The Bacchae
by Euripides · Βάκχαι
Assigned by 7 of the 9 reading lists
- Written
- c. 405 BCE
- Form
- Tragedy
- Language
- Greek
- Length
- Short · 90 ppunder 120 pages
- Difficulty
- Demanding3 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendEuripides V (The Complete Greek Tragedies), translated by William ArrowsmithUniversity of Chicago Press, 2013The Chicago series is what most programs assign; Arrowsmith's Bacchae is vivid and accurate.
Also good
- John Davie. Prose translation with good notes, useful if you want the sense before the poetry.
- Anne Carson. Startling and very fast, best read after you know what happens.
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The god Dionysus arrives in Thebes in human disguise to punish the city for denying his divinity. He drives the women of Thebes, including the royal family, into ecstatic worship on Mount Cithaeron. The young king Pentheus tries to suppress the cult, imprisons the stranger, and is then lured by him into spying on the women dressed as one of them. His mother Agave, in a god-sent frenzy, tears him apart with her bare hands and carries his head home believing it a lion's. Cadmus, her father, brings her back to herself, and the god exiles the whole family. Produced after Euripides' death, it won first prize.
Why it's on the list
This is the last great Athenian tragedy and the one that turns on the theatre itself. The god of drama walks on stage in a mask, puts a costume on the man who refuses to believe in him, and destroys him with an illusion. Programs assign it because it puts the sharpest possible question to Greek rationalism at the moment that rationalism was at its most confident: what happens to a city, or a mind, that has no room for what Dionysus represents. Euripides gives no comfortable answer. The god is real, the worship is beautiful, the punishment is monstrous, and the play refuses to say that Pentheus deserved it or that the women were wrong. It has become the standard text for thinking about religious ecstasy, repression and the cost of both.
Key themes
- God and faith
- Dionysus is unmistakably real and entirely without pity. The play asks what worship of such a power could look like, and gives two answers, the chorus's serenity and Agave's hands.
- Madness and the irrational
- Madness here is not a symptom but a punishment and a gift at once. The women on the mountain are blessed and the royal house is destroyed by the same condition.
- Reason and passion
- Pentheus is all control and suspicion, and his repression is what the god uses to ruin him. His curiosity about the women is already the god working in him.
- Women and men
- A young king's fear of what women do when unsupervised drives the plot. What he imagines happening on the mountain is sexual; what is actually happening is religious, until he arrives.
- Family and inheritance
- Dionysus is Pentheus' cousin, Agave is his mother, Cadmus his grandfather. The catastrophe is domestic, and the recognition scene between Agave and her father is the cruellest in Greek drama.
Overview
The Bacchae is short, perhaps ninety pages in translation, and it is built with unusual symmetry. Dionysus speaks the prologue and the epilogue. Between them the play alternates between scenes at the palace gates and reports from the mountain, and the reports get worse. The chorus is unlike any other in surviving tragedy: these are Asian women who came with the god, they worship him throughout, and their odes are the most beautiful lyric Euripides wrote.
Euripides was in his seventies and living in Macedonia, away from Athens, when he wrote it. He died before it was staged. His son or nephew produced it in Athens, probably in 405, and it won the first prize the poet had rarely been given in life. Athens at that moment was a year from losing the Peloponnesian War.
The play has two levels running at once. On the surface a young ruler faces a public order problem, a foreign cult drawing the city’s women out of their houses at night, and handles it badly. Underneath, a god is taking a revenge he announced in the first speech, and every move Pentheus makes to assert control is a move the god has already arranged.
What happens
Dionysus, born to Semele of Thebes and fathered by Zeus, has been denied by Semele’s own sisters, who say she was struck by lightning for lying about her lover. He has come home disguised as a mortal priest of his own cult. Already he has driven the Theban women, Agave among them, out to Mount Cithaeron in ecstasy.
Cadmus, the aged founder of Thebes, and the blind prophet Tiresias dress themselves in fawnskins to join the rites, and the sight of two old men in cult costume is comic before it is ominous. Pentheus returns to find the city emptied of women and arrests the stranger. The interrogation is the centre of the play: the king asks aggressive questions, the prisoner answers calmly and truthfully, and nothing lands. Pentheus orders him locked in the stables, then imagines he has tied him up while roping a bull. An earthquake shakes the palace. The stranger walks out.
A herdsman arrives with the first report from the mountain: the women sleeping in good order, milk and honey springing up, and then, when men try to capture them, cattle torn apart with bare hands. Pentheus orders out the army. The stranger offers an alternative. Would the king like to see the women for himself? He would. To go safely he must dress as a bacchant, and the scene of the god fussing over the king’s wig and hem is the most frightening in Greek theatre, because Pentheus has already begun to see double and to enjoy it.
The second messenger reports the end. Pentheus was set in a pine tree for a view, the god called the women’s attention to him, and they pulled the tree down. His mother took the lead. Agave comes home in triumph with his head, sure it is a lion’s, calling for her son to come and admire her kill. Cadmus leads her word by word back to sanity. Then Dionysus appears undisguised and sentences the family: Agave and her sisters into exile, Cadmus and his wife transformed into serpents and driven to wander. They protest that the punishment is too great. He says a god should not have been treated as they treated him, and leaves.
How to read it
Read it in one sitting. The play is engineered so that the horror accumulates, and breaking it across two evenings throws the design away.
Track Pentheus’ language. He begins with the vocabulary of policing, of order, of what is proper for women, and every time he says one of those words the god uses it. By the dressing scene the king is asking how he looks. Nothing has been argued with him; he has simply been turned inside out.
Do not make the play a lesson. The two obvious readings both fail. If it is a warning against denying the gods, then the punishment of Cadmus, who does not deny them, makes no sense. If it is an attack on religion by a sceptical playwright, then the chorus’s hymns are inexplicably lovely and the god is inexplicably real. Euripides shows a power that is neither moral nor optional, and lets you sit with the fact that the beautiful thing and the atrocity are the same thing.
Watch the chorus. Their odes on peace, on the wisdom of not being too clever, on the sweetness of belonging, give you the case for Dionysus at full strength, and they sing the last of them while Pentheus is being killed.
Arrowsmith’s version keeps the pace of the dialogue and the difficulty of the lyrics. If you want the exact sense of a disputed line, check a prose translation alongside; several key passages are textually damaged, including the end of the god’s final speech.
Questions it raises
- Is Dionysus punishing impiety, or taking a private revenge on his mother’s family? Does the play let you tell the difference?
- Pentheus is curious about the women before the god touches him. How much of his destruction was already inside him?
- What is the difference between the women on the mountain before the men arrive and after? Is the violence the god’s or the intrusion’s?
- Cadmus and Tiresias accept the god out of prudence. Is that piety?
- Why does the god of theatre destroy a man by putting him in a costume?
- Agave regains her mind only to hold her son’s head. Is her recovery a mercy or the final cruelty?
Highlights
Dionysus opens the play by naming himself, saying he has come to Thebes disguised as a man because his mother's sisters denied that Zeus fathered him and called her death a punishment for a lie.
Paraphrase. The audience knows everything from the first minute; no other character does.
Tiresias tells Pentheus that the new god gives wine, which relieves men of pain and gives them sleep, and that a city gains nothing by fighting a power it cannot see.
Paraphrase of the old prophet's defence of the cult.
The herdsman reports the women on the mountain waking at dawn, ordered and calm, with milk and honey flowing from the ground, until the men try to seize them and the same women tear cattle apart.
Paraphrase. The play's two faces of the god in a single report.
Agave enters carrying her trophy and calls on the city to admire her hunting, then asks where Pentheus is, and her father makes her look again at what she is holding.
Paraphrase of the recognition scene.
