Bromius ( grc, Βρόμιος) in ancient Greece was used as an epithet of

Dionysus In ancient Greek religion and myth, Dionysus (; grc, Διόνυσος ) is the god of the grape-harvest, winemaking, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, festivity, and theatre. The Romans ...

/Bacchus. It signifies "noisy", "roaring", or "boisterous", from , to roar. According to Richard Buxton, Bromius (Bromios) is another name for a fundamental divine figure that precedes Ouranus and Night in Orphic myth. This alternative view to

Hesiod Hesiod (; grc-gre, Ἡσίοδος ''Hēsíodos'') was an ancient Greek poet generally thought to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. He is generally regarded by western authors as 'the first written poet i ...

was discovered by a fragmentary papyrus discovered in Derveni, Macedonia (Greece) in 1962, which is referred to as the Derveni papyrus.

Mythology

Bromius is another name for

, the son of Semele and Zeus. Zeus' jealous wife Hera discovered the affair and contrived to influence Semele to request that Zeus revealed his true form to her. Once Zeus has promised his lover that he will grant her any wish, she asks to see him in his godly appearance (an event referred to in antiquity as an epiphany). Semele's mortal frame cannot withstand the overwhelming spectacle, accompanied by lightning and fire, and she is destroyed. Since all sexual intercourse with gods is procreative, Semele was pregnant at the time, and Zeus plucks the child from its mother's womb and puts him in his thigh until he is ready to be born. Despite his half-mortal heritage, Bromius is a true god as opposed to a demi-god on account of being born from Zeus – the “twice-born god”.

References

Epithets of Dionysus {{AncientGreek-lang-stub