The Bacchae for Seekers

Dear reader — this one's not sad. It's horrifying, funny in spots, and hard to pin down, which is exactly why people still stage it. The Bacchae is a tragedy by Euripides about the god Dionysus arriving in Thebes, the city where his mother was born, to be recognized as a god. The young king, Pentheus, refuses. The god, disguised as a human stranger, leads him step by step into the mountain rites he's banned, and Pentheus is killed by the women of his own family, his mother first among them. It's short, and it reads fast.

The Playwright And The Missing Page

Euripides was born around 480 BCE and died in 406 BCE, in Macedon, where he'd gone late in life at the invitation of its king. He lived through the whole Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Ancient sources credit him with about ninety plays, and nineteen survive under his name, a much larger share than for Aeschylus or Sophocles. The Bacchae was first produced after his death, by his son, probably in 405 BCE.

And a fun detail: every surviving copy descends from one medieval manuscript, and it lost a page or more near the end. The missing section held part of Agave's speech after she learns what she's done, and the start of Dionysus's judgment. In some editions you'll see a note: "A page or more has here been torn out of the MS." So the play as printed breaks off mid-speech.

Who's Who Before The Curtain Goes Up

The play assumes you know who Dionysus is and why Thebes. Semele, a princess of Thebes, got pregnant by Zeus. Hera tricked her into asking to see Zeus in his true form, and the sight killed her with lightning. Zeus snatched the unborn child, sewed him into his own thigh, and carried him to term. So Dionysus was born twice. In Thebes the family said Semele lied about the father, which is why he's back: "For they have scorned me whom it least beseemed, / Semele's sisters; mocked my birth."

Cadmus, a prince from Phoenicia, founded Thebes. He killed the dragon of Ares' spring and sowed its teeth, armed men grew up from the ground, and the survivors became the first Theban nobles. His daughters were Semele, Agave, Ino, and Autonoe. Agave married one of the sown men, and her son is Pentheus.

Dionysus was the god of wine and of the loosening of the self: ecstasy, intoxication, the mask, the crowd, the wild. Also the god of the theater, since tragedy was performed at his festival. His followers, women especially, were called maenads or bacchae. They left their homes to dance in the hills at night.

The Arrival And The Refusal

The prologue is the god, alone, in human form, telling the audience exactly what he plans. He's taught his rites across Asia and come to Thebes first among Greek cities. The women of Thebes refused him, so he's driven them out of their houses into the mountains. "For this I veil my godhead with the wan / Form of the things that die, and walk as Man."

Then the Chorus, foreign women who followed him from Asia, dancing with timbrels. Their first song is one of the most beautiful in Greek poetry: "Oh, blessed he in all wise, / Who hath drunk the Living Fountain." And it's sung by the very people the king means to arrest.

The blind prophet Teiresias and old King Cadmus enter dressed in ivy and fawn-skins, on their way to dance. They're both comic and moving: two men too old for this, and instantly feeling the god's energy. They set up two ways of answering Dionysus that Pentheus will refuse, the sincere and the prudent. "Aye, Thebes is blinded. Thou and I can see."

Pentheus comes back to find the women gone. He assumes the worst: a cover for drinking and sex, and a foreign charlatan behind it, "a man of charm and spell, from Lydian seas." He's already chained some women. When he sees his grandfather and Teiresias dressed for the dance, he orders them to take it off.

The Contest

Teiresias gives the most reasoned defense of the god: wine gives rest from care the way Demeter's bread feeds us, and he gives a kind of prophecy and a kind of panic in battle. And a line for Pentheus: "Dream not thou that force is power; / Nor, if thou hast a thought, and that thought sour / And sick, oh, dream not thought is wisdom!"

Cadmus's argument is the uncomfortable one, because it's what most people would actually say. He doesn't claim Dionysus is a god. He says if the story has any chance of being true, treat it as true, since it would honor Semele and the family. "Grant that this God be naught, / Yet let that Naught be Somewhat in thy mouth; / Lie boldly, and say He Is!" The argument from social convenience.

Dionysus is arrested and brought in chains. He made no attempt to flee. Pentheus mocks his long hair and pale skin and demands to know his rites. The god answers every question and gives nothing away. "Thou knowest not what end thou seekest, nor / What deed thou doest, nor what man thou art!"

Then the palace miracle. An earthquake, fire at Semele's tomb, and Dionysus walks out unharmed, then explains what happened inside: Pentheus, deceived by the god, tried to chain a bull instead of the prisoner, then stabbed at an empty shape in the dark. "Twas there I mocked him, in his gyves, and gave him dreams for food."

A herdsman reports from Mount Kithaeron. The women, including Agave, were found asleep and chaste, not drunk and wild as Pentheus believed. They rose at the god's call and made water, wine, and milk flow from the earth with their wands. But when the herdsmen tried to seize Agave, the women turned on the herd, and the speech doesn't spare you what happened. It's the first time the play shows what the rites can do, and it sets up a much worse report.

The Undoing Of Pentheus

Pentheus orders his army to prepare. Dionysus warns him, then after a long look changes tactics and offers to lead him to the mountain to watch the women, if he goes in disguise. The king's mind visibly loosens: he answers questions Dionysus hasn't quite asked, finishes the god's sentences, and slides from refusal to eagerness. "Man, thou wouldst fain behold them on the hill / Praying!"

The dressing scene is half comic, half terrible: wig, robe to the feet, snood, fawn-skin, thyrsus. Pentheus, who refused to wear a woman's dress, now asks the god to fix his hair and says how well he looks. He sees the sun double, Thebes double, and the god as a bull: "And is it a Wild Bull this, that walks and waits / Before me? There are horns upon thy brow!"

The second messenger tells how Pentheus died. The stranger bent down a great pine, set Pentheus in the top, and let it spring up. A voice from the sky called the women to avenge the god. Pentheus tore off his headdress and begged his mother: "Mother, it is I, thy child, / Thy Pentheus... Have mercy, Mother!" I'm going to leave it there. The play doesn't.

Agave walks in carrying her son's head on a wand, believing it's a young lion she hunted bare-handed. She's radiant. "Come! Look upon this prize, this lion's spoil." The Chorus, which had been urging on the god's vengeance, falls into horror right in front of her.

Cadmus gently leads her out of the delusion. He asks her to look at the sky, then asks simple questions: who was your husband, who was your son. Each answer narrows the gap until he asks whose head she's holding. "No; 'tis the head — O God! — of Pentheus, this!" It's brief and without ornament, and it's the emotional center of the play.

After the gap in the text, Dionysus appears to pass sentence. Cadmus and Harmonia are to be turned into serpents and lead a barbarian army against Greece. Agave and her sisters are exiled. The family begs for mercy and the god says it's too late. "Too late! When there was time, ye knew me not!"

What It's About (Pick Your Poison)

Twice the Chorus asks the same question: what else is wisdom? Their answer isn't a body of knowledge but a way of being. "To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait; / To hold a hand uplifted over Hate; / And shall not Loveliness be loved for ever?" Set against the cleverness of the "wise" who claim more than mortals can know. Pentheus is the clearest case.

Sight and blindness keep flipping. The blind seer sees. The king with open eyes doesn't. The prisoner in chains sees, and his guards don't. Pentheus sees double after the god touches his mind, and the one thing he wants is to see the rites, and that's how he's destroyed.

Pentheus defines himself by manhood and control. The cult he fears is led by women and a long-haired, soft-featured god, and he sees it as an attack on masculine order. The god's answer is to dress him as a woman and lead him to watch.

And reason versus the irrational. Pentheus is often taken as reason, order and the law of the city; Dionysus as ecstasy, instinct, and what the city tries to shut out. The play doesn't let either side win cleanly. Pentheus's reason turns out to be fear and fantasy in disguise. The Chorus's joy is real, and so is its blood.

Is the god good? The play won't say. Dionysus gives wine, joy and release, and arranges the murder of a man by his own mother. The Chorus sings his kindness and then cheers his vengeance. The ending doesn't tell you whether the punishment was justified, and the final speeches give the god no defense.

How People Read It

The simplest reading takes it at face value: a god is denied and punishes those who denied him. A warning. A second starts from the ending: a god who destroys a family for a slight, and answers a mother's plea with "too late," is a god the play invites you to judge, and Euripides often questioned the gods in other plays. Others read Pentheus's fascination as what he's repressing, and his death as the revenge of the repressed, or read it as a state that won't allow any ecstatic religion and a leader who meets a new movement only with force. I can't tell you which one is the real one. I don't think there is one.

To read it: the lines quoted here are Gilbert Murray's 1908 translation, free and in rhymed verse that sounds older than the play does. Most people do better with a recent translation, especially for the choral songs and the argument scenes. It follows the usual shape of Greek tragedy: a prologue by a god, an entrance song, episodes each followed by a choral song, and a final scene. It's short.