Euripides’ Bacchae

Produced posthumously along with Iphigenia at Aulis and Alcmaeon in Corinth and awarded first prize at the City Dionysia in 405 bce, Euripides’ Bacchae is one of his most well-known and influential tragedies. One of the most significant aspects of the play, attracting religious, gendered, psychological, philosophical, and metatheatrical readings, is the appearance as a major character of the god Dionysus seeking to establish his cult in the city of Thebes. Dionysus is simultaneously an outsider, setting off from Lydia with his band of Asiatic maenads, and a son of the city, conceived by Semele, a member of the Theban royal family, and born out of his father Zeus’ thigh after the death of his mother. Worshipping Dionysus brings ecstasy and joy, experienced through revels, music, and dancing, yet there is also a vengeful and destructive side to the god. He seeks to punish his maternal aunts for their lack of belief in his divine parentage and drives them from the palace onto the mountains along with the other Theban women. At the same time, the Theban elder Cadmus, Dionysus’ maternal grandfather, and the prophet Tiresias attire themselves in Bacchic garb and head for the mountains in a show of respect for the god. But Cadmus’s grandson Pentheus, the ruler of the city, is hostile to the establishment of Dionysus’ cult and refuses to accept the outsider. In the course of the play, Pentheus confronts Dionysus and attempts to constrain him by force to reassert his control over the city. Yet it is impossible for a mortal to defeat a god. Intrigued by news of the women’s Bacchic revels on the mountains, Pentheus is persuaded by Dionysus to disguise himself as a maenad and visit the mountains to observe the women. A messenger reports the terrible news of Pentheus’s death, torn apart as if he were an animal in a Bacchic ritual, by his mother and her two sisters. The play culminates with a powerful scene in which Agave returns to the palace carrying the head of her own son, believing it to be the head of a mountain lion they have killed. During the scene her father Cadmus gradually helps her to see that she has in fact dismembered her own son. The play concludes with the exile of the remaining members of the royal family.