Bacchus, is another name, and the name used by the Romans, for the Greek god of Wine, Dionysus.

Bacchus/ Dionysus was an Olympian diety and a new god as he was the son of Zeus and the human girl Semele. While in her sixth month of pregnancy, she wished for Zeus to show himself to her in his full majesty, and she was struck dead by the force of his thunderbolt essence. Zeus then took the boy child from her womb and sewed up him into his own thigh. Thus Bacchus, "the twice born god," was given to King Athamas and his wife Ino to rear, and instruced to dress him as a girl to avoid detection by Zeus' jealous wife Hera. But Hera set the couple mad and the child was then given to the Nymphs of Nysa, then recognized again, was turned into a kid by Zeus.

Grown finally, Bacchus discovered the vine and its uses, but Hera drove him mad, and he wandered through Egypt and Syria. In Phygia, Cybele initiated him into her mystery cult and cured his madness.
Back into Greece, after marching an army to conquer India, he introduced the ecstatic revels of the vine outside of the towns, and came into conflict with his mother Semele's nephew, King Pentheus of Thebes, who refused to believe him a god, and stripped him of his thrysus emblem and shore off his long hair. Thus humiliating the god, Pentheus went to investigate the revels, dressed in womens' clothes, and being seen as a wolf, was torn limb from limb by his own mother, one of the revelers.

In his wanderings, Bacchus favored the island of Naxos, and on one of his visits there discovered Ariadne stranded after she had been abandoned by Theseus. Astonished by her youthful beauty, Bacchus ravished her, against her will at first, then married her and made her a goddess.