Dioniso, la follia, la gloria

Dionysus is the god in whom joy and destruction, glory and death reach their maximum tension. The paper outlines some traits also starting from the studies that Walter Friedrich Otto and Karl Kerényi dedicated to this figure. On this philological basis, the theoretical meaning of the Dionysian cult emerges very evident in Nietzsche’s Wahnbriefe, as well as obviously in the Geburt der Tragödie, and in the dynamics between life and death expressed by Hegel and Heidegger. The text ends with a brief analysis of Euripides’ Βάκχαι. A “total tragedy” that brings classical drama to completion, bringing it back to where it began, bringing it back to Dionysus, to Thebes, to the smile of the god.