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.

Lorenzo Costa, “The Reign of Comus” (ca. 1506-1511), painted for Isabella d’Este’s studiolo and inspired by Philostratus’s description; Louvre. — Lorenzo Costa, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The revel before the god

Behind the personification stands an ordinary thing. The kōmos was the after-piece of the drinking party — the band of celebrants who spilled out of a symposium into the night street, garlanded, half-drunk, singing, carrying torches and cups, moving from house to house with music and noise. It was so common a sight that Greek vase-painters made a whole genre of it: the running, dancing, sometimes staggering komast appears on hundreds of cups and mixing-bowls, often with a drinking-vessel in hand, sometimes named on the vase as the act he embodies. From the same root grew the word for comedy — kōmōidia, the song (ōidē) of the kōmos — so that the genre of the laughing stage and the spirit of the drunken procession share a single ancestor in the noun for the revel itself.

Attic black-figure komast cup attributed to the KY Painter (ca. 585-570 BC), showing the dancing komasts of the after-dinner revel; Louvre, E742. — KY Painter, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

To turn that experience into a deity was a characteristic Greek move. The pantheon was crowded with such figures — Victory, Persuasion, Strife, Fear, Rumor — abstractions lifted into persons, the daimones of states and moods. Most of them carried at least a thread of cult or a place in a genealogy. Comus carried almost neither. He is the clearest specimen of the type drained to its limit: an experience made into a god, and then left there, without the temple, the festival, the myth, or the moral weight that the older powers accumulate. He keeps the company of Dionysus, in whose train the revel naturally belongs, and the vase-painters set him among the followers of the wine-god and his bride Ariadne — but the wine itself, the vine, the ecstatic dissolution, the mystery cult and its promise of a blessed afterlife — and the Orphic poems that grew from the same Dionysiac soil, in which the wine-god is a cosmic king and a key to the soul’s fate — all of that is the wine-god’s province, not his. Comus owns only the late hour and the high spirits.

The painting at the door

The fullest ancient portrait is a description of a painting rather than a shrine. In the Imagines of the elder Philostratus — a sophist’s gallery-tour written in the early third century, a sequence of word-pictures of pictures — Comus opens the first book. He stands at the golden doors of a bridal chamber, where a newly married and evidently wealthy pair lie within. He is a delicate, full-grown youth, flushed with wine and asleep on his feet, his face fallen into shadow; the torch in his hand has begun to slip as sleep loosens his grip, and he tilts his leg aside so the guttering flame will not catch him. Around him the revel goes on in the half-light: women in men’s dress and men in women’s, the night’s permitted inversion, lit just enough to see what is directly in front of them. It is the truest image of him in antiquity, 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 — a described painting, not a sanctuary; an ekphrasis, not a rite.

Where the late genealogists trouble to assign him parents at all, they make him a child of Dionysus, the god of the vine whose company he keeps. But the link is loose and late, and no canonical theogony fixes his birth; he has no settled mother, no birth-narrative, no cycle of deeds. This is the deep difference between Comus and the figures he is shelved beside. A weaver like Arachne is undone by a told story; a devourer like Lamia is the residue of a told grief. Comus has no story to be undone by. He is a mood with a face, and the mood is enough.

Milton’s enchanter

His longest afterlife is literary, and it transforms him almost beyond recognition. The transformation begins on the English court stage. In Ben Jonson’s masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, performed at Whitehall on Twelfth Night 1618 — the masque in which the young Prince Charles made his court début — Comus enters as a swollen belly-god of the antimasque, the patron of gluttony and drink whose disorder the masque proper must answer and reform. Jonson’s revel-god, set against the claims of virtue, supplied the germ of the work that would fix the name for English readers.

In 1634 John Milton wrote the masque performed at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire, on Michaelmas night, before John Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, with music by Henry Lawes and the Earl’s own children in the leading parts — the tradition has called it simply Comus. Here the reveler becomes an enchanter. Milton recasts him as the son of Bacchus and the sorceress Circe — a wholly post-classical parentage, the wine of the father wed to the shape-changing spells of the mother — who haunts a dark wood with his crew of beast-headed followers and waylays a virtuous Lady separated from her brothers. He sets her fast in an enchanted chair and presses on her a glass whose liquor would turn her, like his other victims, into something half-animal; she refuses, holding out a long and argued defense of chastity and temperance against his seductive case for indulgence and the spending of nature’s bounty. Her brothers, guided by an Attendant Spirit, break his rout, and the river-nymph Sabrina frees her from the chair.

Francis Oliver Finch, “The Dell of Comus” (ca. 1835), a watercolor evoking the dark wood of Milton’s masque; Morgan Library. — Francis Oliver Finch, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Milton’s Comus is far more developed than anything in the ancient sources, and largely his own invention: the architecture of the work is a debate, the seductive argument for pleasure set against the Lady’s argued chastity, with the old revel-spirit pressed into service as the mask for one side of it. The cup, the wood, the Circean parentage, the moral combat — none of this is Greek. Through that work the name entered English letters, and the masque, not the Greek personification, is what most later readers mean by “Comus.” When the Romantic painters and illustrators took him up — William Blake’s watercolor sequence of the masque in the eighteen-teens, and a long line after it — they were illustrating Milton’s enchanter, not Philostratus’s sleeping youth.

The textual record

The thinness of the ancient evidence is itself the subject’s defining fact, and it can be stated precisely. The one sustained ancient description is Philostratus the Elder’s, in the opening chapter of the Imagines; the standard English text remains Arthur Fairbanks’s translation in the Loeb Classical Library (volume 256, 1931), now in the public domain, which prints the Greek and English of the gallery-pictures together. Beyond it, Comus survives as a name attached to vase-scenes and in scattered late notices rather than in any hymn, cult-record, or theogonic poem; the standard modern handbook account, Robin Hard’s revision of H. J. Rose, the Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology (2004), places him among the late personifications that Greek religion manufactured without endowing them with worship.

The richer body of scholarship attaches not to the god but to the masque. The critical study of Milton’s Comus — its 1634 performance, its 1637 and 1645 printings, its debt to Jonson and to the masque tradition, the long argument over the meaning of the Lady’s chastity — fills a substantial corner of Milton studies; the text and its first reception are cataloged in the standard reference entries on Milton’s Comus and on Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, its acknowledged source. The disproportion is the striking thing: a few pages on a vase-painting genre and a sophist’s ekphrasis on one side, three centuries of commentary on an English poem on the other — a thin classical name made to carry the whole weight of the use later writers found for it.

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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