Half-Boiled Dionysus: The Etymology of Mesatis and the Unfinished Feast of the Titans

Pausanias tells that the historians of Patras derived the name of the neighbourhood of Mesatis from the myth of Dionysus and the Titans. They were probably thinking of the verb mesazo (to be half-boiled), since Zeus arrived before the Titans had the time to cook Dionysus completely. The half-boiling of Dionysus is a very significant detail, since it expresses the ambiguity between cooked and raw, which is also present in other pieces of evidence for this controversial myth; it is also a detail which shows the Titanic perversion of the normal sacrifice; and above all, it reveals the narrative strategy of the narrators of this myth, both pagans and Christians, to avoid making explicit mention of the taboo of theophagy.