The Bacchae, Euripides
Tragic Roots of Western Literature
Literature
Tragedy
• Must understand the Ritual context
(Worship of Dionysus--nature deity, god of
many names, syncretism, mystery religion,
emotional, ecstatic, transcendent, connects
to cycle of nature, the imminent life force)
• Must understand the Political context
(Peloponnesian War--Athens attempts to
extend hegemony over peninsula-->will
doom Athens in victory (paradox)
Tragedy
• “Goat Song”-->sacred
to Dionysus?
• Award…
• Individual Will Vs.
Mystery (cyclical or
cosmic)
• State Sponsored and
yet Criticism of
leadership
• Irony: most significant
trope in Greek tragedy,
source of Pathos
• Strength<-->Weakness
• Empathy: imaginative
identification
• Humility/Compassion
Awe
Tragedy: Aristotelian View
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•
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Protagonist, of an elevated station
Hubris (overweening pride or willfulness)
Harmartia (tragic fault)
Goal: Catharsis (cleansing of self,
emotional)
What Issues?
• Individual Will
• Context of the War
• Civilization Getting
Cut off from Roots
• Rigidity Vs
Flexibility
• Human Will Vs
Divine Ground
• Enter with one
model, leave with
another...
Existential oppositions
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•
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Pentheus: Dionysus
Nomos:Physis
Order:Chaos
Polis:Nature
Apollonian:Dionysian
Polarized gender:androgyny
Characters
• Pentheus
• Dionysus
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•
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• Divine authority
• Challenges Pentheus
• Androgynous, appeals
to women (Bacchae)
• Elusive,
uncontrollable,
controls “from below”
the conscious will
Civic authority
Denies Dionysus
“Anti-effeminacy”
Tries to control
through conscious
exercise of power
• Cf. Tao Te Ching
Other characters:
• (Semele) crossed over
• Tiresias (blind man
who sees)
– male and female
– balance/yielding
• Cadmus
• Agave: punished for
denying her sister’s
claim
• Chorus:
– reflects community
mind (elders)
– turns throughout
play
– thematic device
Setting
• Thebes:Cadmean
line cursed by Hera)
• Civilization Vs
Wilderness, true
relationship
• Asserted relationship
between these places
• What ideas they
represent or
embody?
• How do Gender
models map over
this?
• positive and negative
values?
• Polarities can be
reversed both in
gender and valuation
• look in context
• What is underlying
relationship?
City: two perspectives in
literature
• Order
• Reason
• Male/Polarized gender
model
• Chastity/infertility
• Will
• Nomos
• Apollonian
• Clarity
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•
•
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Decay of true values
Corruption
Decadence/Materialism
“Effeminate”
Civilization
• Coercion
• Rigidity/death
• Darkness
Country:two perspectives
• Chaos (remember has
two sides, + and -)
• Irrationality
• Female/Androgyny
• Sexuality/fertility
• Instinct/Drive
• Physis
• Dionysian
• Ambiguity
• True Order (cyclical)
• Social harmony (as
opposed to class
structure)
• Moral Order
• Freedom
• Life Giving
• Balanced
• Clarity
Archetypal Pattern
• Always a Crossing
Over
• Attitude toward the
Ineffable/Cosmos/mys
tery/ “Luminous
darkness”
• Knowing via
Experience vs
Intellectual Ordering
Patterns
• A Crossing Over, + and Possibilities
• Imbalance?
• Justice!
• A reckoning
• PARALLELS AUDIENCE’S
“Crossing over”
• (but WE return safe, cf
Marlowe and narrator of
Heart of Darkness
Huh?
• THEATER IS A
LIMINAL SPACE!
• Sacred to Dionysus
• Essential for
Community to
Confront these issues
• Growth and Renewal
• Wisdom?
Key Quotes: “I began from
• “I am all
conqueror/…
All Asia is
mine.”
• East Vs West
Lydia…Phrygi
Persia….Bactr
…Media…Ara
…Asia….I cam
here--my first
Greek City--”
Dionysus as merciful...
• He it was who turned the grape into a
flowing draft/ and proffered it to mortals./
So when they fill themselves with liquid
vine/ they put an end to grief.
• It gives them sleep/ which drowns the
sadness of each day.
• Oh, how lovely to forget/just how old we
are!
…merciful Dionysus/wrathful
Dionysus
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“He gives to the rich, he gives to the poor.”
“His wine, sweet spell against sorrow;” 420
“Despiser of him who despises.”
“Dionysus…To man most gentle/And most
dangerous”
The Nature of Wisdom
• “ Living his days and loving his nights/
Content to the end, or wise in keeping/
Mind and heart from passing beyond/
The horizons of man…/ Whatever the
many,/ The simple, allow--/ that I will
follow
• cf. Tao Te Ching...
Words of Wisdom
• “To the foolish ear the wise speak
foolishly”
• “There’s mystery in the dark.”
• The braggart’s unbridled tongue,/The
anarchical folly of fools/ Leads to
untimely demise/ But the life of the
quietly wise,/unshaken abides,/ Holding
the home together.
• There is no cure for madness when the
cure itself is mad.
The paradox of will and intellect
• Mere cleverness is not wise./ Life, given
immortal airs,/ Shortens and dies./ And a
man in pursuit of mere grand desires/
Misses his time./ Oh that is the way/ of the
frantically, willfully mad/ men, I surmise.
“All government is
power/violence over others…”
• Do not imagine men are molded by sheer
force/ or mistake your sick conceits for
insights.
Unity of Human and Nature
• Some fondled young gazelles/ or untamed
wolf-cubs in their arms/and fed them with
their own white milk…./One of them took
up her thyrsus,/struck the rock,/ and water
gushed from it as fresh as dew./ Another hit
her rod of fennel on the ground/and the god
for her burst forth a fount of wine./while
from their ivy-crested rods/ sweet streams
of honey dropped.
Bringer of the Golden Age
• Anyone who fancied liquid white to
drink/ just scratched the soil with
fingertips/ and had herself a jet of
milk.
Penetrating Insight into the
Obvious: Double Vision2Late
• Yes, yes: I’d say I see two suns,/ a double
city Thebes,/twin sets of seven gates,
• and a bull seems to beckon me--/he walks
before me./Now I’d say your head was
horned…/or were you an animal all the
while?/For certainly you’ve changed--/oh,
into a bull.
• Cf. Blake
Dionysian Instinct Vs Apollonian
Intellect
• Great Dionysus, breaker of
barriers,….Capture the nights ambush the
days Of the impishly stupidly clever/And
those that depend on the march of the
brain/ And the force of the master plan/
To alter the wages of man, and think/To
know better. O Bacchus, evoe!
Opposites Unite?
• …Let every peak of Citheron ring/ With the
triumph of animal holiness.
Caution to Awe
• Complexity
• A product of IRONY
– Verbal
– Situational
– Dramatic
• PARADOX
– Verbal
– Existential...