The Orphic Hymns

or, riding over the swell of the sea in a chariot drawn by swans, you delight in the circling dances of the sea creatures, or you take your pleasure with the rosy-faced nymphs in the land of Dia, a maenad leaping lightly on the sandy shores;

The tour goes out to sea. In later poetry swans drew Aphrodite's chariot through the air (Sappho had given her sparrows), and here she drives them over the waves while the creatures of the sea dance round her. Then she becomes a thyias, a woman possessed in the Bacchic way, leaping with the nymphs on the beaches. Dia is an island name. In the Odyssey it is the place where Ariadne died, and ancient writers took it as an old name of Naxos, the island where Dionysus found Ariadne; the hymn probably means Naxos, which suits a goddess who has just been called the companion of Bacchus.