We do know that the theater developed as part of the celebration of the god Dionysus, a pan-Hellenic god who was widely celebrated throughout the Archaic period and honored at dramatic contests with tragedies and comedies. His was also an orgiastic cult. Dionysus is the god of ecstasy and possession and might be called the patron saint of the drama as well as of various festivals and celebrations. Bacchus is the Roman name for the same god. The iconography of Bacchus makes him easily recognizable in artworks and evokes images of wine and revelry along with specific symbols of the god and his cult. In Greek mythology, Dionysus was a bastard son of Zeus. The mother of Dionysus is variously named depending on the source, and some have said she was Demeter, or Io, and some Dione, and still others Lethe. The most common story has it that Zeus disguised himself as a mortal and had a secret affair with Semele ("moon"), the daughter of King Cadmus of Thebes. Zeus's wife, Hera, was jealous. She disguised herself as an old neighbor and advised Semele to ask her lover to do her a favor by

Cohan, Robert. "The Greeks." http://lupus.northern.edu:90/wild/

The contemporary theater has at times drawn on elements of Greek drama, as noted. The modern theater is largely commercial in nature rather than religious, but a certain kind of social religions infuses much of the theater at least since the time of Eugene O'Neill earlier in this century. O'Neill saw the theater in essentially religious terms, and in his approach he harked back to the religiously-oriented theater of the Greeks. In general, O'Neill did not deal with the preoccupations of the external world but with his own preoccupations and his own personal demons, which he sought to eliminate in his plays: "And this tension, this pain of spirit, could only be released if shared by an audience, by a body of fellow sufferers who in the sharing become father confessors" (Chabrowe xii). He dramatized his conflicts in a way that made them into a religious experience. This approach could not have been further removed from the prevailing style in the American theater at the time. There had never been anything but a commercial theater in America, existing between the poles of burlesque and melodrama. Prior to World War I, the only contemporary drama in which American audiences could see three-dimensional characters was work by Europeans such as Ibsen and Shaw, and even this repertory was rarely found in the legitimate theaters. O'Neill saw the theater as requiring the writing of plays in the spirit of the Greeks, which meant restoring to the theater its original function as a place of ritual and religious experience. He therefore had a twofold aesthetic view, both the idea of the theater as a temple of the gods and an idea of life as inevitable tragedy. His plays are most easily understood as having one or the other emphasis:

In other words, the emphasis is sometimes on the celebration of life in the abstract and sometimes on t