This time the presenter, historian Bettany Hughes, travels around Europe and Asia in order to reconstruct the cult of the Greek god Dionysos. Among the topics treated : the birth of tragedy as a theatrical genre, the modern-day survival of certain Greek rites, the age-old origins of wine making plus vineyard cultivation and Mankind's immemorial liking for moments of rapture, oblivion and transcendence. Unsurprisingly, this last ambition overlaps significantly with Mankind's desire to get blotto every now and then.
Some of the objects shown impress through their great age : for instance, the documentary shows an eight-thousand-years-old wine pot, found in Georgia, in the Caucasus. This means that Humanity must have discovered the joys of communal wine-making and, especially, communal wine-drinking early on, possibly around the time when nomadic hunter-gatherers morphed into more sedentary farmers. The roots of civilization may be wetter than many joyless accountants are willing to admit.
"Bacchus uncovered" includes some rarely-seen material, such as a rather unique mosaic found on Cyprus. The mosaic dates back to a time when Dionysos and Christ were battling for primacy in men's hearts. It's a mind-blowingly strange thing which seems to suggest that somewhere around the fourth century Pagans were trying to use Christian iconography against itself. It defies description and, indeed, may have done so even in the fourth century.
People willing to get into the spirit of things can do worse than attack a bottle of good red while watching the documentary. Moreover, viewers capable of reading Dutch should not neglect to read Godfried Bomans' "Kent gij Dionysos ?", with its rather funny classification of drunks. (Bomans distinguished three types, to wit the Promethean, the Dionysian and the "Untergang des Abendlandes" melancholic.)
