3. The figure of Dionysus
(1) The ancient Greeks had a god for every important aspect of human life. Dionysus was at the
centre of a secretive mystical cult; he was also the Greek god who presided over drinking,
dancing, song, festivity and revelry – in short, over having fun. From the 6th-century B.C.E.
onwards, the March festival in Athens in honour of Dionysus became the occasion for three
days of performances of new tragedies and comedies. In this sense, Dionysus is also the god of
theatre and theatricality.
(2) Euripides portrays Dionysus at the beginning of his play The Bacchae [c.406 B.C.E.] as a
beautiful androgynous youth, claiming rather than being guaranteed a divine identity, and
coming from an Asiatic/Arabian world as much as from his Greek birthplace of Thebes. The
ambiguity of Dionysus is fundamental to the way he’s seen: he cuts across basic distinctions
between male/female, divine/human, Greek/exotic.
Enter Dionysus. He is of soft, even effeminate, appearance. His face is beardless;
he is dressed in a fawn-skin and carries a thyrsus (i.e. a stalk of fennel tipped with
ivy leaves). On his head he wears a wreath of ivy, and his long blond curls ripple
down over his shoulders. Throughout the play he wears a smiling mask.
Dionysus. I am Dionysus, the son of Zeus,
come back to Thebes, this land where I was born…
And here I stand, a god incognito,
disguised as man…
Far behind me lie
those golden-rivered lands, Lydia and Phrygia,
where my journeying began. Overland I went,
across the steps of Persia where the sun strikes hotly
down, through Bactrian fastness and the grim waste
of Media. Thence to rich Arabia I came;
and so, along all Asia’s swarming littoral
of towered cities where Greeks and foreign nations,
mingling, live, my progress made. There
I taught my dances to the feet of living men,
established my mysteries and rites
that I might be revealed on earth for what I am:
a god.
territories in Asia Minor
remote regions of modern
Iraq/Iran
(Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. William Arrowsmith, in Greene & Lattimore, Greek Tragedies vol. 3
[University of Chicago Press, 1960])
Euripides’ play ends in tragedy because Pentheus, the ruler of the city to which Dionysus has
returned, wants to control and eradicate the ambiguous and transgressive forces represented by
Dionysus and his female followers, the Bacchae or Maenads. Dionysus successfully persuades
Pentheus to go out into the hills to see the Bacchae for himself, and even persuades him that he
can only go there unobserved if he disguises himself as a woman. But he is seen in any case and
the frenzied Bacchic women, led by Pentheus’s own mother Agave, tear him to pieces.
Early on in the play, the old and blind Teiresias, incongruously dressed in the costume of a
follower of Dionysus, warns Pentheus of the folly of not worshipping the ambiguous god:
We do not trifle with divinity…
People may say: “Aren’t you ashamed? At your age,
going dancing, wreathing your head with ivy?”
Well, I am not ashamed. Did the god declare
that just the young or just the old should dance?…
He wants no one excluded from his worship.
If Teiresias is the voice of wisdom in the play, then Pentheus is foolish to think that he can
simply get rid of the drunken folly represented by Dionysus. One way of understanding the play
would be to say that it shows how tragedy arises when society refuses to give a place to the
comic/Dionysiac/smiling-mask world of revelry, ambiguity, drunkenness and fun.
(3) In Roman mythology, Dionysus is re-named Bacchus, and becomes a less ambiguous figure
– an old, fat, drunken man, compared to the youthful and attractive Greek version. It’s a sort of
“before” and “after” contrast, in which Bacchus stands as a warning about the consequences of
Dionysiac excess. However, fat, greedy, jolly men go on playing an important role in the festive
and comic traditions, from Father Christmas and Falstaff to Jim Royle and David Brent.
[Greek Dionysus]
[Roman Bacchus]
(4) Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy [1872] makes complex use of the idea of revelry associated with
Dionysus. He contrasts it with the idealism associated with the god Apollo, and sees Greek
tragedy as the product of these two opposing forces: the heightened Apollonian vision giving
artistic form and beauty to the Dionysiac view of life’s terror and chaos.
If the Apollonian view is the highest expression in classical culture of what Nietzsche calls the
“principle of individuation” (the principium individuationis, which places its emphasis on the ideal
individuality of human beings), Dionysiac revelry is the clearest expression of its opposite, in
which the individual loses his or her identity in a drunken, dancing crowd:
One might say that the unshakable confidence in [the ‘principle of
individuation’] has received its most magnificent expression in Apollo, and that
Apollo himself may be regarded as the marvellous divine image of the principium
individuationis, whose looks and gestures radiate the full delight, wisdom, and
beauty of “illusion.”
…If we [consider] the glorious transport which arises in man, even from the very
depths of nature, at the shattering of the principium individuationis, then we are
in a position to apprehend the essence of Dionysiac rapture, whose closest
analogy is furnished by physical intoxication. Dionysiac stirrings arise either
through the influence of those narcotic potions of which all primitive races speak
in their hymns, or through the powerful approach of spring, which penetrates
with joy the whole frame of nature. So stirred, the individual forgets himself
completely. It is the same Dionysiac power which in medieval Germany drove
ever increasing crowds of people singing and dancing from place to place; we
recognise in these St. John’s and St. Vitus’ dancers the bacchic choruses of the
Greeks, who had their precursors in Asia Minor and as far back as Babylon and
the orgiastic Sacaea…
[In the Dionysiac ritual] the slave emerges as a freeman; all the rigid, hostile
walls which either necessity or despotism has erected between men are
shattered… Man now expresses himself through song and dance as the member
of a higher community, he has forgotten how to walk, how to speak, and is on the
brink of taking wing as he dances. (section 1, pp.22f.)
The relevance of these ideas of freedom, drunkenness, and of the singing, dancing crowd to
comedy are many. So too is the idea that the comic/Dionysiac view resists the integrity of the
individual: a strong reason surely why comedy so often deals with disguise or mistaken identity
or people in some way forgetting who they are.
In a later comment – the only one in the book that is directly related to comedy -- Nietzsche
sees the “sublime” and the “comic” as two artistic reactions to life’s awfulness:
The truth once seen, man is aware everywhere of the ghastly absurdity of
existence… nausea invades him. Then… art, that sorceress expert in healing,
approaches him; only she can turn his fits of nausea into imaginations with which
it is possible to live. These are on the one hand the spirit of the sublime, which
subjugates terror by means of art; on the other hand the comic spirit, which
releases us, through art, from the tedium of absurdity. (section 7, p.52)
)quotations from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Francis Golffing [Anchor,
1956])
(5) A sex, drink and religion joke:
The Mother Superior calls all the nuns together and tells them, “I’m afraid it’s my
solemn duty to tell you that a case of gonorrhoea has been discovered in the
convent.”
“Oh good,” whispers Sister Angelica at the back. “I was getting really fed up with
the Chardonnay.”