Out for a run last night and listening to the radio, in particular an excerpt about Greek mythology being discussed by Stephen Fry.
Not my usual digest but it has been one of those weeks!
Anyway the piece was about Dionysus the Ancient Greek god of wine, renamed by the Romans to Bacchus.
Dionysus had an interesting start to life, after his conception by Zeus his mother was tricked by Zeus's jealous wife into looking at his godly form, and consequently burst into flames. Zeus took the unborn foetus and zipped it into his thigh until his birth.
The interesting and somewhat confusing mythological life of Dionysus was written about by Ancient Greek poet Nonnus in his work Dionysiaca.
My interest was really pricked by a particular passage where Dionysus was in the Kingdom of Assyria being entertained by king Staphylus, his wife Methe and their son, Botrys.
To celebrate the king put on a huge drunken feast, after which Staphylus mysteriously died the morning after - of course never felt like that myself!
Out of respect for his dead friend Dionysus commemorates Methe's name forever by naming the state of drunkenness after her, and the giving names of Staphylus and Botrys to grapes.
Methe became the Greek god of drunkeness, but also in common use today for example as the alkyl group Methyl in chemistry.
(I wonder if this Methe is something to do with the Asian name Methe for Fenugreek?)
Botrys, the name for grape also lives on used in names such as Botrytis or "noble rot".
Of course in the mineral world Botrys gives us the term botryoidal, grape-like as a habit or formation of minerals.
Staphylos, was also the name given to Dionysus's son with Ariadne, and also lives on in science.
However to note; botroidal carbonate-rich fluorapatite aka "Staffelite" is named after Staffel in Germany where it was originally discovered.
So the answer to the original question is not really.
The ever interesting world of mineralogy.
