PATIENT
The Bacchae
COMPOSED
c. 405 BCE (approx.)
FORM
A Greek tragedy
SETTING
Thebes, where Dionysus' mother was born
CHIEF COMPLAINT
What happens to a city that refuses to honor a god, and who was right?
HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS
A god comes to the city where his mother was born and asks to be honored. The young king, Pentheus, refuses, and the god leads him, one agreed step at a time, into the rites he has forbidden. The play gives the god's side its full beauty and then shows the price, and it never says who was right. At the end Dionysus pronounces judgment: Cadmus and Harmonia are to be turned into serpents, Agave and her sisters are exiled, and when the family begs for mercy the god answers that it is too late, because when there was time they did not know him.
REVIEW OF SYSTEMS
MANIA
Divinely sent madness. The state that carries the women up the mountain, and the state that carries Pentheus to his death.
SOPHROSYNE
Sound-mindedness, the Greek virtue of limits. The play asks whether Pentheus has it, and whether the Chorus rejects it.
SPARAGMOS
The tearing apart of a living body. The cult's central rite and the play's central event.
EPIPHANY
The showing forth of a god. Dionysus comes in disguise, and the play is about what happens when he reveals himself.
WISDOM
The Chorus twice asks what else is wisdom. Its answer is a way of being, and Pentheus is the clearest example of the other kind.
PHYSICAL EXAM — STYLE & STRUCTURE
- —A tragedy with a Chorus of Dionysus' followers, whose hymns give the god's side its beauty.
- —The violence in the hills is reported by messengers, so we hear it described rather than see it.
- —Built on disguise, sight and blindness, and a king whose mind visibly loosens as he is persuaded.
- —There is a gap in the surviving text near the end, so the judgment scene is partly reconstructed.
- —Ends on a question and a verdict rather than a resolution.
ASSESSMENT & PLAN
The Bacchae sits beside the Sophocles guide as the other great late-fifth-century tragedy, and the two make a useful pair: Oedipus is a king undone by what he does not know about himself, and Pentheus is a king undone by what he will not admit about himself. Plato's Republic argues against the tragic poets, so reading the play first gives that argument something real to push against. For a first read, try Paul Woodruff (Hackett), William Arrowsmith (Chicago) or Anne Carson (Bakkhai, Oxford); the full guide quotes Gilbert Murray's public-domain 1908 translation.