My contribution focuses on a dionysiac experience of the Athenian women of the classical age, that is a ritual maenadism, organized by the City, which – this is what I suggest – selects a group of them, a kind of delegation, to participate to the most disturbing dionysiac experience: the ecstasy. This experience includes the short-lived lost of personality in order to access to the most inner encounter with the god, the possession by him, but in the frame of the very strict local and temporary boundaries of the ritual and for the benefit of the whole City. Of course, it has been well established that Athens – in contrast with the Thebes of the Euripides’ tragedy for instance – welcomed Dionysus as a great god in the City, but also that no “direct” source allows to assert categorically the existence of ritual maenadism in the classical Athens. The elements given by different sources make possible to suggest that even that extreme dionysiac experience exists among the various ways of the Dionysus’ reception by the City. Tragedy and visual arts present some amazing similarities in the maenadic portrait they show, excluding any possibility of reciprocal influences both because of the chronological gap and of the specific rules of every artistic field. A shared experience of a kind of “ritual reality”, long-lived by nature, observed by the poets, the sculptors and the painters, should be a more acceptable explanation. Finally, some very uncommon documents about the sanctuary of Delphi bear evidence of an ecstatic ritual practiced by women of Delphi named the Thyiads with the participation of Athenian Thyiads, for Dionysus on the Parnassus. So, the “artistic” portrait of the Athenian maenad lets us know something regarding an actual religious practice.