"Lenaia vases" is the traditional title given to a group of some seventy fifth-century Attic vases, black- and red-figure. These vases have in common that they show a cult-image of Dionysos, consisting of a mask or masks on a column, in combination with the conventional Attic imagery of the revelling ecstatic female worshippers usually called "maenads." The vases are important and their meaning much debated because they seem to hold out the promise of providing otherwise unavailable information about historical bacchic religion. There is no consensus on the character of the historical information of these scenes. In an older view the imagery records the appearance of enacted ritual; in a newer view, the imagery "discusses," in a fashion analogous to language, concepts about Dionysiac religion. This paper proposes a reinterpretation of a coherent subset of the "Lenaia vases," based on a linguistic reading of the imagery. This subset consists of twenty-eight red-figure stamnoi, a group that has traditionally been the focus of studies of the "Lenaia vases." I analyze the vases as describing, in conventional visual terms of reference, a rite of theoxenia celebrated by ecstatic female worshippers. The imagery says that these worshippers perform a thysia, offer Dionysos a banquet of meat and wine, and celebrate a symposion and komos. It also comments on the practice of such rituals by women, saying that they derive honor from these actions. These rituals find parallels in historical evidence for Dionysiac theoxenia and banquets; the scenes thus may provide additional evidence that Dionysiac celebrations took this form. The scenes, however, are not about the historical enactment of such rituals, and still less a visual record of such enactments. Rather, their message, conveyed by the interweaving of mythical and social references, is that for the worshipper of Dionysos the worlds of myth and of the polis are one.

Much recent scholarship on "thysia" sees the meaning and function of the rite for the ancient Greeks to stem partly or largely from the beliefs and emotions surrounding the slaughter of the victim. Scholars have proposed that the Greeks experienced fear and awe when they killed animals for food, and that the source of these feelings was a perception of the slaughter of liverstock as akin to murder. This paper considers evidence for the ancient Greek experience of the rite of "thysia", with the ultimate aim of shedding light on current theories of sacrifice. My source is the extensive system of imagery of "thysia" in Attic vase-painting. I view this imagery not as a series of illustrations of the way "thysia" was performed but rather as a map of the way it was conceptualized. Analyzed in this way, the iconography of "thysia" yields information on the degree to which "thysia" was identified with slaughter, and on the emotions inspired by the rite. The visual terms of definition of "thysia" in this repertory are not slaughter and burnt offerings but rather edible animals and the preparation of meat in the context of feasts and festivals. The semantic range of this imagery is the basis for conclusions about the emotional connotations of "thysia". The depiction of slaughter and of unwilling victims may be associated with the iconography of revelry and appears in some scenes to be the focus of humor. Most significant are the employment of "thysia" in the depiction of victory and the development of several important scene types of "thysia" as subsets of the iconography of Dionysian symposion and kōmos. In these contexts, the imagery of "thysia" appears as a visual metaphor denoting joy and celebration.