The Bacchae
Introduction
Euripides was more than seventy years old and living in self-imposed exile in King Archelaus's court
in Macedonia when he created The Bacchae, just before his death in 406 B.C. The play was produced
the following year at the City Dionysia in Athens, where it was awarded the prize for best tragedy.
Ever since, The Bacchae has occupied a special place among Greek dramas and particularly among
the eighteen surviving plays of Euripides. It was a favorite of the Romans in the centuries following
the decline of the Greek Empire. It persisted through the "dark ages" of Medieval Europe and was
among the first classical plays translated into vernacular languages during the Renaissance.
Alongside Medea and Sophocles's Oedipus the King (also known as Oedipus Rex) it is one of the most
produced ancient plays of the twentieth century.
The simple plot of The Bacchae mixes history with myth to recount the story of the god Dionysus' s
tumultuous arrival in Greece. As a relatively new god to the pantheon of Olympian deities, Dionysus,
who represented the liberating spirit of wine and revelry and became the patron god of the theatre,
was not immediately welcomed into the cities, homes, and temples of the Greeks. His early rites,
originating in Thrace or Asia, included wild music and dancing, drunken orgies, and bloody sacrifice.
Many sober, conservative Greeks, particularly the rulers of the many Greek city-states, feared and
opposed the new religion.
Pentheus, the king of Thebes, stands as a symbol in the play for all those who opposed the cult of
Dionysus and denied the erratic, emotional, uninhibited longings within all human beings. He
confronts the god, faces him in a battle of wills, and is sent to his bloody death at the hands of his
own mother and a frenzied band of maenads, female worshipers of the god.
In half a century of playwriting, Euripides tackled many difficult and controversial topics and often
took unconventional stands, criticizing politicians, Greek society, and even the gods. The Bacchae,
however, has proven frustratingly ambiguous in its treatment of gods and men. Writing the play in
exile, while watching the glory of Athens disintegrate near the end of the Peloponnesian War,
Euripides explores the disintegration of old systems of belief and the creation of new ones. He
questions the boundaries between intellect and emotion, reality and imagination, reason and
madness. At the end of it all, however, it is not quite clear whether the tragic events were meant to
glorify the gods and reinforce their power and worship among the Greeks, or condemn the
immortals for their fiendishness, their petty jealousies, and the myriad sufferings they inflict on
humankind.
Author Biography
The life of Euripides, one of the great tragic playwrights of Classical Greece, spans the "Golden Age"
of 5th century B.C. Athens. This single stretch of a hundred years saw the reign of Pericles, the great
Athenian statesman and builder of the Parthenon; the final defeat of the Persians at the Battle of
Salamis; the philosophical teachings of Anaxagoras, Protagoras, and Socrates; the construction of
the Theatre of Dionysus; the playwriting careers of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes; and,
ultimately, the decline of the Greek Empire following the devastating Peloponnesian War.
Although accounts of Euripides's life differ, some elements seem relatively certain. He was born on
the island of Salamis in 484 B.C. but spent most of his life on the Greek mainland, in Athens. Based
on the education he received, and the personal library he reportedly owned, his family was likely at
least middle-class. His father, upon hearing a prophecy that his son would one day wear many
"crowns of victory," led him to begin training as an athlete. Later, he studied painting and philosophy
before finally turning to the stage and producing his first trilogy of plays in 455 B.C., just after
Aeschylus's death.
Third in the line of great Greek tragedians, behind Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides's plays were
quite different from his traditional-minded predecessors and stirred much controversy when they
were presented at the annual theatre festivals (called the Dionysia) in Athens. To begin with,
Euripides shared a healthy intellectual skepticism with the philosophers of his day, so his plays
challenged traditional beliefs about the roles of women and men in society, the rights and duties of
rulers, and even the ways and the existence of the gods. He had been influenced by the Sophists, a
group of philosophers who believed that truth and morality are matters of opinion and by the
teachings of Sophocles, who sought truth through questioning and logic. His own doubts, about
government, religion, and all manner of relationships, are the central focus of his plays.
Additionally, Euripides did not adhere to accepted forms of playwriting. He greatly diminished the
role of the chorus in his plays, relegating them to occasional comments on his themes and little or no
participation in the action onstage. Furthermore, he was criticized for writing disjointed plots that
didn't rise in a continuous action and for composing awkward prologues that prematurely reveal the
outcome of plays. When seeking a resolution for the conflicts in his work, he often turned to the
deus ex machina, or "god from the machine," and hastily ended a play by allowing an actor,
costumed as a god, to be flown onto the stage by a crane to settle a dispute, rather than allowing
the natural events of the story to run their course.
Perhaps most importantly, Euripides provided characters for his plays that seemed nearer to actual
human beings than those of any of his contemporaries. Figures like Medea, Phaedra, and Electra
have conflicts rooted in strong desires and psychological realism, unlike the powerful, but
predictable, characters in earlier tragedies. It has been said that Aeschylus wrote plays about the
gods, Sophocles wrote plays about heroes, and Euripides wrote plays about ordinary humans.
During his fifty year career as a dramatist, Euripides wrote as many as ninety-two plays, yet won only
five prizes for best tragedy in competitions. In contrast, Sophocles wrote more than 120 plays and
won twenty-four contests. During his lifetime, Euripides was not always appreciated by his
audiences or his critics—he, in fact, found himself the object of ridicule among writers of comedies
like Aristophanes, who lampooned the tragedian and his techniques in his satire The Frogs. Time,
however, has proven Euripides's merits. While Aeschylus and Sophocles are each represented by
only seven surviving plays, eighteen of Euripides's tragedies still exist, along with a fragment of one
of his satyr plays. They have been preserved over the centuries as admirable models of classical
tragedy and helpful examples of spoken Greek. Due largely to his progressive ideas and realistic
characters, the same qualities that once earned him scorn, he is now one of the most popular and
widely-produced writers of antiquity.
Plot Summary
The setting of The Bacchae is the royal palace of Thebes, where Pentheus has succeeded his
grandfather, Cadmus, as king. The play begins with a prologue spoken by Dionysus, the great god of
wine and revelry himself. He announces that he has successfully spread his cult throughout Asia and
returns now to the land of his mother, Semele, in order to teach the Greeks how to worship him
through dancing, feasting, and sacrifices.
Some of the women of the city, including his own mother's sisters, have denied his status as a god,
claiming he is simply a mortal and that the great Zeus killed his mother for lying about her lover. In
threatening tones he describes how he has already driven the women of Thebes mad and sent them
to the hills around the city, where they wear the animal skins of bacchants, priestesses of Dionysus,
carry the ivy-entwined thyrsus (a symbol of his worship), and dance and sing hymns of praise to the
new god. Now he is ready to turn his attention to King Pentheus, who opposes his worship and
denies his existence.
To accomplish his task, he has come to Thebes disguised as a mortal and brought with him a chorus
of his Asian followers. Together, he claims, they will try to persuade the Thebans to accept him into
their rites of worship, even fight them if necessary. Then he will leave Thebes and spread his cult
throughout Greece.
Dionysus leaves to join the bacchants on Mount Cithaeron as his Chorus enters to sing and dance for
the people of Thebes. The Chorus' song explains the origins of the god and describes how the Greeks
can become worshipers themselves. They sing about Dionysus's mother, Semele, who conceived the
god with Zeus, ruler of all the immortals on Mt. Olympus; and how she was tricked into asking Zeus
to reveal himself to her in all his godlike glory. Zeus complied, appearing to Semele as a lighting bolt
and killing her instantly in his flame. Zeus himself plucked the unborn Dionysus from the fire and
sealed him up in his thigh, later giving birth to his half-human, half-divine son.
To worship Dionysus, the Chorus sings, followers need only to crown themselves with ivy, wear deer
skins lined with goat hair, carry the branches of oak and fir trees, delight in the bounty of the vine,
and make ritual animal sacrifices. If they do, the land will overflow with natural beauty and riches fawns and goats, wine and honey.
The women worshipers of Dionysus are interrupted in their revels by the arrival of Tiresias, the
famous blind prophet. Tiresias has come to collect Cadmus; the two elders have rediscovered their
youth in the worship of Dionysus, and they are headed to the hills around Thebes to dance and sing
the god's praises. Before they can leave, however, King Pentheus returns to the city from a trip
abroad.He heard about the flight of women from his city and hurried back to contain the madness.
He proclaims the worship of Dionysus false and immoral, reveals he has already caught and jailed
many of the mad women, and soon will have them all captured and safely imprisoned.
Although both Tiresias and Cadmus try to convince Pentheus not to spurn the new god, on peril of
his life, the king is unconvinced. He has heard about the arrival of a mysterious stranger in Thebes, a
sorcerer with golden curls who is always surrounded by women. Not knowing the man he seeks is
actually the god Dionysus himself, he orders the stranger caught and brought back to the palace in
chains, to face death by stoning. As a further insult, he orders Tiresias's home - where he divines his
prophecies - destroyed and even threatens his grandfather, Cadmus, before rushing off in search of
Dionysus.
After a brief interlude by the Chorus, which chants a warning about human pride and men who will
not give in to the pleasures of life, Pentheus returns and is met by a Servant, leading the disguised
Dionysus in chains. The Servant reports that the stranger turned himself in willingly, but that all the
women Pentheus had captured have escaped from their jails by some miracle of the gods. In a brief
exchange, Pentheus accuses the Stranger of worshiping a false god and undermining the morals of
women and orders him imprisoned, to await his death. The Stranger (Dionysus) warns Pentheus that
he will free himself and that the god's wrath will fall heavily on the king and his city, but Pentheus,
filled with arrogance, doesn't listen and leads the god away to his punishment.
The Chorus provides another interlude, this time worrying about the fate of Dionysus. They wonder
if the god has forsaken them in Thebes. Suddenly, in the midst of their chanting, the Chorus is
startled by a roar of thunder and the brilliant flash of lightning that engulfs the palace and the
nearby tomb of Semele. When the blaze dies, the Stranger appears again and tells the bacchants
how he escaped by tricking Pentheus into shackling a bull, tearing down the prison, and fighting
phantom images.
Worn down by his struggles, Pentheus reappears in pursuit of the Stranger. They are met by a
Herdsman from Mount Cithaeron, who describes a terrible battle he has just witnessed between
Dionysus's frenzied female worshipers, the maenads, and the villagers on the mountain. Stumbling
upon the bacchants in the forest, the villagers hid and saw the women perform strange miracles.
They seemed to communicate with the wild animals and draw water from rocks and wine from the
earth itself. Among the crazed women was Agave, Pentheus's mother, and they decided to help their
king by capturing her and bringing her home again. When the women saw the villagers, however,
they attacked them ferociously. Weapons could not harm the bacchants, but with simple branches
or their bare hands Dionysus' s priestesses wounded their attackers, then turned on their cattle,
ripping the cows and bulls to pieces and feeding on the raw flesh.
Though the Herdsman and the Chorus implore Pentheus to accept the fearsome new god, the king is
more resolute than ever. He orders his soldiers called to arms in preparation for an attack on the
bacchants in the hills. Dionysus, still in the guise of the Stranger, again warns Pentheus not to tempt
fate by taking arms against a god, but it is too late to change his mind: Pentheus, like all tragic
figures, is blind to his errors, and stumbling inexorably toward his doom.
Seeing no way to deter the king, Dionysus instead begins to prepare Pentheus for his punishment.
He offers to lead the hapless man to the forest to spy on the women in their revels. To prevent him
from being discovered, Dionysus convinces Pentheus to dress himself as a woman. Thus, attired in
women's robes and deerskins, and carrying the Thyrsus of Dionysus, Pentheus is led, in a hypnotic
trance, through the streets of Thebes and into the hills where the bacchants dance. The Chorus,
knowing the fate that awaits him, sings a song of celebration, cheering the impending death of the
foolish king and exalting the name of Bacchus - Dionysus - the god of wine and revelry.
Soon afterward, a Messenger arrives to relay the news of Pentheus's grisly destruction: When the
king and his soldiers arrived near the grassy glade occupied by the maenads, the Messenger tells the
Chorus, Pentheus complained he could not see the women through the trees. The Stranger reached
up and pulled down the top of a tall fir tree, set Pentheus in its branches, then gently straightened
the trunk again, sending the king upward to the top of the forest. As soon as he was aloft, the
Stranger disappeared and the voice of Dionysus boomed across the hillside, calling the women to
attack the non-believer perched helplessly atop the tree.
The Messenger watched while the women pulled the tree from the ground, roots and all, sending
Pentheus plummeting to earth. They descended upon him like animals with Agave, his own mother,
in the lead. Pentheus tore off his disguise and pleaded with his mother to recognize him and spare
him, but in her madness she thought he was a mountain lion and helped tear him apart, limb from
limb, taking his head as a trophy of the hunt.
Finishing his tale, the Messenger hurries away as Agave approaches, bearing Pentheus's head on her
thyrsus. Still in a Dionysian frenzy, Agave boasts that she was the first of the maenads in the hunt to
reach the lion, whose head she claimed as a prize. Cadmus enters with servants, carrying some of
Pentheus's remains on a bier. Sorrowfully, the founder of Thebes forces his daughter, Agave, to
shake off her trance and recognize her own son's bloody head in her hands. He laments that it was
her own blindness, and that of Pentheus and the women of Thebes, that led to this disaster. Because
they mocked the god and dishonored his name, Dionysus has punished them all.
Dionysus himself returns and pronounces their final punishment: Cadmus will be driven into exile,
later to be turned into a serpent with his wife Harmonia. Agave, too, will be banished from Thebes
and forced to wander as an outcast for the remainder of her days. As father and daughter bid each
other a tearful goodbye, the Chorus delivers the play's final lesson - that the gods may appear in
many forms and accomplish wondrous, unexpected things. Let mere mortals beware.
Prologue Summary
Dionysus, son of the god, Zeus, and the mortal, Semele, is at the palace of Pentheus, King of Thebes.
Dionysus addresses the audience to announce himself and his reason for coming. He has taken the
form of a human leader of the Dionysian cult, so that he may punish those of Thebes who do not
worship him as a god. He also intends by this to vindicate his mother, Semele.
When Zeus had his affair with Semele, Hera found out and caused Semele to question whether the
one she loved was really Zeus. Semele secured a promise from Zeus to grant her any wish, and her
wish was that he reveal himself as a god. The lightening flash from his god-self destroyed Semele.
Zeus took Dionysus from her womb and sewed the unborn Dionysus into his own thigh until the
baby was full term. To this day, smoke still rises from the site of Semele's death, and is visible from
Thebes.
Although Semele's father, Cadmus, honors her burial site, no one in Thebes honors her or her son by
believing that Zeus is Dionysus' father. This is why he has come to teach the whole city a lesson.
Dionysus has already caused madness to confuse the women of Thebes, starting with his aunts. They
are outside the city now, dressed in the manner of his cult. Dionysus threatens to use these women,
his bacchants, to fight any who would try to remove them from the mountain by military force.
One of these women is Agave, the mother of Pentheus. Pentheus, besides being king, is Dionysus'
cousin. Pentheus does not know Dionysus and does not believe him to be the son of Zeus. Therefore,
he has left Dionysus out of his prayers and worship. Because of this, Dionysus has come to reveal
himself to all of Thebes. He has brought a chorus of believers with him.
Prologue Analysis
The Bacchae is a Greek drama, written by Euripides, and set in Greece in the 400s, B.C. The
Cambridge Translation of The Bacchae into English explains that the danger of ignoring the gods was
a common theme in Greek tragedies. During this time in particular, there was much discussion in
Greece over whether the gods existed.
The same as with any enduring myth, The Bacchae tells a truth about human consciousness. From
this, the reader can understand that Pentheus, the head of the city, is a symbol of human intellect
and pride. With Pentheus in charge, faith is suppressed, or sent outside the city as a wild and
dangerous thing. Something larger than human intellect must be honored, or humanity is destroyed.
Dionysus' threat unequivocally foreshadows Pentheus' destruction at the hands of the women of his
own city, or the intellect's destruction at the hands of its own emotions.
Parodos Summary
The Parodos is a hymn of praise to Dionysus by his cult followers. The cult has followed him from
Persia, not realizing that he is actually the god they worship. In song, they again tell the story of his
birth. They describe the joy of worship with abandon, even to the point of dressing in animal skins
and eating raw meat. Wildness and holiness are synonymous in the worship of Dionysus, although
this combination is frightening and revolting to outsiders like Pentheus.
Parodos Analysis
For his Chorus and for Dionysus, worship is more important than reason. This song praises
unrestrained worship instead of reason. In fact, it suggests that worship is the only reasonable
response to the gods.
First Episode Summary
The blind prophet, Tiresius, enters the stage, calling for Cadmus. The two old men have agreed to
join in the festivities honoring Dionysus, each dressed in fawn skins and carrying the thyrsus, which is
a sort of spear made with leaves. The men also wear garlands of leaves on their heads. Tiresius and
Cadmus prepare to walk out to honor Dionysus and enjoy feeling young again in his dance.
Pentheus, King of Thebes, enters with scandalous stories of what the women are doing in their
worship of Dionysus. The king is clearly obsessed with what he imagines to be their wanton sexual
behavior. Pentheus scolds his grandfather, Cadmus, for looking foolish and accuses Tiresius of
supporting the new god, Dionysus, for his own selfish reasons, saying Tiresius does so to increase his
own offerings as a prophet. Pentheus scoffs at the story that Dionysus was born a second time from
Zeus' thigh.
In response, Tiresius tries to reason with Pentheus. Tiresius tells him, for example, that the story of
Zeus' thigh is a metaphor. What really happened, he says, is that Zeus hid Dionysus from Hera, and
that is what the story means. Then he continue to offer advice that Pentheus should not rely on
force to dominate mankind. Failing to give honor where honor is due, Tiresius says, is the real
madness.
Cadmus argues with Pentheus, too, but on different grounds. Cadmus doesn't say whether or not he
believes Dionysus is a god, but he says it would be wise for Pentheus to treat him like one. If
Pentheus would declare Dionysus a god, it would honor their whole family.
Pentheus, however, is angered by their words, so he orders the destruction of Tiresius' seat and the
capture of Dionysus and the women. Tiresius does not respond in anger, but in pity.
First Episode Analysis
This play is a study in characterization. Pentheus is fascinated by what he imagines is involved in that
worship, but he distances himself from it. Tiresius, who often shows up in Greek plays as a prophet,
flatly foreshadows the tragic end of this story. He does this not by use of his prophetic gifts but by
simple common sense. Cadmus is a politician who argues for the wisdom of worship for political and
family reasons.
Again, the time period of this play is important to its understanding. If people begin to question the
existence of the gods, the status of prophets and seers becomes shaky. So the prophets and seers
begin to explain the metaphors in their myths, in hopes of salvaging their meaning. Politicians may
counsel hanging on to tradition for the stability of society. Intellectuals may express disgust. None of
these, however, satisfies that in the human psyche which longs for faith and devotion.
First Choral Ode Summary
The Chorus sings a hymn denouncing Pentheus as a blasphemer and extolling the virtues of simple
living. Dionysus is praised as the god that brings wine and plenty that "cures [the] grief" of both the
rich and the poor.
First Choral Ode Analysis
Usually, the Chorus of a Greek play does not take sides, but this Chorus is not objective. This chorus
consists of those devotees who have followed Dionysus from Persia into Thebes. By making even the
Chorus take sides, Euripides seems to suggest that to ignore the divine is indeed folly.
Second Episode Summary
In this first of three confrontations between Dionysus and Pentheus, a soldier brings Dionysus to the
palace. The soldier is ashamed, he says, because the 'stranger' came so willingly. The soldier also
informs his king that the women have already been set free from their prison, so this man seems to
cause miracles.
Pentheus begins to question his prisoner and becomes enraged when he cannot understand the
answers. Dionysus says, more than once, that the god is now before Pentheus, but the king is only
more confused by his words. The king still thinks he has the power in this conversation. Pentheus
thinks he is only dealing with a cult leader and issues orders to lock up Dionysus. Pentheus also says
that he will sell the women as slaves or keep them as servants, spinning at the loom, to quiet their
drumming in worship.
Second Episode Analysis
This first confrontation shows why a tragic end is inevitable. The gods must be honored and that is
not up for negotiation. Pentheus, however, cannot see the god standing before him. The collision
between the two perspectives is infuriating for both Pentheus and Dionysus.
It is ironic that Pentheus threatens to keep the women spinning at the loom, since that is where they
were before Dionysus caused the madness to befall them. Both use the women of the city as pawns
in their conflict.
Second Choral Ode Summary
The Chorus sings another hymn to denounce Pentheus and pray for the release of their cult leader.
Second Choral Ode Analysis
It is ironic that the Chorus does not recognize Dionysus in the person of their cult leader any more
than Pentheus does. They do, however, honor and worship him, and so they are in correct
relationship to him.
Third Episode Summary
As though in answer to prayer, there is an earthquake, and Dionysus is set free from the palace
prison. A messenger arrives with news about the bacchants, the women outside the city. This
messenger reports that they are not living lasciviously, like Pentheus said they were. The messenger
did report, though, that these women overcame men in battle.
Pentheus, true to character, is enraged and confused. The kind wants Dionysus to shut up, until
Dionysus suggests that he could sneak out and see the women for himself, dressed as a woman.
Pentheus is entranced by the idea and begins to fall under the spell of Dionysus.
Third Episode Analysis
In this scene, the audience sees further signs of the divinity of Dionysus. However, Pentheus remains
as blind to it as ever. Because Pentheus is as attracted as he claims to be repelled by the women and
what he imagines they do, Dionysus is able to set a trap.
Third Choral Ode Summary
The Chorus looks forward to the Dionysus' revenge. The Chorus sings that although divine power is
slow, it will certainly punish the arrogant. Again, the Chorus extols the virtues of the simple man who
lives within the traditions of his people.
Third Choral Ode Analysis
Like Tiresius and Cadmus, the Chorus seems to argue that to honor the divine is just good common
sense for mortals to follow.
Fourth Episode Summary
Pentheus comes out of the palace dressed as a bacchant and playing the part. Now he is eager to spy
on the women and hopes to catch them at lovemaking. Dionysus mocks him by humoring him, and
promises that Pentheus will return in the arms of his mother. Pentheus replies, "I take what I
deserve."
Fourth Episode Analysis
This episode is rich with irony, for the Pentheus' mother certainly will carry him home. His mother
will carry his head as a trophy. From the perspective of the gods, Pentheus speaks correctly when he
says he will get what he deserves.
Fourth Choral Ode Summary
The Chorus sings to inspire the mad bacchants' rage against Pentheus. The Chorus refers to him as
the offspring of animals and they call for justice to avenge the gods.
Fourth Choral Ode Analysis
From what comes next, the audience is to understand that several hours have passed during the
singing of this ode. Dionysus and Pentheus have traveled through Thebes and on to Cithaeron where
the women are. By referring to Pentheus as the child of beasts, the Chorus adds to the bacchants'
insane perceptions.
Fifth Episode Summary
The second messenger to appear in this play comes to report the violent death of Pentheus. When
he could not see the women well, Pentheus complained, and so Dionysus bent down the top of a
tree and placed him there. Once Pentheus was high up in the tree the messenger says Dionysus
called and ordered the women to take their vengeance on Pentheus for mocking their rites.
The women ripped the tree out of the ground, and his mother, Agave, ripped Pentheus limb from
limb. In her state of mind, she did not recognize her son. Poor Agave is now on her way, carrying the
head of her son like a battle trophy. All she has won, though, are tears, says the messenger.
Fifth Episode Analysis
In this horrid description of the death of Pentheus, the audience is reminded that the king is not the
only person being punished. By making the king's own mother the murderer, Dionysus has
completed his revenge on the whole family and the city of Thebes.
Fifth Choral Ode Summary
The Chorus sings in celebration of Dionysus' revenge and mocks Agave when she returns carrying
Pentheus' head, unaware that she has murdered her own son.
Fifth Choral Ode Analysis
The Chorus functions as an extension of Dionysus himself. Dionysus' revenge is their revenge.
Exodos Summary
When Agave triumphantly returns to the city, even the Chorus expresses pity for her. Cadmus comes
out to see what has happened, and then he talks Agave back to her senses, helping her face what
she has done. Cadmus explains that Dionysus has punished them all, because they did not recognize
him as a god.
Agave and Cadmus complain to Dionysus that his punishment is too harsh, but he is unrelenting.
Agave and Cadmus grieve while they leave Thebes for separate exiles.
Exodos Analysis
Surely Agave and Cadmus speak for the audience when they complain that Dionysus was too hard
on them, but the message of the final scene is clear. The gods will have their honor, and they will not
be merciful if it is denied them.
Characters
Agave
Agave is daughter to Cadmus, the founder and former king of Thebes, and mother to Pentheus, the
city's current ruler. As revealed by Dionysus in the play's prologue, Agave insulted the god by saying
he was not the son of Zeus; that Semele, Dionysus's mother and Agave's own sister, lied about her
lover, who was actually some mortal. For her heresy, Dionysus has driven Agave, and all the women
of Thebes, mad and sent them into the hills where they have been wearing animal skins, dancing,
and singing hymns of praise to the god of wine and revelry. Near the end of the play, Agave, still in a
mad frenzy, leads the women in a bloody attack on Pentheus, her own son, who she mistakes for a
mountain lion. She returns to Thebes triumphant, carrying her son's head as a trophy. Cadmus finally
breaks the spell she has been under, bringing her back to sanity and the painful realization of what
she has done. She and her father are both condemned to exile by the angry Dionysus.
Cadmus
In Greek mythology, Cadmus was the ancient founder of Thebes. He populated the city by sowing
the teeth of a dragon he and his brothers had slain. The planted teeth grew into soldiers called
Spartoi, who became the Theban nobility and helped Cadmus build the city's citadel. Interestingly,
because one of Cadmus's daughters, Semele, was Dionysus's mother, Cadmus is actually the god's
uncle. In The Bacchae, Cadmus appears in his old age, after he has resigned the throne to his
grandson, Pentheus. Cadmus and his friend, the blind prophet, Tiresias, have discovered the joys of
the worship of Dionysus and thereby discovered a second youthful spirit. Try as he will, however, he
cannot convince the headstrong Pentheus to accept Dionysus into the pantheon of gods in Thebes.
At the end of the play, he is banished by Dionysus and told he and his wife, Harmonia, will become
serpents before perishing in another land.
Chorus
The Chorus is a group of Asian "Bacchae," women followers of Dionysus who wear deer skins and
crowns of ivy, carry the thyrsus wand and fennel stalk, drink, dance, and sing hymns - or
"dithyrambs" - in honor of the god of wine and revelry. They watch all the action of the play, never
becoming direct participants but providing, through their songs, important background information
about the life and worship of Dionysus. As with most choruses in Greek tragedies, they often address
the audience directly, moralizing about the actions of the play's characters, as when these Bacchae
warn the onlookers that the gods punish mortals who do not honor them properly. Their pure spirit
and beneficent actions contrast with the view Pentheus has of Dionysus and his cult.
Dionysus
The Greek god of wine and revelry, Dionysus was also known as Bacchus to the Romans. In Greek
myth, he is said to have been the son of the immortal king of the gods, Zeus, and Semele, the mortal
daughter of Cadmus, founder of Thebes. When jealous Hera, Zeus's Olympian wife, tricked Semele
into asking Zeus to show her his real identity, the hapless woman caught only a glimpse of the god in
his glory before she perished in his divine fire. Zeus plucked the unborn baby Dionysus from her
womb and concealed him in his thigh, until his proper birth.
As a young god, Dionysus did not receive the recognition he deserved in Greece, so he left for Asia,
where he gathered his power and his followers before returning to conquer his homeland and
spread the worship of the vine. It is at this point in the god's life where the play begins. He has
returned to Thebes, the home of his mother, Semele, leading a chorus of "Bacchae," his female
followers. He wants the Thebans to be the first among the Greeks to learn the songs, dances, and
rites of the Dionysian cult. He has encountered difficulty, however: While the old founder and ruler
of Thebes, Cadmus, and the wise seer Tiresias have chosen to honor him, the people of Thebes, and
especially their new king, Pentheus, deny his name and refuse his worship.
A jealous but patient god, Dionysus has driven the women of Thebes mad and sent them into the
hills where they have been dancing and singing his praises. Disguising himself as a mortal, a priest of
his own cult, he tries to convince King Pentheus to accept the new god into Thebes. Pentheus,
however, doubts Dionysus's existence and finds the drinking and dancing associated with his
worship immoral, especially among women. He orders the Stranger (Dionysus) placed in chains and
led off to prison to await his death. Dionysus escapes, wreaking havoc on the king and his court.
Unable to reason with Pentheus, he finally devises a gruesome punishment for the prideful mortal:
He places Pentheus in a trance, then convinces him to dress as a woman and spy on the Bacchae
dancing Dionysus's rites in the hills. When the women discover him, they tear Pentheus limb from
limb, and his own mother carries his head back into the city. In the end, Dionysus banishes what is
left of the royal family of Thebes and declares his cult newly established in Greece.
First Messenger
Messengers in Greek drama are typically minor characters whose principal function is to relay
important information about plot developments offstage, so the action of the play can continue
unabated. The First Messenger in The Bacchae is a herdsman from Mount Cithaeron, who appears
halfway through the play to describe a terrible battle he witnessed between the "maenads" (another
name for Dionysus's female followers) and the villagers of the mountain. During the battle, he
claims, the women were impervious to the villagers' weapons but were themselves able to wreak
terrible havoc with simple branches and reeds. Furthermore, they tore cattle apart with their bare
hands and caused wine to flow from the earth. Like others before him, the First Messenger
encourages King Pentheus to accept Dionysus and his cult before it is too late.
Pentheus
Pentheus is the son of Agave and grandson of Cadmus, making him cousin to the god, Dionysus. He
has inherited the throne of Thebes from Cadmus, and early in the play he is abroad on business of
his realm. He returns quickly, however, after hearing that the women of his city have been driven
mad and are cavorting in the hills around Thebes, dressed in the manner of Dionysian priestesses.
Though Cadmus and Tiresias each try to convince him to accept the new god and his rituals,
Pentheus is, in the manner of all Greek tragic protagonists, too filled with pride and blind to his
errors to see the folly of his ways.
Even when he is confronted with the god himself, disguised as a priest of his cult, Pentheus calls
Dionysus a false divinity, sends him off to prison, and orders soldiers to attack his Bacchae in the
hills. As punishments for his crime, Pentheus is entranced by Dionysus, who convinces him to don
women's clothes and suffer humiliation walking through the streets of his city out to the forest, to
spy on the women worshiping the god. He is placed atop a tall tree to see the women dancing and
singing but once there they see him and, in their frenzy, pull the tree up from the roots, tumbling the
ill-fated king to the ground. The women fall on him, led by his own mother, Agave. They tear him
limb from limb, and Agave, thinking he is a mountain lion, claims his head as a prize.
Second Messenger
For the most part, scenes of death and destruction in Greek tragedy occur offstage. It is usually left
to messengers to report the bloody deeds to the other characters and the audience, using words
that often describe the scene as vividly as if it were taking place before their eyes. The Second
Messenger in The Bacchae is given the task of reporting the grisly death of Pentheus. He was part of
Pentheus's retinue of soldiers who followed the king to the forest and witnessed him being torn to
pieces by the maenads. Near the end of the play, he arrives back in Thebes just ahead of Agave and
tells the Chorus about the tragic events on Mount Cithaeron.
Servant
Playing only a small part in the play, the Servant is one of King Pentheus's men. He leads the group
that captures the Stranger (actually Dionysus in disguise), and he reports the escape of the captured
Bacchae from their jail cells.
Tiresias
In Greek mythology, Tiresias was the famous blind prophet of Thebes, and he appears in many
stories, including Homer's Odyssey, Sophocles's Oedipus cycle, and another play by Euripides, The
Phoenician Women. He was a descendant of the Spartoi sown by Cadmus, and he was given the gifts
of prophecy and long life by Zeus, after being struck blind by the goddess Hera.
In The Bacchae, Tiresias appears briefly at the beginning of the play, as the voice of wisdom and
experience. Along with Cadmus, he tries to persuade the headstrong Pentheus to accept Dionysus
and his worship, telling him he is wrong to rationalize about the gods, whose ways cannot be known
by mere mortals such as himself.
Themes
Rational vs. Instinctual
The Greeks of the 5th century B.C. prized balance and order in their lives. Their art and architecture,
laws, politics, and social structure suggest a culture that sought equilibrium in all things, including
human behavior. Even their gods aligned themselves with opposing aspects of human essence.
Apollo was the Greeks' god of prophecy, music, and knowledge. He represented the rational,
intellectual capacity of the human mind and its ability to create order out of chaos. As the god of
wine and revelry, Dionysus represented the opposite but equally important feature of human
instinct: the emotional, creative, uninhibited side of people that balances their daily rational,
structured, law-abiding behavior. The main conflict in The Bacchae is between these two conflicting
behavioral patterns, the rational and the instinctual, disciplines often referred to as the Apollonian
and the Dionysian.
The fruits of Dionysus's worship are extolled by Cadmus, the former king of Thebes; Tiresias, the
elderly blind prophet of the city; and by the Chorus of Bacchae, the god's followers. Never too old to
learn a new lesson, Tiresias and Cadmus have discovered the joys of the Dionysian rites and in them
a new youth. "I shall never weary, night or day, beating the earth with the thyrsus," Cadmus boasts,
"In my happiness I have forgotten how old I am."
The Chorus, who explain the history of the god and describe how to worship him, also warn about
his dual nature, and the peril of crossing him. "The deity, Zeus's son, rejoices in festivals," they sing.
"He loves goddess Peace, who brings prosperity and cherishes youth. To rich and poor he gives in
equal measure the blessed joy of wine. But he hates the man who has no taste for such things—to
live a life of happy days and sweet and happy nights, in wisdom to keep his mind and heart aloof
from over-busy men."
Pentheus's error in the play is his distaste for the simple pleasures Dionysus offers. He is totally
dedicated to reason, and he refuses to acknowledge the need of his citizens, or himself, to
occasionally release inhibitions—to dance, to sing, to eat, drink, and be merry. Ever the conservative
moralizer, he warns Tiresias, "When the sparkle of wine finds a place at women's feasts, there is
something rotten about such celebrations, I tell you." His sin is excessive pride, or hubris to the
Greeks. He doesn't believe in Dionysus, a god of wine and celebration, and his fanatical obsession
with order proves his downfall, in spite of the warnings he is given.
Individual vs. God
The struggle between individuals and their gods, whether actual or metaphorical, has been depicted
countless times in literature, from the biblical stories of Moses and Job to modern plays like Peter
Shaffer's Amadeus (1985) and Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1993). Each of these stories
recounts the difficult, delicate relationship between mortals and the higher powers that may have
created them—and possibly provides them their life force, their sustenance, and their inspiration. In
spite of the love/hate relationship they often share in these stories, however, humans rarely
encounter their divine nemeses directly, the way Pentheus battles Dionysus in The Bacchae.
At stake in the struggle is Dionysus's right to exist and to expect homage from the mortals of Greece,
whether they wish to honor him or not. "This city must learn, whether it likes it or not, that it still
wants initiation into my Bacchic rites," the god explains in the prologue to the play. "The cause of my
mother Semele I must defend by proving to mortals that I am a god, borne by her to Zeus."
Dionysus's jealous behavior is similar to that of God in the Old Testament, who tests his human
creations, ravages entire cities, and floods the earth to purify it for his worshipers.
Pentheus, Dionysus's mortal opposition, is a cynical realist, unwilling to believe in the god or his
fantastic powers. He believes he can shackle Dionysus, contain his followers, and stop the spread of
his worship through sheer physical force, even though everyone near him warns against his folly.
Cadmus and Tiresias encourage Pentheus to allow Dionysus's worship into the city. The Chorus sings
the god's praises. The Herdsman from Mount Cithaeron declares, "If he exists not, then neither does
Cypris, nor any other joy for men at all." In spite of all the warnings, however, Pentheus stays his
course, and only experiences the mystery of Dionysus's powers when the god himself hypnotizes the
hapless king and sends him to his death.
The result of the struggle between individuals and gods is often the same, though with different
lessons to be learned. After battling his creation for centuries, the Biblical God is reformed in the
New Testament, following the life and martyrdom of his son, Jesus. Free will is offered to humanity,
along with the freedom to suffer or prosper at the hands of others. In Amadeus, Shaffer's Salieri is
consumed by his hatred for God and destroys himself. The characters in Kushner's Angels in America
fight divinity to a draw. Pentheus, of course, learns a valuable lesson much too late.
Sex Roles
Of all the Greek tragedians, Euripides provided the most leading roles to women (although, in
keeping with the theatrical conventions of the time, the parts would have been played by men). His
plays also often seem to sympathize with the plight of women in Greek society. Medea, scorned by
Jason, becomes an almost sympathetic figure, in spite of the fact that she murders her own children.
Hippolytus's stepmother, Phaedra, is driven by a passion she cannot control and, like Pentheus,
Hippolytus is a fanatical extremist who may deserve his grisly fate. In The Bacchae, the playwright's
analysis and criticism of the Greeks' treatment of women may not be immediately obvious, but it
exists in the portrayal of the Dionysian rites, the sympathetic Chorus of Bacchae, and Agave's
suffering at the end of the play.
During Euripides's lifetime, women were mainly prohibited from politics, the arts, and many religious
ceremonies. Dionysus's cult offered women an outlet for worship, equal or greater to that afforded
to men. In the spirit of the wine and revelry he represented, women could become priestesses of
Dionysus, or "Bacchae," simply by drinking, dancing, singing, and releasing their inhibitions. Although
Pentheus, the conservative voice of male-dominated Greek culture, objects to women drinking and
participating in religious ritual, Tiresias notes that women's own nature, not a god, will determine
whether they are moral or not. "Even in Bacchic revels the good woman, at least, will not be
corrupted," he claims. The Chorus of Bacchae in the play prove Pentheus wrong. They have followed
the god from Asia minor, where he first established his cult, and now exist only to worship him and
share in his peaceful bounty. "The ground flows with milk, flows with wine, flows with the nectar of
bees," they sing.
Agave's punishment at the end of the play proves that women are equal candidates for suffering as
well as for pleasure. It was Agave who originally denied Dionysus's divinity, claiming her sister,
Semele, lied about her amorous relationship with Zeus, the king of the gods. Agave's false claims
brought the wrath of Dionysus down on the women of Thebes, driving them mad and sending them
into the hills around the city. Because her son, King Pentheus, chose to compound her mistake by
denying the worship of the god to the people of Thebes, they both suffered horribly: The mother
was forced to kill her own son and carry his severed head among the stunned Thebans.
Style
Climactic Plot Construction
Classical Greek tragedians were the creators of climactic plot construction, a form of playwriting that
condenses the action of the story into the final hours or moments of the protagonist's struggle and
places the most emphasis on the play's climax. This is quite different from an episodic plot, such as
those created by Shakespeare or those used by most modern films, in which the protagonist, or
hero, of the story encounters many harrowing episodes in a story that may take place across many
days, months, or even years. Aristotle recognized the appeal of climactic plots in his Poetics when he
suggested that "beauty depends on magnitude and order." In the case of a climactic plot such as The
Bacchae, magnitude and order emerge from the simple structure of the plot: One man struggles
against one overwhelming force, a god, and is defeated in the course of a single day.
In a climactic plot, the "point of attack," or starting point, of the play is relatively late in the entire
story, requiring a great deal of exposition up front. In other words, a number of things have already
occurred to propel the action to the point it is at when the play begins and all that is left is for the
protagonist to make the fatal error that plunges him into tragedy. In The Bacchae, for example,
Dionysus presents a prologue at the beginning of the play that sums up what has already taken
place: He has been to Asia and successfully started his cult of worship there and now has returned to
Greece to offer his homeland the rewards of his divinity. He has learned, however, that his own
mother's sisters have denied his origins, and King Pentheus refuses to worship him. In retaliation, he
has already driven the women mad and sent them into the hills. Almost immediately, Pentheus
returns from abroad to confront the new menace, and the play's struggle begins in earnest. A few
hours later, the battle has ended and, through his pride, Pentheus has suffered a grisly death.
Dialogue
One interesting convention of the Greek stage required playwrights to carefully structure their
tragedies in short, distinct episodes and forced actors to be extremely versatile in approaching their
parts. When Thespis, a dramatist and performer long credited with being the first "actor" (thus the
term "thespian"), won the award for the best tragedy at the City Dionysia in 534 B.C., he alone
played all the parts in his plays. For at least the next sixty years, tragedies were limited to a chorus
and one actor. According to Aristotle, Aeschylus introduced the second actor, sometime around 470
B.C., and Sophocles is credited with adding a third. By the time Euripides began writing plays,
dramatists were limited to no more than three principal actors to play all the parts.
To the dramatist, this means the plot of the play must be divided into distinct episodes in which the
important characters of the story can confront one another in groups of two or three, with the
chorus standing near, observing the action. Playwrights manufactured reasons for characters to
leave the stage, so other characters (played by the same performers) could appear. To
accommodate scene and costume changes, the chorus provided interludes consisting of song and
dance that usually commented on the action of the play. A quick glance at the episodes in The
Bacchae will reveal that three separate actors must play the parts of Pentheus, Cadmus, and
Tiresias, since these characters all appear on stage at the same time; but the actor playing Tiresias
might also portray Dionysus and the Stranger, while the actor playing Pentheus may double as his
mother, Agave, since these combinations are never seen together on the stage.
Chorus
One of the most unique and recognizable features of the construction of classical Greek tragedies is
the use of a chorus. Some historians have speculated that the very origins of Greek tragedy lie in the
appearance of the chorus on stage. Before there was actual dialogue and characters in conflict in
drama, performances consisted of large groups of men, perhaps as many as fifty, representing each
of the various tribes in the hills around Athens, who would gather at festivals honoring Dionysus and
dance and sing hymns (or dithyrambs), honoring the god of wine, revelry, and the theatre. After 534
B.C., the year of the first competition for tragedies at the City Dionysia festival in Athens, the role of
the chorus began to diminish as the individual characters in the plays became increasingly
important.
By the time Sophocles wrote Oedipus the King in the late 5th century B.C., the conventional size of
the chorus had been fixed at fifteen. The chorus continued to sing, chant, and dance and
occasionally interacted with the principal characters, but most often, as in The Bacchae, they stand
outside the action and provide the audience with important background information, sometimes
commenting on what they see happening or even warning characters that their choices may prove
dangerous. Typically, the singing and dancing of the chorus occur during choral interludes that divide
the episodes of the play. These interludes may help suggest the passing of time, as when the Chorus
of Dionysus's followers in The Bacchae chant an appeal to the god for justice while Pentheus goes off
to face his death. Practically speaking, they also may help delay the action in the play while scenery
is replaced or actors change costumes to appear in other roles. Of the three Greek tragedians whose
work has survived, Euripides used the chorus least, preferring instead to allow his individual
characters more time to develop his themes.
Historical Context
Greece in the 5th century B.C. was a collection of many small, independent city-states, each called a
"polis." While these tribal communities would occasionally band together in a common cause, as the
Athenians and Spartans did to overthrow Persian control of Greek colonies early in the century, they
remained, for the most part, separate, autonomous entities, constantly suspicious of each other and
forever questing for greater wealth and control in the realm.
The 5th century B.C. has been called the "Golden Age" of Greece, and for most of the era, the polis
of Athens was the centerpiece of a burgeoning culture that has left an indelible imprint on more
than two thousand years of science, religion, philosophy, and the arts. Golden Age Athens produced
the philosopher Socrates and his pupil, Plato. Phidias, the famous sculptor, lived in the same
community as the great dramatists Sophocles and Euripides. Pythagoras, Protagoras, and Herodotus,
some of the greatest scientists and thinkers of all time, lived in the shadow of the famous Parthenon,
perched atop the city's Acropolis.
Politically, Athens accomplished what has been called the world's first democracy nearly 2,500 years
ago. Beginning with the "tyrannos," or popular leader Pisistratus, who fought against aristocratic
power in the 6th century B.C., Athens was led by a series of governors who included its citizens in
the creation and enforcement of its laws, even though those citizens did not include women,
foreigners, or slaves, which the Athenians took from various wars and kept as household servants
and tutors for their children. The democratic system established by the Athenians divided the
society into ten tribes, each of which provided fifty men for the city's "boule," a legislative body that
was on duty year round, night and day, with each tribe on duty for thirty-six days at a stretch,
working three daily shifts. Additionally, all eligible Athenians were expected to participate in the
"ekklesia," a meeting of at least 6,000 citizens held about every nine days, during which the entire
city would debate issues raised by the boule.
Between them, the boule and the ekklesia created laws, empowered a police force, established a
law court, the Helaia, and developed a trial by jury system. Interested as they were in fair, impartial
decisions, the Athenians demanded a minimum jury size of 201 citizens, with larger juries of 501, or
even 1001 or 2001 not uncommon.
As presented in The Bacchae, ancient Greek religion was "polytheistic." The Greeks believed in a
"pantheon" of twelve main gods, along with a host of lesser deities, heroes, and local, household
gods. Each of the gods represented a different facet of human knowledge and experience, though
they were recognized as something superior, or at least different from, earthly mortals. Stories
about the gods often depict them interfering in human affairs, though no god was ultimately viewed
as entirely good or entirely bad. Each was capable of helping, or harming, humans.
Religious ritual was extremely important in the daily lives of the Greeks. Their cities were often set
up around the various temples to Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Apollo, and the other immortals
who were thought to live atop Mount Olympus; many days in the Greek calendar were set aside for
the worship of these gods, which included prayer, sacrifice, and divination.
Greek theatre emerged from the worship of one of the minor gods, Dionysus, who was thought to
be the son of Zeus and Semele, a mortal, and was associated with wine, fertility, and celebration.
Although Dionysus had been worshiped in Thrace and Asia Minor since at least 700 B.C., it wasn't
until the 6th century B.C. that his cult reached into Athens. Worshiping Dionysus involved the
sacrifice of animals and feasts, accompanied by wine drinking, dancing, and singing dithyrambs,
ritual hymns honoring the god. Eventually, a contest for dancing and dithyramb singing evolved
among the tribes of Athens and from this singing and dancing, it is believed, drama developed. The
first contest for tragedies was held in Athens at the City Dionysia, an entire festival honoring
Dionysus, in 534 B.C. During the next hundred years, through the play-writing careers of Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides, the great stone amphitheatres of Greece, some seating as many as 17,000
people, were built and production practices involving costuming, masks, and machinery evolved.
Throughout its Golden Age, Athens' s great rival was Sparta. While Athens assembled a confederacy
of city-states in the North through peaceful agreements and trade negotiations, Sparta, known
primarily for its military might, built a minor empire to the South out of smaller territories it
conquered. While the two rivals found a common interest in defeating the Persians early in the 5th
century B.C., old jealousies and new affronts stirred renewed animosity and led to the
Peloponnesian War. This terrible series of battles between Spartan and Athenian forces lasted from
431 to 404 B.C., eventually destroying Athens and elevating Sparta to supremacy in mainland
Greece. At the end of the war, to avoid having all their soldiers killed and their women and children
sold into slavery, the Athenians agreed to Spartan terms of peace, which included government of
Athens by thirty pro-Spartan aristocrats, who became known as the Thirty Tyrants. Athens' s
democracy was dead, and though it would struggle to its feet again in the fourth century, the glory
of Greece belonged next to the Thebans, the Macedonians, and, finally, the Romans.
It was in the historical context of Athens' s decline, just before its defeat at the hands of the
Spartans, that Euripides chose to leave the city he had called home for so many years and journey
into self-imposed exile to King Archelaus's court in Macedonia. There, he wrote The Bacchae and,
according to popular account, was accidentally killed by the king's hunting dogs while walking in the
woods—just two years before the fall of Athens.
Critical Overview
While the original productions of classical Greek tragedies were not reviewed for potential
audiences the way theatrical performances are today, some measure of their critical success may be
determined by the awards they received (or did not receive) during the festivals at which they were
produced, and by the subsequent number of times the plays were revived over the years.
Euripides spent most of his playwriting career pursuing the elusive top prize at the City Dionysia,
Athens' s famous annual festival honoring Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and revelry. While
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and dozens of other tragedians whose work has not even survived the ages
received many honors and a great deal of popular acclaim, Euripides took only four first prizes
during his lifetime and, as often as not, his plays came in last. Whether it was his own death in 406
B.C. or the radical departure in subject matter from his earlier plays, he achieved a new level of fame
and appreciation by the time The Bacchae was produced in Athens in 405 B.C. The avant-garde
playwright was posthumously awarded the top prize for that year's festival.
Scattered references to the play suggest that it was revived continuously on Athens's stages for the
next hundred years and that it continued its popularity during the period of the Roman Empire,
when it was translated into Latin and performed across Italy. There is evidence that the work was
familiar to Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. During the Middle Ages, it is commonly known, Euripides
received more attention than either Aeschylus or Sophocles as a first-rate tragedian and brilliant
writer of spoken Greek. The Bacchae and other plays by Euripides were among the first to be
translated into Latin prose and Italian during the Renaissance and seventeenth and eighteenth
century writers from Milton to Goethe praised the play's singular purpose and intense depiction of
man's conflict with his god.
In the modern era, criticism of The Bacchae has largely been divided between scholarly commentary
on the text and history of the play and popular reviews of occasional performances. In Dramatic
Lectures, a collection of his scholarly analyses of dramatists and their plays, the nineteenth century
German critic August W. Schlegel wrote, "In the composition of this piece, I cannot help admiring a
harmony and unity, which we seldom meet with in Euripides, as well as abstinence from every
foreign matter, so that all the motives and effects flow from one source, and concur towards a
common end. After the Hippolytus, I should be inclined to assign to this play the first place among all
the extant works of Euripides."
In his autobiographical Life of Macaulay, the famous English historian G. M. Trevelyan praised
Euripides, writing," The Bacchae is a glorious play. I doubt whether it be not superior to the Medea,
it is often very obscure; and I am not sure that I fully understand its general scope. But, as a piece of
language, it is hardly equaled in the world. And, whether it was intended to encourage or to
discourage fanaticism, the picture of fanatical excitement which it exhibits has never been rivaled."
Twentieth century productions of The Bacchae are not as common as stagings of Euripides's other
masterpiece, Medea, and they tend to meet with mixed or unfavorable reaction. In his review of
Michael Cacoyannis' s adaptation of the play, which Cacoyannis himself directed for Broadway in
1980, New York magazine critic John Simon wrote, "There is serious doubt in my mind about
whether Greek drama can be performed today." Simon complained about the artificial,
melodramatic qualities of classical tragedies, Cacoyannis's translation of the play, which he deemed
embarrassing and accidentally comic, and the problems inherent in staging plays that were originally
meant to be performed in enormous outdoor amphitheatres before crowds of several thousand.
In his review of the same production for Newsweek magazine, critic Jack Kroll observed that
mounting modern productions of classical tragedies is a difficult feat, requiring immense creativity
and, often, radical reinterpretation for contemporary audiences. "Euripides' s The Bacchae is a
stupendous, searing play," Kroll noted, "but like most productions of Greek tragedy, Michael
Cacoyannis's staging at Broadway's Circle in the Square can't really break through the centuries-old
crust to the white-hot life beneath. Directors have gone to great lengths to solve this problem. In
America, Peter Arnott used marionettes instead of actors. In Italy, Luca Ronconi used one actress ...
to speak the entire play as the audience moved with her through a series of rooms and spaces. In
Germany, Klaus Michael Gruber used nudity, horses, glass walls and 100,000 watts of neon lights."
In the Nation, reviewer Julius Novick echoed Kroll's comments, and asked, "Am I alone in having
difficulty with the elaborate passages of woe in which the Greek and Elizabethan tragic playwrights
so frequently indulged themselves? If my sensibilities are typical at all, modern audiences are
conditioned to be moved obliquely, by irony, or poignant understatement, rather than by lines like
'O Misery! O grief beyond all measure!"'
At least part of the reason The Bacchae has been applauded as a literary text and dismissed in
performance during the twentieth century may lie in Greek tragedy's original purpose: religious
ritual. Several critics have observed that, since modern audiences do not feel the same ritual
impulses as the ancient Greeks, their plays do not have the same effect on us in performance. In
1969, the avant-garde theatre producer Richard Schechner assembled a group of performers and
created a modern version of The Bacchae they called Dionysus in 69. In his collection of criticism
called God on the Gymnasium Floor, Walter Kerr explained his objections to the production this way:
Mr. Schechner has gone all the way back—as far as our literary history permits—in his search for a
religious impulse capable of breeding a fresh form of drama. He really does wish us to act on the
impulse he has attempted to borrow: to get up from our places on the floor and to enter, to feel, the
interior Dionysiac pressure toward abandon that the Greeks felt and that exists as a record in
Euripides's play. We do not in fact feel this specific religious impulse today, however; we do not
bring it into the theatre with us as a deposit or guarantee. The specific religious impulse is dead. It
has been dead for a very long time. Because it is dead, the gesture dependent upon it must, for the
most part, be empty, effortful, artificial. We can try to let ourselves go, but there is nothing genuine
pushing us.
Critical Essay #1
Glenn is a Ph.D. specializing in theatre history and literature. In this essay he examines Euripides's
ambiguous treatment of Dionysus as a god to be either worshiped or abhorred in The Bacchae.
For half a century, Euripides was known as a playwright unafraid to speak his mind. Very often what
he had to say disturbed his audiences. In plays like Medea, Hippolytus, and Alcestis, he recalled
stories and myths familiar to ancient Greek audiences. Yet, viewed from the perspective of their
respective protagonists, they also function as harsh criticisms of the Athenian society they inhabited.
These plays show the Greeks' utter disregard for women, bastards, and foreigners. In addition, they
lampoon some of the culture's most cherished heroes and even call into question the wisdom of the
gods. Euripides was not one to follow rules of literature, pander to audience tastes, or shy away
from public controversy. Plot and character were usually subverted by the themes in his plays, and
he was as likely to indict his audiences as his villainous characters for crimes against humanity.
Euripides's reputation as a hard-nosed, cynical critic of contemporary society makes the ambiguous
thematic statements of The Bacchae all the more puzzling. Was he, true to earlier form, questioning
the motives of the gods and condemning the damaging effects of religious excess? Or as an old man,
well into his seventies when the play was written, did he finally choose to accept the Dionysian rites
that might make him youthful again? Was he making an appeal to the great god of wine, revelry, and
the theatre? Critics have disagreed for centuries over this fundamental question raised by The
Bacchae, and, confoundingly, the play itself offers evidence to support either view.
To begin with, Dionysus has the largest speaking role and controls the play from start to finish,
suggesting his order is the order of the day, and perhaps the playwright meant to justify his ways
and glorify his godhead. It is the god, rather than the Chorus or some secondary figure, who appears
at the beginning of the play to deliver the prologue, describing how he has developed his worship
abroad and only recently returned to his homeland, the land of his dead mother, Semele, to teach
the Greeks the glory of the vine and provide for them his bounty. Very likely, he raises sympathy
from the audience when he recalls the tragic circumstances of his birth. His mother was seduced by
Zeus, impregnated, then tricked by Hera into asking to see Zeus's real identity. He obliged, and in an
instant she was burned to ashes by the lightning flash of Zeus's divinity. "Close by the palace here I
mark the monument of my mother, the thunderblasted," the orphaned Dionysus tells the audience,
"The ruins of her home, I see, are smoldering still; the divine fire is still alive - Hera's undying insult
to my mother."
Dionysus has brought with him a Chorus of Bacchae, Asian women followers from the North, who
recount his history and sing his praises at every opportunity. In fact, while the choruses of most
Greek tragedies sound a variety of themes between the episodes of their plays, from beautiful
paeans honoring nature to moral judgments on the actions of characters, the Bacchae Chorus sings
each of their five choral odes - four stasima and the parados - in honor of Dionysus. They know no
other theme, and in Greek tragedy this may be an indication of the author's intent. As John Edwin
Sandys noted in The Bacchae of Euripides, "The chorus in Greek tragedy is, again and again, the
interpreter to the audience of the inner meaning of the action of the play; and the moral reflections
which are to be found in the lyrical portions of The Bacchae seem in several instances to be all the
more likely to be meant to express the poet's own opinions, when we observe that they are not
entirely in keeping with the sentiments which might naturally have been expected from a band of
Asiatic women."
Sandys may be right. Throughout the play, this Chorus provides sage bits of wit and wisdom that
sound decidedly like a classically educated scholar - or playwright. "If man, in his brief moment, goes
after things too great for him, he may lose the joys within his reach," the Bacchae lecture in their
first choral ode. More important to the stature of the god within the play, however, is the passion
and poetry the Bacchae display for Dionysus. In their opening song, the parados, they rejoice:
My love is in the mountains. He sinks to the ground from the racing revel-band. He wears the holy
habit of fawn-skin; he hunts the goat and kills it and delights in the raw flesh. He rushes to the
mountains of Phrygia, of Lydia. He is Bromius, the leader of our dance. Evoe! The ground flows with
milk, flows with wine, flows with the nectar of bees. Fragrant as Syrian frankincense is the fume of
the pine-torch which our bacchic leader holds aloft.
The spirit of the Bacchae is contagious, and, while it has been unable to move Pentheus, the new
king of Thebes, it has reached the wise in the upper echelons of Theban society. Cadmus, the city's
original founder, and Tiresias, the famous blind prophet of Thebes, have both discovered the joys of
Dionysus's worship. As the Chorus completes their ode, Tiresias appears at the city gate, calling for
his friend and fellow cultist to "dress the thyrsus and put on skins of fawns and wreathe our heads
with shoots of ivy." Unlike the women of Thebes, they do not need to be compelled, or driven mad,
to find the spirit in their hearts to worship a god who makes them feel young again. In a voice that
could be that of the aged (and reformed) Euripides himself, Tiresias lectures, "We do not rationalize
about the gods. We have the traditions of our fathers, old as time itself. No argument can knock
them down, however clever the sophistry, however keen the wit." If Tiresias's sentiment does
indeed mirror Euripides' s at the time he wrote the play, then the author had certainly come a long
way from his earlier work, which typically criticized, satirized, or simply ignored the gods.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence to suggest Dionysus was meant to be the hero, and not the
villain, of The Bacchae is the personality of his nemesis, Pentheus. The new king of Thebes, though
descended from the wise and noble Cadmus, is immature, headstrong, and puritanically
conservative. The fault common to each of these flaws is the Greek concept of hubris, or excessive
pride. He is convinced he is right, and he simply will not be told what to do. Encountering Tiresias
and Cadmus on their way to the hills and the bacchic rites, Pentheus rails, "This is your instigation,
Tiresias. This is another device of yours to make money out of your bird-gazing and burnt sacrifices introducing a new god to men." He threatens the old, blind prophet with imprisonment and
complains, "When the sparkle of wine finds a place at women's feasts, there is something rotten
about such celebrations, I tell you."
Pentheus's position on the moral high ground makes him unsympathetic to audience members who
have very likely experienced lapses in ethical behavior, as most humans have. Pentheus's hubris is
that he claims to be something more than human, something perfect. Like Hippolytus, who wears his
virginity like a badge of honor and refuses to worship Aphrodite, the goddess of love, Pentheus is
heading for a fall from the moment he appears on the stage.
Taking only these elements into account - Dionysus's supremacy, the recommendations of the
Bacchae, and the wise instincts of the Theban elders - it seems likely that Euripides intended The
Bacchae as a moral lesson on the proper worship of the gods. As German scholar K. O. Muller
suggested in his History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, "This tragedy furnishes us with
remarkable conclusions in regard to the religious opinions of Euripides at the close of his life. In this
play he appears, as it were, converted into a positive believer, or, in other words, convinced that
religion should not be exposed to the subtleties of reasoning; that the understanding of man cannot
subvert ancestral traditions which are as old as time, that the philosophy which attacks religion is
but a poor philosophy, and so forth."
With Cadmus and Tiresias, two of Thebes' most distinguished and respected elders, shuffling off the
infirmities of age to toss their heads and beat the earth and Dionysus's chorus of devotees dancing
and singing his praises between each episode of the play, it is difficult to find sympathy with
Pentheus, the lone abstention from the merriment of the bacchic rites; he's the lone square at a
hipster ball. Still, Dionysus has his devilish side, and there is enough in the play to also suggest that
Euripides may have been less interested in appeasing the god in his old age and more determined to
chastise the drunken deity for his reckless, damaging behavior. To establish his cult in Thebes,
Dionysus has had to drive the women to madness, a state of artificial religious frenzy. In spite of the
bounty he offers those who worship him, he can be jealous and petty, and even his most devoted
followers may suffer terrible fates.
If Dionysus were held to the same standard of hubris as his mortal adversary, Pentheus, he would
likely have to suffer a fate worse than the king's for his outrageous, unreasonable pride. After
boasting of his success establishing his Asian cult, he threatens, ominously, "This city must learn,
whether it likes it or not, that it still wants initiation into my Bacchic rites." God or no, his tactless,
overbearing rant detracts from the dignity his divinity should afford. While Pentheus is overreaching
for the status of a god on earth, Dionysus is cutting himself down to the stature of a mere man
through his bullying and hypersensitivity.
Then there is the matter of the justice the god dispenses at the end of the play. While it is true he
gave Pentheus many opportunities to change his mind and accept the bacchic rites as part of the
Theban rituals, does the errant king's punishment really fit his crime? For denying Dionysus' s
rightful place in the pantheon of gods and for imprisoning his servant (actually the god himself in
disguise), Pentheus is hypnotized, fooled into donning women's clothes and walking through the
town, and led to the forest to spy on the maenads. The crazed women, led by his own mother,
Agave, shake him down from atop a tree and tear him limb from limb. Agave herself carries her
unfortunate son's head back to the city as a trophy, thinking it is the head of a lion she has helped to
kill.
Pentheus's destruction is gruesome enough, but how bad was Agave's crime that she must suffer
this way - with the knowledge that she murdered her own son and carried his head aloft through
town. Then, to make matters even worse, Dionysus decrees exile for Agave, her sisters, and their
father, Cadmus. While Agave and her sisters insulted the god directly, by claiming he was not the son
of Zeus, Cadmus's "crime" was far less malevolent. He is punished simply for allowing Pentheus, a
non-believer, to ascend to the throne in Thebes, once he himself had finally become too old to rule.
The Bacchae is a play tantalizingly filled with contradictions. Whether Euripides intended his
audiences to become more devout worshipers or hone their cynicism, however, may be beside the
point. There is more to the play than whether or not Dionysus's claim to divinity is a legitimate cause
for disrupting the life of a city. As G. M. A. Grube noted in The Drama of Euripides, "The tragic beauty
of The Bacchae does not arise from a purely external conflict between a ruthless god and a mortal
who defies him; it arises from a conflict within the nature of the god himself."
It is worth remembering that Dionysus is the god of wine and revelry. Wine sets free inhibition and
releases passions that are locked inside every one of us. The Greeks adored balance and order and
recognized the need for each thing, as well as its opposite. Laws, civility, and propriety govern the
day-to-day world, but passion is the essence of life and fighting against passion destroys the soul, as
surely as Pentheus was flung from his tree and torn limb from limb. Dionysus is also the god of
passion, and, Grube continued, "It is this god, and this worship, that Euripides has dramatized in all
its aspects, its beauty and its joy, its ugliness and terror; he has even included the disgusting and the
merely silly. Few will deny that it is from the very completeness of the picture that the play derives
its power and its greatness."
Source: Lane A. Glenn, for Drama for Students, Gale, 1999.
Critical Essay #2
In this essay, Walton delineates the plot of The Bacchae and discusses its historical significance in
relation to Euripides's other works and those of his ancient Greek contemporaries.
The god Dionysus returns in disguise to Thebes where he was born. Rejected by his family, he is now
set on punishing his cousin Pentheus, king of Thebes, for denying his divinity. Pentheus has Dionysus
imprisoned but he escapes and persuades the king to dress up as a woman so as to witness the
Dionysiac rites. Pentheus's mother, Agave, and the other women tear Pentheus to pieces believing
him to be a lion. Cadmus, the grandfather of both Pentheus and Dionysus, restores Agave to sanity
while Dionysus looks on unrepentant.
Euripides went to live in Macedon for the final years of his life. The Bacchae was written there and
performed posthumously in Athens in 405 B.C. The play revolves around the clash between a
traditional culture in the person of Pentheus, and a foreign invasion in the figure of Dionysus, the
god intent on introducing his religion to Thebes. Dionysus opens the play with a prologue, disguised
as a man, in which he outlines his progress through Asia with his chorus of Bacchae before returning
to his birthplace. The son of Zeus and Semele, he is both an individual and a representative of a
religion of freedom and mystical powers. Introduced primarily as a religion for the women of
Thebes, this religion has claimed Cadmus, founder of Thebes, and the prophet Teiresias among its
converts. The young Pentheus sees his authority under threat when, under the influence of the god,
the women of Thebes abandon the city and roam the mountains, apparently performing miracles.
Whether or not such miracles occur in the play is an open question. When Dionysus and Pentheus
meet face to face, it soon becomes apparent that Dionysus's power is related to his ability to
confuse and delude. This is how he escapes from imprisonment. It is never quite clear whether an
earthquake, which the chorus "see" destroy the palace, really takes place. When Dionysus begins to
exert his influence over Pentheus he persuades him to dress in women's clothes, believing these will
serve as a disguise. He is torn apart by women who think he is a lion, his head returned on a Bacchic
wand brandished by his mother. Cadmus, now freed from Dionysus's influence, has the task of
bringing his daughter to see what she has done. At the end of the play Dionysus reveals himself as a
god and Cadmus and Agave depart into exile.
A bloodthirsty enough story, the play is pervaded by a sense of theatrical power. For the Greeks,
Dionysus was the god of ecstasy, as well as the god of wine. He was also the god of illusion and the
god of the theatre. The play is full illusions: Dionysus is in disguise; Cadmus and Teiresias deck
themselves out as Bacchants; Pentheus dresses up; a messenger reports remarkable events he
claims to have witnessed—milk pouring from the earth, women unharmed by weapons that bounce
off them, superhuman strength, snakes licking blood off human faces.
This world beyond reason is one with which Pentheus is ill-equipped to cope, but his clash with
Dionysus is not a simple meeting of rational and irrational. Pentheus is no Apollo-figure for all his
claims that he stands for order in a world that threatens to become chaotic. Dionysus destroys
Pentheus by locating the Dionysiac elements in him: his conceit, his childishness, his prurience,
turning him into a voyeur who contributes to his own destruction. Dionysus does so in the name of
his religion which he claims as benign and beneficial except when opposed. Yet his motives are
personal. Half-god, but from a mortal mother, he resents as a human being that he is excluded from
his human family. As a god he has divine power to execute a revenge that is fearsome in its
callousness. This ambiguity about where an audience's, or indeed the author's, sympathies may lie,
has led to widely divergent interpretations and productions. For some, Dionysus is a destructive
force whose cat-and-mouse cruelty disqualifies him from any claims to approval. At least one
rationalist critic refused to believe him a god at all, but a sinister con-man with skill as a hypnotist.
His defenders regard Pentheus as a "fascist" dictator in opposition to the life-force. Popular in the
1960's, this view led to bizarre adaptations like the Performance Group's Dionysus in'69.
The play can stand a variety of treatments but functions best as a warning against excess of any kind,
thus linking it to Euripides' earlier Hippolytus. The power that Dionysus represents, and of which the
Chorus of Bacchae serve as a living manifestation, is both formidable and mysterious. It exists and,
whether the story is seen primarily at a literal or at a figurative level, the implications are the same.
There are aspects of the individual and of the collective which transcend reason and should be
recognised. Pentheus, in trying to maintain order in Thebes, is suppressing not only the instinctive
desire of the women to escape from the constant drudgery of their everyday lives, but also those
aspects of himself which are part of the feminine side to his nature. Dionysus, who wins all the
arguments and all the battles, does so at the expense of both humanity and compassion. To an
audience of any age such a sacrifice is likely to seem too great.
Source: J. Michael Walton," The Bacchae'' in The International Dictionary of Theatre, Volume 1:
Plays, edited by Mark Hawkins-Dady, St. James Press, 1992, pp. 39-41.
Critical Essay #3
In this positive review, the critic praises a 1930 British production of Euripides's play, noting the
strength of the chorus and the director's faithfulness to the original play text.
Cambridge has broken new ground in producing the Bacchae. Of Euripides the Ion was produced
forty years ago and the Iphigenia in Tauris a little later, and now with admirable enterprise the
finest, to many minds, and assuredly the most difficult of his plays to appraise and explain has been
performed, for the first time, so far as we know, for many centuries. The executors of Euripides
produced it just after his death, and it was acted in Athens and elsewhere for a time. Pagan and
Christian writers have borrowed from it at all times since then. There is little here of "Euripides the
human" or of "the touches of things common till they rose to touch the spheres," that Mrs.
Browning found in other plays. The play has its passages of wild grandeur that are almost
Aeschylean, and a solemn, dreadful treatment of madness inflicted by divine power, in which the
audience is spared nothing of horror and pity. The more ghastly scene of Agave with her son's head
is scarcely more weird than the "fascination " scene in which Dionysus gradually asserts his power
over Pentheus until he has a crazy victim at his bidding.
Very wisely and mercifully the production last week attempted no indication of controversial
interpretations. There were no laboured hints of matriarchal legends, of women's rights, or of Dr.
Verrall's theories, whose delightful ingenuity would have puzzled Euripides. The play was not one of
the Euripidean series written in Athens for competition at the Dionysia. It was the work of his old
age at the Court of Archelaus, and seems to us to be the teaching of his disillusion over human
intelligence, summed up in ... the Second Chorus; "the foolishness of God is wiser than men" . . . The
lesson of thankfulness for the good and pleasant things that Dionysus brought to man as against a
stark puritanism is simpler and is rarer in tragedy. No tricks were played with the text, but the last
scene, where the god pronounces the doom of Cadmus and Agave, was sensibly and substantially
cut on account of the well-known mutilations and imperfections.
The scenery was novel and effective, with departures from antiquarian correctness. There was no
pretence of reproducing the altar of Dionysus which was invariably the central object at Athens, but
the play, none the less, kept that ultimate sense of worship which prevails in other plays in which
Dionysus himself does not appear. The royal palace was placed to the right instead of in the centre
of the stage, to give that honour to the shrine of Semele. The dresses of the Chorus were original
rather than beautiful, but their merit appeared in the colour schemes of the dances, though they did
not lend the grace of line which could be seen, for instance, in the robes of the Bacchantes on a
beautiful little altar which was in Lansdowne House. The figure of Dionysus himself had the right
effeminate charm of the dispenser of pleasure. Pentheus was the handsome blusterer that we
expect until he is undone by the "fascination." All the acting was good except at two points. To our
mind the "fascination" was taken too abruptly and lost the gradual growth of horror. Secondly, the
comic sporting of Cadmus and in a less degree of Tiresias (whose blindness the actor seemed to
forget), when they set out for the revels, was out of place. They were following a divine instinct, not
a "lark," and the Cadmus of that scene could never have been the infinitely tender father of the last,
when he brings Agave to her senses. The elocution was admirable. The two long narrative speeches
were so delivered that every word could be followed and the two actors without any labouring
spoke with great feeling. The music was a surprise to many. It was not, as is usual, composed for the
play, but entirely adapted from operas of Handel that are known only to musical scholars. The
ingenuity expended must have been great, but was not apparent. All the necessary dignity was
there....
These plays, carefully mounted and performed at Oxford, Cambridge, Bradfield or elsewhere in
England, revived, too, abroad in ancient Sicilian or other theatres, are classics, and a classic work is
one upon which time has no effect. The spirit survives through the ages. Even the Roman comedies,
Greek at second hand, as played at Westminster, are alive to-day: and great passages can be spoken
by Eton boys in knee-breeches and silk stockings without seeming absurd. Pedantry may have a hand
in preparation: mere antiquarianism may prevail over art or intelligence on a small point here or
there. But the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes are immortal classics.
Time after time the man who vaunts himself to be "practical" has come to mock and always he has
remained to pray. He has thought that his emotions (if he had any) were proof against the purging
by pity and fear as threatened by "an old tag," until he has suffered the experience and felt a better
man therefore. So, too, it seemed a joke to call a classical education "fortifying." Yet the man who
has learnt the lessons of the Bible (we do not speak here of its sacred side as well) and of the Greek
tragedians, lessons of beauty, nobility and awe, is fortified for the struggles of life as other men are
not All round us we hear complaints of the results of a narrow education that is no education, but a
futile specializing aimed at securing quick material returns. The War opened the eyes of many to the
effects of that materialism. Since the Peace we have heard of the gradually but steadily growing
appreciation of a classical education It holds its own in the Universities and Public Schools and is
spreading healthily into the schools provided from our rates and taxes, where scholars have until
now had little chance of its blessings. This performance of the Bacchæ last week is not an action
isolated from the movement, but it has been a vivid, stimulating and delightful event within that
movement.
Source: Anonymous. Review of The Bacchae in the Spectator, Vol. 144, no. 5307, March 15, 1930,
pp. 421-22.
Media Adaptations
The Bacchae has inspired a handful of operas, including at least three that are available on CD:
Szymanowski's King Roger (1926) and Hans Werner Henze's The Bassarids (1966), each available
from the Koch Schwann label; and Harry Partch's Revelation in the Courthouse Park (1961), available
on the Tomato label. Other operatic versions include Egon Wellesz's Die Bakchantinnen (1931);
Daniel Bortz's Backanterna (1991); and John Buller's Bakxai (1992).
Italian director and writer Giorgio Ferroni produced a filmed adaptation of Euripides's play in 1961
called Le Baccanti. The film stars Taina Elg as Dirce (a character Ferroni introduced to his version of
the story), Pierre Brice as Dionysus, and Elberto Lupo as Pentheus. An English version, called
Bacchantes is available on video.
In 1968 the avant-garde American theatre producer Richard Schechner formed his own company
called the Performance Group. Their first production, staged in a converted garage, was Dionysus in
69, a reworking of The Bacchae that explored sexuality, freedom, and societal repression through a
series of ritual vignettes.
Topics for Further Study
Research the agriculture and economy of Greece in the 5th century B.C. What products did the
Greeks export? Which did they import? How was trade within the country, and outside the country,
managed? How was the worship of Dionysus conducted to coincide with important phases of
agriculture throughout the year?
When writing his plays, Euripides seems to have concentrated his efforts mainly on characters and
themes and often appears to have ignored important elements of plot. Sophocles, on the other
hand, has been called the greatest constructor of plots in the ancient world, and Aristotle called his
Oedipus the King the finest example of Greek drama. Research Oedipus the King and compare it to
The Bacchae. Consider the similarities and differences between each play's plots, characters, and
themes.
By the end of the 5th century B.C., Greek theatres had developed a distinct shape and very particular
elements of scenery, costuming, and special effects that affected the way plays such as The Bacchae
were produced. Research the physical properties of Greek theatres in the age of Euripides, then
choose a scene from The Bacchae and describe how it might have been staged. As a group project,
you may wish to actually recreate the scene you have chosen.
In his time, Euripides was widely known as skeptic, someone who questioned authority and doubted
traditional beliefs. His ideas were influenced by, among others, the Sophist philosophers, who
believed that truth and morality were relative to the individual and largely matters of opinion. Who
were some of the Sophists? What were their beliefs? How did they influence Western culture?
In his Poetics, Aristotle suggests that the ideal tragic protagonist is someone who is highly renowned
and prosperous, basically good, and suffers a downfall not through vice or depravity but by some
error or frailty—a "tragic flaw" as it has often been called. Does this description suit Pentheus?
Why/why not?
Compare & Contrast
5th Century B.C.: The Athenian democracy which evolved during the 5th century B.C. is considered
to be the first of its kind in the world. Matters of the state are decided by a vote of the citizen
assembly, known as the ekklesia.
Today: The United States is considered the world's leading democratic nation, though American
democratic practices are quite different. Officials of the state are elected to one of three branches of
the government: the executive, the legislative, or the judicial. Each branch is given different
responsibilities and authorities to act on behalf of the citizens of the country, all of whom, men,
women, and naturalized citizens included, may vote, or choose to run for office, during periodic
public elections.
5th Century B.C.: Education in Athenian society is reserved for boys, who learn reading, writing,
arithmetic, and music. Once the boys reach age twelve, physical education becomes a priority, and
they are taught gymnastics and sports such as wrestling, running, the discus and javelin toss, which
will serve them well during their mandatory military service at age eighteen. Middle and upper class
girls, expecting to marry well, may learn to read and write, and perhaps play the lyre, from a female
tutor at home. They rarely, if ever, participate in physical education or sports.
Today: Equal education for women, in both academic subjects and sports, is recognized as important
in a majority of the world's industrialized nations. In the United States, some type of formal
education is required of all children and public education is available for everyone from kindergarten
through the twelfth grade. A limited amount of music and physical education may be required of
students but intense training in these areas is largely elective. Military service is not mandatory for
young men, though American boys must still register to be drafted when they turn eighteen.
5th Century B.C.: Theatre in Greece is associated with religious worship and the cult of Dionysus, the
Greek god of wine and revelry. Plays are produced each March during the Dionysia. Production of
the plays is financed by rich and public-spirited citizens, known as choregoi, who are assigned a
playwright and up to three actors and charged by the state with employing a chorus, hiring a trainer
for the group, and providing costumes, scenery, and props.
Today: Most theatre is no longer associated with religious worship, though "Passion Plays,"
commemorating the lives of Jesus and the saints, are common in American Christian churches. Plays
are performed year-round, mainly for recreational and entertainment purposes. In the United
States, professional play production is concentrated mainly in larger cities, such as New York, where
individual financiers or groups of wealthy investors provide the funds necessary to pay large groups
of performers and buy often extravagant sets, costumes, and lighting effects, which may cost
millions of dollars.
5th Century B.C.: Many of the most popular Greek tragedies impart a lesson that is central to
Athenian society: the gods are all-knowing and all-powerful and human beings should not allow
hubris to let them think they are equal or superior to the deities.
Today: The European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encouraged exploration
and experimentation in the fields of science, geography, philosophy, and the arts. As a result, in the
twentieth century, a variety of mainly monotheistic religions offer the opportunity to worship at will,
while individual human endeavors and accomplishments are regularly recognized for superior
achievement, and pride in ability, within reason, is encouraged as an important feature of personal
development.
What Do I Read Next?
Eighteen of Euripides's plays have survived, each of which contains elements of the dramatist's nontraditional style that raised criticism from his contemporaries and earned him the respect and
admiration of later generations of play readers and theatergoers. One of his most popular works is
Medea, Euripides's 431 B.C. retelling of the myth of the sorceress who, faced with abandonment and
exile in a strange land, murdered her own children and cursed her unfaithful husband. Hippolytus
(428 B.C.) is the story of King Theseus' s bride Phaedra, who falls in love with her stepson,
Hippolytus, leading them both down a path toward destruction.
Classical historian Michael Grant has written several books about the ancient Greeks and Romans,
including The Rise of the Greeks (1987), which largely examines the political and military history of
the Greek Empire; The Classical Greeks (1989), which provides a profile of Greek society through
brief biographical essays about prominent Greek writers, philosophers, and leaders; and A Social
History of Greece and Rome (1992), an exploration of the roles of women and men, slaves and
citizens in Greek society.
The Mask of Apollo is a novel of historical fiction by Mary Renault. Niko, the story's protagonist, is an
actor in the 4th century B.C. who travels the Greek Empire, performing for kings and tyrants and
befriending Plato, the famous philosopher, and Dion, a great soldier and statesman. The book draws
on Renault's lifetime of classical research and presents an engaging glimpse into the life of the
Greeks thousands of years ago.
Much of what is known of classical Greek tragedy is recorded in Aristotle's Poetics, a 4th century B.C.
treatise in which the philosopher attempts to describe dramatic poetry (tragedy). Aristotle suggests
the six essential ingredients of good tragedies are plot, character, theme, diction, music, and
spectacle; and he refers specifically to the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as examples.
While several translations and editions of the Poetics exist, S. H. Butcher's version, which first
appeared in 1902, is one that is often used in the classroom and appears frequently in literary
anthologies.
For nearly 150 years, students and teachers alike have relied on Bulfinch's Mythology as a
dependable and entertaining way to learn about the great heroes, gods, and myths of the world. In
this great collection of legends, originally published in 1855 but readily available in recent editions,
Thomas Bulfinch has carefully researched and retold some of the greatest stories the world has ever
known, including tales about the full pantheon of Greek gods and the mortals who dared to cross
them.
Peter Connolly's The Ancient City: Life in Classical Athens & Rome is an introduction to the history
and culture of two of the world's greatest empires. Filled with original drawings, suggesting what
ancient theatres, temples, and homes may have looked like, as well as photographs and helpful
maps, Connolloy's carefully researched text is simple, straightforward, and entertaining.
Further Reading
Arnott, Peter. The Ancient Greek and Roman Theatre, Random House, 1971.
An accessible, basic introduction to the drama and stagecraft of the classical Greeks and Romans
that includes theories about the origins of tragedy, suggestions about the evolution of the Greek
performance space, a handful of illustrations, and a helpful bibliography.
Bieber, Margarete. The History of the Greek and Roman Theatre, Princeton University Press, 1961.
An in-depth, scholarly look at the evolution of the classical Greek and Roman theatres, including
many photographs, illustrations, and conjectural drawings.
Foley, Helene P. "The Bacchae" in her Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides, Cornell
University Press, 1985.
In this essay, Helene suggests one of the things Euripides accomplished with The Bacchae was an
investigation of the relationship between ritual and theatre and between the spirit of festival and
the society that creates it.
Grube, G. M. A. "The Bacchants" in his The Drama of Euripides, Barnes and Noble, 1961.
A careful episode-by-episode examination of the plot of The Bacchae, with running commentary by
Grube explaining terminology and the possible historical and cultural significance of words and
deeds in the play.
Hamilton, Edith. The Greek Way, W. W. Norton, 1993.
Hamilton's research and writing about the minds and culture of the ancient Greeks have been
popular reading for decades. This relatively slim volume includes references to Euripides.
Segal, Charles. Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides's Bacchae, Princeton University Press, 1982.
In this exhaustive, scholarly tome, Segal examines many of the popular questions about The
Bacchae, including whether or not Euripides approved of Dionysus's worship himself, the
importance of the
Dionysiac cult to Greek society, and sex roles in the plays of Euripides.
Stapleton, Michael. The Illustrated Dictionary of Greek and Roman Mythology, Peter Bedrick Books,
New York, 1986.
A helpful collection of brief descriptions of some of the most famous Greek gods, heroes and myths,
arranged alphabetically.
Winnington-Ingram, R. P. Euripides and Dionysus: An Interpretation of the Bacchae, Cambridge
University Press, 1948.
A careful examination of The Bacchae that explores each action of the play, setting it in its literary
and historical context, with special emphasis on Euripides's possibly negative opinion of Dionysus
and the Greek gods.
Sources
Kerr, Walter. God on the Gymnasium Floor, Simon and Schuster, 1971, p. 42.
Kroll, Jack. Review of The Bacchae in Newsweek, October 13, 1980, p. 135.
Muller, K. O. A History of the Literature of Ancient Greece: Volume I, Parker, 1858, p. 499.
Novick, Julius. Review of The Bacchae in the Nation, October 25, 1980, pp. 417-18.
Sandys, John Edwin. The Bacchae of Euripides, Cambridge University Press, 1880.
Schlegel, Augustus Wilhelm. A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, translated by John
Black, H. G. Bohn, 1861.
Simon, John. Review of The Bacchae in New York, October 20, 1980, p. 101-02.
BookRags Student Essays on Does Pentheus Deserve His Fate?
Euripides presents an ambiguous view on Pentheus and his treatment throughout the play. The play
is sprinkled with conflicting views, contrasts of character and opposition, most prominently between
Pentheus and Dionysus. There is even a duality in the character of Dionysus himself; Euripides splits
the god between mortal and divine. On the one hand, Dionysus is calm and attractive and on the
other hand the divine form of Dionysus Euripides creates speaks from offstage, is obstinate, curt and
ruthless. These different viewpoints of the god cause the reader to change their opinion on
Pentheus' fate according to how Dionysus is drawn.
Dionysus arrives in Thebes seeking revenge on his mother Semele's family (the Royal family) for not
believing she was pregnant with the child of Zeus - Dionysus. We know that he has sent Theban
women to mount Cithaeron to worship him in madness; this tells us that Dionysus is vengeful and
callus with a penchant for revenge. However, in the Ancient world, recognition and respect for the
gods was of paramount importance. The Bacchic religion, newly introduced to Thebes is rejected by
the young king Pentheus. He even mocks the religion and Dionysus, which is showing hubris and
therefore he must be punished.
Dionysus introduces himself to the audience and appears androgynous, with his smooth face and
long flowing hair, one of the elements of duality in the god. He is in disguise as a priest of Dionysus
from the east. This allows Euripides to use irony on stage in dialogue between Dionysus and
Pentheus, as Dionysus is then forced to speak in the third person. For example when Dionysus tells
Pentheus the god is close by and when he is telling the chorus of Bacchants what "Dionysus" did to
free him from prison and punish Pentheus. This disguise can also be looked upon as yet another
form of mockery upon Pentheus as he has no idea who Dionysus really is, it makes him look like a
fool. The audience can feel sympathy towards Pentheus after Dionysus's cruel and vindictive
behaviour. Dionysus enjoys making Pentheus look ridiculous and plays upon his ignorance. Dionysus
shows his strength and power in his description of the destruction of the palace and causing the
deterioration of Pentheus' mind. This emphasises the malice of Dionysus because he has the power
to just kill Pentheus but he sends him mad and draws out his death. Pentheus' humiliation continues
when he is dressed up as a female bacchant by Dionysus and lead up to the mountain to spy on the
Maenads.
Pentheus, although he is a strict, authoritarian head of state is no match for Dionysus. This is
illustrated in the Guard's speech and the dialogue that follows, Pentheus is keen to impose his
authority on Dionysus but the calm, cooperative attitude of the foreigner is unexpected and
Pentheus is intimidated. This is another way that Dionysus forces Pentheus into looking like a fool.
We must remember that Pentheus is a very young man, not much more than a boy and new to the
throne of Thebes. Therefore it is understandable that he wants to establish his status amongst his
people, however it is implied that he exults in his power and takes it to excess, an example of this
being his hubris. However is in chaos as all the women have fled to the mountains, maddened by
Dionysus and left their children and husbands. Pentheus, by trying to hunt them down and bring
them back is trying to restore order to the city. Pentheus also seems to be threatened by new things
and rejects anything that he does not understand. Cadmus, his grandfather and Teiresias on the
other hand are wise in their old age. Euripides presents them as somewhat comic characters and it is
implied that the two old men are not as enthusiastic about the new Bacchic religion as they seem
but they are not naïve like Pentheus to be as defiant as he is.
It seems that Pentheus' worst crime is lack of self-knowledge or amathia and ignorance. He is an
impatient bully who is sometimes brutal, he rejects Dionysus and the new religion; his unthinking
and uncompromising scorn for popular piety is neither rational nor open-minded. However, his
youth in part excuses his crimes. Moreover, the gods too exhibit amathia; Dionysus' excessive
revenge is hardly the act of a wise man. Dionysus plays upon Pentheus' ignorance when he leads him
on to the mountain and quickly reverses the positions of hunted and hunter. Pentheus' morbid,
voyeuristic fascination with seeing and watching the women makes it easy for Dionysus to lure him
into his trap.
The messenger's speech, which details the expedition and ultimately Pentheus' death is written in a
way which presents Dionysus as brutal and evokes sympathy for Pentheus. The speech begins with a
description of the environment the Maenads are living in, Euripides uses words like "happy", "gay"
and "holy" to describe them, this emphasises the power of the god later on. The calming, soothing
description provides a stark contrast to the language and scene a little later in the speech as
Pentheus is killed, this calm opening also builds suspense and creates tension as the audience can
not quite forget what is about to happen. Dionysus continues deceiving Pentheus by encouraging
him to climb a tree, from which he claims Pentheus will be able to see the Maenads more clearly
whereas really is the reverse; it will make Pentheus more visible to the Maenads. The great impact
made by the voice of Dionysus from the sky, ordering the Maenads to kill Pentheus confirms
Dionysus' power over the Maenads and his vindictiveness as his revenge on Pentheus is almost
complete. His power is illustrated in the contrast of the women before and after this order, before
they were peaceful and content and after they are fierce, brutal and savage-like. Dionysus is
determined that he will be murdered by his own mother's bare hands that he does not allow
Pentheus to be injured by any of the spears or rocks the women throw at him. Euripides enforces
Pentheus' desperate situation through his begging his mother, something quite out of character for
the severe king. Even after Pentheus' death, Dionysus allows the women to play with his flesh by
tossing it around. This not only emphasises that his corpse is scattered throughout the forest and the
Maenads' ignorance of what they have just done and the difficulty to come in arranging a funeral for
the young king, but also the brutality of Pentheus' death.
In conclusion, I think that, yes Pentheus did deserve to be punished as he showed hubris to the gods
and rejected Dionysus and his religion, which is something that cannot go unpunished in the Ancient
world as the gods demand respect and all humans should know and adhere to this. However, it is
the extent to which Pentheus is punished which is excessive and unnecessary. This illustrates the
gods' disregard for humans and the disruption they may cause in life on earth. Through this
ambiguity of morality in Dionysus, Euripides is perhaps initiating the absurdity of having faith in the
gods who act with human-like vengeance.
BookRags Student Essays on The Ecstasy of Reason
In the Bacchae, Euripides questions the authority of god versus man and man's allegiance to the
gods. Pentheus is caught in a unique struggle of maintaining authority in his own kingdom and
keeping allegiance to his favored god Apollo. The appearance of Dionysus in Thebes raises a conflict
for Pentheus in that he can not accept the authority of a god other than the one he has chosen to
revere within his kingdom. Pentheus resists Dionysus supreme authority as a show of solidarity with
Apollo and the laws of reason versus Dionysus and the disruption of civil order.
Pentheus is worshiped and revered in Thebes just as he reveres Apollo. Apollo represents rationality,
law, order, harmony and philosophical enlightenment. Dionysus is the god of wine and pleasure and
represents all that is irrational, chaotic, and physically pleasing. Dionysus takes possession of the
women of Thebes who have denied his godly descent from Zeus. He dresses them as bacchanals and
sends them to the mountains to learn the rites of Bacchus, so that his prestige will be greater than
that of Apollo in Thebes. A rumor reaches Pentheus that there is another controlling his people,
specifically the women. His immediate reaction is outrage and Pentheus returns to Thebes to find
that the women have indeed left their homes for the mountains, where they are said to "frisk in
mock ecstasies...where they serve the lusts of men" (ln 210-220). Pentheus considers himself to be
the protector of civilized society and does not want the Bacchae to disrupt the civic order and duty
to which they are bound. Pentheus hostile response to the erotic liberation of the women by
Dionysis is due to the closely held belief that sexual energy should be repressed within the culture of
the city and women should be made to serve the sociopolitical functions of sustaining patriarchal
kingship through marriage alliances and the procreation of heirs. The sex life of the female citizens
should be regulated, bound to laws and customs and have no contact with the "filthy mysteries" (ln
260) that Dionysus commands. The Bacchae represent a force that Pentheus cannot control and this
loss of control over his city is the ultimate unmanning of Pentheus as a leader. The prospect of
expressed female sexuality infuriates Pentheus who refers to the spreading eroticism as "obscene
disorder" (ln 232). Pentheus vows to destroy Dionysus, that "effeminate stranger, the man who
infects our women with this strange disease and pollutes our beds." (ln 353) In Pentheus' view there
is no room for Dionysus' licentiousness. Dionysus offends Pentheus' sense of balance and order on
both a civic and a personal level.
Dionysus has long-hair, rosy cheeks and displays no overtly frightening qualities yet Pentheus takes
an instant dislike to the strange, beautiful and charming stranger that has appeared in his land.
Pentheus tries to reestablish his authority over the stranger during a verbal battle upon their first
encounter. Dionysus baits Pentheus to try and reestablish his rule and Pentheus asserts his position
as a great and powerful ruler by announcing, "But I say: chain him. And I am the stronger here." (ln
503). He denounces the god as a fake and decides that hanging is a just punishment for the imposter
who dares to challenge Pentheus' rule. Dionysus is forever breaking down the boundaries that
Pentheus erects just as he breaks down Pentheus' palace after being chained.
Pentheus' struggle to be the most powerful makes him blind to the god that appears in his kingdom
and he places himself in danger by allowing his selfish pride at ruling Thebes to come before his
willingness to serve the gods. Pentheus continues to resist Dionysus' authority after the destruction
of his palace by claiming that if the women of Thebes will not yield to Pentheus then he will sacrifice
them to Dionysus. The young king has refuted numerous warnings by Tieresus, Cadmus and
Dionysus himself to take heed and worship the god rather than establish a blind authority that does
not yield to those more powerful. Pentheus' unwillingness to bend, to see beyond rigid order, leads
to his own demise. Tieresus councils Pentheus to yield to the disorder of Dionysus and claims that
yielding does not mean he must break with Apollo but allow for a dual existence of both order and
chaos. Coryphaeus says in response to Tieresus' council, "Apollo would approve your words. Wisely
you honor Bromius: a great god." (ln 330) Pentheus must reconcile Apollonian law and order with
Dionysus quest for fun and games. It is only in a joint worshiping of Apollo and Dionysus that
Pentheus may find salvation. However, Pentheus' own rigidness is the seed of his undoing at the
hands of Dionysus.
Dionysus takes possession of Pentheus by using reasoning and Pentheus' longing to understand and
see the rites of the Bacchants. He subjugates Pentheus to his power and convinces him to dress as a
woman. Dionysus power over Pentheus is complete when one of Pentheus' curls comes loose from
the snood and Dionysus says, "then let me be your maid and tuck it back. Hold still." (ln 931)
Dionysus leads Pentheus to the women's encampment knowing the fate that awaits him at his
mother's hand. Pentheus is torn limb from limb by the impassioned Bacchants and Pentheus' mother
Agave severs his head. After a brief celebration of their kill in which Agave lionizes her "prize" (ln
1175) Agave recovers and begs to make amends for "exalting in [her] kill" (ln 1325). However, it
becomes clear that there is no punishment to great for insulting a god.
The life and death of Pentheus emerges in this play as irrational and borders on insane. There is no
heroism in Pentheus' death and at the end of the play he does not even exist as a corpse. The play
leaves Pentheus lying unburied and scattered so that he is denied the rites of a hero. Apollo has
been bested and reason can not save Pentheus from his ignoble death without the trace of
traditional heroism. Pentheus actions are without dignity or any final significant grandeur. He is
hopelessly outmatched but throws himself against the might of Dionysus because he is blinded by
the power that Apollo seemed to promise against irrationality. Pentheus' death accomplishes
nothing and amounts to nothing. He is unable to save his city and those who advised him to act
differently to Dionysus are punished or destroyed. The Bacchae leaves us with a world in Dionysian
control. There is no law or reason and ethical norms have disappeared. Dionysus will move on to the
next city and conduct the same disruption there. Pentheus resistance is futile and serves only as a
warning that it is futile to resist chaos. A well placed shield of Apollonian rational is easily cast aside
by the madness of Dionysus ritual. The lesson Pentheus refused to learn is this: the ecstasy of wine
and pleasure must be embraced to counter the rigid nature society demands or there is the risk of
being torn apart by the demands of both.
References
Euripides V. The Bacchae. Ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago & London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1968
BookRags Student Essays on Pentheus's Death in "Bacchae" by Euripides
"Bacchae", by Euripides, talks about Dionysus (also called Bromius, Bacchus, or Evius), son of Zeus
and a mortal woman, Semele, who came back to his homeland of Thebes to show everyone that he
was a real god. His mother was killed while giving birth to him and her sisters spread rumors that she
lied about her pregnancy. Therefore his family does not know about his existence. Dionysus's cousin
Pentheus was not convinced that he was god and argued with him in spite of everyone around
telling him to stop fighting with Dionysus. At the end of the play, his own mother killed Pentheus
while she was at the state of being possessed by Bacchus; not knowing it was her son. Why does
Pentheus get killed? This essay discusses three possible explanations for that.
The first and the most important reason is, of course, that Pentheus denies Dionysus being a god.
Dionysus came to Thebes to prove to everyone who he was but Pentheus's refusal could mislead
people. This angered Bromius and he wanted to put a stop to that. In the beginning of the play,
Dionysus did not want to kill his cousin. However, after Pentheus started arguing with Bacchus and
had him chained, Dionysus got more upset. He said that Pentheus meant nothing to him, and that
the wise know how to restrain their passions. This shows that that was the point when Dionysus
decided to get revenge against Pentheus.
It is very clear to us that Pentheus is a young boy with very little experience. His grandfather Cadmus
together with the great sage Teiresias. Cadmus said that we should believe in gods, but not
necessarily love them. That was what he wanted Pentheus to do. It's known that Greeks honored the
elders but Pentheus ignored the advise and this way, showed disrespect and dishonor of his
grandfather. That is another point that angered Dionysus even more.
Throughout the play, it seems that Dionysus does not care much about his relatives. He came to
Thebes not to simply pay a visit to his family but to show them his powers and pay back to those
people who spread rumors about his mother. That was why it did not bother him to kill Pentheus
even though he was his cousin. He thought that by killing him, he would show his real powers and
once again prove his true being a god. Other people who had any doubts about that would see it and
change their opinions about him; and Bacchus would do the same to those who still did not believe
him. So another reason for Dionysus killing his cousin, and doing it particularly in a cruel way, was to
demonstrate his godly powers in front of everyone. Also, to prove that he was a god of war, as
Teiresias tells us; the god of wilderness in a world of beasts and the hunt.
These three themes that are presented in this essay are the primary reasons for the killing of
Pentheus by his own cousin, Bromius.
Encyclopedia of World Biography on Euripides
Name:
Encyclopedia of World Biography Biography
Of the three poets of Greek tragedy whose work survives, Euripides is the one whose plays survive in
the largest number (eighteen in contrast to seven each for Aeschylus and Sophocles). His plays are
notable for containing both tragic pathos and the nimble play of ideas. In antiquity, at least from the
time shortly after his death about 407 or 406 B.C., Euripides was immensely popular and his dramas
were performed wherever theaters existed. His influence continued through later antiquity and into
the Renaissance and beyond, shaping French, German, Italian, and English literature until well into
the twentieth century.
For the biography of Euripides, as for those of most ancient writers, reliable evidence is in short
supply. By the time curiosity about the poet's life developed, almost all the means to satisfy it had
disappeared. The biographical tradition passes on conjectures based both on Euripides' plays and on
his portrayal in the works of Aristophanes and other comic poets; it also hands down transparently
mythical stories with only a few scraps of information that cannot be immediately unmasked as
invention. (The testimonia, or ancient notices, about Euripides' life are collected and translated in
David Kovacs's Euripidea, 1994.) Furthermore, it is only occasionally that the poet's work can be
related to anything known about his life or to the public events of Athens's history. Thus, little about
the life of Euripedes can be said with any assurance.
Euripides was born about the year 484 B.C. His father was Mnesarchus (or Mnesarchides). Despite a
repeated joke in Aristophanes' Frogs (405 B.C.) that Euripides' mother, Cleito, was a vegetable seller,
reliable evidence shows that she came from a noble family. Euripides grew up in the deme, or
village, of Phlya, north of Mount Hymettus in northern Attica. An inscription there, recorded by
Theophrastus, commemorates his serving as wine pourer for the sons of leading families who
danced in honor of Apollo Delios. Another notice makes him torchbearer in a procession in honor of
Apollo Zosterios. Both these positions suggest that Euripides came from a prominent family. Nothing
about his education is known: tradition gives him a variety of philosophers as teachers, but the
connections are mostly impossible on chronological grounds. None of the notices connecting him
personally with Socrates, Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and other such figures survives scrutiny. His plays,
however, demonstrate his familiarity with contemporary philosophical speculation.
Euripides began to enter his plays in the tragic competitions at Athens in 455 B.C., when he was in
his late twenties. At the City Dionysia in the spring of each year, three poets were allowed to
compete with three tragedies followed by a mythological burlesque called a satyr play. One of the
four plays he produced in 455 B.C. was Daughters of Pelias, the story of Medea's revenge on Jason's
wicked uncle. Euripides came in third. He won a first prize for the first time in 442 B.C. (play
unknown), one of only five during a career in which he entered some twenty-two times in the tragic
competitions.
At some time between 428 B.C. and 408 B.C., as one learns from a glancing reference in Aristotle's
Rhetoric (circa 334 B.C.), Euripides was involved in a lawsuit with a man called Hygiainon. At issue
was the question whether it was Euripides' or Hygiainon's turn to serve as financial sponsor for some
piece of public expenditure, as rich men were required to do in Athens. At some point Hygiainon
accused Euripides of impiety on the grounds that a line in Hippolytus with a Garland (428), "My
tongue swore, but my mind is unsworn," encouraged perjury. Euripides' reply was to remind
Hygiainon that the Athenian people had already passed judgment on this play (it had received a first
prize), and if Hygiainon continued this line of attack, they would do so again in their capacity as
jurors.
A short time after he staged his drama Orestes in 408 B.C., Euripides went to Macedonia to the court
of King Archelaus. Some have called this a self-imposed exile and have alleged that Euripides
despaired of his city or was disgusted at the treatment he received as a poet. This, however, is mere
speculation: several artists, including Timotheus the lyric poet, Zeuxis the sculptor, and Agathon the
tragic poet, accepted invitations from Archelaus at about this time. Euripides died and was buried in
Macedonia in 407-406 B.C.. He is said either to have been killed by hunting dogs, (accidentally let
loose on him or deliberately set on him by enemies or rivals), or to have been torn apart by women.
Either death is possible but cannot be deemed likely. When the news of Euripides' death was
brought to Athens, Sophocles donned mourning robes and introduced his chorus at the Dionysia
without the customary garlands.
Soon after his death Euripides became by far the most popular and widely performed of the tragic
poets, and his works were produced throughout the Greekspeaking world. The plays that have
survived to the present day came down in two different streams. Sometime after A.D. 250 a group of
ten plays, now called the "select plays," were chosen, perhaps for school use, and increasingly only
these plays were copied. By fortunate chance, however, one or two volumes of the Collected Works,
containing nine plays beginning with the letters epsilon, eta, iota, and kappa, survived into the
Byzantine period and were copied onto a single manuscript now in Florence. The "alphabetic plays,"
as they are called, are thus a chance cross section of Euripides' work, and the fact that many of
them, such as Heracles (circa 416), Ion (circa 413), and Iphigenia among the "Taurians (circa 414),
are so well written suggests that the general level of Euripides' dramas must have been high.
Much of the biographical tradition represents Euripides as an unpopular outsider and a friend of
Sophists and philosophers, antitraditionalist in his art and skeptical or atheistic in his religious views.
On this basis the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche thought that Euripides and
Socrates were friends, and that these two rationalists collaborated to murder tragedy by destroying
its religious foundations. Later scholars, taking their cue from Nietzsche, have with considerable
subtlety interpreted Euripides' plays as challenges to the artistic and religious ideals of Aeschylus and
Sophocles. It is likely, however, that this view of the poet derives in the last analysis from
Aristophanes and other poets of what is called Old Comedy. Prima facie, this evidence, practically
the only contemporary evidence that exists, ought to count for a great deal to modern readers of
the plays, because it could well show how Euripides' first audiences reacted to his work. But when
Old Comedy is carefully examined in cases where its witness can be checked, it becomes apparent
that any critic who uses Aristophanes to guide his own readings of Euripides' plays is leaning on a
broken reed.
The amount of truth in a comic portrait can be extremely minimal: there need be only a slight
resemblance between the actual person and his comic representation. A certain Cleisthenes, for
example, because he had a skimpy beard, was pilloried for twenty years, first as a eunuch and then
as an effeminate person. Socrates, because he was an intellectual at a time when intellectuals
typically engaged in scientific speculation or taught skill in speaking, was portrayed as a quack
scientist and teacher of dishonest rhetoric. Aristophanes presents Euripides in two of his plays as a
misogynist, which there is good reason to doubt mat he was. These examples show clearly how Old
Comedy works: it is a joke to say that Cleisthenes is a eunuch, Socrates a physicist, or Euripides a
misogynist, not because the claim is true, but because it is comically colorable. Cleisthenes' skimpy
beard, Socrates' intellectualism, the presence in Euripides' plays of several characters who make
unfavorable comments about women—all provide the comic justification. When one comes to
charges such as Euripides' atheism, which modern scholars have taken seriously, one must reckon
with the certainty that comic poets, like writers of lapidary inscriptions, are "not upon oath"; and
also with the possibility that the relation between the comic portrait and the real-life person
portrayed might be just as distant in the one case as in the other. For particulars of Aristophanes'
portrait, one may consult the "Introduction" to the Loeb Classical Library's volumes on Euripides, in
which Kovacs discusses the possibility that Euripides really was perceived by his audience as a
subverter of religion, morality, and tragic decorum and defends the conclusion that agnosticism is
the most certain verdict the evidence allows.
The earliest of Euripides' extant plays is the Alcestis of 438 B.C. This drama was the fourth play of a
series of four, a position usually occupied by a satyr play. But Akestis is no satyr play, and despite its
happy ending, it is fully tragic in its themes. Its premise is the fairy-tale motif of receiving a special
privilege not accorded to other mortals, like the three magical wishes or the golden touch. Typically
such a story serves to show that, however much one might wish that the ordinary rules of mortality
could be suspended, it is just as well that they are not. Admetus, king of Pherae in Thessaly, is given
the chance to escape the early death that has been fated for him. The god who won this privilege for
him was Apollo, who had been forced to serve a year as servant to Admetus, because he and his son
Asclepius, who raised the dead, had rebelled against the order of Zeus, an order that insists strongly
on the distinction between god and mortal. Apollo had been treated kindly by his master Admetus,
and so in gratitude he tricked the Fates into allowing Admetus to live beyond his destined timeprovided that he could find someone among his own kin willing to die in his place. Only Admetus's
wife, Alcestis, was willing. Apollo tells Death at the beginning of the play that Alcestis will be brought
back to Admetus by Heracles, who is coming to Thessaly on his way to fetch the Thracian mares of
Diomedes.
Admetus will thus get the benefit of Apollo's boon, and Heracles will restore the wife who gave
herself in his stead. A happy ending is assured, but Apollo, though right about the facts, has no idea,
since he has never been a mortal, what it will be like in the interval for Admetus to lose his wife. The
paradox of the situation is this, that a woman who would die for her husband would be a wonderful
wife indeed, but the loss of such a woman would render the life she gave her husband utterly
desolate. Admetus suffers terribly from the loss of his wife, and in addition he cuts a sorry figure
when he quarrels with his father, who had refused to sacrifice his life for his son. The nadir of his
fortunes is reached when he returns to his empty house after the funeral and realizes that his wife is
better off than he is. The ending restores to Admetus not only his wife but a new sense of the joy of
life lived under the usual conditions of mortality.
Medea was presented in 431 B.C., a few weeks before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. It
came in third, defeated not only by the phenomenally successful Sophocles (who took second place),
but also by Aeschylus's son Euphorion. Medea, a princess from the far-off land of Colchis, had fallen
in love with Jason when he came to Colchis in quest of the Golden Fleece. She helped him overcome
the deadly obstacles in his way and ran away with him to Greece, relying on his oath to her that he
would never abandon her. In Euripides' play, Jason, now in exile in Corinth, has seized the chance
offered him of marrying the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. Jason thinks he is marrying in the
best interest of everyone, Medea included, but she regards his marriage as base treachery and
determines to have revenge. Her situation is made more desperate by the decree of exile that Creon
has just pronounced against her, and she has only a day in which to punish Jason. She also notes that
she has no place to go afterward and decides to see if anyone will turn up to give her refuge. By a
coincidence that was criticized by Aristotle in his Poetics (circa 334 B.C.) Aegeus, king of Athens, is
passing through Corinth on his way from Delphi, where he has consulted the oracle about his
childlessness. He promises Medea a place of refuge. Medea then announces to the chorus her
revised plan of revenge. She will kill Jason's new bride and then, instead of killing Jason himself, she
will kill her two sons by Jason, condemning him to the childless fate that had so distressed Aegeus.
As part of a pretended reconciliation with Jason, she sends the boys with gifts for Creon's daughter,
a gown and a diadem, surpassingly beautiful but smeared with a poison that bursts into flames and
consumes the unlucky woman. Then, after two soliloquies in which she wrestles with her own very
real maternal feelings, she stabs her sons to death. When Jason arrives he finds that they are dead
by their mother's hand and that she is aloft in a magic chariot that will take her out of harm's way to
Athens. After mutual recriminations Medea departs. The Chorus offers concluding reflections on the
unexpected things Zeus and the other gods have in store for mortals.
The play, as all readers and audiences who experience it know, has searing emotional power. Among
the themes critics have noted are the strains and tensions between men and women, the contrast
between the smugness and perfidy of the Greek and the moral outrage of the trusting barbarian he
has wronged, and the ability of passion to overcome reason. One should also note, as critics by and
large have not, the theological dimension of the drama, emphasized time and again throughout the
play and most prominently in its last five lines. Jason has broken his oath, and the gods punish
perjurers, as everyone in antiquity knew, by the destruction of the perjurer's line, his descendants.
This is precisely what Medea's revenge accomplishes, a revenge abetted by the chance appearance
of Aegeus, the providential character of which is hinted at by Medea the moment he is out of
earshot. On no human estimate of the probabilities could anyone have guessed that a woman,
without family or friends and under sentence of exile, could have worked such a stunning revenge.
The impotence of human understanding in the face of the gods is an important traditional theme of
Greek literature, and its relevance to this play is clear.
Hippolytus with a Garland was produced in 428 B.C. and won a first prize. Euripides had produced an
earlier and unsuccessful version of this story, but the work that survives is arguably the best of his
extant plays. It is the story of the revenge taken by Aphrodite against Hippolytus, illegitimate son of
Theseus by an Amazon woman. Hippolytus is the special favorite of Artemis. He lives a life of
chastity, hunting in the wilds with the goddess, and calls Aphrodite the basest of divinities. To
avenge this slight to her honor, Aphrodite uses her power as goddess of love to cause his death. She
causes Theseus's wife, Phaedra, to fall in love with her stepson. Phaedra intends to starve herself in
silence rather than be guilty of any disgraceful act, but her secret is wormed from her by her old
nurse, who, though shocked by the revelation of this quasi-incestuous love, yet determines to save
Phaedra's life by helping her gratify her passion. Though she is under strict instructions not to tell
Hippolytus, the nurse goes to him and, after putting him under oath not to reveal to anyone what
she is about to say, tells him of Phaedra's love for him and urges him to become her lover.
Hippolytus, under the impression that Phaedra has sent the nurse, denounces his stepmother in the
harshest terms but, after an initial quibble about its validity, promises to keep his oath. Phaedra,
afraid that her secret will be found out in the world at large, decides to hang herself and to leave a
note accusing Hippolytus of raping her. When Theseus returns, he finds his wife dead and reads the
note. Theseus's father is Poseidon, and he has granted him three curses. Theseus at once calls upon
Poseidon to grant him one of these curses by killing Hippolytus. To make his assurance certain, he
exiles his son. On his way into exile Hippolytus is fatally hurt in a chariot wreck caused by a
miraculous bull from the sea that frightens Hippolytus's horses, driving him onto the rocks. He is
brought back in excruciating pain and at the point of death. Before he dies, however, Artemis comes
to tell Theseus the truth about both his wife and his son. Their good name is restored to both, and
father and son are reconciled. Artemis promises revenge on Aphrodite (she will kill the love
goddess's favorite mortal) and posthumous honors for Hippolytus.
The gods of this play, though repellent to modern taste, are the traditional divinities of Greek
polytheism, who reward their personal favorites and punish their personal enemies in ways that
often have little to do with justice. In the world of myth such divinities exist, and since they know
more than mortals and are more powerful, they can manipulate their enemies in ways that wreak
havoc with ordinary human reasoning about the past, present, or future. Aphrodite uses the
excellences of Phaedra and Hippolytus and the wholly forgivable misapprehension of Theseus to
work her vengeance. Hippolytus denounces Phaedra for a proposal she did not authorize; Phaedra
slanders Hippolytus in order to discredit an accusation he will never make. Hippolytus, bound by his
oath, can say in reply to his father's accusation only things that make the suspicion against him all
the deeper. Artemis speaks the truth when she remarks, "When the gods so ordain, it is to be
expected that mortals will commit disastrous mistakes." It is Aphrodite's desire for revenge, not
anything in the character of either of her antagonists, that accounts for the devastation seen by the
end of the play; and Artemis's comments on the nobility of the two mortals' lives is surely meant to
be the final judgment.
Two plays written about 425 B.C. and 424 B.C. have plots that combine two separate stories and are
both set in the aftermath of the Trojan War. In Andromache the action takes place in Phthia, the
home of Neoptolemus, son of Achilles and grandson of Peleus. Neoptolemus has returned home
from Troy with Andromache, Hector's widow, as his spear prize and mistress, and she has borne him
a son. But subsequently he marries Menelaus's daughter Hermione. When Neoptolemus is away
from home, Hermione, who has no children because Neoptolemus cannot stand his beautiful but
arrogant wife, attempts to murder her rival, Andromache, and her son by Neoptolemus. Hermione's
father, Menelaus, has come from Sparta to help her. The murder is all but accomplished when
Peleus appears in response to Andromache's plea for help and drives Menelaus away. Hermione,
afraid of facing her husband without the backing of her father, is then on the point of killing herself,
when her cousin Orestes appears. He claims at first to be merely passing through, but when he has
heard Hermione's story, he reveals that he has heard of the strife between her and Andromache and
has come to take Hermione away to be his wife, as she was originally promised to be. Orestes then
reveals that he has set in motion a plot to murder Neoptolemus at Delphi, where he has gone to
offer amends to Apollo for his earlier demand of satisfaction for the death of Achilles, his father. A
messenger arrives bringing the news of Neoptolemus's murder to Peleus, who is crushed by the
death of the only son of his only son. Then his divine wife, Thetis, appears and tells him that all this
was fated to be but that a happy future awaits him: he will become a god and live with her. His line
is not extinct, because the boy whose life he so gallantly saved is his great-grandson, and he will rule
over the Molossians and carry on the lineage of Peleus and of the Trojan royal house, both of which
are in the gods' care. The two stories of triangular love-the strife of Andromache and Hermione in
regard to Neoptolemus and of Orestes and Neoptolemus in regard to Hermione—are made to fit
together in a single play, one that is packed with reversals of fortune that are revealed by the end of
the drama to be part of a divine plan.
Hecuba (circa 424 B.C.) also combines two stories that take place after the Trojan War. Hecuba, the
queen of Troy, is a captive on her way to Greece. The ghost of Achilles, after reproaching the
departing Greek army for leaving without giving him a prize of honor, asks that Polyxena, Hecuba's
daughter, be sacrificed at his tomb. The Greeks are persuaded by the amoral Odysseus to honor the
request. When Odysseus comes to take Polyxena away, Hecuba pleads with him to spare her
daughter, just as Hecuba had once spared his life; when he refuses, Hecuba asks her daughter to
plead. But Polyxena, instead of pleading for her life, declares that death is preferable to her ruined
circumstances; and when she is taken to Achilles' tomb, she bravely bares her neck and chest to the
blade of Neoptolemus, who is officiating at the sacrifice to his father. Hecuba, though crushed by the
report of her daughter's death, finds her grief lessened by the nobility with which Polyxena died.
But when Hecuba sends a servant to fetch water to wash her daughter's body for burial, the servant
returns with the corpse of Hecuba's son Polydorus, whose ghost had opened the play with the
prediction that his body would be found. As a young boy before the war, Polydorus had been sent,
with a large amount of gold, to the safekeeping of Priam's guest-friend Polymestor, king of Thrace.
After Troy fell Polymestor killed his young charge and seized his gold, throwing Polydorus's body into
the sea without a burial. Aided by a dream that Hecuba had about her son, she divines the identity
of the murderer. She then persuades the Greek king, Agamemnon, to allow her to send a message to
Polymestor to entice him and his sons into the Greek camp, where she can take vengeance on him.
Hecuba conceals from Polymestor that she knows her son is dead and tricks him into entering the
tent by telling him there is gold hidden there. In the tent the Trojan captives kill Polymestor's sons
and blind Polymestor. When he calls upon Agamemnon to punish Hecuba, Agamemnon replies that
he, Polymestor, has been justly punished. In the final lines of the play Polymestor turns prophet and
predicts the death of Agamemnon at the hands of his wife, Clytemnestra, and the transformation of
Hecuba into a dog, the Bitch of Cynossema, a landmark that sailors use to chart their course.
Written within about six years of one another are two dramas in which the city of Athens plays a
central role. In Children of Heracles, produced about 430 B.C., the sons and daughters of the hero
Heracles, persecuted by their father's great enemy, Eurystheus, seek refuge in Marathon in Attica,
where they are protected by Demophon and Acamas, the sons of Theseus. In battle Eurystheus is
routed, in part because of the bravery of one of Heracles' daughters, who agrees to be sacrificed to
secure the success of the Athenian army. At the end of the play, Eurystheus prophesies that he will
be buried on Attic soil and will cause harm to the later descendants of Heracles (the Spartans) when
they attack Athens, forgetful of the city's former kindness to them. In Suppliant Women, produced
about 424 B.C., the Argive king, Adrastus, leader of the disastrous expedition of the Seven Against
Thebes, begs Theseus to help him return the bodies of the leaders, whom the Thebans will not
surrender for burial. Theseus at first refuses, but, urged by his mother to adopt for his city a policy of
studied vigor, he goes to war and recovers the bodies. Both plays are much influenced by the
political issues of Euripides' own time.
Electra, probably staged about 420 B.C., retells the story of Orestes' and Electra's revenge on their
mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. The play makes notable innovations in the story:
Electra does not live in the palace at Argos, as in Aeschylus's Libation Bearers (458 B.C.), but has
been married off by Aegisthus to a poor farmer and lives in poverty. Her ragged clothing and the hut
she lives in increase the bitterness of her hatred against her mother. The Orestes of this play is less
resolute than Aeschylus's Orestes, and his sister must steel him to kill their mother. The murders
take place in the countryside, with a loyal old retainer of Agamemnon playing an important role. The
atmosphere is less elevated than in other treatments of the story, and one is reminded of the last
half of Homer's Odyssey (circa eighth century B.C.), with its loyal swineherd and rustic hospitality.
Staged in about 416 B.C., Heracles, like Andromache and Hecuba, is composed of two separate
stories. In the first half Heracles is presumed to be dead (Eurystheus had sent him to the Underworld
to fetch Cerberus), and his family is being persecuted by a Theban usurper named Lycus. Heracles
returns in the nick of time, rescues his father, wife, and children, and kills Lycus. But immediately
after the joyful choral ode celebrating the justice of the gods, the minor divinities Iris and Lyssa
(Madness) descend on Heracles' house, sent by Hera, Heracles' implacable enemy. Iris orders Lyssa
to bring a fit of madness on Heracles so that he will kill his own children. This Lyssa does, and
Heracles kills not only his children but his wife as well, and almost kills his father. When he recovers
from the fit and learns the truth, he determines to kill himself. Theseus, whom he had rescued from
the Underworld, comes with an army to rescue Thebes from the usurper Lycus, and when he finds
Heracles amid the corpses of his family, he persuades him to give up his intention to kill himself and
go with him to Athens. The sharp juxtaposition of these two actions, one ending in joy, the other in
misery, emphasizes the theme of mutability.
For quite some time scholars connected Euripides' 'Trojan Women of 415 B.C. with the Athenians'
massacre of the Melians in the waning months of 416 B.C.. The prevailing view, until recently
universal, was that the play was a sort of piece a clef, so that in the Greeks, who have taken Troy and
proceed to kill Astyanax, the young son of Hector, the audience is meant to see the Athenians, while
the Trojans stand in for the Melians. It was further held that the play expresses Euripides' revulsion
at his city's treatment of Melos. But the adherents of this view have a few embarrassing facts to deal
with. First, there was not enough time between the fall of Melos and the City Dionysia for Euripides
to have planned, written, and rehearsed a play on this theme, as A. Maria van Erp Taalman Kip
demonstrated in Mnemosyne in 1987. Second, the Trojan Women is part of a connected trilogy in
which the first two plays are the lost Alexandros and Palamedes. The surviving fragments of
Alexandros make it plain that the fall of Troy is to be seen against a divine backdrop, and that it was
the gods who, in the last analysis, destroyed Troy, with the Greeks as their instrument, a theme also
prominent in Trojan Women. This view of the fall of Troy would be unsuitable, to say the least, in a
play intended to reproach Athens for destroying Melos. Third, however successfully it has been
staged in modern times as a play of protest against war, Trojan Women contains several scenes and
choral odes—notably the scene where Helen is on trial and the ode on the gods' abandonment of
Troy—that work counter to the supposed purpose of the play. Most embarrassing of all, the chorus
of Trojan captives, in a choral ode speculating on where they will be sent as slaves, go out of their
way to pray that they may be sent to blessed Athens and not to hateful Sparta, something hard to
explain if Euripides is trying to tell his countrymen how criminal Athens has been in its prosecution of
the war against Sparta. It is prudent to look at the play without the a priori assumption of allegory.
Of all Euripides' extant plays, Trojan Women is the most oddly constructed. There is no peripeteia
(swift change of fortune) at all: the Trojan women are miserable at the beginning of the play and
scarcely more so at the end; only the death of Astyanax makes any objective change in their
situation. The play consists of four scenes revolving around Cassandra, Andromache, Helen, and
Hecuba, preceded by a prologue involving Poseidon and Athena. Yet, diverse as they are in other
respects, all five of these scenes can be seen as meditations on the archaic Greek themes of the
deceptiveness of appearances, the impotence of human judgment, and the power of the gods.
The next three of Euripides' extant plays have happy endings and are sometimes referred to as
tragicomedies. Both Iphigenia among the Taurians of about 414 B.C. and the Helen of 412 B.C. are
plays set in far-off places (the Crimea and Egypt respectively) and involve Greeks who manage to
outwit and escape from their barbarian captors. In Iphigenia the heroine, after her apparent sacrifice
at Aulis, is in reality still alive, having been spirited away by Artemis to the Crimea. Here Iphigenia is
priestess of Artemis and is expected to oversee the sacrifice of any foreigners who come to Tauria.
Her brother Orestes, whom she has not seen since he was a baby, is sent by Apollo (along with his
friend Pylades) to steal the statue of Artemis from the Taurians and give it a home in Greece. The
two men are captured, and Iphigenia nearly sacrifices her own brother unwittingly before she
recognizes him. The two then form a plot to escape with the statue. In Helen Euripides uses a version
of the story of Helen invented by the sixth-century poet Stesichorus: the real Helen was innocent of
the elopement with Paris, because it was a phantom made by the gods who went to Troy. In
Euripides' play, the real Helen is in Egypt when her husband Menelaus returns from Troy with the
phantom Helen. The phantom disappears; he learns that the woman he finds in Egypt is the real
Helen; and together they plot their escape from King Theoclymenus, who wants to marry Helen and
would certainly kill Menelaus if he could. Their trick succeeds, and they make their escape.
Ion of about 413 B.C. is a foundling story with a happy ending. Ion is the son of the Athenian princess
Creusa, who was raped by Apollo. She gave birth in secret and exposed her son to die, but Apollo
rescued him, raised him as a temple servant in Delphi, and now means to restore him to the throne
of Athens. Creusa and her husband, Xuthus, are childless and have come to Delphi to ask the god
how they may bear children. Apollo's oracle tells Xuthus that the first person he meets on leaving
the temple will be his son. (This is false, but the audience is perhaps meant to think that the
prophecy was ambiguously expressed.) Xuthus thinks Ion, who meets him outside the temple, is his
child by some earlier affair and proposes to take him back to Athens, with a view to making him his
heir. He means to conceal the boy's supposed parentage from Creusa, who would be distressed that
it was not her son but only Xuthus's who was heir to the throne. (Creusa is of the Athenian royal
family, and Xuthus is a foreigner, so if Ion is no son of hers, the royal line of Athens would be
replaced by a foreign dynasty.) But Creusa learns of the oracle and the meeting of the supposed
father and son and determines with a loyal retainer to poison Ion before he can usurp the throne of
her father. The plot is detected (Apollo foils it), and Ion sets out to punish Creusa, who takes refuge
at an altar. Mother has almost killed son, and son mother, when the priestess of Apollo, prompted
by the god, brings out the cradle in which Ion had been exposed. This leads to the recognition:
Creusa is the mother Ion has longed to see and Ion the baby Creusa thought dead. When Athena
appears to explain the past and predict the future (Ion is destined to found the Ionian race), Creusa
can see the hand of Apollo in all that has gone before and forgives the god for the rape he
committed years earlier. Mutability of fortune, human ignorance, and divine power are all themes
unmistakably present here-in this case, to bring about blessing.
Phoenician Women of 410 or 409 B.C. is a retelling of the story of the Seven against Thebes, the
struggle of Oedipus's sons, Eteocles and Polynices, for the throne. It is perhaps the most varied in
incident of Euripides' plays; it contains a scene where Antigone in a tower learns the names of all the
attacking champions, a debate about justice between Eteocles and Polynices, the voluntary selfsacrifice of Creon's son Menoeceus, and a scene in which the blind Oedipus appears. The women of
the title are the chorus, which consists of women of Tyre in Phoenicia on their way to serve Apollo in
Delphi.
Orestes of 408 B.C. is a wonderfully inventive sequel to the story of the murder of Clytemnestra.
Orestes lies sick in bed, given to fits of madness brought on by the Erinyes, who pursue him for
killing his mother. In addition, the people of Argos are putting him on trial for murder. Apollo, it
seems, has abandoned Orestes after ordering him to exact vengeance from his father's murderers.
When Menelaus appears, Orestes appeals to him for help, but at the trial Menelaus does nothing.
After Orestes and Electra are condemned, they decide in one last desperate act to kill Menelaus's
wife, Helen, and his daughter, Hermione. The murder of Helen miscarries when she is spirited away
toward heaven, and Orestes is just about to cut Hermione's throat and set the house on fire when
Apollo appears and sets things once more in order.
In 408 B.C., as noted earlier, Euripides went to Macedonia to the court of Archelaus. There he died,
and among his effects were three tragedies, Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, and a third tragedy now
lost, that were put on for the first time after the poet's death and crowned with a first prize. In
Bacchae the god Dionysus, who is the son of Zeus by the Theban princess Semele, returns with his
female Asian worshipers, the Bacchants, to Thebes. There the new worship of Dionysus has
encountered the resistance of Pentheus, king of Thebes. Dionysus is disguised as the Bacchants'
mortal leader, and Pentheus imprisons him, believing that the new religion is mere imposture and an
excuse for lascivious behavior by women; Pentheus, however, is finally persuaded by the god to
disguise himself as a woman and spy on the Theban women whom Dionysus has caused to roam the
mountains. The women catch Pentheus and, imagining in their deluded state that he is a wild
animal, tear him limb from limb. Pentheus's mother, Agave, was one of those who dismembered
him, and she returns to Thebes with Pentheus's head impaled on her Bacchic wand. The god
Dionysus then appears and justifies the terrible revenge he has taken.
Euripides apparently left his Iphigenia at Aulis incomplete at the time of his death, because there is
much in the play that is not Euripidean. His son, who was his literary executor, may have completed
the play for its first performance, but other hands, some much later, have been at work as well. The
original ending seems to have been lost, and the ending that survives commits grave sins against the
metrical laws of Euripides' day. The plot concerns the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Agamemnon's daughter,
to appease the anger of Artemis and allow the Greek expedition against Troy to sail. Only the
commander's daughter's death will appease the goddess, and he tricks his wife, Clytemnestra, into
bringing the girl to Aulis on the pretext that she is to marry Achilles. Achilles has not been informed
that his name is being used in this way. Clytemnestra and Achilles meet in a scene worthy of a
comedy-she speaking familiarly to the man she thinks to be her future son-in-law, he interpreting
this as forward behavior from another man's wife. Once their cross-purposes are sorted out, both
are angry at the deception. Achilles decides to take up arms to defend the young woman his name
has helped to entrap, but Iphigenia, realizing the hopelessness of the situation and changing from
her earlier fearfulness, resolves to offer herself willingly to the Greek cause. She is led off to sacrifice,
but at the last moment Artemis substitutes a hind and spirits the "real" Iphigenia away to safety.
The eighteen extant plays of Euripides have proved endlessly fascinating to readers, theater
audiences, and critics alike, as well as to other poets and playwrights. And the testimony to the
power of Euripides' work has a long history. Aristotle claimed in the Poetics, his analysis of Greek
drama, that Euripides committed certain faults as a playwright, but he praised him, nevertheless, as
"the most tragic of dramatists."
Encyclopedia of World Biography on Euripides
Name:
Encyclopedia of World Biography Biography
Euripides (480-406 BC) was a Greek playwright whom Aristotle called the most tragic of the Greek
poets. He is certainly the most revolutionary Greek tragedian known in modern times.
Euripides was the son of Mnesarchus. The family owned property on the island of Salamis, and
Euripides was twice married (Melito and Choirile) and had three sons (Mnesarchides, Mnesilochus,
and Euripides). Euripides was raised in an atmosphere of culture, was witness to the rebuilding of
the Athenian walls after the Persian Wars, but above all belonged to the period of the
Peloponnesian War. Influenced by Aeschylus, Euripides has been described as the most intellectual
poet of his time and was a product of the Sophistic movement. He has been called the philosopher
of the stage. In addition to his literary talents, he is said to have been an excellent athlete and
painter.
The first play by Euripides, Daughters of Pelias (455 B.C.; lost), was concerned with the Medea story.
His first victory in a literary competition was in 442. Euripides's Cyclops is the only satyr play to have
survived in its entirety. The Rhesus, sometimes assigned to Euripides, may or may not be genuine.
The remainder of his plays constitute a partial commentary on Athens's war with Sparta.
Euripides was well ahead of his times, and though popular later (more papyri of Euripides survive
than of any other Greek poet except Homer), he irritated people in his own day by his sharp criticism
and won only five dramatic prizes during the course of his career. He is reputed to have owned a
library and to have spent a great deal of his time in his cave by the sea in Salamis.
We know nothing of Euripides's military or political career, and he may have served as a local priest
of Zeus at Phyla and traveled on one occasion to Syracuse. Toward the end of his life he stayed
briefly in Thessaly (at Magnesia) and at the court of King Archelaus in Macedonia, where he wrote
his masterpiece, the Bacchae. He died in Macedonia and was buried at Arethusa. The Athenians built
him a cenotaph in Athens.
Euripides's Style
Euripides was a most remarkable tragedian who had a way of baffling and startling his audiences. He
radically humanized and popularized Greek tragedy and was responsible for bringing tragedy closer
to the experience of the ordinary citizen. Though he used the traditional form of the drama, he had
some very unconventional things to say, and he said them in a language that was much easier to
comprehend than that of Aeschylus or even Sophocles. Euripides rejected rare and archaic words.
He popularized diction and utilized many everyday expressions. But he was also the lbsen of his day
because he was the first to introduce heroes in rags and crutches and in tears. He treated slaves,
women, and children as human beings and insisted that nobility was not necessarily an attribute of
social status.
Euripides's plays generally are comparatively loose in structure and use the prologue and deus ex
machina to simplify plot structure. The prologue has the effect of relieving the author from working
into his play the background and information necessary for its understanding. The use of the deus ex
machina, or the appearance of a god at the end of the play, indicates that the playwright was unable
to bring his play to a close in the proper dramaturgical manner. In Euripides's case this often
indicates that he was much more interested in the ideas he was exploring than in the form of the
play.
A critic of society, Euripides was a serious questioner of the values of his day. As a realist, he often
placed modern ideas and opinions in the mouths of traditional characters. Up to the time of
Euripides, the aristocracy were the only ones depicted on stage as worthy of serious consideration.
Euripides felt for all classes of people and was particularly sensitive to the humanity of women and
slaves. He studied female psychology with an acute eye and with unbelievably powerful perception.
Euripides also could and did probe religious ecstasy, dreadful revenge, and all-consuming love. As a
rationalist, Euripides was relentlessly attacked by conservative Aristophanes and accused of being an
atheist. Euripides treated myths rationally and expected men to use their rational powers.
Influenced by the rhetoric of the Sophists, Euripides engaged in considerable rhetorical argument
(agon), hairsplitting, and well-put platitudes. His plots are replete with sensationalism, surprise, and
suspense, and Euripides tried to achieve the maximum of tragic effect.
All of Euripides's extant plays are concerned with three basic themes: war, women, and religion. He
repudiated and despised aggressive wars. He advocated women's equal rights, and he severely
questioned anthropomorphic divinity and its fallible human institutions. Euripides knew both the
rational and the irrational aspects of human life and probed deeply into the social, political, religious,
and philosophical issues of his day. Despite the verbal flagellation of his fellow Athenians, he truly
loved Athens and sympathized genuinely with suffering humanity.
His Plays
Euripides's extant plays (excepting the Cyclops) can be divided into three basic categories. The true
tragedies include Medea (431 B.C.), Andromache (early in the Pel ponnesian War, 431 B.C.-404 B.C.),
Heraclidae (ca. 430 B.C.), Hippolytus (428 B.C.), Hecuba (ca. 425 B.C.), Suppliants (ca. 420 B.C.-419
B.C.), Heracles (ca. 420 B.C.-418 B.C.), Trojan Women (415 B.C.), and Bacchae (ca. 407 B.C.). The
tragicomedies comprise Alcestis (438 B.C.), Ion (ca. 418 B.C.-413 B.C.), Iphigenia at Tauris (414 B.C.412 B.C.), and Helen (412 B.C.). And the melodramas are Electra (ca. 415 B.C.), Phoenician Women
(ca. 409 B.C.), Orestes (408 B.C.), and Iphigenia at Aulis (ca. 407 B.C.).
The Alcestis is the earliest of the Euripidean plays that is preserved and was presented in 438 in
place of the satyr play. A tragicomedy, it has a happy ending and has fascinated critics for countless
years. Alcestis is willing to die instead of her husband, Admetus. Heracles visits Admetus and, when
he learns that Alcestis has died, struggles with Death, recovers Alcestis, and restores her to her
husband.
Medea, though it won only third prize, is perhaps Euripides's most famous and most influential play.
Medea, a princess, who has left family and country to marry Jason (whom she helped procure the
Golden Fleece), lives peacefully in Corinth. However, when Jason suddenly sees the opportunity to
gain the Corinthian throne by marrying the daughter of the king of Corinth, he ruthlessly abandons
wife and children. Medea, who is also a sorceress, vows revenge and, just before she is about to be
banished, sends poisoned gifts to the new bride and slays her own children to vent her hate for
Jason.
In Medea, Euripides demonstrates that "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," and he berates his
fellow men for mistreating women and particularly for treating foreign women as inferiors. But
perhaps even more brilliantly, Euripides shows that man is both rational and irrational, that the
irrational can bring disaster when it gets out of control, and that a woman is particularly susceptible
to passions.
Hippolytus shows clearly Euripides's concern about the claims of religion on the one hand and
sexuality on the other. Hippolytus is a chaste young man dedicated to Artemis, goddess of the hunt
and of purity. Phaedra, wife of King Theseus, falls in love with her stepson, Hippolytus, and reveals
her overpowering "incestuous" love to her nurse. The nurse takes pity on Phaedra and informs
Hippolytus of the cause of his stepmother's distress. In a rage Hippolytus denounces her and all
women. Phaedra commits suicide, implicating Hippolytus, and Theseus banishes him. As Hippolytus
leaves Troezen, he is mortally wounded but survives long enough for Artemis to reveal the truth to
his father Theseus, who then becomes remorseful and forgiving.
The Trojan Women is typical of Euripides's war plays. Written during the Peloponnesian War after
the brutal subjugation of the island of Melos by the Athenians, this play is perhaps the weakest of all
Euripidean plays because of its episodic nature. However, it is a powerful condemnation of war and
exhibits universal compassion for suffering mankind by portraying the devastating effect of war on
the innocent, particularly women and children.
Euripides's Electra beautifully illustrates Euripidean realism and rationalism. In this play Electra is
married off to a peasant who does not consummate the marriage but who is noble in heart and
respectful of his princess wife. Clytemnestra, the adulterous wife of Agamemnon who is fighting in
the Trojan War, is lured to the mean hut of her daughter Electra on the pretense that Electra is
having a baby. Aegisthus, Clytemnestra's lover, is killed first, and Electra prepares for her mother's
arrival with his corpse in the hut. Though Clytemnestra is moved to remorse over her past treatment
of Electra, it does not save her from being killed by Electra and the brother, Orestes, who are
overwhelmed by their actions and are bewildered. A deus ex machina in the form of the Dioscuri
(Castor and Pollux) is needed to bridge the dilemma between an excusable murder and a mandatory
punishment. Electra is to be punished by exile; Orestes will be pursued by the Furies until his trial in
Athens, when he will be acquitted.
Euripides radically changes Electra from a ruthless seeker of vengeance to a tortured human being
who suffers intensely as a result of her actions. Matricide is strongly condemned and the gods are
vigorously castigated.
The Bacchae, Euripides's masterpiece, is tightly structured and closely follows the pattern of the
Dionysiac ritual itself. Pantheus, a young king of Thebes, refuses to acknowledge the divinity of the
newly introduced Asiatic god Dionysus, and even though grandfather Cadmus and prophet Tiresias
accept him, Pentheus defiantly but unsuccessfully tries to incarcerate him. Pentheus, attracted by
descriptions of the orgiastic rites, attempts to participate in one and is caught and decapitated by his
own triumphant mother, Agave. She gradually recovers her senses and realizes the terrible deed she
has done. The whole family of Pentheus is to be punished, asserts Dionysus, who appears as a deus
ex machina.
The Bacchae is a very powerful play, Euripides's swan song. He is again showing how the irrational,
when not acknowledged and properly moderated, can get out of control and destroy all those
around it. Dionysus is not a god that can be worshiped in the ordinary sense. He symbolizes the
bestiality in nature and in man, and the Bacchic rites provide a release, as the Greeks see it.
In his day Euripides managed to call the attention of his countrymen to many flagrant abuses and
wrongs in his own society. He subjected all to a merciless rational examination, but he was
fundamentally tolerant and understanding and fully sympathized with the troubles and suffering of
humanity.
Dictionary of Literary Biography on Euripides
Name:
Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography
Of the three poets of Greek tragedy whose work survives, Euripides is the one whose plays survive in
the largest number (eighteen, in contrast to seven each for Aeschylus and Sophocles). His plays are
notable for containing both tragic pathos and the nimble play of ideas. In antiquity, at least from the
time shortly after his death about 407 or 406 B.C., Euripides was immensely popular and his dramas
were performed wherever theatres existed. His influence continued through later antiquity and into
the Renaissance and beyond, shaping French, German, Italian, and English literature until well into
the twentieth century.
For the biography of Euripides, as for those of most ancient writers, reliable evidence is in short
supply. By the time curiosity about the poet's life developed, almost all the means to satisfy it had
disappeared. The biographical tradition passes on conjectures based both on Euripides' plays and on
his portrayal in Aristophanes' and other comic poets; it also hands down transparently mythical
stories with only a few scraps of information that cannot be immediately unmasked as invention.
(The testimonia, or ancient notices, about Euripides' life are collected and translated in David
Kovacs's Euripidea, 1994.) Furthermore, it is only occasionally that the poet's work can be related to
anything known about his life or to the public events of Athens's history. Thus, little about the life of
Euripedes can be said with any assurance.
Euripides was born about the year 484 B.C. His father was Mnesarchus (or Mnesarchides). Despite a
repeated joke in Aristophanes' Frogs (405 B.C.) that Euripides' mother, Cleito, was a vegetable seller,
reliable evidence shows that she came from a noble family. Euripides grew up in the deme, or
village, of Phlya, north of Mount Hymettus in northern Attica. An inscription there, recorded by
Theophrastus, commemorates his serving as wine pourer for the sons of leading families who
danced in honor of Apollo Delios. Another notice makes him torchbearer in a procession in honor of
Apollo Zosterios. Both these positions suggest that Euripides came from a prominent family. Nothing
about his education is known: tradition gives him a variety of philosophers as teachers, but the
connections are mostly impossible on chronological grounds. None of the notices connecting him
personally with Socrates, Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and other such figures survives scrutiny. His plays,
however, demonstrate his familiarity with contemporary philosophical speculation.
Euripides began to enter his plays in the tragic competitions at Athens in 455, when he was in his
late twenties. At the City Dionysia in the spring of each year, three poets were allowed to compete
with three tragedies followed by a mythological burlesque called a satyr play. One of the four plays
he produced in 455 was Daughters of Pelias, the story of Medea's revenge on Jason's wicked uncle.
Euripides came in third. He won a first prize for the first time in 442 (play unknown), one of only five
during a career in which he entered some twenty-two times in the tragic competitions.
At some time between 428 and 408, as one learns from a glancing reference in Aristotle's Rhetoric
(circa 334 B.C.), Euripides was involved in a lawsuit with a man called Hygiainon. At issue was the
question whether it was Euripides' or Hygiainon's turn to serve as financial sponsor for some piece of
public expenditure, as rich men were required to do in Athens. At some point Hygiainon accused
Euripides of impiety on the grounds that a line in Hippolytus with a Garland (428), "My tongue
swore, but my mind is unsworn," encouraged perjury. Euripides' reply was to remind Hygiainon that
the Athenian people had already passed judgment on this play (it had received a first prize), and if
Hygiainon continued this line of attack, they would do so again in their capacity as jurors.
A short time after he staged his drama Orestes in 408, Euripides went to Macedonia to the court of
King Archelaus. Some have called this a self-imposed exile and have alleged that Euripides despaired
of his city or was disgusted at the treatment he received as a poet. This, however, is mere
speculation: several artists, including Timotheus the lyric poet, Zeuxis the sculptor, and Agathon the
tragic poet, accepted invitations from Archelaus at about this time. Euripides died and was buried in
Macedonia in 407-406. He is said either to have been killed by hunting dogs, either accidentally let
loose on him or deliberately set on him by enemies or rivals, or to have been torn apart by women.
Such a death is possible but cannot be deemed likely. When the news of Euripides' death was
brought to Athens, Sophocles donned mourning robes and introduced his chorus at the Dionysia
without the customary garlands.
Soon after his death Euripides became by far the most popular and widely performed of the tragic
poets, and his works were produced throughout the Greek-speaking world. The plays that have
survived to the present day came down in two different streams. Sometime after A.D. 250 a group of
ten plays, now called the "select plays," were chosen, perhaps for school use, and increasingly only
these plays were copied. By fortunate chance, however, one or two volumes of the Collected Works,
containing nine plays beginning with the letters epsilon, eta, iota, and kappa, survived into the
Byzantine period and were copied onto a single manuscript now in Florence. The "alphabetic plays,"
as they are called, are thus a chance cross section of Euripides' work, and the fact that many of
them, such as Heracles (circa 416), Ion (circa 413), and Iphigenia among the Taurians (circa 414), are
so well written suggests that the general level of Euripides' dramas must have been high.
Much of the biographical tradition represents Euripides as an unpopular outsider and a friend of
Sophists and philosophers, antitraditionalist in his art and skeptical or atheistic in his religious views.
On this basis the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche thought that Euripides and
Socrates were friends, and that these two rationalists collaborated to murder tragedy by destroying
its religious foundations. Later scholars, taking their cue from Nietzsche, have with considerable
subtlety interpreted Euripides' plays as challenges to the artistic and religious ideals of Aeschylus and
Sophocles. It is likely, however, that this view of the poet derives in the last analysis from
Aristophanes and other poets of what is called Old Comedy. Prima facie, this evidence, practically
the only contemporary evidence that exists, ought to count for a great deal to modern readers of
the plays, because it could well show how Euripides' first audiences reacted to his work. But when
Old Comedy is carefully examined in cases where its witness can be checked, it becomes apparent
that any critic who uses Aristophanes to guide his own readings of Euripides' plays is leaning on a
broken reed.
The amount of truth in a comic portrait can be extremely minimal: there need be only a slight
resemblance between the actual person and his comic representation. A certain Cleisthenes, for
example, because he had a skimpy beard, was pilloried for twenty years, first as a eunuch and then
as an effeminate person. Socrates, because he was an intellectual at a time when intellectuals
typically engaged in scientific speculation or taught skill in speaking, was portrayed as a quack
scientist and teacher of dishonest rhetoric. Aristophanes presents Euripides in two of his plays as a
misogynist, which there is good reason to doubt that he was. These examples show clearly how Old
Comedy works: it is a joke to say that Cleisthenes is a eunuch, Socrates a physicist, or Euripides a
misogynist, not because the claim is true, but because it is comically colorable. Cleisthenes' skimpy
beard, Socrates' intellectualism, the presence in Euripides' plays of several characters who make
unfavorable comments about women -- all provide the comic justification. When one comes to
charges such as Euripides' atheism, which modern scholars have taken seriously, one must reckon
with the certainty that comic poets, like writers of lapidary inscriptions, are "not upon oath"; and
also with the possibility that the relation between the comic portrait and the real-life person
portrayed might be just as distant in the one case as in the other. For particulars of Aristophanes'
portrait, one may consult the "Introduction" to the Loeb Classical Library's volumes on Euripides, in
which Kovacs discusses the possibility that Euripides really was perceived by his audience as a
subverter of religion, morality, and tragic decorum and defends the conclusion that agnosticism is
the most certain verdict the evidence allows.
The earliest of Euripides' extant plays is the Alcestis of 438. This drama was the fourth play of a
series of four, a position usually occupied by a satyr play. But Alcestis is no satyr play, and despite its
happy ending, it is fully tragic in its themes. Its premise is the fairy-tale motif of receiving a special
privilege not accorded to other mortals, like the three magical wishes or the golden touch. Typically
such a story serves to show that, however much one might wish that the ordinary rules of mortality
could be suspended, it is just as well that they are not. Admetus, king of Pherae in Thessaly, is given
the chance to escape the early death that has been fated for him. The god who won this privilege for
him was Apollo, who had been forced to serve a year as servant to Admetus, because he and his son
Asclepius, who raised the dead, had rebelled against the order of Zeus, an order that insists strongly
on the distinction between god and mortal. Apollo had been treated kindly by his master Admetus,
and so in gratitude he tricked the Fates into allowing Admetus to live beyond his destined time -provided that he could find someone among his own kin willing to die in his place. Only Admetus's
wife, Alcestis, was willing. Apollo tells Death at the beginning of the play that Alcestis will be brought
back to Admetus by Heracles, who is coming to Thessaly on his way to fetch the Thracian mares of
Diomedes.
Admetus will thus get the benefit of Apollo's boon, and Heracles will restore the wife who gave
herself in his stead. A happy ending is assured, but Apollo, though right about the facts, has no idea,
since he has never been a mortal, what it will be like in the interval for Admetus to lose his wife. The
paradox of the situation is this, that a woman who would die for her husband would be a wonderful
wife, indeed, but the loss of such a woman would render the life she gave her husband utterly
desolate. Admetus suffers terribly from the loss of his wife, and in addition he cuts a sorry figure
when he quarrels with his father, who had refused to sacrifice his life for his son. The nadir of his
fortunes is reached when he returns to his empty house after the funeral and realizes that his wife is
better off than he is. The ending restores to Admetus not only his wife but a new sense of the joy of
life lived under the usual conditions of mortality.
Medea was presented in 431, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. It came in
third, defeated not only by the phenomenally successful Sophocles (who took second place), but
also by Aeschylus's son Euphorion. Medea, a princess from the far-off land of Colchis, had fallen in
love with Jason when he came to Colchis in quest of the Golden Fleece. She helped him overcome
the deadly obstacles in his way and ran away with him to Greece, relying on his oath to her that he
would never abandon her. In Euripides' play, Jason, now in exile in Corinth, has seized the chance
offered him of marrying the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. Jason thinks he is marrying in the
best interest of everyone, Medea included, but she regards his marriage as base treachery and
determines to have revenge. Her situation is made more desperate by the decree of exile that Creon
has just pronounced against her, and she has only a day in which to punish Jason. She also notes that
she has no place to go afterward and decides to see if anyone will turn up to give her refuge. By a
coincidence that was criticized by Aristotle in his Poetics (circa 334 B.C.) Aegeus, king of Athens, is
passing through Corinth on his way from Delphi, where he has consulted the oracle about his
childlessness. He promises Medea a place of refuge. Medea then announces to the chorus her
revised plan of revenge. She will kill Jason's new bride and then, instead of killing Jason himself, she
will kill her two sons by Jason, condemning him to the childless fate that had so distressed Aegeus.
As part of a pretended reconciliation with Jason, she sends the boys with gifts for Creon's daughter,
a gown and a diadem, surpassingly beautiful but smeared with a poison that bursts into flames and
consumes the unlucky woman. Then, after two soliloquies in which she wrestles with her own very
real maternal feelings, she stabs her sons to death. When Jason arrives he finds that they are dead
by their mother's hand and that she is aloft in a magic chariot that will take her out of harm's way to
Athens. After mutual recriminations Medea departs. The Chorus offers concluding reflections on the
unexpected things Zeus and the other gods have in store for mortals.
The play, as all readers and audiences who experience it know, has searing emotional power. Among
the themes critics have noted are the strains and tensions between men and women; the contrast
between the smugness and perfidy of the Greek and the moral outrage of the trusting barbarian he
has wronged; and the ability of passion to overcome reason. One should also note, as critics by and
large have not, the theological dimension of the drama, emphasized time and again throughout the
play and most prominently in its last five lines. Jason has broken his oath, and the gods punish
perjurers, as everyone in antiquity knew, by the destruction of the perjurer's line, his descendants.
This is precisely what Medea's revenge accomplishes, a revenge abetted by the chance appearance
of Aegeus, the providential character of which is hinted at by Medea the moment he is out of
earshot. On no human estimate of the probabilities could anyone have guessed that a woman,
without family or friends and under sentence of exile, could have worked such a stunning revenge.
The impotence of human understanding in the face of the gods is an important traditional theme of
Greek literature, and its relevance to this play is clear.
Hippolytus with a Garland was produced in 428 and won a first prize. Euripides had produced an
earlier and unsuccessful version of this story, but the work that survives is arguably the best of his
extant plays. It is the story of the revenge taken by Aphrodite against Hippolytus, illegitimate son of
Theseus by an Amazon woman. Hippolytus is the special favorite of Artemis. He lives a life of
chastity, hunting in the wilds with the goddess, and calls Aphrodite the basest of divinities. To
avenge this slight to her honor, Aphrodite uses her power as goddess of love to cause his death. She
causes Theseus's wife, Phaedra, to fall in love with her stepson. Phaedra intends to starve herself in
silence rather than be guilty of any disgraceful act, but her secret is wormed from her by her old
nurse, who, though shocked by the revelation of this quasi-incestuous love, yet determines to save
Phaedra's life by helping her gratify her passion. Though she is under strict instructions not to tell
Hippolytus, the nurse goes to him and, after putting him under oath not to reveal to anyone what
she is about to say, tells him of Phaedra's love for him and urges him to become her lover.
Hippolytus, under the impression that Phaedra has sent the nurse, denounces his stepmother in the
harshest terms but, after an initial quibble about its validity, promises to keep his oath. Phaedra,
afraid that her secret will be found out in the world at large, decides to hang herself and to leave a
note accusing Hippolytus of raping her. When Theseus returns, he finds his wife dead and reads the
note. Theseus' father is Poseidon, and he has granted him three curses. Theseus at once calls upon
Poseidon to grant him one of these curses by killing Hippolytus. To make his assurance certain, he
exiles his son. On his way into exile Hippolytus is fatally hurt in a chariot wreck caused by a
miraculous bull from the sea that frightens Hippolytus's horses, driving him onto the rocks. He is
brought back in excruciating pain and at the point of death. Before he dies, however, Artemis comes
to tell Theseus the truth about both his wife and his son. Their good name is restored to both, and
father and son are reconciled. Artemis promises revenge on Aphrodite (she will kill the love
goddess's favorite mortal) and posthumous honors for Hippolytus.
The gods of this play, though repellent to modern taste, are the traditional divinities of Greek
polytheism, who reward their personal favorites and punish their personal enemies in ways that
often have little to do with justice. In the world of myth such divinities exist, and since they know
more than mortals and are more powerful, they can manipulate their enemies in ways that wreak
havoc with ordinary human reasoning about the past, present, or future. Aphrodite uses the
excellences of Phaedra and Hippolytus and the wholly forgivable misapprehension of Theseus to
work her vengeance. Hippolytus denounces Phaedra for a proposal she did not authorize; Phaedra
slanders Hippolytus in order to discredit an accusation he will never make. Hippolytus, bound by his
oath, can say in reply to his father's accusation only things that make the suspicion against him all
the deeper. Artemis speaks the truth when she remarks, "When the gods so ordain, it is to be
expected that mortals will commit disastrous mistakes." It is Aphrodite's desire for revenge, not
anything in the character of either of her antagonists, that accounts for the devastation seen by the
end of the play; and Artemis's comments on the nobility of the two mortals' lives is surely meant to
be the final judgment.
Two plays written about 425 and 424 have plots that combine two separate stories and are both set
in the aftermath of the Trojan War. In Andromache the action takes place in Phthia, the home of
Neoptolemus, son of Achilles and grandson of Peleus. Neoptolemus has returned home from Troy
with Andromache, Hector's widow, as his spear prize and mistress, and she has borne him a son. But
subsequently he marries Menelaus's daughter Hermione. When Neoptolemus is away from home,
Hermione, who has no children because Neoptolemus cannot stand his beautiful but arrogant wife,
attempts to murder her rival, Andromache, and her son by Neoptolemus. Her father, Menelaus, has
come from Sparta to help her. The murder is all but accomplished when Peleus appears in response
to Andromache's plea for help and drives Menelaus away. Hermione, afraid of facing her husband
without the backing of her father, is then on the point of killing herself, when her cousin Orestes
appears. He claims at first to be merely passing through, but when he has heard Hermione's story,
he reveals that he has heard of the strife between her and Andromache and has come to take
Hermione away to be his wife, as she was originally promised to be. Orestes then reveals that he has
set in motion a plot to murder Neoptolemus at Delphi, where he has gone to offer amends to Apollo
for his earlier demand of satisfaction for the death of Achilles, his father. A messenger arrives
bringing the news of Neoptolemus' murder to Peleus, who is crushed by the death of the only son of
his only son. Then his divine wife, Thetis, appears and tells him that all this was fated to be but that a
happy future awaits him: he will become a god and live with her. His line is not extinct, because the
boy whose life he so gallantly saved is his great-grandson, and he will rule over the Molossians and
carry on the lineage of Peleus and of the Trojan royal house, both of which are in the gods' care. The
two stories of triangular love -- the strife of Andromache and Hermione in regard to Neoptolemus
and of Orestes and Neoptolemus in regard to Hermione -- are made to fit together in a single play,
one that is packed with reversals of fortune that are revealed by the end of the drama to be part of a
divine plan.
Hecuba (circa 424) also combines two stories that take place after the Trojan War. Hecuba, the
queen of Troy, is a captive on her way to Greece. The ghost of Achilles, after reproaching the
departing Greek army for leaving without giving him a prize of honor, asks that Polyxena, Hecuba's
daughter, be sacrificed at his tomb. The Greeks are persuaded by the amoral Odysseus to honor the
request. When Odysseus comes to take Polyxena away, Hecuba pleads with him to spare her
daughter, just as Hecuba had once spared his life; when he refuses, Hecuba asks her daughter to
plead. But Polyxena, instead of pleading for her life, declares that death is preferable to her ruined
circumstances; and when she is taken to Achilles' tomb, she bravely bares her neck and chest to the
blade of Neoptolemus, who is officiating at the sacrifice to his father. Hecuba, though crushed by the
report of her daughter's death, finds her grief lessened by the nobility with which Polyxena died.
But when Hecuba sends a servant to fetch water to wash her daughter's body for burial, the servant
returns with the corpse of Hecuba's son Polydorus, whose ghost had opened the play with the
prediction that his body would be found. As a young boy before the war, Polydorus had been sent,
with a large amount of gold, to the safekeeping of Priam's guest-friend Polymestor, king of Thrace.
After Troy fell Polymestor killed his young charge and seized his gold, throwing Polydorus's body into
the sea without a burial. Aided by a dream that Hecuba had about her son, she divines the identity
of the murderer. She then persuades the Greek king, Agamemnon, to allow her to send a message to
Polymestor to entice him and his sons into the Greek camp, where she can take vengeance on him.
Hecuba conceals from Polymestor that she knows her son is dead and tricks him into entering the
tent by telling him there is gold hidden there. In the tent the Trojan captives kill Polymestor's sons
and blind Polymestor. When he calls upon Agamemnon to punish Hecuba, Agamemnon replies that
he, Polymestor, has been justly punished. In the final lines of the play Polymestor turns prophet and
predicts the death of Agamemnon at the hands of his wife, Clytemnestra, and the transformation of
Hecuba into a dog, the Bitch of Cynossema, a landmark that sailors use to chart their course.
Written within about six years of one another are two dramas in which the city of Athens plays a
central role. In Children of Heracles, produced about 430, the sons and daughters of the hero
Heracles, persecuted by their father's great enemy, Eurystheus, seek refuge in Marathon in Attica,
where they are protected by Demophon and Acamas, the sons of Theseus. In battle Eurystheus is
routed, in part because of the bravery of one of Heracles' daughters, who agrees to be sacrificed to
secure the success of the Athenian army. At the end of the play, Eurystheus prophesies that he will
be buried on Attic soil and will cause harm to the later descendants of Heracles (the Spartans) when
they attack Athens, forgetful of the city's former kindness to them. In Suppliant Women, produced
about 424, the Argive king, Adrastus, leader of the disastrous expedition of the Seven Against
Thebes, begs Theseus to help him return the bodies of the leaders, whom the Thebans will not
surrender for burial. Theseus at first refuses, but, urged by his mother to adopt for his city a policy of
studied vigor, he goes to war and recovers the bodies. Both plays are much influenced by the
political issues of Euripides' own time.
Electra, probably staged about 420, retells the story of Orestes' and Electra's revenge on their
mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. The play makes notable innovations in the story:
Electra does not live in the palace at Argos, as in Aeschylus's Libation Bearers (458), but has been
married off by Aegisthus to a poor farmer and lives in poverty. Her ragged clothing and the hut she
lives in increase the bitterness of her hatred against her mother. The Orestes of this play is less
resolute than Aeschylus's Orestes, and his sister must steel him to kill their mother. The murders
take place in the countryside, with a loyal old retainer of Agamemnon playing an important role. The
atmosphere is less elevated than in other treatments of the story, and one is reminded of the last
half of Homer's Odyssey (circa eighth century B.C.), with its loyal swineherd and rustic hospitality.
Staged in about 416, Heracles, like Andromache and Hecuba, is composed of two separate stories. In
the first half Heracles is presumed to be dead (Eurystheus had sent him to the Underworld to fetch
Cerberus), and his family is being persecuted by a Theban usurper named Lycus. Heracles returns in
the nick of time, rescues his father, wife, and children, and kills Lycus. But immediately after the
joyful choral ode celebrating the justice of the gods, the minor divinities Iris and Lyssa (Madness)
descend on Heracles' house, sent by Hera, Heracles' implacable enemy. Iris orders Lyssa to bring a fit
of madness on Heracles so that he will kill his own children. This Lyssa does, and Heracles kills not
only his children but his wife as well, and almost kills his father. When he recovers from the fit and
learns the truth, he determines to kill himself. Theseus, whom he had rescued from the Underworld,
comes with an army to rescue Thebes from the usurper Lycus, and when he finds Heracles amid the
corpses of his family, he persuades him to give up his intention to kill himself and go with him to
Athens. The sharp juxtaposition of these two actions, one ending in joy, the other in misery,
emphasizes the theme of mutability.
For quite some time scholars connected Euripides' Trojan Women of 415 with the Athenians'
massacre of the Melians in the waning months of 416. The prevailing view, until recently universal,
was that the play was a sort of pièce à clef, so that in the Greeks, who have taken Troy and proceed
to kill Astyanax, the young son of Hector, the audience is meant to see the Athenians, while the
Trojans stand in for the Melians. It was further held that the play expresses Euripides' revulsion at
his city's treatment of Melos. But the adherents of this view have a few embarrassing facts to deal
with. First, there was not enough time between the fall of Melos and the City Dionysia for Euripides
to have planned, written, and rehearsed a play on this theme, as A. Maria van Erp Taalman Kip
demonstrated in Mnemosyne in 1987. Second, the Trojan Women is part of a connected trilogy in
which the first two plays are the lost Alexandros and Palamedes. The surviving fragments of
Alexandros make it plain that the fall of Troy is to be seen against a divine backdrop, and that it was
the gods who, in the last analysis, destroyed Troy, with the Greeks as their instrument, a theme also
prominent in Trojan Women. This view of the fall of Troy would be unsuitable, to say the least, in a
play intended to reproach Athens for destroying Melos. Third, however successfully it has been
staged in modern times as a play of protest against war, Trojan Women contains several scenes and
choral odes -- notably the scene where Helen is on trial and the ode on the gods' abandonment of
Troy -- that work counter to the supposed purpose of the play. Most embarrassing of all, the chorus
of Trojan captives, in a choral ode speculating on where they will be sent as slaves, go out of their
way to pray that they may be sent to blessed Athens and not to hateful Sparta, something hard to
explain if Euripides is trying to tell his countrymen how criminal Athens has been in its prosecution of
the war against Sparta. It is prudent to look at the play without the a priori assumption of allegory.
Of all Euripides' extant plays, Trojan Women is the most oddly constructed. There is no peripeteia
(swift change of fortune) at all: the Trojan women are miserable at the beginning of the play and
scarcely more so at the end: only the death of Astyanax makes any objective change in their
situation. The play consists of four scenes revolving around Cassandra, Andromache, Helen, and
Hecuba, preceded by a prologue involving Poseidon and Athena. Yet diverse as they are in other
respects, all five of these scenes can be seen as meditations on the archaic Greek themes of the
deceptiveness of appearances, the impotence of human judgment, and the power of the gods.
The next three of Euripides' extant plays have happy endings and are sometimes referred to as
tragicomedies. Both Iphigenia among the Taurians of about 414 and the Helen of 412 are plays set in
far-off places (the Crimea and Egypt, respectively) and involve Greeks who manage to outwit and
escape from their barbarian captors. In Iphigenia the heroine, after her apparent sacrifice at Aulis, is
in reality still alive, having been spirited away by Artemis to the Crimea. Here Iphigenia is priestess of
Artemis and is expected to oversee the sacrifice of any foreigners who come to Tauria. Her brother
Orestes, whom she has not seen since he was a baby, is sent by Apollo (along with his friend Pylades)
to steal the statue of Artemis from the Taurians and give it a home in Greece. The two men are
captured, and Iphigenia nearly sacrifices her own brother unwittingly before she recognizes him. The
two then form a plot to escape with the statue. In Helen Euripides uses a version of the story of
Helen invented by the sixth-century poet Stesichorus: the real Helen was innocent of the elopement
with Paris, because it was a phantom made by the gods who went to Troy. In Euripides' play, the real
Helen is in Egypt when her husband Menelaus returns from Troy with the phantom Helen. The
phantom disappears; he learns that the woman he finds in Egypt is the real Helen; and together they
plot their escape from King Theoclymenus, who wants to marry Helen and would certainly kill
Menelaus if he could. Their trick succeeds, and they make their escape.
Ion of about 413 is a foundling story with a happy ending. Ion is the son of the Athenian princess
Creusa, who was raped by Apollo. She gave birth in secret and exposed her son to die, but Apollo
rescued him, raised him as a temple servant in Delphi, and now means to restore him to the throne
of Athens. Creusa and her husband, Xuthus, are childless and have come to Delphi to ask the god
how they may bear children. Apollo's oracle tells Xuthus that the first person he meets on leaving
the temple will be his son. (This is false, but the audience is perhaps meant to think that the
prophecy was ambiguously expressed.) Xuthus thinks Ion, who meets him outside the temple, is his
child by some earlier affair and proposes to take him back to Athens, with a view to making him his
heir. He means to conceal the boy's supposed parentage from Creusa, who would be distressed that
it was not her son but only Xuthus's who was heir to the throne. (Creusa is of the Athenian royal
family, and Xuthus is a foreigner, so if Ion is no son of hers, the royal line of Athens would be
replaced by a foreign dynasty.) But Creusa learns of the oracle and the meeting of the supposed
father and son and determines with a loyal retainer to poison Ion before he can usurp the throne of
her father. The plot is detected (Apollo foils it), and Ion sets out to punish Creusa, who takes refuge
at an altar. Mother has almost killed son, and son, mother, when the priestess of Apollo, prompted
by the god, brings out the cradle in which Ion had been exposed. This leads to the recognition:
Creusa is the mother Ion has longed to see and Ion the baby Creusa thought dead. When Athena
appears to explain the past and predict the future (Ion is destined to found the Ionian race), Creusa
can see the hand of Apollo in all that has gone before and forgives the god for the rape he
committed years earlier. Mutability of fortune, human ignorance, and divine power are all themes
unmistakably present here -- in this case, to bring about blessing.
Phoenician Women of 410 or 409 is a retelling of the story of the Seven against Thebes, the struggle
of Oedipus's sons, Eteocles and Polynices, for the throne. It is perhaps the most varied in incident of
Euripides' plays; it contains a scene where Antigone in a tower learns the names of all the attacking
champions, a debate about justice between Eteocles and Polynices, the voluntary self-sacrifice of
Creon's son Menoeceus, and a scene in which the blind Oedipus appears. The women of the title are
the chorus, which consists of women of Tyre in Phoenicia on their way to serve Apollo in Delphi.
Orestes of 408 is a wonderfully inventive sequel to the story of the murder of Clytemnestra. Orestes
lies sick in bed, given to fits of madness brought on by the Erinyes, who pursue him for killing his
mother. In addition, the people of Argos are putting him on trial for murder. Apollo, it seems, has
abandoned Orestes after ordering him to exact vengeance from his father's murderers. When
Menelaus appears, Orestes appeals to him for help, but at the trial Menelaus does nothing. After
Orestes and Electra are condemned, they decide in one last desperate act to kill Menelaus's wife,
Helen, and his daughter, Hermione. The murder of Helen miscarries when she is spirited away
toward heaven, and Orestes is just about to cut Hermione's throat and set the house on fire when
Apollo appears and sets things once more in order.
In 408, as noted earlier, Euripides went to Macedonia to the court of Archelaus. There he died, and
among his effects were three tragedies, Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, and a third tragedy now lost,
that were put on for the first time after the poet's death and crowned with a first prize. In Bacchae
the god Dionysus, who is the son of Zeus by the Theban princess Semele, returns with his female
Asian worshipers, the Bacchants, to Thebes. There the new worship of Dionysus has encountered
the resistance of Pentheus, king of Thebes. Dionysus is disguised as the Bacchants' mortal leader,
and Pentheus imprisons him, believing that the new religion is mere imposture and an excuse for
lascivious behavior by women; Pentheus, however, is finally persuaded by the god to disguise
himself as a woman and spy on the Theban women whom Dionysus has caused to roam the
mountains. The women catch Pentheus and, imagining in their deluded state that he is a wild
animal, tear him limb from limb. Pentheus's mother, Agave, was one of those who dismembered
him, and she returns to Thebes with Pentheus's head impaled on her Bacchic wand. The god
Dionysus then appears and justifies the terrible revenge he has taken.
Euripides apparently left his Iphigenia at Aulis incomplete at the time of his death, because there is
much in the play that is not Euripidean. His son, who was his literary executor, may have completed
the play for its first performance, but other hands, some much later, have been at work as well. The
original ending seems to have been lost, and the ending that survives commits grave sins against the
metrical laws of Euripides' day. The plot concerns the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Agamemnon's daughter,
to appease the anger of Artemis and allow the Greek expedition against Troy to sail. Only the
commander's daughter's death will appease the goddess, and he tricks his wife, Clytemnestra, into
bringing the girl to Aulis on the pretext that she is to marry Achilles. Achilles has not been informed
that his name is being used in this way. Clytemnestra and Achilles meet in a scene worthy of a
comedy - she speaking familiarly to the man she thinks to be her future son-in-law, he interpreting
this as forward behavior from another man's wife. Once their cross-purposes are sorted out, both
are angry at the deception. Achilles decides to take up arms to defend the young woman his name
has helped to entrap, but Iphigenia, realizing the hopelessness of the situation and changing from
her earlier fearfulness, resolves to offer herself willingly to the Greek cause. She is led off to sacrifice,
but at the last moment Artemis substitutes a hind and spirits the "real" Iphigenia away to safety.
The eighteen extant plays of Euripides have proved endlessly fascinating to readers, theater
audiences, and critics alike, as well as to other poets and playwrights. And the testimony to the
power of Euripides' work has a long history. Aristotle claimed in the Poetics, his analysis of Greek
drama, that Euripides committed certain faults as a playwright, but he praised him, nevertheless, as
"the most tragic of dramatists."