thing to escape from, but more specifically because the individual, as the modern world knows him, began in that age to emerge for the first time from the old solidarity of the family, and found the unfamiliar burden of individual responsibility hard to bear. Dionysus could lift it from him. –E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational