Study guide

The Bacchae

by Euripides

Overview

Author: Euripides of Athens (c. 480–406 BC), the youngest of the three great tragedians; about 90 plays were known in antiquity, of which 18 or 19 survive
First performed: After the poet's death, at the City Dionysia in Athens, probably in 405 BC, produced by his son (or nephew) Euripides the Younger together with Iphigenia at Aulis and the lost Alcmaeon in Corinth; the set won first prize
Genre: Tragedy in Greek verse: spoken iambic trimeters (with some trochaic tetrameters) for the episodes, lyric metres for the choral odes
Setting: Before the royal palace of Thebes, beside the smoking tomb of Semele; the decisive events happen off stage on Mount Cithaeron and are told by messengers
Structure: Prologue, parodos, five episodes with five choral odes (stasima), and exodos; 1,392 lines in the standard numbering, with a gap in the text near the end
Main characters: Dionysus (disguised as a Lydian stranger); Pentheus, king of Thebes; Cadmus, his grandfather; the prophet Teiresias; Agave, Pentheus' mother; two Messengers; a Chorus of Asian Bacchae
The myth: Dionysus, son of Zeus and the Theban princess Semele, returns to his mother's city to punish the family that denied his birth and to establish his rites
Key ideas: Recognising a god, ecstasy and violence, wisdom and cleverness, seeing and spectacle, male and female, city and wild, the justice of the gods
Quoted translation: Gilbert Murray, rhymed verse translation (London: George Allen, 1902), quoted from the 1906 second edition; the stage directions are Murray's own; references use the standard Greek line numbers, so they are approximate for the English

Context

Euripides (c. 480–406 BC) wrote for the Athenian theatre for almost fifty years, from his first production in 455 BC to the end of the Peloponnesian War. In his own lifetime he won first prize only four times, yet he was the most discussed playwright of his age: comic poets, above all Aristophanes, parodied his clever heroes, his ragged kings and his questioning of the gods. In about 408 BC he left Athens for the court of King Archelaus of Macedon, where he died in the winter of 407–406. The Bacchae, his last surviving tragedy, was found among his papers and staged in Athens after his death, probably at the City Dionysia of 405 BC; with Iphigenia at Aulis and the lost Alcmaeon in Corinth it won the first prize that Athens had so often refused him (Dodds 1960) (Kovacs 2002).

The play is unique among surviving tragedies in having the god of the theatre as its protagonist. Dionysus (also called Bacchus, Bacchios and Bromios, 'the Roarer') was the god of wine, of ecstatic possession, of masks and of the life of growing things. His worshippers, chiefly women, were called bacchae or maenads ('mad women'). In myth and in some real cults they went out to the mountains in winter, wearing fawn-skins and carrying the thyrsus, a fennel stalk tipped with ivy, to dance in the god's honour; in myth they also tore animals apart (sparagmos) and ate the raw flesh (omophagia). The play draws on this cult, and its descriptions of maenadic ritual are among our richest ancient evidence, though they mix real practice with mythical marvel (Dodds 1960) (Henrichs 1978) (Burkert 1985).

Tragedy at Athens was itself an act of worship of Dionysus. The City (or Great) Dionysia was held each spring in honour of Dionysus Eleuthereus: his statue was carried into the city in procession, sacrifices were made, and then, in the theatre on the south slope of the Acropolis, three poets each presented three tragedies and a satyr play before the assembled citizens. Actors and chorus were male citizens wearing masks. A play in which a god in disguise arrives, a king is dressed in costume and a man becomes a spectacle for others' eyes was therefore performed at the god's own festival, in his own precinct, by men playing women (Pickard-Cambridge 1968) (Csapo 1995) (Goldhill 1987).

The story was old. Aeschylus had written a Pentheus, now lost, and vase-painters had shown the death of Pentheus at the hands of maenads since the late sixth century. Behind the play lie other myths of resistance to the god, such as those of Lycurgus of Thrace and of the daughters of Minyas, and the family history of Cadmus, founder of Thebes, whose daughter Semele bore Dionysus to Zeus and whose grandson Actaeon was torn apart by his own hounds. Euripides' originality lies less in the plot than in its treatment: the god's calm irony, the king's hidden longing, the beauty of the choral odes and the horror of the ending (Dodds 1960) (Seaford 1996).

The Bacchae has had an extraordinary afterlife. Plutarch reports that at the Parthian court in 53 BC an actor sang Agave's lines holding the head of the defeated Roman general Crassus. In modern times Nietzsche made Dionysus the key to tragedy, the Cambridge Ritualists found in the play the ritual origin of drama, and twentieth-century productions treated it as a study of mass hysteria, sexuality and totalitarian violence. Gilbert Murray's rhymed translation of 1902, the one quoted here, was itself part of this revival: for a generation of English readers and theatre audiences it was the Bacchae (Nietzsche 1999) (Perris 2016).

Plot overview

Dionysus arrives at Thebes disguised as a young man from Lydia. His mother Semele's sisters have denied that she was loved by Zeus, and the young king Pentheus refuses to honour the new god, so Dionysus has driven all the women of Thebes, among them Pentheus' mother Agave, mad and out to Mount Cithaeron. His own band of devotees from Asia forms the Chorus. The old king Cadmus and the prophet Teiresias, dressed as worshippers, set off to dance on the mountain; Pentheus mocks them, orders the arrest of the stranger and threatens the maenads with chains.

The stranger is brought in, calm and smiling. Pentheus questions him, cuts his hair, takes his wand and locks him in the stables. An earthquake shakes the palace, fire blazes on Semele's tomb, and the stranger walks out free. A herdsman reports the marvels he has seen on the mountain: women suckling wild animals, wine and milk springing from the earth, and then, when the men tried to seize them, cattle torn apart and villages raided. Pentheus calls out his army, but the stranger, in a scene of mounting control, awakens the king's desire to watch the women in secret and persuades him to disguise himself in women's clothes.

Pentheus returns dressed as a maenad, giddy and seeing double, and is led through the city to the mountain. A second messenger reports what followed: the stranger set Pentheus on top of a bent pine tree, the god's voice called the women, and they pulled the tree down. Pentheus tore off his headdress and begged his mother to recognise him, but Agave, possessed, wrenched off his arm, and the women tore him to pieces. She impaled his head on her thyrsus and carries it back, believing it the head of a lion cub.

Agave enters in triumph and invites the city to share her prize. Cadmus returns with the gathered remains of Pentheus' body and, in a scene of slow questioning, brings her back to her senses until she sees what she holds. After a gap in the manuscript, where Agave lamented over her son's body, Dionysus appears in his own form, pronounces exile on the family and foretells that Cadmus and his wife Harmonia will be turned into serpents. Father and daughter part, and the Chorus closes with lines on the unexpected ways of the gods.

Part by part

Part 1: Prologue: The God Comes to Thebes

1–63

Summary

Dionysus enters alone before the palace of Thebes. He announces himself as the son of Zeus and Semele, who died here when struck by Zeus' lightning, and points to her tomb, still smoking and wreathed with his vines. He has travelled from Lydia and Phrygia through Persia, Bactria and Arabia, teaching his dances and mysteries, and Thebes is the first Greek city he has come to. He has taken human form.

He explains his anger. Semele's sisters said that she had a mortal lover and that Zeus killed her for the lie; so he has stung them, and all the women of Thebes with them, into madness and driven them to the mountain. The new king, his cousin Pentheus, fights against the god and excludes him from worship. Dionysus will prove his divinity to the city and, if the Thebans attack the women, lead the maenads into battle himself. He then calls his own band of Asian devotees to surround the palace with their music while he goes to the women on Cithaeron.

Analysis

Euripides often opens with a god who tells the audience what is coming, but here the god will stay on stage as a character, disguised as his own priest. The audience therefore knows throughout what Pentheus does not: that the smiling stranger is Dionysus. Nearly every exchange that follows is charged with this double meaning, and the play's irony begins in the prologue's emphasis on a god 'changed in shape' (Dodds 1960) (Segal 1982).

The speech also sets up the play's moral problem. Dionysus' grievance is personal, a wrong done to his mother's name and his own honour, and his punishment has already begun before Pentheus appears. His long list of Asian lands presents him as a foreign arrival, though he insists he is Theban by birth. The question of whether this god is stranger or kinsman, Greek or barbarian, runs through the whole play (Seaford 1996).

For this I veil my godhead with the wan Form of the things that die, and walk as Man.

Ba. 53–54

The disguise that drives the plot. Murray's 'walk as Man' gives the god's frank statement of purpose a solemn ring; every later meeting between Pentheus and the stranger depends on it.

Pentheus; who on my body hath begun A war with God.

Ba. 44–46

The Greek uses a single verb, theomachei, 'he fights the god'. Pentheus is defined from the start as a theomachos, a mortal who wars against a god, a type whose end is never in doubt.

There by the castle side I see her place, the Tomb of the Lightning's Bride,

Ba. 6–9

Semele's tomb, kept sacred by Cadmus, is the visible sign of the god's birth on stage. It will flare up again in the palace miracle.

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Part 2: Parodos: The Hymn of the Bacchae

64–169

Summary

The Chorus, a band of women who have followed Dionysus from Asia, enters with drums and pipes. They call for holy silence and sing a hymn of the god's worship. They bless the person who knows the god's rites, joins the dance on the mountain and keeps his life pure. They tell the story of the god's double birth: Semele, struck by the thunderbolt, gave birth prematurely as she died, and Zeus hid the child in his thigh, fastened with golden pins, until he was born a horned god crowned with snakes.

They call on Thebes, Semele's city, to put on ivy and fawn-skins and join the dance. They tell how the drum was invented in Crete by the Curetes for the infant Zeus, given to Rhea and taken by the Satyrs for Dionysus' festival. The last stanza describes the ecstasy itself: the worshipper falls to the ground in the dance, catches the goat and eats its raw flesh, while the earth flows with milk, wine and honey and the god leads the dancers with a torch. The ode ends with the maenad leaping like a foal beside its mother.

Analysis

The parodos is our most complete poetic picture of Dionysiac religion, and it is at first entirely attractive. Its language of blessedness and purity resembles that of the mystery cults, and its cry 'to the mountain' promises release from house and loom. Dodds stressed that the ode describes a real religious experience of communal joy, not merely a drunken revel (Dodds 1960) (Dodds 1951).

Yet the climax of the song is a scene of raw flesh and blood. The joy of eating the torn goat sits beside the miraculous springs of milk and honey; the same rites that make the earth flow with nourishment also tear living things apart. The audience will remember this when the maenads tear apart cattle and then Pentheus. Murray's anapaestic rhythms and refrains catch the excitement of the original, though his rhymes add a sweetness of their own (Segal 1982).

Oh, blessed he in all wise, Who hath drunk the Living Fountain,

Ba. 72–77

A makarismos, or blessing on the initiate, in the language of the mystery religions. Murray's 'Living Fountain' adds a biblical tone that is not in the Greek, which speaks of knowing the rites of the gods.

To the joy of the red quick fountains, The blood of the hill-goat torn,

Ba. 135–139

The sparagmos and the 'joy of eating raw flesh' (omophagia) appear first as a part of worship. The image prepares for the two messenger speeches.

Oh, then, like a colt as he runs by a river, A colt by his dam, when the heart of him sings,

Ba. 165–167

The ode closes on an image of innocent animal freedom. In the Greek the dancer is a girl; Murray makes her a 'Bacchanal'.

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Part 3: First Episode: Two Old Men and a Young King

170–369

Summary

Teiresias, old and blind, comes to fetch Cadmus; both are dressed in fawn-skins and ivy and mean to dance for the god on the mountain. Cadmus feels himself made young again. They are the only men in Thebes who will honour the god, and they refuse to reason about the ancestral beliefs. Pentheus arrives, back from a journey, furious at the reports that the women have left home for drunken and sexual rites under the cover of worship and that a perfumed, golden-haired stranger is leading them. He has imprisoned some women and threatens to hunt down the rest and behead the stranger. He is outraged to see his grandfather in Bacchic costume and accuses Teiresias of seeking new fees from a new cult.

Teiresias answers in a formal speech. Two powers are greatest for mortals: Demeter, the earth, who gives dry food, and Dionysus, who gave the liquid of the grape that brings sleep and forgetting of sorrow. He explains away the story of the thigh-birth as a misunderstanding of words, and adds that the god also gives prophecy and panic in war. He warns Pentheus not to think that force is power. Cadmus adds a more worldly argument: even if this god is not real, it is good for the family to say he is, and he reminds Pentheus of Actaeon, torn apart for boasting against Artemis. Pentheus orders the prophet's seat of augury destroyed and the stranger arrested. Teiresias leaves with Cadmus, playing on Pentheus' name, which recalls penthos, 'grief'.

Analysis

The old men are both dignified and comic. Two elderly figures stumbling off to dance in women's costume is an absurd sight, and their arguments are oddly inadequate: Teiresias defends the god with something close to contemporary sophistic theory of the gods as natural forces, and Cadmus with family advantage. Many critics have seen them as representatives of a respectable, prudent religion that has not grasped the danger of the god it is accepting (Winnington-Ingram 1948) (Dodds 1960).

Pentheus is shown at once as a man of the city, a ruler concerned with order, who imagines what the women do in sexual terms that the messenger will soon refute. His obsession with what happens on the mountain, and his description of the stranger's beauty, hint at a fascination he does not admit. The leader of the Chorus and Teiresias both call his mind sick; the threat of the Actaeon story, a grandson of Cadmus torn by hounds, hangs over him (Segal 1982).

Aye, Thebes is blinded. Thou and I can see.

Ba. 196

The blind prophet claims sight. Murray sharpens a line that in the Greek says 'we alone think rightly, the others badly', but the play's paradox of vision and blindness is already there.

Two spirits there be, Young Prince, that in man's world are first of worth.

Ba. 274–275

Teiresias' pairing of Demeter and Dionysus, bread and wine, treats the gods almost as names for natural goods, in the manner of the fifth-century thinker Prodicus.

Dream not thou that force is power;

Ba. 310

The play's central warning to Pentheus: political power and violence cannot master the god, as the coming scenes will show.

Lie boldly, and say He Is!

Ba. 333–336

Cadmus' advice to pretend belief for the family's honour. The god will reward this prudent piety with exile.

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Part 4: First Stasimon: Ode to Holiness

370–433

Summary

The Chorus calls on Hosia, Holiness, to hear the insolence of Pentheus against the son of Semele, whose gifts are dancing, music, laughter and the end of care. Unbridled mouths and lawless folly end in disaster; the quiet life and good sense keep a house firm. Cleverness is not wisdom, and life is short: the one who reaches for great things loses what he has.

In the second pair of stanzas the women long to escape to Cyprus, the island of Aphrodite, or to Pieria near Olympus, home of the Muses, where the Graces and Desire live and the Bacchic rites are lawful. The god loves Peace, the giver of wealth; he gives the joy of wine to rich and poor alike, and hates only the one who refuses to live happily. The Chorus ends by declaring that it will accept what the common people believe and do.

Analysis

This ode states the values the Chorus claims for its god: moderation, quiet, piety, and a democratic religion open to all. Its most famous phrase, that cleverness (to sophon) is not wisdom (sophia), sets up a contest over the meaning of 'wise' that runs through the play. Pentheus thinks himself clever; the god's followers claim a wisdom that accepts limits (Dodds 1960).

The irony is that the god of quiet and peace will soon act with terrifying violence, and that the Chorus, which praises restraint, will call for Pentheus' blood. Critics differ on whether this is a contradiction in Dionysus himself, in his worshippers, or in religion generally; the ode does not resolve the question but makes it hard to ignore (Winnington-Ingram 1948) (Segal 1982).

Thou Immaculate on high;

Ba. 370

Murray's rendering of Hosia, 'Holiness' or 'Piety', a personified divine principle rather than an Olympian god.

But the world's Wise are not wise, Claiming more than mortal may.

Ba. 395–396

The famous paradox to sophon d' ou sophia, 'cleverness is not wisdom', here rendered as a rhymed epigram.

The simple nameless herd of Humanity Hath deeds and faith that are truth enough for me!

Ba. 430–433

The Chorus sides with ordinary belief against intellectual pride. Readers have long debated whether this is Euripides' own view or a dramatic voice.

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Part 5: Second Episode: The Stranger in Chains

434–518

Summary

A soldier brings in the stranger, bound. He reports that the prisoner made no attempt to escape and offered his hands with a smile, and that the women already in prison have been freed: their chains fell off and the doors opened by themselves. Pentheus mocks the stranger's beauty, his long curls and pale skin, and questions him. In quick line-by-line exchange (stichomythia) the stranger says he is from Lydia, that Dionysus himself gave him the rites face to face, that the mysteries cannot be told to the uninitiated, and that the rites are held mostly at night.

Pentheus has the stranger's sacred lock of hair cut off, takes his thyrsus and orders him imprisoned. The stranger warns that the god will release him and that the god is present and sees what he suffers, though Pentheus cannot see him. When Pentheus names himself with pride as son of Agave and Echion, the stranger replies that his name fits misfortune. Pentheus orders him tied up in the stables and threatens to sell the Chorus as slaves or set them to the loom.

Analysis

The first meeting of king and god is a masterpiece of dramatic irony. Every answer the stranger gives is true and misleading at once: he speaks of the god as another person while being that god. Pentheus' attempt to strip him of hair and wand is an attempt to strip the god of his power, but it reverses the order of the later scene, where the god will give Pentheus long hair and a thyrsus (Segal 1982) (Seaford 1996).

The scene also shows the attraction beneath Pentheus' hostility. His first words dwell on the stranger's body and on what the women do at night; the stranger plays on his curiosity by refusing to reveal the mysteries. The exchange about identity ('you do not know who you are') is the play's sharpest statement of Pentheus' blindness to himself as well as to the god (Dodds 1960).

Marry, a fair shape for a woman's eye, Sir stranger!

Ba. 453–454

Pentheus' first response to the god is to his beauty. His scorn already betrays fascination.

Wise words being brought To blinded eyes will seem as things of nought.

Ba. 480

The stranger returns the theme of wisdom and folly to Pentheus, in the language of sight and blindness.

Thou knowest not what end thou seekest, nor What deed thou doest, nor what man thou art!

Ba. 506–508

Pentheus answers by naming his parents; the stranger replies that the name is fit for disaster. Knowing one's own identity becomes the play's question.

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Part 6: Second Stasimon: Dirce and the Dragon's Son

519–575

Summary

The Chorus addresses the Theban spring Dirce, where the infant Dionysus was washed when Zeus took him from the fire into his thigh and named him Dithyrambos. Why, they ask, does Dirce now reject them? The time will come when Thebes will care for Bromios.

They turn on Pentheus, son of Echion, one of the 'Sown Men' who sprang from the dragon's teeth: he is no mortal but a monster, like the earth-born Giants who fought the gods. He has imprisoned their leader and threatens them. They call on Dionysus to come down from Olympus and, in a final stanza, imagine where he might be, among the beasts of Nysa, on Parnassus, or in Pieria where Orpheus once moved trees and animals with his song, and pray that he will cross the rivers of Macedonia to come to them.

Analysis

The ode makes the conflict cosmic. Pentheus' descent from Echion, whose name recalls echis, 'snake', and from the dragon's teeth links him with the earth-born Giants whose war against the Olympians was a familiar image of disorder overcome. In the Chorus's eyes Pentheus is not a king defending order but a monster of chaos (Segal 1982).

The closing journey through northern Greece and Macedonia may reflect Euripides' last years at the Macedonian court, but this is only a guess. Murray's 'Thou of the Twofold Door' interprets the god's name Dithyrambos, which ancient etymologists explained as 'he of the double door', born twice, from his mother and from Zeus (Dodds 1960).

Thou of the Twofold Door, and seal thee Mine, O Bromios,

Ba. 526

Murray's version of the cult title Dithyrambos, explained as a reference to the god's double birth.

Dark and of the dark impassioned Is this Pentheus' blood;

Ba. 537–541

The Chorus makes Pentheus a child of the earth and of the serpent, an enemy of heaven like the Giants.

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Part 7: Third Episode: Earthquake, Messenger and the Snare

576–861

Summary

The god's voice is heard from within. He calls on the earthquake; the palace shakes and fire blazes on Semele's tomb. The Chorus falls to the ground, and the stranger walks out, unbound. He tells them how Pentheus, deluded, tied up a bull in the stable instead of him, ran to put out the fire, and stabbed at a phantom, while the god brought the building down. Pentheus storms out, amazed to find his prisoner free. A herdsman arrives from Cithaeron and describes the women: sleeping modestly in the woods, then rising to wreathe themselves with ivy and snakes, suckling fawns and wolf cubs, striking springs of water, wine and milk from the ground. When the herdsmen tried to capture Agave the women attacked, tore cattle apart with bare hands, raided villages, carried fire in their hair unhurt and routed armed men with their wands. He begs the king to receive the god.

Pentheus orders out his army. The stranger warns him not to fight a god, offers to bring the women back without weapons, and is refused. Then, with a single exclamation, he changes course and asks whether Pentheus would like to see the women on the mountain. The king's desire breaks out at once. Step by step the stranger persuades him that he must go disguised as a woman, with long hair, a full-length robe, a headband, fawn-skin and thyrsus. Pentheus resists, hesitates and goes into the palace. Alone, Dionysus tells the Chorus that the man is walking into the net, prays for Pentheus' madness and humiliation, and says he will now dress him in the robe in which he will go to Hades.

Analysis

The palace miracle is presented largely in words, and scholars dispute how much of the destruction the audience saw; the god's own account, with its bull and phantom, suggests a delusion in Pentheus' mind as much as a physical collapse. The messenger's speech then gives the most vivid picture in Greek literature of the maenads, beautiful and violent at once: the same hands that nurse animals tear them apart. It confirms that the women are chaste, against Pentheus' suspicions, but shows that their power is uncontrollable (Dodds 1960) (Henrichs 1978).

The turning point is the god's 'Ah!' (810), after which Pentheus' will is no longer his own. Murray's stage direction says that Pentheus now speaks the thoughts the god puts into him, but the text allows a subtler reading: Dionysus only releases a desire to look that Pentheus already had. The dressing plan reverses the arrest scene, and the god's closing speech, which asks for Pentheus to be mocked through the streets in woman's dress, reveals a punishment designed to shame as well as destroy (Segal 1982) (Zeitlin 1985).

Spirit of the Chained Earthquake, Hear my word; awake, awake!

Ba. 585

The god acts directly for the first time. The palace, symbol of Pentheus' power, is shaken from within.

And one a young fawn held, and one a wild Wolf cub, and fed them with white milk, and smiled

Ba. 699–702

The herdsman's picture of maternal tenderness to wild creatures. The mothers who suckle animals have left their own babies at home, and one of them will kill her son.

Than kick against the pricks, since Dionyse Is God, and thou but mortal.

Ba. 794–795

A Greek proverb about an ox kicking against the goad, used for mortal resistance to divine power. The phrase later appears in Acts of the Apostles, which made it familiar in English.

Man, thou wouldst fain behold them on the hill Praying!

Ba. 810–811

The question on which the play turns. In the Greek it is preceded by the god's single cry, a; from here Pentheus is lost.

Damsels, the lion walketh to the net!

Ba. 847–848

The Greek says 'the man' is entering the net. Murray's lion anticipates the beast Agave will think she has killed; the hunt imagery now becomes explicit.

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Part 8: Third Stasimon: The Fawn Escaped

862–911

Summary

The Chorus longs to dance all night again, barefoot on the dewy grass, like a fawn that has escaped the hunters' nets and runs free in the meadows far from men. A refrain asks what is wisdom, or what finer gift the gods can give, than to hold one's hand in triumph over the head of an enemy; what is fine is always dear.

The second stanza declares that divine power moves slowly but surely, hunting down the impious man who honours folly and not the gods. It costs little to believe that whatever is divine has power, and that what has long been accepted by custom is grounded in nature. After the refrain is repeated, the ode ends with blessings on the one who has escaped the storm and reached harbour, and on the one who is happy day by day.

Analysis

This ode combines the play's most lyrical image with its most disturbing ethics. The fawn escaping the hunt is the Chorus's own release from Pentheus; the refrain, however, defines wisdom as revenge, as the Greek makes clear: to hold one's hand over the head of the enemy. The phrasing looks forward with dreadful literalness to Agave holding her son's head (Dodds 1960) (Segal 1982).

Murray softened the refrain. His 'To hold a hand uplifted over Hate' turns a cry of vengeance into something like moral triumph over hatred, a sign of how his liberal, humane reading of Euripides shaped his translation. Comparing the refrain with a literal version is an excellent way to see a translator's choices at work (Perris 2016).

What else is Wisdom? What of man's endeavour Or God's high grace, so lovely and so great?

Ba. 877–878

The refrain's question, 'what is the wise thing?', returns to the play's contest over wisdom.

O Strength of God, slow art thou and still, Yet failest never!

Ba. 882–883

Divine justice as a patient hunter. The Chorus is now openly confident of the outcome.

That To Live is happy, hath found his Heaven!

Ba. 910–911

The ode's close returns to the quiet happiness of the first stasimon, just before the god leads Pentheus to his death.

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Part 9: Fourth Episode: The King in Woman's Dress

912–976

Summary

Dionysus calls Pentheus out of the palace. The king appears dressed as a maenad, and he is changed: he sees two suns and two cities of Thebes, and he sees the stranger as a bull with horns. He asks whether he looks like his mother or his aunt. Like a dresser or a mother, the stranger tucks back a lock of hair that has slipped out while Pentheus was practising the dance, straightens his belt and the hem of his robe, and shows him how to hold the thyrsus.

Pentheus now boasts that he could lift Cithaeron on his shoulders, then agrees not to use force against the women but to hide and watch. He imagines them making love in the bushes. The god promises that he will be famous, that he will be carried home in his mother's arms; Pentheus takes this as a sign of luxury and honour. When he goes off to the mountain, Dionysus calls on Agave and her sisters to receive him and says that the outcome will show who is the victor.

Analysis

The scene is at once funny, pathetic and horrifying. The king who wished to imprison women now fusses over his costume, and the audience, watching a male actor dressed as a woman dressed as a maenad, sees the theatre itself reflected. Zeitlin's influential essay reads this as a moment where tragedy shows its own power to make men take on the role of the other, and Segal sees in Pentheus' double vision the ambiguities of the Dionysiac experience (Zeitlin 1985) (Segal 1982).

Pentheus' vision of the bull is the closest he comes to seeing the god. Every line of the god's promises has a second meaning that the audience understands and Pentheus does not: he will indeed be 'carried' by his mother, and he will indeed be famous. Many readers have also seen the scene as sacrificial preparation, with Pentheus dressed and adorned like a victim led to the altar (Seaford 1996) (Foley 1985).

Yon sun shines twofold in the sky, Thebes twofold and the Wall of Seven Gates.

Ba. 918–919

Pentheus' double vision, a sign of intoxication or of the god's madness, and an image of his split self.

There are horns upon thy brow!

Ba. 920–922

He sees the god's animal form, the bull of Dionysiac cult, at the moment he has lost his reason.

In the hollow of thy hand I lay me. Deck me as thou wilt.

Ba. 934–935

Total submission. The ruler has become the god's doll, and the dressing scene its rehearsal of his death.

Thou shalt be borne on high!

Ba. 966–969

Pentheus thinks of a royal procession; the god means the head carried on his mother's thyrsus.

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Part 10: Fourth Stasimon: The Hounds of Madness

977–1023

Summary

The Chorus calls on the swift hounds of Madness to go to the mountain and sting the daughters of Cadmus to fury against the man spying on the maenads in woman's dress. They imagine his mother seeing him first from the rocks and crying out that he is no child of woman but born of a lioness or a Gorgon.

A refrain calls on Justice to come with a sword and pierce the throat of the godless, lawless son of Echion. The middle stanza, partly corrupt in the manuscripts, contrasts the pursuit of cleverness with a life of piety that accepts the gods' ways. The ode ends with an invocation: let Dionysus appear as a bull, a many-headed serpent or a fire-breathing lion, and with a smile throw the noose of death around the hunter of the maenads.

Analysis

The gentle women of the parodos now call for murder. The hunt imagery is reversed: Pentheus, who wished to hunt the women with nets, is himself the prey, and the god is called to appear in the animal shapes of his cult. The song anticipates the messenger's narrative so closely that the audience seems to watch the killing before hearing it told (Segal 1982).

The ode is one of the clearest places where the play's sympathy becomes uncomfortable. The Chorus's demand for Justice is in its own terms just: Pentheus has persecuted the god and his followers. But the language of throat and blood, sung by beautiful foreign women, leaves the audience with divided feelings that the ending will deepen (Winnington-Ingram 1948).

O hounds raging and blind, Up by the mountain road,

Ba. 977–978

The hounds of Lyssa, Madness, recall Actaeon's dogs and the women as hunters.

O Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads, Lion of Burning Flame!

Ba. 1017–1019

Dionysus called to appear in beast form. The bull has already appeared to Pentheus; the lion will appear in Agave's delusion.

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Part 11: Fifth Episode: The Death of Pentheus

1024–1152

Summary

A servant of Pentheus arrives and announces that the king is dead. The Chorus rejoices, and the messenger rebukes them for exulting over another's suffering. He then tells the story. He, Pentheus and the stranger went beyond the Theban farms into Cithaeron and hid in a grassy glen to watch the women, who were peacefully adorning their wands and singing. Pentheus, unable to see, asked to climb a tree. The stranger bent a tall pine down to the ground like a bow, set Pentheus on top and let it rise. Then the stranger vanished and a voice from the sky called the women to punish the man who mocked them; a light of holy fire stood between earth and heaven and the whole valley fell silent.

The women rushed up, threw stones and branches, then gripped the tree with their hands and tore it from the ground. Pentheus fell, pulled off his headband and touched his mother's cheek, begging her to know her son and spare him. But Agave, foaming at the mouth and possessed by the god, set her foot against his side and tore off his arm; Ino and Autonoe and the rest tore the body apart, scattering it over the rocks. Agave put the head on her thyrsus as if it were a lion's and is coming to the city, calling the god her fellow hunter. The messenger ends by praising piety and restraint as the best wisdom.

Analysis

The second messenger speech is one of the great narrative set pieces of Greek tragedy, and its horror lies in contrasts: the silent glen and the sudden voice, the beauty of the bent pine and the brutality of the women's hands, the son's last moment of sanity and his mother's madness. The words 'unseen and yet to see' sum up Pentheus' ambition, and his end reverses it: he is seen by all and sees too late (Segal 1982) (Dodds 1960).

Many scholars read the sparagmos in the light of Greek sacrifice, with Pentheus as a victim prepared and offered to the god, and some, following Girard, as the collective violence that founds a community. Others insist that the play presents the killing as an aberration, a sacrifice perverted, since the victim is a human son and the sacrificers his mother and aunts (Foley 1985) (Girard 1977) (Seaford 1996).

One can forgive thee!—Yet 'tis no fair thing, Maids, to rejoice in a man's suffering.

Ba. 1039–1040

The messenger's humane rebuke to the Chorus voices the audience's unease.

Watching, to be unseen and yet to see.

Ba. 1050

The voyeur's wish in a single line, before Pentheus is placed on high where all can see him.

Mother, it is I, thy child, Thy Pentheus, born thee in Echion's hall!

Ba. 1118–1119

Pentheus' recognition of his mother, and of himself, comes too late; his plea to be known is the one she cannot hear.

She bears in triumph . . . her own broken heart!

Ba. 1145–1147

The Greek says she wins only tears as her victory prize. Murray's pause stresses the gap between her triumph and the truth.

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Part 12: Fifth Stasimon: A Short Song of Triumph

1153–1164

Summary

In a brief, excited song the Chorus dances for the god and celebrates the fall of Pentheus, the dragon's child, who put on woman's dress and took up the thyrsus, his escort to death, with a bull leading him to doom. The Cadmean Bacchae, they sing, have turned their glorious hymn of victory into lament and tears: a fine contest, to bathe one's hand in the blood of one's child.

Analysis

The ode is so short that some editors treat it as the opening of the exodos. It holds the play's mixed feelings in a few lines: the Chorus means to praise the god's victory, but the words 'lament' and 'tears' and the image of the mother's bloodstained hand show the cost. The moment prepares the audience for Agave's entry, where the Chorus will waver for the first time (Dodds 1960).

Weave ye the dance, and call Praise to God! Bless ye the Tyrant's fall!

Ba. 1153–1155

A dance of victory over the fallen king. Murray's 'Tyrant' gives the Chorus's view of Pentheus as an illegitimate, godless ruler.

Hands that a mother rears Red with gore!

Ba. 1161–1164

The terrible 'glory' of Agave's victory, in which the Chorus's joy already turns toward pity.

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Part 13: Exodos: Agave's Return and the God's Epiphany

1165–1392

Summary

Agave enters in Bacchic ecstasy carrying her son's head, which she believes is a young lion's. In a lyric exchange with the Chorus she boasts of being the first to strike, calls herself blessed, and invites them to a feast; the Chorus, appalled, plays along. She calls on the Thebans to admire the beast killed without nets or spears, and asks for her father and for Pentheus, who should nail the head to the palace wall. Cadmus arrives with servants carrying what he has gathered of Pentheus' body from the glens. Gently he leads her back to sanity: he asks her to look at the sky, to remember her husband and son, and then to look at what she carries. She recognises Pentheus' head and understands that Dionysus has destroyed them. Cadmus laments his grandson, the protector of his old age.

At this point the manuscript breaks off. In the lost passage Agave mourned over her son's limbs, and Dionysus appeared in his divine form; when the text resumes he is foretelling the future: Cadmus and Harmonia will be turned into serpents and lead a barbarian army against Greece, but will finally be brought to the Isles of the Blessed. Cadmus admits the family's fault and pleads in vain (Murray gives these pleading lines to Agave); the god answers that they knew him too late, that he was insulted, and that Zeus decreed it long ago. The protest follows that gods should not be like mortals in anger. Father and daughter take leave of each other, and Agave goes into exile wishing never again to see Cithaeron or the thyrsus. The Chorus closes with lines on the unexpected outcomes the gods bring about.

Analysis

The recognition scene, in which Cadmus questions Agave back to reason, is one of the most painful and psychologically exact in tragedy; it moves from the bright sky to the household and finally to the object in her hands. Agave's earlier boast that she has left the loom for the hunt completes the play's reversal of gender roles, and her recognition shows the cost of being 'blessed' by the god (Segal 1982) (Seaford 1996).

The lacuna after line 1329 is real: a substantial passage is lost from the only manuscript that preserves this part of the play. Its contents are partly known from a Byzantine cento, the Christus Patiens, which borrowed lines from the play, and from the rhetorician Apsines, who describes Agave holding up each limb in lament (Dodds 1960) (Kovacs 2002). The god's final epiphany asserts his power, but it does not answer the protest that gods should not rage like mortals, and Cadmus' earlier judgment that the god has destroyed them justly but too harshly (1249–1250) sums up a verdict many readers share.

I have let fall The shuttle by the loom, and raised my hand For higher things, to slay from out thy land Wild beasts!

Ba. 1236–1238

Agave's boast reverses women's work and men's: the weaver has become a hunter.

Raise me thine eyes to yon blue dome of air!

Ba. 1264

The first step of Cadmus' patient questioning, which brings Agave from madness to recognition.

No; 'tis the head—O God!—of Pentheus, this!

Ba. 1284

The moment of recognition, the anagnorisis, in which the whole tragedy is concentrated.

Too late! When there was time, ye knew me not!

Ba. 1345

The god's verdict links knowledge and timing; the family's failure was to recognise him when it mattered.

Should God be like a proud man in his rage?

Ba. 1348

The objection that gods should not resemble mortals in anger is the play's sharpest challenge to Dionysus; he answers only by appeal to Zeus. In the Greek, as edited today, Cadmus speaks this line; Murray's text gives it to Agave.

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Characters

The god

Dionysus: Son of Zeus and the Theban princess Semele, god of wine, ecstasy and the theatre. He appears for most of the play disguised as a Lydian stranger, a young priest of his own cult with long perfumed hair, calm, smiling and ironic. He frees his worshippers, shakes the palace, leads Pentheus to his death and finally appears in divine form to pronounce judgment. Gentle and terrible, he is both a kinsman of the family and a foreign invader, and readers have seen in him the irrational forces of nature and the mind, the power of illusion and theatre, or simply a god whose honour must be paid.

House of Cadmus

Pentheus: The young king of Thebes, son of Agave and of Echion, one of the Sown Men. He represents order, the city and male authority, and he regards the new cult as a cover for drunkenness and sex. Rash, angry and proud, he imprisons the stranger and threatens to fight the women. Yet he is fascinated by what he condemns, and the god uses his desire to see the rites to lure him to the mountain in woman's dress. His name recalls penthos, 'grief'.
Cadmus: Founder of Thebes, grandfather of Pentheus and father of Semele, Agave, Ino and Autonoe. Old and abdicated, he joins the god's worship partly from family pride. In the last scene he becomes the play's most sympathetic figure: he gathers his grandson's remains, gently brings Agave back to sanity and laments the boy who protected him. His punishment, exile and transformation into a serpent, seems to him excessive.
Agave: Daughter of Cadmus and mother of Pentheus. Driven mad with her sisters for denying Semele's story, she leads the maenads on Cithaeron and is the first to tear her son apart, thinking him a lion. She returns in joyful triumph with his head and is brought back to her senses by Cadmus. At the end she is exiled and turns away from the god's worship for ever. The part was probably played by the same actor as Pentheus, who returned wearing the mask of the mother carrying his own.
Semele: Mother of Dionysus, killed by Zeus' lightning while pregnant. She does not appear, but her smoking tomb stands on stage and the denial of her story by her sisters is the origin of the god's revenge.
Ino and Autonoe: Agave's sisters, who lead two of the three bands of maenads and help tear Pentheus apart. Autonoe is the mother of Actaeon, whose death by his own hounds is recalled throughout the play.

Thebes

Teiresias: The blind prophet of Thebes. Dressed as a worshipper, he defends the new god with arguments that mix tradition and contemporary intellectual theory, warns Pentheus against confusing force with power and leaves praying for the city. His blindness and insight make him a pointed contrast to the king who sees but does not understand.
The Soldier: One of Pentheus' guards (in the Greek simply a servant), who brings in the stranger and reports his strange willingness to be captured and the miraculous release of the imprisoned women.
First Messenger: A herdsman from Cithaeron. He describes the peaceful and miraculous life of the maenads and their sudden violence against cattle and villages, and he begs Pentheus to accept the god.
Second Messenger: A servant who accompanied Pentheus to the mountain. He narrates the king's death and rebukes the Chorus for rejoicing, ending with a plea for moderation and piety.

Followers of Dionysus

The Chorus: A band of women from Lydia in Asia Minor who have followed the god on his travels. Their songs praise the joy, peace and purity of his worship and the beauty of nature, but also call for vengeance on Pentheus and rejoice at his death. Foreigners who share in the god's victory, they show the double nature of Dionysiac religion.

Themes

Knowing the god

The plot turns on recognition. Dionysus comes in disguise to make himself known; Pentheus fails to recognise him, Cadmus and Teiresias accept him for the wrong reasons, and Agave recognises the truth only when she sees her son's head. The god's last word is that the family knew him too late. In Greek religion to recognise a god means to give him honour, and the play shows the disaster of withholding it (Dodds 1960).

Knowledge of the self is part of the same theme. Pentheus does not know 'what man he is', Agave does not know her own child, and both are forced to a knowledge that destroys them. The play thus combines the human recognition scene typical of tragedy with the epiphany of a god.

Wisdom and cleverness

The words sophos ('wise', 'clever') and sophia recur again and again. Pentheus prides himself on his intelligence; Teiresias offers clever arguments; the stranger is called clever, and the Chorus declares that cleverness is not wisdom. True wisdom, in the Chorus's view, is the acceptance of human limits and of tradition.

But the Chorus also asks whether wisdom is vengeance on an enemy, and the god's wisdom proves to be the skill of a hunter. The play does not offer a simple choice between reason and faith; it questions what each side means by being wise (Winnington-Ingram 1948) (Segal 1982).

Ecstasy and violence

The worship of Dionysus brings release from care, communion with nature and the joy of the dance, and the play gives this experience some of the most beautiful poetry in Greek. The same power produces madness, the tearing of animals and the killing of a son. The two are not separable: the women who suckle fawns are the women who tear cattle apart.

Dodds argued that Euripides understood both sides of this experience and that the play's lesson is the danger of denying it: to suppress Dionysus is to provoke him in his destructive form (Dodds 1960) (Dodds 1951).

Male and female, city and wild

The women leave the loom and the house for the mountain, the realm of beasts; the king who represents the walled city and male rule tries to bring them back by force, then dresses as a woman to watch them. Agave returns with the boast of a male hunter. The play's oppositions of male and female, inside and outside, civilised and wild, are constantly crossed, and Segal's structuralist reading makes these crossings the play's central concern (Segal 1982) (Zeitlin 1985).

Seeing and spectacle

Pentheus wants to see what he should not, and at the end he becomes the spectacle himself. The blind prophet sees truly, the king sees double, Agave sees a lion, and the god is invisible to those who do not believe. Since the play was performed in a theatre, before spectators watching a disguised god and a man in costume, its interest in looking has been read as a reflection on drama itself (Segal 1982) (Zeitlin 1985).

Divine justice

Dionysus' punishment falls not only on Pentheus but on Agave, her sisters and the pious Cadmus. The protest that gods should not be like mortals in anger (Cadmus' line in the Greek, Agave's in Murray), and the god's answer that Zeus willed it, leave the justice of the outcome open. Some critics see the play as an indictment of the gods, others as a sober picture of a divine power that is beyond human morality (Winnington-Ingram 1948) (Mills 2006).

Motifs

The hunt

Pentheus plans to hunt the women with nets; the Chorus imagines the god as a hunter and itself as a fawn escaping; Agave boasts of catching a lion without nets. Hunter and prey change places, and the echo of Actaeon, torn by his own hounds, runs through the play (Segal 1982).

Binding and release

Pentheus binds the women, the stranger and, in delusion, a bull; chains fall away and doors open. The god releases those who serve him and binds those who resist, until Pentheus is bound by his own desire.

Sacrifice

The tearing of animals, the dressing of Pentheus, the 'feast' Agave offers and the language of victims and altars present the killing as a perverted sacrifice. Ritual readings of the play take this as their key (Foley 1985) (Seaford 1996).

Sight and blindness

From Teiresias' claim to see when Thebes is blind to Pentheus' double vision and Agave's slow return to sight, the vocabulary of seeing tracks the movement of understanding.

Hair and dress

The stranger's long curls are cut; Pentheus is given long hair, a robe and a headband; at his death he tears off the headband so his mother will know him. Costume marks identity and its loss.

Gifts of the earth

Milk, wine, honey and water spring from the ground at the touch of a thyrsus. These miracles of nourishment show the god's beneficent side and are set beside the torn flesh of the same scenes.

Symbols

The thyrsus

The fennel wand tipped with ivy is the badge of the god's worshippers. It strikes water from rock, defeats armed men, is taken from the stranger and given to Pentheus, and finally carries Pentheus' head.

Semele's tomb

The smoking enclosure on stage keeps the god's birth and his mother's death before the audience; its flames revive in the palace miracle as a sign of his presence.

The bull

Dionysus' animal form in cult. Pentheus binds a bull instead of the god, sees horns on the stranger's head, and Agave describes her son's head as a young steer's.

The pine tree

The tall pine bent to the ground and raised again lifts Pentheus to the place where he can see and be seen, and becomes the instrument of his fall.

Pentheus' head

Carried as a lion's trophy and meant to be nailed to the palace, it embodies the confusion of human and animal, son and prey, that the god has worked, and becomes the object of Agave's recognition.

Ivy

The evergreen plant of Dionysus crowns the worshippers, wreathes Semele's tomb and the thyrsus, and signals the god's power over growing life.

Critical debates

Pious or rationalist? Euripides and religion

Nineteenth-century critics often saw the Bacchae as an old man's recantation: the skeptic of earlier plays had at last bowed to the gods. Others read it in the opposite way, as an exposure of religious fanaticism, and A. W. Verrall even argued that the stranger was a human impostor. Both readings found support in the text, since the Chorus praises simple faith while the god behaves with a cruelty the play does not conceal.

Most modern scholars, following Dodds and Winnington-Ingram, reject both extremes. The play is neither a conversion nor an attack, but a tragic representation of a power that is real, beautiful and destructive, and which human beings can neither ignore nor control (Dodds 1960) (Winnington-Ingram 1948).

Nietzsche and the Dionysian

In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Nietzsche argued that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two artistic forces, the Apollonian, of form, image and individuality, and the Dionysian, of intoxication, music and the dissolution of the self. He blamed Euripides, with Socrates, for killing tragedy by bringing in rational argument, but suggested that in the Bacchae the poet, too late, acknowledged the god he had resisted (Nietzsche 1999).

Nietzsche's conception has shaped modern views of Dionysus as the god of the irrational, of loss of self and of suffering, though classical scholars have pointed out how much of it is modern philosophy rather than Greek religion (Henrichs 1984).

Dodds and the irrational

E. R. Dodds' edition of 1944 (revised 1960) remains the foundation of modern study. Dodds read the play against the history of Greek religion and compared the maenads with later outbreaks of dancing mania, arguing that Euripides depicted a real psychological experience. In The Greeks and the Irrational he placed Dionysiac religion within a larger account of the non-rational elements of Greek culture (Dodds 1960) (Dodds 1951).

Later work has refined this picture. Henrichs showed that historical maenadism was an organised, ritual activity, more restrained than the myth, and that the play's violence belongs to myth rather than documented practice (Henrichs 1978).

Segal: structures and metatheatre

Charles Segal's Dionysiac Poetics (1982) read the play through structural anthropology: Dionysus dissolves the boundaries between god and beast, male and female, Greek and barbarian, city and wild on which Greek culture rested. The play becomes a study of the categories by which a society orders the world and of what happens when they collapse (Segal 1982).

Segal and Zeitlin also stressed the play's self-consciousness: the god of theatre stages a play within the play, casting and costuming Pentheus and directing the scenes on the mountain. On this reading the Bacchae is tragedy reflecting on its own power over its audience (Segal 1982) (Zeitlin 1985).

Ritual, sacrifice and the origins of drama

The Cambridge Ritualists, notably Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray, saw in the Bacchae traces of the primitive rite from which they believed tragedy had arisen, the death and rebirth of a year-spirit. This theory of origins is no longer accepted, but it brought ritual to the centre of interpretation (Harrison 1912).

Later critics have read Pentheus' death as a perverted sacrifice (Foley), as a model of the collective violence that founds communities (Girard), or as an aetiology of Dionysiac cult and of the polis festival, including mystery initiation (Seaford) (Foley 1985) (Girard 1977) (Seaford 1996).

Gender and the feminine

The play's women leave the household and wield superhuman violence; its king becomes a woman to watch them. Feminist and gender-centred readings have explored what Athenian men could imagine about women through this god, and Zeitlin argued that the theatre used the feminine as a means for men to experience otherness (Zeitlin 1985).

Others warn against making the play a simple statement about Athenian women, since the maenads are mythical and the play's violence is the god's work as much as theirs (Seaford 1996) (Mills 2006).

Is the god just?

Dionysus' revenge strikes the innocent Cadmus as well as the guilty Pentheus, and the family's protest against an angry god is answered only by an appeal to Zeus. Winnington-Ingram read the play as a critique of the god and of the mass emotion he inspires; others see it as a portrait of the amoral power of divinity in Greek religion, in which honour must be paid regardless of justice (Winnington-Ingram 1948) (Burkert 1985).

Readers must also weigh the play's lack of a single authoritative voice: Chorus, messengers, Teiresias and Cadmus offer conflicting judgments, and the final ode merely notes that the gods bring about the unexpected (Mills 2006).

Murray's Bacchae in its time

Gilbert Murray (1866–1957), later Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, published his rhymed version in 1902, and his translations were staged in London by Harley Granville Barker and others in the following years. His Euripides was a humane, rational poet, close to the liberal ideals of Murray's own day, and his Dionysus a spirit of joy and natural beauty as much as of terror (Wilson 1987) (Murray 1913) (Stray 2007).

The translation's style, with rhyming couplets, Swinburnean lyrics and a Christian vocabulary of 'saints', 'sin' and 'the Elect', made Euripides popular but drew sharp criticism. T. S. Eliot's essay 'Euripides and Professor Murray' (1920) attacked it as a modern poetic idiom imposed on the Greek, and Perris has traced how Murray's version shaped the reception of the play in English (Eliot 1920) (Perris 2016).

Key passages

For this I veil my godhead with the wan Form of the things that die, and walk as Man.

Dionysus · Ba. 53–54

The god's disguise in human form creates the play's dramatic irony: the audience knows what Pentheus does not. The play explores what it means for a god to walk among mortals unrecognised.

To the joy of the red quick fountains, The blood of the hill-goat torn,

The Chorus · Ba. 135–139

In the middle of a joyful hymn, the Chorus celebrates the tearing and eating of raw flesh. The play's double vision of Dionysiac religion, beauty and violence together, begins here.

Dream not thou that force is power;

Teiresias · Ba. 310

The prophet's warning to Pentheus names the king's central error: he believes that armed authority can master a god and the human emotions the god represents.

But the world's Wise are not wise, Claiming more than mortal may.

The Chorus · Ba. 395–396

The play's most famous paradox distinguishes cleverness from true wisdom, which accepts the limits of human life. Who in the play is truly wise is left for the audience to decide.

Thou knowest not what end thou seekest, nor What deed thou doest, nor what man thou art!

Dionysus · Ba. 506

The god tells Pentheus that he knows neither his purpose nor himself. Pentheus' failure to know the god is also a failure of self-knowledge.

Man, thou wouldst fain behold them on the hill Praying!

Dionysus · Ba. 810–811

The turning point of the play. By awakening Pentheus' hidden desire to watch the women, the god takes control of his mind and leads him to destruction.

Yon sun shines twofold in the sky, Thebes twofold and the Wall of Seven Gates.

Pentheus · Ba. 918–919

Dressed as a maenad, Pentheus sees double. His vision is a sign of madness and a symbol of the divided self the god has exposed.

Mother, it is I, thy child, Thy Pentheus, born thee in Echion's hall!

Pentheus, quoted by the Second Messenger · Ba. 1118–1119

Pentheus' last words, a plea for recognition, are spoken to a mother who cannot recognise him. The scene is the emotional heart of the messenger's speech.

No; 'tis the head—O God!—of Pentheus, this!

Agave · Ba. 1284

Agave's recognition of her son's head ends her ecstasy and completes the tragedy. The play's themes of seeing, knowing and the confusion of human and beast come together in one line.

Should God be like a proud man in his rage?

Agave in Murray's text (Cadmus in modern editions of the Greek) · Ba. 1348

The line questions the morality of divine vengeance. The god's reply, that Zeus willed it, asserts power without answering the moral objection.

Questions for study

Is Pentheus a tyrant, a defender of order, or a victim?
Look at his first speech (215–262), his treatment of the stranger and the women, the Chorus's view of him as a Giant, and Cadmus' lament (1302–1326).
How does the play present the worship of Dionysus: as joy, as danger, or both?
Compare the parodos with the two messenger speeches, especially the miraculous springs and the tearing of cattle and of Pentheus.
What does the play mean by 'wisdom'? Who in the play is wise?
Consider the first and third stasima, Teiresias' arguments, Cadmus' advice to 'lie boldly', and the second messenger's closing words.
Why does Pentheus agree to dress as a woman?
Trace the dialogue from the god's 'Ah!' (810) to the end of the third episode; is the god creating a desire or releasing one already present?
How does dramatic irony work in the scenes between Pentheus and the stranger?
Look for lines that mean one thing to Pentheus and another to the audience, especially in the second and fourth episodes.
What is the role of the Chorus, and how do its attitudes change?
Compare the parodos and first stasimon with the fourth stasimon and the Chorus's reaction to Agave.
How are the roles of men and women reversed in the play?
Think of the women on the mountain, Pentheus' costume, and Agave's boast that she has left the loom for the hunt (1236–1237).
Is Dionysus' punishment just?
Weigh the offences of Pentheus, Agave and Cadmus, the god's final speech and the objection at 1348 (Cadmus' line in the Greek, Agave's in Murray).
How does the play reflect on theatre and spectatorship?
Consider the god as director and costumer, Pentheus' wish to watch unseen, and the original performance at the festival of Dionysus.
How does Murray's translation shape our sense of the play?
Look at the refrain of the third stasimon, his religious vocabulary ('saints', 'sin', 'Elect') and his stage directions, which are not in the Greek.