The Orphic Hymns

Hear, father, son of Kronos, Sabazios, glorious god, you who sewed Bacchus Dionysus, the loud-roaring Eiraphiotes, into your thigh, so that he might come fully formed (a line or more is lost here) to holy Tmolus and to fair-cheeked Hippa.

Sabazios was a god of Phrygia whose rites seemed to the Greeks very like those of Dionysus, and in time his name was used for Dionysus himself. Athenians knew the cult and laughed at it: Aristophanes jokes about it, and Demosthenes mocks his rival Aeschines for leading Sabazios's worshippers through the streets, holding snakes over his head and shouting euoi saboi. In this hymn Sabazios is something more. "Father, son of Kronos" makes him Zeus, and dedications do call him Zeus Sabazios. As Zeus he does what Zeus did after Semele's death: he sewed the unborn child into his thigh and carried him to term. Herodotus tells it with the same word for sewing, and Euripides' Bacchae adds the golden pins that held the thigh shut. The title eiraphiōtēs, already in a Homeric hymn, was explained in antiquity in more than one way, one of them "the one sewn in". The child comes out tetelesmenos, "made complete", the very word Plato's Phaedo uses for the initiate who reaches the next world "purified and initiated". Then a line is lost; an old guess recorded in Abel's notes gives its sense as "when the months came round, and you quickly brought him". The child arrives at Tmolus, the mountain over Sardis in Lydia, and at Hippa, his nurse in the next hymn.