Euripides' Bacchae Study Guide

Euripides (c. 480- c. 406 BC) was the youngest and most provocative of the three great Athenian tragedians. Though he wrote about ninety plays, only nineteen survive. Bacchae was produced after Euripides’ death, probably in 405 BC, as the final part of a trilogy consisting of Iphigenia at Aulis and the lost play Alcmaeon, along with a satyr play. It was awarded first prize at the Great Dionysia festival in ancient Athens.

Bacchae: A Divine Tragedy, by Dr Rosa Andújar

Euripides’ final masterpiece, the Bacchae, is uniquely centred on Dionysus, the god of the Athenian theatre as well as one of the most intriguing deities in the ancient Greek pantheon. Throughout the play, which itself explains the establishment of Dionysus’ cult in Greece, the tragedian includes many elements that were associated with the experience of participating in the god’s cult. These include various stories that relate the birth of the god, detailed descriptions of his maenads who wildly celebrate the god on Mount Cithaeron, and the ritual sacrifice of tearing flesh apart (sparagmos). The evocation of this experience takes on special meaning when one considers the ritual context of ancient Greek drama: all fifth-century tragedies were performed as part of a city-wide celebration honouring Dionysus, the City Dionysia festival, which featured sacrifices and elaborate processions, as well as dramatic and poetic competitions in honour of the god. Dionysus is thus not only the play’s protagonist, he is extraordinarily omnipresent in a drama that itself is a crucial celebration of his divinity.

The gods were no strangers to the fifth-century Athenian stage: many of the surviving tragedies feature scenes with deities such as Poseidon, Athena, and Aphrodite, who typically appear at the beginning or end of a play, either delivering the opening prologue or providing closure ex machina. In the majority of cases, the actors playing the gods appeared from ‘on high’, delivering their lines from the roof of the wooden background (skene) building. The gods were thus in a sense alien to the tragic plot, restricted to beginnings and ends. Though tragic characters continually call out and appeal to them, on stage they were literally placed above the action. Tragedians might choose to give their plays a divine frame (as in the case of Hippolytus, Ion, and the Bacchae, the only surviving tragedies with both a divine prologue and closing scene), but, with the exception of a few notable plays (Aeschylus’ Eumenides, and Prometheus Bound) they tended physically to isolate their divine characters from the rest of the human cast.

In the Bacchae, however, Dionysus takes centre stage, the only major god in surviving Greek tragedy to serve as a play’s main focus. Like Hippolytus, the play reveals the awesome power of a spurned deity, who devastates and destroys those such as Pentheus who refuse to worship him. Dionysus’ appearance and dominance on stage, however, makes it the ultimate tragedy of revenge. In Hippolytus, Aphrodite must work her revenge through indirect means and human intermediaries, inflaming Phaedra with a forbidden passion for her stepson. Dionysus, on the other hand, takes personal and direct charge, perhaps because vengeance must be exacted against his cousin and immediate family. There existed other earlier revenge tragedies centred on Dionysus’ ire: Aeschylus, for example, wrote a tetralogy (unfortunately lost) about Lycurgus of Thrace, who like Pentheus banned the cult of Dionysus and was destroyed as a result. Though not much is known about this lost series of plays which preceded Bacchae, we can probably assume that Dionysus’ revenge in Aeschylus’ drama was not as extreme and brutal as that depicted by Euripides, who sets the common theme of divine vengeance within a novel context: the god’s own immediate human family.

In a play about the god of the Athenian theatre, it is not surprising that the role of performance in the theatrical experience and the question of stagecraft are central concerns. After his opening prologue, the god of theatre appears on his own stage, in costume and in disguise. Euripides places special emphasis upon the act of disguise throughout the play, as in the scene in which Dionysus (in the guise of a mortal) helps Pentheus dress in the robe of a maenad in order to spy on the women. Other notable mythical figures such as Cadmus and Tiresias (who is easily identifiable in many other Theban plays by his staff and seer garb) also don special costumes in honour of Dionysus. The staging of many scenes, such as the earthquake in which Dionysus is liberated, recalls the power of the theatre, which can easily transform any stage into another world. Under Dionysus’ spell, Pentheus states that he can see two suns, a vision which might have prompted the Athenian viewing audience to think about the relationship between the fictive world of Thebes that is conjured by the play and their present experience of sitting in the Theatre of Dionysus on the south slope of the Acropolis. The illusions conjured up in the theatre were themselves a crucial part of Dionysian worship, of altered perceptions, and crucially of ekstasis, or ‘standing outside yourself’.

It is apt that one of our last surviving ancient Greek tragedies is itself a celebration of Dionysus and his theatre. This unique play is one of final plays written by Euripides, who composed Bacchae in his old age while living far from Athens, in the court of Archelaus, king of Macedon. The play was produced after his death by his son, perhaps in 405 BC, as the final part of a trilogy consisting of Iphigenia at Aulis and the lost play Alcmaeon, along with a satyr play, which were awarded first prize at the ancient festival. It is no surprise that this complex play, in which the paradoxical idea of a divine protagonist exacting vengeance upon his human relatives is paired with a larger meta-theatrical exploration of the general theatre-going experience, continues to fascinate modern audiences around the world. (© Dr Rosa Andújar)

Nietzsche and the Dionysiac, by Emma Cole

The Bacchae, produced posthumously around 405 BC, is part of one of the only Euripidean tragic trilogies to be awarded first prize at the City Dionysia. The other surviving play from this trilogy, Iphigenia at Aulis, is likely filled with corrupted passages due to fourth-century actor additions to the script. Not only has the Bacchae survived relatively intact, but its focus on religion and the positioning of a god as a protagonist is almost unparalleled in the extant Euripidean corpus. All this has seen an enormous amount of scholarly ink spilled over the tragedy; however, none of this has permeated cultural consciousness to the same level as philosophical inquiries into the play.

In nineteenth-century Germany a number of prominent thinkers turned to the Bacchae. Hölderlin and Goethe both translated passages, and A. W. Schlegel excluded this one tragedy from his ‘damnatio’ of Euripides. The most significant engagement, however, is arguably that of the classical philologist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and his 1872 monograph The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.

The Birth of Tragedy focuses not on Euripides’ Bacchae, but rather on the origins of tragedy and the conditions required for its rebirth in contemporary society. Nietzsche begins with the argument that all true art is either Apolline, Dionysiac, or both, and argues that ancient tragedy represents these forces in perfect negotiation and is thus the most life-affirming of all art forms. The binary between the Apolline and the Dionysiac is one between civilisation and nature, sculpture and music, individuation and collective experience, and order and the orgiastic. The Dionysian force is perceived to be the foundational element of human existence and is something that one should never attempt to deny. The Bacchae, through such a reading, illustrates what happens when one attempts to resist this power. Yet Nietzsche does not advocate that we wholly give ourselves up to Dionysian impulses, as this would be an impossible way of life. The repercussions of such a purely transgressive and ecstatic existence are memorably depicted in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History - the reading of which as a form of procrastination during exam time is a rite of passage for any classics undergraduate!

As tragedy blends the Dionysiac, represented through the singing and dancing chorus, with the Apolline, represented by the pragmatic dramatis personae, it synthesises these two human tendencies and allows us to comprehend the Dionysiac in a logical form. But if such a perfect articulation of this ideal equilibrium was established in fifth century Athens, why then does tragedy disappear? Nietzsche explains this through the arrival of Socratic philosophy, which strove for rational inquiry and reasoned knowledge, epitomised in the line Plato gives Socrates in his Apology: the unexamined life is not worth living. The Socratic drive, for Nietzsche, underpins modern theoretical and scientific thought and results in the form of passionless existence disconnected from bodily vitality that he felt characterised the nineteenth century. The time was ripe, he believed, to once again create a tragic culture that integrates both forces and recognises the primordial power of the Dionysiac.

This interpretation of the origins of tragedy, the need for its rebirth, and its association with forces derived from the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus, has not been without its critics. This even includes Nietzsche himself, particularly in regards to his conclusion, which posits that the rebirth of tragedy in contemporary Germany might take the form of Wagner’s music-dramas. In 1886, when he was no longer so closely associated with Wagner, Nietzsche added a new preface to The Birth of Tragedy, critiquing a number of its claims. Yet the opposition between an Apolline and Dionysiac force, or restraint and revelry, prevails, and it is this dichotomy that continues to exert influence upon interpretations of the Bacchae today.

This tension can be seen, for example, in Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69, perhaps the most iconic twentieth-century reception of the play. This performance-available online and well worth watching-spoke directly to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and characterised Pentheus as an uptight, prudish opponent of this movement. Contrastingly, Dionysus and the other characters in the play appeared naked, and encouraged the audience to take part in a ‘group grope’. Dionysus’ ultimate seduction of Pentheus and the subsequent punishment of his early resistance loudly proclaimed the futility of opposing free love. Interpreting the Bacchae as a dramatisation of Nietzsche’s arguments is perhaps an unconscious activity for many, but it is so embedded within critical discourse that even productions which don’t explicitly set out to do this, such as Peter Hall’s 2002 National Theatre production, are often reviewed this way nevertheless. It is now practically impossible to watch the play without reading it through this concept, and I’m sure Nietzsche wouldn’t have it any other way. (© Emma Cole)

Study Questions

What makes Bacchae a religious play?
Describe the typical role of the gods in Greek tragedy.
How is Bacchae different from other revenge dramas?
To what extent can Bacchae be described as a celebration of the power of theatre?
How does Bacchae relate to the focus of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy?
What does Nietzsche identify as the Dionysian and Apollonian elements of tragedy?
According to Nietzsche, what was responsible for the death of tragedy in ancient Greece?
How have Nietzsche’s views in the Birth of Tragedy influenced modern interpretations of Bacchae?

Euripides' Bacchae Study Guide

Bacchae: A Divine Tragedy, by Dr Rosa Andújar

Nietzsche and the Dionysiac, by Emma Cole

Study Questions

Further Reading