Lusus
Lusus is the supposed son or companion of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and divine madness, to whom Portuguese national mythology attributed the foundation of ancient Lusitania and the fatherhood of its inhabitants, the Lusitanians, seen as the ancestors of the modern Portuguese people. Lusus thus has functioned in Portuguese culture as a founding myth.
Origins of the name
With the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, the Roman province of Lusitania was established, broadly in what is today Portugal south of the Douro river together with Extremadura in Spain. There are no historic records of the eponyms Luso or Lusus amongst the Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula.The etymology of Lusitania, like that of Lusitani, is unclear. The name may be of Celtic origin, or derive from Lucis or Lusis, an ancient people mentioned in Avienius's Ora maritima.
Origins of the mythological character
The entire character of Lusus in fact seems to derive from a mistranslation of an expression in Pliny's Naturalis Historia. Pliny writes: "M. Varro informs us that... the name 'Lusitania' is derived from the games of Father Bacchus, or the fury of his frantic attendants, and that Pan was the governor of the whole of it." The mistake would have been in the interpretation of the word lusum as a proper name rather than as the common noun meaning "games": thus "lusum liberi patris" becomes "Lusus of father Bacchus" rather than "the sportiveness of father Bacchus." The resulting interpretation made "Lusus" a companion or son of Bacchus. It is this interpretation that is seen in Luís Vaz de Camões's Lusiads :In Portugal
In The Lusiads by Camões, Lusus was the progenitor of the tribe of the Lusitanians and the founder of Lusitania. For the Portuguese of the 16th century it was important to look at the past prior to the Moorish domination to find the origins of the nationality.These interpretations would strongly be propagated by the authoritarian right-wing regime of the Estado Novo during the 20th century.