Comus

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Comus (Greek Kōmos) is the personified spirit of the revel — the riotous procession of feasters, song, and torchlight that closed a Greek banquet. He arrives late in the record and never as a figure of established cult. Where older gods carry temples and festivals, Comus is the festivity itself given a name and a face: a minor deity, more a literary image than an object of worship.

The fullest ancient portrait is a description of a painting rather than a shrine. In the Imagines of the elder Philostratus, written in the early third century, Comus appears at the door of a wedding feast as a young man flushed with wine and heavy with sleep, his torch tilting toward the ground, his head sunk on his chest in the heaviness that comes at the end of a long night. The passage is the closest thing to a defining image of him, and it is telling that it describes art: Comus belongs to the world of pictures, poems, and allegory more than to the calendar of sacrifice. Late genealogies, where they trouble to assign him parents at all, make him a child of Dionysus, the god of the vine whose company he keeps.

His longest afterlife is literary. In 1634 John Milton wrote the masque performed at Ludlow Castle that tradition has called Comus, in which the reveler becomes an enchanter — recast here as the son of Bacchus and the sorceress Circe — who waylays a virtuous Lady in a dark wood and tempts her with his cup. Milton’s Comus is far more developed than anything in the ancient sources, and largely his own invention: the seductive case for indulgence, set against the Lady’s argued chastity. Through that work the name entered English letters, and the masque, not the Greek personification, is what most later readers mean by “Comus.”

The figure is worth noting less for any doctrine than for what he illustrates. Greek religion could take an experience — the drunken, joyful disorder at the close of a feast — and personify it into a god, without that god ever acquiring the cult, myth, or moral weight of the older powers. Comus is one of the clearest examples: a deity made entirely of a mood. What he was later made to carry, in Renaissance allegory and in Milton, was added afterward, by writers who found in a thin classical name a useful mask for the argument between pleasure and restraint.

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