to Sophocles, the Sun was the celestial body which was most worshipped by the Thracians, and the cult of the solar deity was already well-developed in Thrace by the late Bronze Age. 's "Apollonian" form was seen as standing in opposition to the chthonic deities of death and the underworld in Thrace and in Asia Minor, and in both regions he was revered under the Greek epithet of (), the "god of mice," not only due to the mouse's role in Thracian religion as the symbol of indigeneity to Thrace, but also because the mouse was also considered to incarnate the antagonist, and therefore was its natural adversary. The "Dionysian" The chthonic and Fire aspects of were initially a separate god named Zagreus who was later subsumed into the figure of - in his form as Zagreus, was a god of fertility, of the rejuvenation of nature and the flowering of life, and he was personified as a bull, that is the ritual incarnation of the male principle, being the Thracian reflex of the same deity known to the Greeks as Dionysos. Therefore, the Greeks identified Zagreus, and later the chthonic aspect of , with their Dionysus, and they held that Dionysus originated in Thrace because the Thracians were unrestrained drinkers. The "Dionysian" was the personification of wine, which in the Thracian religion was the sacred drink which brought secret knowledge and immortality, and of the plant from which wine was made, the grape, similarly to the role of the soma among Indo-Aryan peoples, the haoma among Iranian peoples, and the mead among Germanic and Slavic peoples. The chthonic, or "Dionysian," 's personification of the sacred drink represented an ancient Indo-European mythological and ritual theme, and he therefore belonged to a type of deity whose various iterations among a number of cultures were nevertheless very similar, such as being associated with the constellation Orion, the bull, and the autumn season. The god's myth and cult reflected the making of wine from the grape, and therefore depicted his killing, dismemberment, and crushing to death, similarly to how the Indo-Aryan deity Soma, the embodiment of the sacred soma drink, was killed by the Asuras. The making of the wine itself was seen as transcending the essential opposition between the raw and the cooked: the wine initially belonged to wild nature and was brought into human culture by cutting and cultivating it, and