BACCHUS - An Euripidean tragedy

Story of the Bacchus An Euripidean tragedy

Dionysus’ relatives denied his divine nature . He gave them the proper punishment. He inflicted mania on the women of Thebes , and the daughters of Cadmus leading the groups climbed on Mount Cithaeron . Pentheus , son of Agave , on coming into power grudged the events and after capturing some of the Bacchae imprisoned them and sent seekers to find and capture the God. They found and arrested him without him showing any resistance and brought him before Pentheus. He ordered them to have him tied and imprisoned . Pentheus did not only maintain that Dionysus was no god but that he also dared to behave inhumanely .The latter, however , caused an earthquake and destroyed the palace, and after persuading Pentheus to disguise as a female maenad led him onto Cithaeron in order to survey the women . They however dismembered him , an act initiated by Agave. When Cadmus heard the news he gathered the parts of Pentheus’ dismembered body while he detected the dead man; s head in the hands of the woman who had given birth to him. Dionysus appears on the “theologeion” in the form of god and foretells the future with clarity and exactness . He urges everyone to honour him with acts and not look down on him.

…To the exploration of the boundaries of the relation between human and the divine is devoted the most clearly metaphysical and hence less interpretable , Euripidean tragedy the Bacchae , written in Macedonia , a little before his death and indisputably influenced by the poet’s contact with an unprecedented to him form of local Dionysian worship which maintained all its authenticity and savageness intact by social conventions. The traditional myth of the reaction the worship of the “home-coming” god encountered , already elaborated by Aeschylus , incarnated in bigot monarchs like Pentheus , is now being reformed in a painful plunge down into the abyss of Dionysus methexis , which levitates between the sense of sublime bliss and the horror of deadly dismemberment . The dual god , a host of both the tragic and satirical personae, paves the course of his domination with benevolent liquid such as milk and wine which spring from the rocks offering Bacchae the ultimate sense of bliss as well as with the blood of the dispersed members of his pursuer which are gathered , in a frantic hallucination of triumph by Agave , the leading woman of the bacchic group , the mother whose dismembered victim is her own son. With this drama , created before the cavern of death , the poet once more rephrases for another , yet last, time the enigma of human destiny , his own enigma : he pronounces the painful questions one by one , about the relation of the eternal with the ephemeral , of life and death , of body and spirit , of male to female , person and persona, of knowledge and ignorance , of bliss and misery , of laughter and lament , but confusing their limits and speechless in the inability to provide answers he leaves , before his last breath, choked in sobs of despair and nibbles of sarcasm as his sole trust , his open wounds of his wonder , bleeding to eternity

Polarization of apparent opposites – Greek versus barbarian , man versus woman – was a structural characteristic of the ancient Greek world view . Yet Dionysus in Bacchae demonstrates to the shattered people of Thebes than conventional thinking is utterly inadequate to the cognitive and metaphysical task of understanding the workings of the universe . He subverts binary thinking , inverts all hierarchies and confounds all reason. He may be worshipped in eastern lands , but his mother was a Theban Greek . He may allow the women of Thebes to question male authority , yet the ruthlessly sends them mad and destroys their lives in order to impose his own (far more stringent) authority instead. A male deity worshipped with images of erect phalluses, his masculinity is yet compromised by his long hair , delicate beauty and decorative clothing. Illicity celebrated on the wild hill-sides , he is the recipient of an important established cult at the heart of the city. An immortal god, millennia old, he is yet eternally youthful . He dissolves the difference between tragedy and comedy ; his worship offers both transcendental ecstasy and the most terrifying of all violence – a parent’s destruction of her child. In Bacchae Dionysus liberates prisoners , deranges the rational , effeminises men , and with his earthquake visibly , manifestly intrudes the untamed verdant natural world into the brick-built, ordered interior of the supposedly ‘ civilised ’ city. In one of his last plays, produced a tragedy proving that Dionysus , and our relationship to him , are ultimately unknowable . Apollo at Delphi famously told the ancient Greeks ‘to know thyself’; in Bacchae Dionysus warns us to be aware that we do not and can not really know ourselves or our universe at all.