The Bacchae of Euripides

By C. K. Williams and Martha Nussbaum

From the renowned contemporary American poet C. K. Williams comes this fluent and accessible version of The Bacchae, the great tragedy by Euripides.

This book includes an introduction by Martha Nussbaum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466880566

C. K. Williams

C. K. Williams has lived in the United States, Canada, Australia and Paris and is a regular visitor to the UK. When not teaching creative writing at Bonn University, Williams loves to cook (and bake). More often than not, you will be able to find Williams on a train flitting to and fro in Europe or the United Kingdom, realising once again that she has forgotten to bring lunch, and proceeding to buy all the croissants that live in Bruxelles Midi.

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Contents

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

INTRODUCTION by Martha Nussbaum

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

CAST OF CHARACTERS

THE BACCHAE of Euripides

NOTES

ALSO BY C. K. WILLIAMS

COPYRIGHT

Introduction

I

Euripides’ Bacchae ends with a scene in which a mother reassembles her son’s severed bodily parts, parts that she herself has fatally ripped. She puzzles over the proper location of each member, weeping for the disunity that she herself has made. And the play itself demands, it seems, just such an effort from its audience: an effort, mixed with pity and grief, to compose and recompose the parts or aspects of Dionysus, making of the hidings and revealings of this strange god some whole coherent form. And it seems to demand, as well, acknowledgment that this strangeness and disorder are also in the spectators themselves, that they, or a part of them, have made it.

But unlike the dead limbs of Pentheus, Dionysus will not be set in any static ordering; nor will the recognitions that he, and this play, offer to its spectators. Dispersed and yet himself, contradictory and yet strangely constant, he resists human attempts to integrate him and to pin him down. While the audience, like Agave, grieves, trying to produce order, trying to understand, he smiles and moves on. The goal of the confrontation must, then, be appropriate to its object: not so much the resolution of his contradictions as a greater awareness of their structure and of their relations—invasive, consoling, detached, transporting—to human life and its possibilities.

To begin this confrontation, then, we need to get a clearer sense of the problems that face the interpreter of Dionysus, and of this play. We begin to see them emerging if we examine the lyric sung by the Chorus after Pentheus, deluded by the god and dressed in women’s clothing, has been led off to his doom:

Oh, will I, some-

    time, in the all-

        night dances, dance

again, bare-

    foot, rapt,

        again, in

Bacchus, all

    in Bacchus,

        again?

Will I

    throw my bared

        throat

back, to the cool

    night back, the

        way,

oh, in the green joys

    of the meadow, the

        way

a fawn

    frisks, leaps,

        throws itself

as it finds itself

    safely past

        the frightening

hunters, past the

    nets, the

        houndsmen

urging on

    their straining

        hounds, free

now, leaping, tasting

    free wind now,

being wind

now as it leaps

    the plain, the

        stream

and river, out

    at last, out from

        the human,

free, back,

    into the

        green,

rich, dapple-

    shadowed tresses of the

        forest.

What is

    wisdom?

        What

the fairest

    gift the gods

        can offer

us

    below?

        What

is nobler

    than

        to hold

a dominating

    hand

        above

the bent

    head of

        the enemy?

The fair, the

    noble, how

        we

cherish, how

    we welcome

        them.

Hardly

    stirring, hardly

        seeming

to happen, it

    happens sometimes

        so

slowly, the power

    of the gods, but

        it does, then,

stir, does

    come

        to pass, and,

inexorably, comes

    to punish

        humans,

who honor first

    self-pride, and

        turn,

their judgment

    torn, their reason

        torn,

demented, from

    the

        holy.

The first step

    of the gods, it

        hardly, in

its great

    time, seems

        to stir, the

first step

    of the godly hunt

        of

the unholy, first

    step

        of the revenge

on those who

    put themselves

        beyond

and

    over

        law.

So little

    does

        it cost

to understand

    that this

        has power, whatever

is divine; so

    little

        cost

to comprehend

    that what has

        long

been lawful,

    over

        centuries,

comes forever

    out

        of Nature.

What is

    wisdom?

        What

the fairest

    gift the gods

        can offer

us

    below?

        What

is nobler

    than

        to hold

a dominating

    hand

        above

the bent

    head of

        the enemy?

The fair, the

    noble, how

        we

cherish, how

    we welcome

        them.          (862–901)

One of the most beautiful choral lyrics in all of Greek tragedy, this passage closes in a chilling refrain, twice repeated. And it contains, indissolubly, a mixture of beauty and horror. There is indeed beauty here, in the described content as in the describing language and its intricate delicate meter. The religion of Dionysus makes these women free to dance, to leap, to move with grace and power through the world of nature with the green joy of the body and its freedom. Their passage beyond civilization to a place empty of human beings is exuberant and joyful, an overcoming of constraints seen as inherent in the human world. On the other hand, the refrain suggests that they move beyond civilization in another way as well: in their thirst for blood, their pitiless belief that vengeance is the most beautiful thing. The imagery of the ode explores this doubleness. For as fawns they escape well-woven nets; but they delight, too, in hunting down their prey. (Dionysus has just announced that Pentheus has been trapped in his net [line 848].) They move with the light rapidity of the dance, but they delight in the slow, inexorable movement of divine vengeance. They flee constraints, and they gleefully invoke them against their enemy.

These ambiguities reach a climax in the refrain’s final line, whose multiple meanings C. K. Williams has elegantly attempted to set out in this original and convincing version.¹ Literally, the Greek says: "Whatever is kalon is always philon." Kalon is a word that signifies at once beauty and nobility. It can be either aesthetic or ethical and is usually both at once, showing how hard it is to distinguish these spheres in Greek thought. The kalon is, for example, the topic of Plato’s Symposium, where it is a property of young bodies, of moral and civic institutions, of noble souls. Its contrary is aischron—ugly, shameful, base. Fine is perhaps the best single-word translation. Philon, relative of the noun philos—friend, loved one—means beloved, precious, a friend to, dear, welcome. This ambiguous line, then, is the ancestor of A thing of beauty is a joy forever. It expresses love for what is truly noble, truly fine. But what is the object of this moral/aesthetic appreciation? Vengeance and cruelty, punishment and death. It is not possible to separate the beautiful from the horrible. For the freedom to dance is also the hunting of the god’s enemy. And the cruelty of the god’s vengeance is a most beautiful thing, in the sense that it makes and has made possible the transcendent beauty of movement and passion that these women live, the poetic beauty by which the audience is moved. Dionysus, as he himself has just announced, is both fiercest and most sweet to human beings.

This mixture of fierceness and sweetness runs throughout the play. The story of Dionysus’ arrival in Thebes begins with his birth from Semele, a birth that he himself describes in the play’s opening lines. Her midwife was the lightning bolt that killed her (line 3: my own literal translation). A birth that brings death, a fertility that is blazing destruction: so this god’s career begins. And since the lightning bolt represents in the story, as well, Zeus’s impregnating penetration of his earthly bride, the event also combines ecstasy with fatality, erotic passion with the extinction of the self. The still-smoldering tomb is the setting for the play’s action. The spectators watch it throughout, reminded by that monument of a contact between civilized human life and what is other than, outside of, civilization.²

Two groups of women worship Dionysus in

Reviews for The Bacchae of Euripides

[est2lm · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Bacchae is one of my favorite Greek tragedies. It is a hot mess of a family drama filled with deception, two kinds of blindness, a party in the woods, and good old-fashioned man killing. Dionysus (Bacchus to the Romans) seeks out to prove to his mortal family (his mother, Semele, was human) that his father is Zeus and therefore he is a god, because his cousins and his aunts believe that Semele lied about his father and died as a result of that lie. Dionysus and other characters undergo various disguises, putting in question what is real and what is fake, as well as demonstrating a very real fear of women who are left to their own devices. It is both comical in terms of those who fall for disguises or disguises themselves, and it is tragic in terms of the violence involved.

[david.alfred.sarkies · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

We actually don't have a complete copy of this play though the edition that I read attempts to reconstruct the missing sections (which is mostly at the end) because, as they say, this is a popular play that is regularly performed. This in itself is a strange statement since I have never seen it performed (in fact I have only ever seen one Greek play performed, and that was Oedipus Tyrannous and that was by an amateur theatre group). Mind you, Greek plays tend to be short, meaning that they last generally only as long as about a third of a Shakespeare play (though when they were performed in ancient times, it would usually be along with three others plays).The Bacchae is about change and about the resistance to change and how our attempts to resist change is generally futile. Mind you it is a tragedy and it does have a pretty bloody ending (in that a number of the main characters end up dead, though the progenitor of change, Dionysus, doesn't, but then again he is a god). There are two things that do strike me about this play, the first being how there are reflections of Christianity in it, particularly early Christianity, and the second involves reflections of the modern rave culture. However, before I go into exploring those two aspects of the play I should give a bit of a background so you may understand where I am coming from.The cult of Dionysus was a rather new cult to appear in Ancient Greece, as far as the gods are concerned, and he was not one of the traditional gods of the pantheon. He apparently was introduced through migrations from the north, particularly through Thrace. The cult itself was a mystery cult, meaning that the rituals and celebrations tended to be conducted behind closed doors (and this comes out in the Bacchae, particularly since the main worshippers were women). The celebrations (as also comes out in the Bacchae) generally involved drunken revelries out in the bush.The Bacchae itself is set in the mythical period of Ancient Greece in the city of Thebes. The king of Thebes, Penthius, is concerned about this new cult that has appeared that is seducing all of the women into joining. As such he goes out of his way to attempt to put an end to it, including arresting Dionysus. It is interesting that Dionysus, unlike the gods in many of the other Greek plays, has a major role. Most of the gods in Greek drama tend to only come in at the beginning or the end, either to provide an introduction, or to intervene in a hopeless situation. However Dionysus is one of the major characters in this play.Anyway Dionysius, in an attempt to defend his cult (and one wonders if his portrayal here is similar to the charismatic cult leaders that we have seen throughout history) convinces Pentheus to spy on one of the celebrations. However, in a drunken haze, the women in the midst of their celebration mistake Pentheus for an mountain goat, capture him, and tear him to pieces. However, the women do not get away scot free as they are exiled for, well, murder, despite their arguments that they were not in control of their faculties at the time.The idea of the new cult is something that societies have faced throughout time, and it goes to show that the Roman persecution of Christianity is something that is not limited to that particular religion at that particular time. It is interesting to note that in the play Pentheus does not believe that Dionysus is a god, despite certain actions (such as blowing up his palace) that suggest otherwise. Further, the ignorance of the bacchic rites is also similar to Roman ignorance of certain Christian rites, such as the Lord's Supper.Some have even suggested that Dionysus is a Christ figure, and the introduction to the play even has some similarities with the virgin birth. For instance, Dionysus is born of a woman but has Zeus as his father (though unlike Christianity, where the term 'conceived of the Holy Spirit' does not indicate a sexual union between God and Mary, where it is clear from this play that there was a sexual union between Zeus and Dionysus' mother, though this can be put down to our failure to understand, or accept, the possibility that conception can occur outside of sexual union, though these days this is changing). More interesting is that Dionysus mother is accused of extra-marital sex, which Mary also faced. Another interesting note is that after Dionysus' birth, Zeus hides him to protect him from being killed by a jealous Hera, which has reflections in the Christ story in that Jesus was spirited off to Egypt to protect himself from the murderous rampages of a jealous king.Some might suggest that I am drawing some rather tenuous examples here, but I would argue otherwise. One of the reasons is generally because of the fear of Christians to look outside the box. We are more than happy to accept the Bible, but to consider anything outside of that, particularly with regards to pagan representations (or could they be prophecies) of the Christ, can open up to many probabilities. I guess it has to do with the conservative bent that most Christians have, in that what has been done over hundreds of years has proven itself and anything that is new can be dangerous or even destructive. However, remember what Paul writes in the book of Thessalonians: test everything, hold onto what is good, and reject what is bad. He did not say 'reject everything' but to 'test everything' which includes age old traditions.I want to finish off with a comment on the modern rave scene. Okay, the idea of the outdoor rave out in the bush rose out of Britian where, in an attempt to stamp out drug use, the government made raves themselves illegal. However, it could also be suggested that the reason the mystery cults of ancient Greece met out in the bush was because they were also illegal. However (particularly since I have been to raves myself) there is something almost bacchic about the rave. The idea of taking drugs to induce feelings of pleasure, as well as the lights and the sounds adding to that, reflects what was occurring here in the Bacchae. In many cases, the rituals were sensual experiments in pleasure, which is similar to what happens at a rave. This also goes to show that the rave is not something new, but something that has been going on for centuries.

[quantum_flapdoodle · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This work explores what can happen to mere mortals when they reject the gods; Dionysus is not pleased that everyone denies he is the son of Zeus, so he decides to get his revenge. Bloody and disturbing, with a particularly nasty twist at the end. It has a vague whiff of a church hell-house play, except it was written before the age of Christianity. The play appears to be saying if you ignore the gods, or don't worship them enough, nasty things will happen to you - really nasty things. Some interesting one-liners.

[dubiousdisciple · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For those who don’t recognize the title, this ancient Greek theater piece is about the god Dionysus, god of wine. It was first performed in Athens, in 405 BC. And for those who still don’t catch the connection to my blog, it’s this: Many of the characteristics of Jesus are shared with this frivolous Greek god, and at least one of Jesus’ miracles—turning water into wine—also seems closely related. In fact, the late Byzantine play, The Passion of Christ, drew heavily on the Bakkhai.Greek tragedies are a little hard for us to fully enter into two and a half millennia later, particularly as we struggle to understand on just at what level the Greeks believed in their gods, but the commentary of this book does a great job of making something foreign feel familiar. In the play, you’ll see Dionysus’ more unpleasant side … his usual ecstasy and abandon turn into vengeance and bloodlust, aimed toward a young king who seeks to discredit him. True to Greek form, the god wins, with no apparent attempt at a climaxing plot; we understand from the beginning that humans are doomed to subjection before the gods. The punishment for disbelief far exceeds the crime, with no hint of pity or apology, as befits the gods’ disdain for lesser beings.I found the forty page introduction superb, and the notes following the play a bit less so, though still helpful in illuminating the setting.

[jpsnow · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dionysus punishes the Thebans for not honoring him by turning the women into Bacchae who then kill the only grandson of Cadmus.

[hrissliss · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

How many insane people can you count? It was written around the time that the empire was falling to the Hordes, and some have said that the actions of the play are representative of the empire's last days. Great play. (Though that partly depends on your translation.) Interesting to see the interplay between the god present and the mortals around him. Interesting to analyze with a focus on madness and Freudian psycho-analyzation.

[pandoragreen · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I realize it's the nature of the source material, but I hate the fragmentary/piecemeal ending.