Hum 110 | Reed Classics | Reed Library | Reed | Perseus

Euripides’s Bacchae: The Wild Side

The Wild Side: Euripides’ The Bacchae

Jay Dickson, Humanities 110

11/17/03

 

Lecture outline:

  1. I. Introduction: The persistence of the irrational
  2. II. Dionysus
    1. The god of the irrational

B. The Great Dionyzia: "nothing to do with Dionysus"

III. A reading of The Bacchae

    1. Knowing
    2. Seeing
    3. The unfairness of Dionysus

IV. Conclusion: Euripides and human beings "as they really are"

 

 

Timeline for The Bacchae:

533? BCE First tragedy competition in Athens (reputedly won by Thespis)

525? Aeschylus born

499? Aeschylus's first dramatic production; Ionian revolt against Persia

496? Sophocles born

485? Euripides born

479 Greek victory over the Persians

478 Foundation of Delian League

  1. Aeschylus wins first prize for The Persians (production financed by

Pericles; oldest extant Greek tragedy)

458 Aeschylus wins first prize (for eighteenth and final time) with the Oresteia

456 Death of Aeschylus

447 Parthenon begun

441? Antigone by Sophocles

431 The Peloponnesian War begins

  1. Deaths of Euripides and Sophocles

405? Euripides posthumously wins first prize with trilogy including The Bacchae

404 Athens defeated in Peloponnesian War

 

Terms:

maenads: "mad women"; the frenzied female worshippers of Dionysus

sparagmos: the ingesting of a wild animal torn limb from limb in Bacchic worship

prologos: the part of a tragedy preceding the entrance of the chorus, often a

monologue which sets out the situation and the theme of the work

Quotations:
  1. [H]e is Lusios, "the Liberator"–the god who by very simple means, or by other means not so simple, enables you for a short time to stop being yourself, and thereby sets you free. That was, I think, the main secret of his appeal to the Archaic Age: not only because life in that age was a thing to escape from, but more specifically because the individual, as the modern world knows him, began in that age to emerge for the first time from the old solidarity of the family, and found the burden of individual responsibility hard to bear. Dionysus could lift it from him. (Dodds 76-7)
  2. Their two deities of art, Apollo and Dionysos, provide the starting point for our recognition that there exists in the world of the Greeks an enormous opposition, both in origin and goals, between the Apolline art of the image-maker or sculptor and the imageless art of music, which is that of Dionysos. These two very different drives exist side by side, mostly in open conflict, stimulating and provoking one another to give birth to ever-new, more vigorous offspring in whom they perpetuate the conflict inherent in the opposition between them, an opposition only apparently bridged by the common term ‘art’–until eventually, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic ‘Will’, they appear paired and, in this pairing, finally engender a work of art which is Dionysiac and Apolline in equal measure: Attic tragedy. (Nietzsche 14)

C. Chorus: For death the gods exact, curbing by that bit

the mouths of men. They humble us to death

that we remember what we are not who are not god,

but men. We run to death. Wherefore, I say,

accept, accept:

humility is wise; humility is blest.

But what the world calls wise I do not want.

Elsewhere the chase. I hunt another game,

those great, those manifest, those certain goals,

achieving which, our mortal lives are blest.

Let these things be the quarry of my chase:

purity, humility; an unrebellious soul,

accepting all. Let me go the customary way,

the timeless, honored, beaten path of those who walk

with reverence and awe beneath the sons of heaven.

(Bacchae lines 1002-10)

 

D. Dionysus: You do not know

the limits of your strength. You do not know

what you do. You do not know who you are.

(Bacchae lines 505-7)

 

E. Tragedy is not only an art form; it is also a social institution that the city, by establishing competitions in tragedies, set up alongside its political and legal institutions. The city established under the authority of the eponymous archon, in the same urban space and in accordance with the same institutional norms as the popular assemblies or courts, a spectacle open to all citizens, directed, acted, and judged by the qualified representatives of the various tribes [that comprised the citizenry]. In this way it turned itself into a theater. Its subject, in a sense, was itself and it acted itself out before its public. But, although tragedy, more than any other genre of literature, thus appears rooted in social reality, that does not mean it is a reflection of it. It does not reflect that reality but calls it into question. By depicting it rent and divided against itself, it turns it into a problem. (Vernant 32)

Critical bibliography:

-Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. 1968; rpt.

Bloomington:Indiana UP, 1984.

-Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational.1951; rpt. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973.

-Goldhill, Simon. "The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology." Nothing to Do with

Dionysus?:Athenian Drama and Its Social Context. Ed. John J. Winkler and

Froma I. Zeitlin. Princeton, 1990.

-Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Trans. Ronald Speirs.

Ed. Raymond Geuss and Spiers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

-Segal, Charles. Dionysian Poetics and Euripides’ Bacchae (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982).

-Vernant, Jean-Pierre and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece.

New York,1988.

Hum 110 | Reed Classics | Reed Library | Reed | Perseus