Background and Preliminaries

• Produced 405 BC (after Euripides' death)
• Dionysus = Bacchus = Evius = Bromius (all different names for the same god)
• Genealogy:
• Parents: Zeus and Semele: D. born from Zeus' thigh after the lightning bolt incinerated Semele
• Sisters of Semele (daugbters of Cadmus) are:
• Agave (mother of Pentheus)
• Autonoë (mother of Actaeon, torn apart by the hounds of Artemis after seeing her bathing in the nude)
• Ino (who also killed her child, and then killed herself: transformed into the goddess of sea foam, Leucothea)

Images of Dionysus

Attributes: drinking vessel, ivy wreath, grape (or ivy) vines, the thyrsus (a long fennel stalk wound with ivy leaves and topped with a large pine cone), long eastern-style locks and beard; usually accompanied by his followers, the Bacchantes / Maenads (female) and/or the satyrs / Sileni (males with goat features & horse tails)

Iconography

• Dionysus: the eery face of the god. Red-figure amphora ca. 525 B.C.
• Dionysus on a ship. Exekias painter, ca. 540 B.C.
• Dionysus in the beginning. Alkimachus painter, ca. 460 B.C.
• Dionysus and Ariadne. With sons Oinopion and Staphylos. Black figure amphora, ca. 525 B.C.
• Dionysus with his followers, on a ship. Black figure amphora, ca. 510 B.C.
• Dionysus with 2 dancing Maenads. Amasis painter. ca. 530 B.C.
• The Sileni boogie down. Amasis painter. ca. 525 B.C.
• Dionysus with satyr. ca. 480 B.C.
• Other images of Dionysus, from the Univ. of Victoria.

Who is this strange god Dionysus?

• Frederich Nietzsche (classicist and philosopher, brilliant and slightly mad) first identified the opposition between the "Dionysian" and the "Apollonian" as quintessential to Greek thought
• Apollonian: an image of refined order, harmony, individualism, the rational
• Dionysian: an image of disorder, rampant group experience, the irrational
• an opposition that describes a totality: opposites exist together, uneasily but together nonetheless, in Greek culture and persons
• The Homeric Hymn to Dionysus (see handout)
• strange, haunting, eery
• a god who comes among men, and when he does weird things happen
• a god whose image is unstable: now a man, now a lion, now a bear
• a god of transformations: crew change into dolphins, water turns into wine, wines sprout and grow spontaneously
• Dionysus, the bringer of the wine
• epithets: "the god of many joys," "giver of riches," the "benefactor": he stills all cares, brings sleep, and oblivion of daily ills
• Pindar (5th c. Theban poet): "the soul grows great, overcome by the arrow of the vine"
• But there is also a dark side to the loss of self associated with bringing the god inside you
• Story of Ikarios: received vine, made first wine, shared with neighbors, poison?, beat to death, thrown in a well, his daughter Erigone finds him and kills herself
• Ominous quality to the story of D's birth (Semele)
• Sisters of Semele (see above)

Dionysus, a God IN US: enthousiasmos, ekstasis; sparagmos, homophagia

• Dionysiac cult: Compare Demeter: Dionysus also has mysteries, initiates, etc. He like Demeter is a fertility god. But unlike the sedate & matronly goddess of the dry grain, whose followers are initiated into the blessings of the afterlife through a vision of rebirth by death as symbolized in the seeds of grain. For Dionysus is the god of wet fertility (wine, blood, milk, honey, semen).
• City Dionysia: procession of young maidens carrying a huge statue of a phallos.
• The "woman-maddening" god (Dionysius Eirophiotes): wine, dancing, music, s.t. sex
• sparagmos: the tearing apart of a live animal (goat)
• homophagia: the eating of the raw flesh, often thought of as the "eating of the god"
• [later, wine and bread are substituted!]
• inversion festivals (e.g. the Roman Saturnalia): oppression of women in antiquity: release valve for the under classes, an opportunity, within a limited time and in a controlled context, for the women to "run wild" on the mountains: an intoxicated time of license, a controlled riot

• Dionysus and inversion
• birth of Dionysus: destruction yields creation
• Agave and Pentheus: mother's role is its terrible opposite: cf. Bacchae lines 1160ff
• Women act like men (fighting, defeating with the thyrsus men armed with iron)
• men act like (or at least dress like) women (Cadmus, Teiresias, Pentheus)
• only once Pentheus is fully under the god's spell, dressed and acting like a woman, does Dionysus tell him, "Your mind was once unsound, but now you think as sane men do" (!): sane in his insanity!!

 
• Dionysus among and even IN US: wine is something we ingest
• enthousiasmos ("having the god in us", compare enthusiasm: en="in", thou="god", compare "theo" in theology)
• ekstasis ("standing outside of ourselves" wherein we "lose ourselves" in the group experience: compare ecstasy)
• enthousiasmos and ekstasis combined together express the "loss of self" when the god "enters us"-- the notion that the individual, in Dionysiac cult and thinking,  is lost to his/her enthusiasm for the GROUP experience
• Dionysian "ecstasy" is a mass phenomenon and spreads almost infectiously. This is expressed mythically by the fact that the god is always surrounded by his swarm of followers. Everyone who surrenders to this god must risk abandoning his everyday identity and becoming mad: uniquely, both god and follower can be called Bacchus (!)
• The merging of god and follower is without parallel in Greek religion: though it does, differently, occur in other religions, as in early Christianity (in which god and follower are merged after the day of judgement)
• Dionysus brings to the fore (when he is "in us" and causes us to "stand outside ourselves" with the group) the irrational side of our nature, unlike Apollo who stands aloof as a symbol of the higher, refined cultivation to which we mere mortals can only aspire
• But what is essential, and quintessentially Greek, is that these two sides -- both the Rational and the Irrational, the Apollonian and the Dionysian -- are not something that defines now one person, now another: rather they BOTH exist with us all, and it is the god that brings to the fore now the part that delights in Homer, and now the part that delights in ripping live goats apart.

Euripides as Theater of the Absurd, revisited

• At times, Euripides seems interested in exposing the absurdity of the Bacchic madness
• lines 200ff: Teiresias develops as a theme the serious point that religious faith is opposed to sophistic rationalism ("no quibbling logic can topple them / whatever subtleties this clever age invents"), but recall that he, an old blind man, is dressed in the garb of a young woman-- an absurd dramatic figure!
• lines 695ff (description of the Bacchantes): details such as the women suckling gazelles and wolves, or milk and honey bubbling up from the soil as the women scratch it with their fingernails: are these details marvellous, miraculous, wonderful-- or absurd? ("disturbingly strange"-- Jessica)
• lines 1113ff: the sparagmos of Pentheus by Agave: certainly the description of the sparagmos is at first horrifying and pathetic, but then (1137f) the final details: "his ribs / were clawed clean of flesh and every hand was smeared with blood as they played ball with scraps / of Pentheus' body" -- horrible or absurd?
• lines 1159ff: reaction of the chorus to the sparagmos: "Hail, Bacchae! Hail, women of Thebes! / Your victory is fair, fair the prize / this famous prize of grief! Glorious  the game! To fold your child / in your arms, streaming with his blood!" Did the chorus cheer when Oedipus blinded himself? What sort of theater is this??!!
• minor "jokes": e.g. the Oedipus jokes (blind man with a stick dressed up as a young Bacchant, the explicit allusion at 255ff); Pentheus' impatience with the long messenger speeches typical of tragedy at 661ff (will the authoritarian Pentheus rule the stage too?!); Pentheus as fussy "babe" at 925ff, 935ff
• But even while developing these absurdist points, Eur. surely also captures the other side, the extraordinary power of this god "of many miracles", the allure of running to the mountains-- the allure, that dangerous allure of yielding to the irrational that lurks within all of us
• Indeed, as so often in Euripides, both sides -- Pentheus and Dionysus -- seem to be problematic
• Pentheus in his character exemplifies the problems of conservatism and dogmatic insistence on order
• Note e.g. the echo of Oedipus at 255ff
• Two competing notions of "madness"
• Pentheus: 344ff: he is sane, Cadmus is "mad" in following the god
• Once Dionysus has enthused him (this follows the most comic business in the Bacchae, when Pentheus is primping like a young girl) D. says, "Your mind was once unsound, but now you think as sane men do" -- but is faith in the god sanity or madness, is the madness of the followers of Dionysus a more true "saneness"??
• But when the authoritarian (and in modern psychological terms both repressive and repressed) Pentheus "loses himself" in the god, this is not a wholly wonderful experience, nor is it wholly wonderful for the Bacchantes, whether the women of Thebes or the chorus
• at its worse, you rip up your own son
• at its best, you join the chorus in singing "Hail Bacchae! ... To fold your child / in your arms, streaming with his blood!"
• That is, the play seems to focus on the two sides, miraculous but also horrible, to the power of those wilder forces within us: those goat rending, beer-binging passions, and the dangers in letting them out

Euripides as Atheist, revisited

• Euripides as Atheist, part one (link to the discussion under Euripides' Hippolytus)
• The Bacchae, in part, follows the typical pattern of plays like the Oedipus Rex, where the refusal to honor the god (in Oedipus' case, trying to avert the oracle of Apollo) leads ineluctably to the overthrow of the "hero": but given the gruesome and sometimes absurdist details, how do we take passages like the choral song at 878ff, 896ff: "What is wisdom? What gift of the gods / is held in honor like this; / to hold your hand victorious / over the heads of those you hate? / Honor is precious forever." What is the TONE of such a statement in the Bacchae??!!
• Generalities (necessarily broad, vague, false) on the religious stance of the Big Three:
• Aeschylus: theodicy
• Sophocles: divine will is incomprehensible; what is important is that man "know thyself"
• Euripides: a more ambiguous view of the gods:
• Some examples:
• Hippolytus -- yes, Aphrodite's power is confirmed, but neither is it incomprehensible, nor is it linked in any obvious way to justice: a personal vengeance, personal dispute with Artemis
• Medea: at end she appears as though a goddess (ex machina like a god, gives prophecies, forms a cult): is this then an affirmation of her divine power, she a woman who murders her children?
• Orestes: Apollo!
• Bacchae: what has Cadmus done wrong? Cadmus at 1348: "Gods should be exempt from passions"
• In several of his plays, Euripides seems to affirm the devastating power of the gods even as he raises the question as to what motivates this power, or whether there is truly a divine "good"
• What is particularly interesting about the Bacchae though is that here more than in any other of this plays Eur. makes clear the contradictory forces inherent in the godhead, and that an opposing, contradictory nature is essential to the nature of divine power: the close relationship between opposites like joy and horror, insight and madness, innocent gaiety and dark cruelty (such is the power of Dionysus!)

 

 
 
 

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• Dionysus, Bromius, Evius, Bacchus
• Pentheus
• Teiresias (as he's presented here)
• Cadmus
• Agave
• sparagmos, homophagia, enthousiasmos, ekstasis