The Bacchae — themes & analysis

The Bacchae opens with Dionysus, alone on stage, telling the audience exactly what he intends to do. He has come to Thebes because his mother's sisters denied his divine birth and because his cousin Pentheus has banned his rites. He will drive the women of the city into frenzy on the mountain. He will let himself be arrested. He will arrange for Pentheus to be torn apart. He says it plainly, in the prologue, and the play is the patient unfolding of the plan he has already named.

What Euripides stages, with terrifying calm, is divine power that does not raise its voice. Dionysus does not strike Pentheus down. He does not argue him into belief. He simply arranges the conditions — the prison from which the prisoner walks out unbound, the messenger's report that lands at exactly the right moment, the offer of a hidden place from which to spy — and Pentheus, at every step, takes the bait that has been offered. By the time the king is climbing the mountain in a wig and a long robe, the god has not lifted a finger against him. He has only let him have what he wanted.

This is one of the most disturbing depictions of divinity in the Greek corpus. Euripides was the tragedian most sceptical of the gods, the one whose earlier plays question and rationalise and undercut divine authority on every available occasion. In his last year, alone in a foreign court, he wrote a play in which a god is absolutely real and absolutely without mercy — not because he is cruel but because he has been refused. The play does not soften this. The god is right; the man who refused him is destroyed; the city that backed the man is broken. The audience is left to decide what to do with that.

Where to follow it: Scene 1 (the prologue), Scene 5 (the arrest), Scene 6 (the prison undone), Scene 11 (the judgement).

Pentheus is not stupid. He is intelligent, politically serious, alarmed for good reasons by what the women of his city are doing on the mountain. He governs from inside a coherent picture of the world — a picture in which the polis manages its citizens, the king manages the polis, and what cannot be reasoned with cannot exist. The play sets out to show what that picture cannot account for.

Tiresias, the old prophet, makes the philosophical case explicitly in the first episode. There are two great powers among men, he says: Demeter, who feeds the body with dry things, and Dionysus, who has come after to perfect her work — the wet, the liquid, the principle of release that lets the worn mind sleep and the locked body open. To exclude Dionysus from public life is not to eliminate him. It is to concentrate him somewhere else, and to guarantee that what comes back will be worse than what was driven out. Pentheus does not hear a word of it. The play takes the rest of its length to demonstrate, step by step, that Tiresias was right.

What Euripides has built — and the reason Nietzsche built his theory of tragedy on this play — is a dramatic argument about civilisation itself. The Apollonian principle of order, individuation, lit measure cannot stand alone. The Dionysian must be admitted somewhere, in some controlled form. A city that pushes the wet, the irrational, the ecstatic out of public life has not won; it has built a pressure chamber. The Bacchae is the play that watches the pressure chamber rupture. The young king who insisted hardest on the categories is the one whose body comes apart along the seams he was trying to keep clean.

Where to follow it: Scene 3 (Tiresias's defence), Scene 5 (the interrogation), Scene 8 (the chorus on wisdom), Scene 9 (the king dressed).

The hinge of the play is the moment, late in Scene 7, when Pentheus stops resisting and agrees to put on the women's clothes. The text marks the transition with surgical care. Dionysus has been doing nothing for several scenes except being captured, escaping, and standing patiently in front of the king. The Messenger has just delivered a report from the mountain in which milk and honey and wine spring from the rock and the women suckle wolf-cubs and tear cattle apart with their hands. Pentheus, ordering his army out, is interrupted by a single quiet question from the priest in front of him: You would gladly look on them at their prayers on the mountain. Pentheus answers without thinking — yes, though it cost me all the gold of Thebes — and the play has its hinge.

What Euripides has written is not coercion. It is the god finding what his opponent most suppresses and offering it back to him as a hidden permission. Pentheus has spent the whole play raging against the women's rites, accusing the priest of running a brothel on the hill, fixating on the orgies he insists are happening and his sister-women are part of. The fixation is the door. Dionysus opens it. Pentheus walks through.

The dressing scene is calmly, almost domestically staged. Dionysus arranges the wig, smooths the folds of the robe, corrects the way the king is holding the wand. Pentheus, by now half-mad, is docile and almost childlike — he sees double suns, he sees the priest as a bull, he asks whether his hair is in the right place. Whatever has been kept down for years is on the surface now, and the god has him. Two and a half thousand years of readers have argued about what Pentheus desires. The play does not decide. It only shows that the desire is real, that the god knew where it was, and that the kingdom of self-government Pentheus built his rule on was no defence at all.

Where to follow it: Scene 7 (the hinge), Scene 9 (the dressing), Scene 10 (the chorus on the spy).

The play's most famous scene is also its most controlled. Agave returns from the mountain triumphant, carrying what she believes is a young lion she has killed with her bare hands. She is still possessed. She is, by every visible measure, happy. She wants to nail the trophy above her son's door and call her son out to admire it. Her father Cadmus, who has spent the previous scene gathering the scattered pieces of his grandson's body from the woodland, meets her at the gate. The recognition that follows is one of the most precisely written scenes in Greek tragedy.

Cadmus does not tell her. He asks her questions. What is the sky like above you. What is the wind in your face. Is your husband Echion. Is your son Pentheus. What is the head you are holding. Look. Look once more. Look until it is clear. The scene is in real time. Each question removes a single layer of the divine madness. Agave answers each one, more lucid than the last, until the head in her hands is no longer a lion's. Euripides does not cut away. He gives the audience the full descent — the slow widening of her eyes, the catch in her voice, the moment the weight in her hand becomes recognisable.

The scene is more devastating than Oedipus's blinding because it depicts not the consequence of a sin but the consequence of a possession. Agave has not knowingly done anything. She is in any normal sense not guilty. But she holds her son's head, and the play is unforgiving about it. There is no Greek consolation here. There is no balancing speech, no choric reassurance that the gods reward the just. There is a mother and a father and a head, and the long flat lines of judgement and exile that close the play. The Bacchae's last word is that what happened was real and that nobody is forgiven for it.

Where to follow it: Scene 7 (Agave on the mountain, in the report), Scene 11 (the second messenger), Scene 11 (the recognition).

Euripides spent his career picking the gods apart. His Heracles is destroyed by a divine madness sent without justice; his Hippolytus dies because Aphrodite has an unsettled grudge; his Trojan Women is the disaster a divine quarrel leaves on the women of a sacked city. Across thirty years of plays the gods are arbitrary, vain, often petty, often absent. The audiences of the City Dionysia complained. Aristophanes mocked him for it. He left Athens at the end of his life — voluntarily, it seems — and went to the court of King Archelaus of Macedon, in what was effectively cultural exile. He died there, sometime around 406 BCE.

In his last year or two he wrote The Bacchae. It was performed posthumously in Athens, by his son or nephew, in 405 BCE. It won first prize — the only outright victory of Euripides's career. And it is a play in which a god is absolutely real, absolutely powerful, and absolutely without mercy. The man who insisted on questioning the gods has given the audience a theatre of divine action in which the god is not questionable. The reading is so unexpected that scholars have spent two thousand years arguing about what to do with it.

Some have read it as a recantation — the old sceptic, at the end of his life, finally bowing the knee. Others have read it as the opposite — a darker, more sceptical play than any that came before, in which a god turns out to be exactly the kind of capricious, vindictive force the earlier plays warned about, only this time the play does not protest. Both readings are available; the play does not declare for either. What is certain is that Euripides knew what he was doing. He had spent thirty years exploring what a god is and what one is not. In his last year he wrote the play in which the god is real and the consequences of refusing him are total. He left it, finished, in Macedonia. He did not see it staged. The audience that watched its premiere knew the man who wrote it was already dead.

Where to follow it: Scene 1 (the prologue), Scene 3 (Tiresias's defence), Scene 11 (the closing judgement).