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The Bacchae
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Themes
The Cruelty of the Gods
The Bacchae can be a challenging play to interpret, inviting a wide range of readings and debates. In part, this may be due to Euripides reflecting on his own social and historical context. The play was performed in 405 BCE, after the poet’s death around 407/6 BCE, This would place its likely time of composition during the waning years of the Athens-Sparta war that broke out officially in 431 BCE and had, by the time of Euripides’ death, ground on for more than a generation. By 406 BCE, Athens seemed unlikely to win the war. Its fortunes had dwindled considerably. They had optimistically launched not only the war but also an expedition to expand their empire, but it ended in almost complete annihilation for the Athenian navy. The evening before the expedition launched, a series of protective statues (called herms) that were placed around the city were vandalized, which many took as a bad omen.
In other words, the Bacchae was composed when the Athenian empire was collapsing. The city’s dramatic reversal of circumstances may be reflected in Pentheus, Agaue, and Cadmus’ own dramatic reversal of circumstances. Agaue voices this explicitly, saying to Cadmus, “Father, you see how great is the change in my fortunes” (163). Pentheus, Thebes’ ruler, is humiliated then literally torn apart. Agaue, the daughter of the city’s founder and mother of its ruler, is inflicted with madness, murders her own son, and faces banishment. Cadmus, Thebes’ founder, loses his family to death and exile.
The punishments dispensed to Pentheus, Agaue, and Cadmus are brutal and extreme—to the audience and to the characters themselves. Cadmus’ confrontation of the god can seem impious from modern religious perspectives since he questions the god’s judgment. However, questioning the gods, or even not fully believing in them, does not seem to have counted as impiety in the same way as it does in modern monotheism. Agaue and her sisters do not believe in Dionysus’ divinity, but the main problem is not their lack of authentic faith but their mocking of Semele’s claim to have been impregnated by Zeus. Dionysus’ motivation is in part to “defend the cause of my Semele, my mother, by showing myself to mortals as the god she bore to Zeus” (129). When Dionysus tells Cadmus at the end of the play that he punished him and his family because they treated him “with contempt,” what he means is that his rites were not instituted. It is the absence of ritual worship that brings on the god’s retaliation, thus reinforcing the importance of proper ritual (164).
Mortal Defiance and Punishment
Personal choices play a role in the destruction of both Athens and the Theban ruling family of the Bacchae. Following Athens’ success fighting back the Persian invasion of the Greek mainland, the city’s confidence grew, and they began to assert a leadership role in the region. Gradually, that leadership role morphed into an empire. Athens collected tributes from their “allies,” influenced their forms of government, and moved their collective treasury from the comparatively neutral island of Delos to Athens, claiming that they were “protecting” it from potential Persian aggression.
During the war with Sparta, Athens committed numerous atrocities, perhaps the most dramatic being the sack of Melos, an island from which Athens demanded what amounted (from the Melians’ perspective) to subjugation. When Melos refused, Athens destroyed it, killing all the men and enslaving the women and children. Athenian historian Thucydides purports to transcribe the dispute between Melos and Athens, which reads like a Socratic dialogue, each side arguing its point. At stake were the lives and fortunes of the Melians, but the dialogue itself proceeds dispassionately, with Athens essentially arguing that the strong do what they will, and the weak bear what they must.
When confronted with the severity of his punishment, Dionysus gives a similar answer as Athens did to Melos: The gods do what they will, and mortals bear what they must. Cadmus has no further response. Pentheus refused to institute worship of Dionysus, persisting in his refusal even when confronted with evidence of various kinds. Provided with opportunities to change his mind, he instead became more adamantly defiant. Agaue dishonored Semele, Dionysus’ mother. Though Cadmus adopted the rites, as the father of the two main offenders, he is held responsible for his family’s mistakes and punished. There is no recourse for Cadmus and his family, only acceptance of the fate that they participated in creating. The messenger’s conclusion to the story of Agaue reflects the stance of the play in its ritual context: “To be virtuous in one’s life and show the gods reverence is the noblest course; it is also, I think, the greatest wisdom a man can possess” (158).
Duality, Liminality, and Boundary Crossing
An aspect of ancient Greek thinking that can be challenging for modern readers to grasp is the persistence of dualities. Dionysus is especially associated with duality and liminality. He represents both east (where he was raised) and west (where his mother is from). His gift can bring release from social constraints that is simultaneously pleasurable and dangerous. Mortals desire release from the things that may also protect them, e.g., the boundaries of the city, conforming to social norms. Agaue’s boast to the Chorus at the end of the play—that she left her loom (symbolic of her participation in the life of a woman in the city) and rose to “higher things,” meaning “hunting beasts with my hands”—may illustrate this. Her hands can be used to create (garments essential for community life) or destroy.
Movement between aspects of Dionysian nature means crossing boundaries. In the Bacchae, this is especially prevalent in the crossing over from city to mountains, hunter and hunted, and male and female. Dionysus compels the Theban women to leave behind their traditional roles in the city and retreat to the mountains. Though some of their acts are generative (extracting water, wine, and milk from stones and earth), they are also transgressive (dressing in fawn skins rather than woven garments and nursing wild animals instead of human infants).
They also take on traditionally male roles by hunting wild animals and attacking and “routing men” in the villages (147). Pentheus is determined to bring the women back under control, but later, under Dionysus’ spell, he inhabits a woman’s costume. Pentheus mocked Dionysus for being feminine and threatened to cut his hair, but Dionysus turns the tables on him. After convincing Pentheus to disguise himself as a woman, Dionysus crows that he will send Pentheus to the Underworld in woman’s dress, humiliating him eternally.
Hunting imagery is prevalent across the play. In the beginning, Pentheus casts himself as the hunter who will root out the maenads and the “man from Lydia” who has provoked them, but he becomes the prey of Dionysus. The maenads in the mountains are hunted by the male villagers, who them become the prey of the women. At the end of the play, the Chorus affirms how the hunter became the hunted when they reply to Agaue’s observation that Dionysus “a skillful huntsman, skillfully loosed his maenads on this beast,” not realizing that the “beast” in question is her son: “Yes, our lord is a hunter” (159, italics in original).
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