Khaire!

I was thinking about your question and I have a suggestion: We have to remember what life was like back then. It was not a life of ease, nor was it as simple as we thought. It was a time of wars, conquests, famines, disease, fires. Women, more often than not, were in the homes, or the fields. They wove, cooked, baked, raised babies, etc. There were a lot of women who were also slaves. In all this uproar, with the constant threat of the above disasters, these women were stressed. There was also a lot of upheaval about religions too. Men wanted a patriarchy, complete with male gods. They were trying very hard to get women to follow the male part of the pantheon. Perhaps what happened is that during the harvest, the time of Dionysos, the women were encouraged to have some wine. Perhaps, they drank enough to release inhibitions, which led to some of the women turning on some of the men, and taking out all the repressed emotions of the times on them. It only takes one incident to become a legend.