*39 The transmitted text of this line is problematic; I have translated one of a number of posssible reconstructions.
*40 Lines 1226–27 are difficult to interpret in the original, and lines 1228–30 are out of order in the manuscript tradition; this translation reflects a scholarly conjecture of how the lines should be ordered.
*41 There is a short lacuna here, including a missing verb.
*42 There are a couple of words missing in this line.
*43 There are textual problems in this line and the next. The Chorus seem to be saying that Helen has somehow failed to offer proper sacrifice to the goddess and that her sufferings are a result of this.
*44 The fawnskin, fennel stalk, and ivy are all associated with the worship of Dionysos (Bacchus).
*45 The transmitted text of this line is problematic; I have translated one of a number of posssible reconstructions.
*46 The original suggests literally that Menelaus will put up trophies to gloat about his victories over the dead barbarians, presumably when he returns to Greece.
*47 Some editors believe this line and the next are nonsensical and do not belong in the text; the line is certainly somewhat obscure. If genuine, it seems to create an ironic double meaning: she is saying both that funeral rites matter for the living and the dead, and also that her fake funeral for Menelaus will have important consequences both in Egypt and in Greece.
*48 The Chorus imagine Helen’s arrival in Sparta. The daughters of Leucippus were the wives of Helen’s brothers, Castor and Pollux, who were objects of cult worship in Sparta. The river is the Eurotas, the river of Sparta, and the Maiden is Athena, who had a temple on the Spartan acropolis.
*49 Apollo accidentally killed his young boyfriend Hyacinthus with a discus in a competition. In grief he instituted a festival cult, practiced in Sparta in Euripides’ time, called the Hyacinthia, involving festivities and animal sacrifice.
*50 There is a line missing here; the words in angle brackets supply the sense.
*51 The text is problematic here: the original is unmetrical, and it suggests, absurdly, that the disaster has occurred actually inside the king’s house.
*52 This line is corrupt in the original.
*53 The meter switches here in the original to trochaics, a rhythm associated with dancing, excitement, and high energy.
*54 The meter for the rest of the play switches back to regular iambics.
*55 The island of Makronissus, called Helen in antiquity.
INTRODUCTION TO EURIPIDES’ BACCHAE
Dionysus is unlike the other deities in the Olympian pantheon. He was the product of Zeus’ union with a mortal woman, the Theban princess Semele; mixed parentage would ordinarily have made him mortal, but, in part because Zeus gestated the fetus in his own thigh after Semele’s death—she was blasted apart when Zeus visited her in the form of a thunderbolt—his divine nature prevailed. He was raised in the East, on the legendary Mount Nysa, and was therefore thought to have entered the Greek world from outside, after first teaching his arts, including the making of wine, to the barbarian peoples of Asia. Greek artists loved to depict him arriving in Europe as a beautiful young man, followed by a train of Asian women clad in animal skins, playing music on exotic instruments and tossing their heads back in frenzied dances—the bakkhai, or female worshippers of Dionysus, also sometimes called maenads, who form the chorus of Euripides’ celebrated tragedy. Since the procession has journeyed overland through Anatolia and Thrace, the first mainland Greek city it reaches is Thebes, the place of Dionysus’ birth, and it is here, shortly after his arrival, that the action of the Bacchae takes place.
Dionysus played a far different role in Greek religious practice than did Zeus and his other children. His worship had broader social reach, including especially women and the poor, in part since his power manifested itself in wine and frenzied dancing, the most widely available routes the Greeks had toward out-of-self experience. But this populist appeal, together with his perceived foreignness and legendary late arrival among the Hellenes, made Dionysus anomalous, perhaps even dangerous, within the hierarchies of the Greek polis. Thus his shrines tended to be placed outside city walls, and his rites often took place in the wild, in unpeopled mountain vales. The Athenians, the most democratic of Greek peoples, devised a special ceremony to make this rural god at home in their city: in the grand festival called the Greater or City Dionysia, held in the spring, a cult statue of Dionysus was carried in from the country and installed in a temple on the south slope of the Acropolis. This was the occasion, as has often been stressed in this volume, for annual performances of tragedy at Athens, since drama, another route toward out-of-self experience, was thought to be an invention of Dionysus and was held sacred to that god.
But Thebes, at the time that Euripides’ Bacchae takes place, has no such ritual for making Dionysus welcome. Indeed, its ruler, Pentheus, holds a deep antipathy to the new cult that has drawn the women of his city, and even some old men, into the wilds of Mount Cithaeron, dressed in animal skins rather than “civilized” Greek wool garments. He does not even believe Dionysus to be divine; Semele, his aunt, might easily (as he thinks) have claimed Zeus as her lover merely to explain an embarrassing out-of-wedlock pregnancy. His belief system, like his monarchic line, is hierarchical and aristocratic. The idea that new gods can suddenly emerge on the scene, and new rites can spread like wildfire among the disenfranchised, threatens both his most deeply held convictions and the basis of his political power. That power is made visible onstage, as often in Greek theater, by a backdrop representing the strong wall of his royal palace; in this case, however, those walls are fated to crumble.
The sphere in which Dionysus operates extends far beyond the intoxications of wine and the transformations of theater. His presence is felt wherever the forces of nature are strongest: in the rapid growth of vines, the might of bulls, the quick, light movements of deer and leopards. His followers assimilate themselves to such darting creatures by wearing their skins or, in a rite described in myth but perhaps never put into practice, by tearing them apart and devouring their flesh raw, absorbing the blood that animates them. Union with natural forces, for polis-dwellers normally far removed from them, offers an ecstasy as powerful as that of dancing or drunkenness. The sex drive is of course one such force, and goat-footed satyrs and Sileni, embodying the power of that drive with their erect phalluses, were depicted in Greek art as Dionysus’ principal followers, along with the bacchae, women who have surrendered themselves, in nonsexual ways, to Dionysiac experience.
When he chose to explore that experience in a tragedy, Euripides was living far from Athens, at the court of the Macedonian king Archelaus. Perhaps he was influenced by the strange rites he saw there, for the Macedonians apparently gave freer rein to Dionysus than did their southerly neighbors. Whatever inspired him, he created in the Bacchae the most intense and harrowing of his surviving dramas, in recent decades the most influential and most frequently produced of all the plays in this volume. Unfortunately, the Bacchae has not survived intact; its ending is marred by a long gap, between lines 1329 and 1330 of the existing text, where an entire page was lost from an early manuscript.
At the heart of the play stands the tense, psychologically complex duel between Dionysus and Pentheus, cousins and agemates—both around twenty years old, to the extent that gods can be said to have ages—now locked in a struggle for control of Thebes. Throughout this contest, Dionysus operates in disguise, pretending to be only a priest of the newly imported cult rather than the deity it serves. He knows, and the audience knows, that he can make a mockery of all Pentheus’ blusters, threats, and armed guards. When he is finally imprisoned in the palace strongholds, an earthquake levels the walls and an unruffled Dionysus steps into freedom. Euripides seems to have based his portrayal on an archaic poem in which a disguised Dionysus, taken captive on board a pirate ship, coolly bides his time before unleashing his powers and terrifying the crew into jumping overboard. The mix
ture of mischievousness, malevolence, and adolescent brashness in this god’s character makes him fascinating to watch.
Pentheus struggles blindly against this “stranger,” whose curling locks and feminine manner he deeply mistrusts and who, as he imagines, has led the women of Thebes into a debased sex romp. Yet behind his disgust lie covert desires to experiment himself with androgyny and voyeurism. In a mysterious moment of transformation, perhaps begun by Dionysus casting a kind of spell, Pentheus allows those desires to emerge and take control, to the extent of putting on women’s clothes and going out as a spy to Mount Cithaeron. This moment (beginning at line 810) leaves some readers puzzled, but to others it makes perfect sense; directors have adopted various approaches when putting it onstage. Pentheus, now in a kind of trance, sees two suns in the sky and a two-horned bull where the stranger stands; he has crossed over into Dionysus’ world, but the journey will lead, in the horrific episodes that follow, to his destruction.
As Pentheus’ transformation takes place, the Chorus, made up of Asian women who have accompanied Dionysus from the East, sing one of Euripides’ most haunting and mysterious odes, asking “What is wisdom?” Their philosophical question is immediately followed by a violent, vengeful one, that seems to anticipate Pentheus’ coming demise: “What better gift / can gods give to mortals than to hold / an upper hand / above the enemy’s head?” The ode then moves through various meditations on the power of the gods and the vanity of human endeavors, ending with a couplet that seems to sum all up: “A truly happy life / is happiness day by day.” This resigned yet hopeful assertion—that joy, if it ever comes, should not be taken for granted in the present nor counted on in the future—is perhaps the final message of Athenian tragedy, given gorgeous expression here in the final play of our collection and, quite possibly, the final work of Euripides’ career.
Euripides was in fact already dead at the time his Bacchae was put onstage, in 405 B.C. According to stories that circulated later, he had passed away the previous year in Macedonia, and this play, along with his Iphigenia in Aulis and one other tragedy, were found among his papers and staged by a relative. The playwright Sophocles, himself very near death, reportedly wore a black cloak of mourning in the festal procession that preceded that year’s tragic festival, drawing tears from onlookers. After the performances, Euripides was posthumously awarded first prize, only the fourth time he achieved that honor.
Athens was by that time nearly exhausted from its long war against Sparta and its allies; the very next year saw the city’s defeat and surrender. Athens’ power would partly recover in the decades that lay ahead, but the energies that had given rise to its golden age of tragic drama had dissipated. Though tragedies continued to be written during subsequent decades, none of these later ones were thought to have reached the fifth century’s high levels of sublimity, and none of them has survived into modern times.
BACCHAE
Translated by Emily Wilson
I follow the text in E. R. Dodds’s edition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960). Important variants or textual problems are marked in the notes. I have also benefited from Richard Seaford’s edition (Aris and Phillips, 1996, reprinted 2011).
CAST OF CHARACTERS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)
DIONYSUS, a god (son of Zeus by the mortal woman Semele), in disguise as a mortal; his alternative name is Bacchus, so his followers are known as Bacchants
PENTHEUS, king of Thebes
AGAVE, mother of Pentheus
CADMUS, father of Agave; previous king and founder of Thebes
TIRESIAS, old prophet
SERVANT
MESSENGER
SECOND MESSENGER
CHORUS of maenads,* female worshippers of Dionysus, or Bacchus, who have accompanied him from the East; also known as Bacchants or, in Latin, Bacchae—hence the play’s title
* * *
* “Maenad” suggests a woman who is stricken by madness or frenzy; it comes from the verb mainomai, “to rave,” “to be raging.”
Setting: The play takes place at Thebes, in front of the palace of Cadmus, by the river Dirce. There is an ever-smoldering tomb marking the place where Dionysus’ mother, Semele, died from Zeus’ lightning bolt.*1
DIONYSUS: Here: I am come to Thebes: I, Dionysus,
son of Zeus and son of Cadmus’ daughter,
Semele, midwifed by the lightning’s fire.
Shifting my shape to mortal from divine,
I am here at Dirce’s spring, Ismenos’ river.*2
I see my thunder-blasted mother’s tomb,
here, near the palace, and the smoking ruins:
her home, destroyed by Zeus’ flame, still burning:
the mark of Hera’s everlasting hate.
10
Cadmus did well, in making here a shrine
for his dead daughter. I surrounded it
with luscious grapes and green vines intertwined.
I journeyed from the golden Lydian fields,
from Phrygia and through Persia’s sunny slopes,
to Bactrian towns and to the colder country
where the Medes live, to rich Arabia,
and all the Ionian coast, by the salty sea,
where Greeks and foreigners are mixed together,
in crowded cities crowned with handsome towers.*3
20
At last I have come to Greece—this city first.
Already I’ve made Asia dance and serve me,
to show all mortals that I am a god.*4
In Greece the Thebans are the first I’ve roused
to ululations, wrapped in fawn-skin cloaks,
thyrsus and darts of ivy in their hands,*5
since my mother’s sisters, my own aunts,
denied that I was born the son of Zeus!
They said that Semele*6 slept with some man,
got pregnant, and pretended it was Zeus.
30
Cadmus’ smart idea, they snickered: Zeus
killed her for lying, saying I was his.
For that, I stung them till I buzzed them mad:
I made them homeless, crazy, mountain-dwellers.
I made them wear the uniform of my cult:
out of their homes, out of their minds, I drove
all of the female Theban population.
Regular women mix with royalty
out on the roofless rocks beneath green pines.
This city has to learn, by force if need be,
40
what comes of its resistance to my rites.*7
And I must save the honor of my mother,
by showing humans I am son of Zeus.
Cadmus has handed over royal power
to Pentheus, the son his daughter bore.*8
He fights with gods, and shoves me from my rites,
and never thinks to praise me in his prayers.
For that, I’ll show him I was born a god,
and Thebes will see. Once I have fixed things here,
I’ll lead the dance away, to show myself
50
in yet another land. But if Thebes tries
to march in violent anger up the mountains,
then I will lead my maenads into war.
That is the reason I took mortal shape
transformed to human nature in my looks.
(to the Chorus) Women, holy sisterhood, who left
barbarian lands and Lydian mountain peaks
for me, companions, helpers, fellow-travelers,
take up your tambourines—which I invented
with the Great Mother Rhea’s help, in Phrygia.*9
60
Come, beat your rhythms all around this palace,
the place of Pentheus: let the whole town see.
But I will go to deep Cithaeron’s folds*10
to find the Bacchants and to dance with them.
CHORUS:*11
We came from the East,
from holy Mount Tmolus,*12
to work the sweet work
for the Lord of Rumbling Thunder.*13
Praise to Lord Bacchus!
Who stops us, who, who, who?
Go now, away with you, indoors, go.
70
Keep your words sacred, keep your mouth clean.
We will sing the eternal ritual song
for Dionysus.
strophe 1
O,
the happiness! To know
the worship of the gods,
to live the holy life,
twining yourself with others,
as a mountain maenad,
blessed and sanctified,
honoring the mystery rites
of the mighty Mother,*14
80
and whirling high the thyrsus,
wearing ivy garlands,
to worship Dionysus!
Come, Bacchants, come, come, come,
take up the god, resounding god, son of god,
bring back Bacchus, down from the mountains,
back home to Greece, to the streets broad for dancing,
Lord of the Rumbling Thunder.
antistrophe 1
Long ago lightning
flew forth from Zeus
90
to the woman, pregnant, a mother,
forcing her painful birth-pangs:
she bore the tiny child before his time,
and left her life, struck by the blow of thunder.
But right away Zeus, son of Cronus,
took him and hid him in chambers of birthing,
tucking the baby inside his thigh,
fastened together with golden pins
to hide him from Hera.
And when the Fates fulfilled the time,
100
Zeus gave birth to a bull-horned god,
and crowned him with snakes for a crown.*15
That’s why the maenads wear wreaths on their hair
from the spoil they have caught in the wilderness,
nurse of the wild things.
strophe 2
The Greek Plays Page 88