[9][10] Mallory and Adams suggest that, although Semele is "etymologically related" to other mother Earth/Earth goddess cognates, her name might be a borrowing "from another IE source", not inherited as part of the Ancient Greek lexicon.

Nonnus does not present the conception as virginal; rather, the editor's notes say that Zeus swallowed Zagreus' heart, and visited the mortal woman Semele, whom he seduced and made pregnant.

Nonnus classifies Zeus's affair with Semele as one in a set of twelve, the other eleven women on whom he begot children being Io, Europa, Pluto, Danaë, Aigina, Antiope, Leda, Dia, Alcmene, Laodameia, the mother of Sarpedon, and Olympias.

Since an Oriental inscribed cylindrical seal found at the palace can be dated 14th-13th centuries,[31] the myth of Semele must be Mycenaean or earlier in origin.

At the Alcyonian Lake near the prehistoric site of Lerna, Dionysus, guided by Prosymnus or Polymnus, descended to Tartarus to free his once-mortal mother.

[38][39] Semele was a tragedy by Aeschylus; it has been lost, save a few lines quoted by other writers, and a papyrus fragment from Oxyrhynchus, P. Oxy.

[40] Semele is attested with the Etruscan name form Semla, depicted on the back of a bronze mirror from the fourth century BC.

[41] In ancient Rome, a grove (lucus) near Ostia, situated between the Aventine Hill and the mouth of the Tiber River,[42] was dedicated to a goddess named Stimula.

Roscher includes the name Stimula among the indigitamenta, the lists of Roman deities maintained by priests to assure that the correct divinity was invoked in public rituals.

Hiding her divinity, Saturn’s daughter cleverly Incited the Latian Bacchae with deceiving words:" "lucus erat, dubium Semelae Stimulaene vocetur; maenadas Ausonias incoluisse ferunt: quaerit ab his Ino quae gens foret.

Arcadas esse audit et Euandrum sceptra tenere loci; dissimulata deam Latias Saturnia Bacchas instimulat fictis insidiosa sonis:"[44] Augustine notes that the goddess is named after stimulae, 'goads, whips,' by means of which a person is driven to excessive actions.

One of the main principles of the Dionysian mysteries that spread to Latium and Rome was the concept of rebirth, to which the complex myths surrounding the god's own birth were central.

Birth and childhood deities were important to Roman religion; Ovid identifies Semele's sister Ino as the nurturing goddess Mater Matuta.

In the Neoplatonic philosophy of Henry More (1614–1687), for instance, Semele was thought to embody "intellectual imagination", and was construed as the opposite of Arachne, "sense perception".

[50] In the 18th century, the story of Semele formed the basis for three operas of the same name, the first by John Eccles (1707, to a libretto by William Congreve), another by Marin Marais (1709), and a third by George Frideric Handel (1742).

Handel's work, based on Congreve's libretto but with additions, while an opera to its marrow, was originally given as an oratorio so that it could be performed in a Lenten concert series; it premiered on February 10, 1744.