Iacchus
During the Greco-Persian Wars, when the Attic countryside, deserted by the Greeks, was being laid waste by the Persians, a ghostly procession was supposed to have been seen advancing from Eleusis, crying out “Iacchus”.
[3] Iacchus was also possibly involved in an Eleusinian myth in which the old woman Baubo, by exposing her genitals, cheered up the mourning Demeter.
[7] According to Pausanias, the statue was kept in a temple of Demeter located near the Dipylon gate, the main entrance to ancient Athens.
[23] According to the scholiast on the Frogs of Aristophanes, participants at the Lenaia responded to the command to "Invoke the god" with the invocation, "Hail, Iacchos, son of Semele, thou giver of wealth.
[26] Sophocles' Antigone, referring to nocturnal rites occurring on Mount Parnassus above Delphi, contains the invocation: O Leader of the chorus of the stars whose breath is fire, overseer of the chants in the night, son begotten of Zeus, appear, my king, with your attendant Thyiads, who in night-long frenzy dance and sing you as Iacchus the Giver!
[30] In addition to being the cultic cry, "iacchus" was also a term for a kind of song or hymn of worship, possibly unassociated with the god.
[36] In Sophocles' Antigone (c. 441 BC), an ode to Dionysus begins by addressing Dionysus as the "God of many names" (πολυώνυμε), who rules over the glens of Demeter's Eleusis, and ends by identifying him with "Iacchus the Giver", who leads "the chorus of the stars whose breath is fire" and whose "attendant Thyiads" dance in "night-long frenzy".
[40] From Thebes, where he was born, he first went to Delphi where he displayed his "starry body", and with "Delphian girls" took his "place on the folds of Parnassus",[41] then next to Eleusis, where he is called "Iacchus": Strabo says that Greeks "give the name 'Iacchus' not only to Dionysus but also to the leader-in-chief of the mysteries".
[51] According to Herodotus, Dicaeus an Athenian exile told the story that, he and the former Spartan king Demaratus, who had become an advisor to the Persian king Xerxes I, witnessed a miraculous event which Dicaeus interpreted as predicting the defeat of the Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis (480 BC), during the Greco-Persian Wars: However, while the "cloud of dust" and the ritual cry "Iacchus" are apparent references to the Eleusinian procession, no explicit reference is made by Herodotus to Iacchus' statue, nor in fact to the god himself— either here or elsewhere.
[58] The earliest such source, a 4th-century BC vase fragment at Oxford, shows Demeter holding the child Dionysus on her lap.
[60] By the 1st-century BC, Demeter suckling Iacchus had become such a commonplace, that the Latin poet Lucretius could use it as an apparently recognizable example of a lover's euphemism.
[63] And according to Nonnus, Iacchus was the son of Dionysus and the nymph Aura, who was the daughter of the Titan Lelantos and the Oceanid Periboia (or Cybele?).
In an apparent later Orphic version of the story, the old woman Baubo makes Demeter laugh by lifting her skirts (an anasyrma) thereby exposing her genitals.
[66] The 2nd-century Christian apologist Clement of Alexandria, in giving an account of this story, attributes the following lines of verse to Orpheus:
