Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' Bacchae: Expanded Edition

By Charles Segal

In his play Bacchae, Euripides chooses as his central figure the god who crosses the boundaries among god, man, and beast, between reality and imagination, and between art and madness. In so doing, he explores what in tragedy is able to reach beyond the social, ritual, and historical context from which tragedy itself rises. Charles Segal's reading of Euripides' Bacchae builds gradually from concrete details of cult, setting, and imagery to the work's implications for the nature of myth, language, and theater. This volume presents the argument that the Dionysiac poetics of the play characterize a world view and an art form that can admit logical contradictions and hold them in suspension.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9780691223988

Book preview

Introduction

Every literary critic in some way addresses the question: what vision of life is the work under consideration seeking to represent? As every critic has roots in his own time, he cannot but emerge with a reading that is in some sense contemporary as well as historical. In this continual adjustment between the historical uniqueness of an ancient work and the inevitable contemporaneity of subsequent interpretation lie the incessant changes in our understanding of the past and our constant need for the reinterpretation of the past.

In the case of the Bacchae the problem is especially acute, for this play is deeply rooted in the intellectual, artistic, and religious life of the late fifth century, yet also speaks to our time with an extraordinarily clear and powerful voice. It remains one of the most contemporary of ancient Greek texts. Its concern with the dissolution of order and boundaries—the boundaries between divinity and bestiality in man, reality and imagination, reason and madness, self and other, art and life—makes it unusually accessible and particularly important to the closing decades of the twentieth century. Because of its self-conscious correlation of the order of language with the order of personality, art, city, and world, it is also important to the concerns of current literary scholarship.

Our awareness of the symbol-making and order-imposing work of all aesthetic and indeed all cultural forms, beginning with language, is probably heightened at periods of the disintegration of old systems and the nascent development of new ones. The Bacchae was composed at such a transitional moment—an historical moment not unlike our own. Both geographically and spiritually exiled, the poet looks back from the fringes of the Hellenic world to the collapse of the Athenian Empire whose power and confidence fostered the development of tragedy. Writing at the end of this great age of tragedy, he also reflects, indirectly, on the inner logic and spirit of the tragic form, in whose development he had played no small role. Through the multiple meanings and ambiguities of Dionysus he explores the mythopoeic imagination and the constructive energies that underlie tragedy, and also their reversals, the arbitrariness and instability of tragic and theatrical illusion, the affinities of tragedy and its god with limit and order on the one hand and with madness and chaos on the other.

More than any other single work, the Bacchae is responsible for that complex of associations that the Romantics extolled as the Dionysiac. This quality of released emotion must probably appear to our own chaos-ridden time in a more subdued light. The Dionysiac includes the dissolution of limits, the spanning of logical contradictions, the suspension of logically imposed categories, and the exploration of in-between-ness and reversibility in a spirit that may veer abruptly from play and wonder to unrestrained savagery. It remains as fascinating and bewildering to us as to the fifth century. Implicit in these processes is the Dionysiac poetics that the Bacchae both enacts and examines.

The Bacchae is a play about primordial beginnings, primitive forces, the clash of different cultures and different modes of constructing reality. Because it is also a distillation of Euripides’ tragic art and because its divinity is so closely linked to the origin and form of tragedy itself, an interpretation of the Bacchae becomes, at least in part, a reflection on all of Euripides’ work, on the nature of classical tragedy, and indeed on the tragic in general.

My reading of the play also situates itself firmly in the context of twentieth-century interpretation. I discuss the play thematically from several different critical stances, utilizing a number of complementary methodologies. After a largely (though not exclusively) structuralist analysis in Chapters 2 through 5, I move to a more psychological approach in Chapter 6 and then to the poststructuralist concerns associated with writers like Barthes and Derrida in Chapters 7, 8, and 9. All these methods, however, interpenetrate throughout; beneath them all runs a dominant concern for Euripides’ language and dramatic structure. The newer approaches, I believe, help us pose some new questions to this rich text and, I hope, gain some new answers. At the same time the careful philological and interpretive work of Winnington-Ingram, Dodds, Roux, and many others, the numerous studies of Greek ritual and religion over the past decade, and particularly the reexamination of Dionysus in relation to cult and tragedy by Detienne, Girard, Henrichs, and Kerényi, to mention only a few, have laid a valuable foundation for a critical reevaluation of the Bacchae.

My primary concern is with the play as a work of literary art. I rely on a close reading of the text, but I also utilize the social, cultic, and literary context of which the play formed a part. Despite all that has been written on the Bacchae, much remains to be said about the poetry, structure, and dramaturgy. The language of the play in particular can be taken even more seriously and probed more deeply than has generally been done. On any reading, however, ritual, myth, theatrical illusion, and language itself are central issues, and these are also in the foreground of this study.

My premise is that a literary masterpiece like the Bacchae does not have one single, definitive meaning, but rather is an endlessly shifting constellation of possibilities, multiple relations and interactions, fixities and indeterminacies that are constantly rearranging themselves with each reading and each reader. This is not to say that such a work can mean anything one wants it to mean. There is a text which prescribes definite limits and directs us to its principal concerns. But this text is an open network rather than a closed field. Any interpretation is an intervention in the text and a re-creation of the text. There is no escaping the rearrangement of relations or the shifting of emphases among details that any interpretation brings. Or, as Heidegger put it, there is no avoiding the hermeneutic circle: the problem is to come into it in the right way.

The Bacchae is itself about the process of constituting these symbolic relations, that is, about the relations between art and illusion, imagination and truth, and about the nature of artistic truth. For that reason viewing it through a variety of critical optics may help us better clarify its peculiar polysemicity and its relation to the changing shapes of the god who stands at its center.

This method makes for an inevitable overlap between chapters. I have tried to keep this to a minimum. The details of the early chapters will, I hope, be justified by the cumulative effect of the whole. In the case of so multifaceted a work it is necessary to disentangle the separate strands before trying to weave them together again into the syntheses of the last chapters. The reader eager to reach the intoxieating realms of masking, illusion, and the Dionysiac in tragedy in the last chapters will, I hope, bear with me through the elucidation of detail from which the larger interpretation is built up.

Winnington-Ingram's deservedly influential Euripides and Dionysus is the only recent book-length interpretive study of the Bacchae in English, and a word about its differences from my approach may be helpful. Like all students of the play, I owe a great deal to this sensible and sensitive work. Completed in 1939 (though not published until 1948), it is remarkable for its time not only in the author's grasp of Dodds’ work on the irrationalist strains in Greek culture but also because of its awareness of verbal echoes and repetitions, the associative patterns of Euripides’ poetry, multiple levels of meaning. Yet these insights need to be supplemented by what we have learned in recent years about Dionysus, sacrificial ritual, the role of madness in Greek literature and cult, the sexual tensions of fifth-century Athens, and about Euripides’ language, dramaturgy, theology, characterization, and so on. Recent approaches like structuralism, symbolic anthropology, and semiotic and psychoanalytic criticism, together with the awareness of the literary work's reflexive consciousness of its own strategies and mimetic devices, its own fictionality and peculiar kind of truth, are, as I try to show, particularly illuminating for the Bacchae.

Though Winnington-Ingram is not avowedly (and certainly not consciously) a New Critic, his study shares a great deal with the text-immanent approach of the New Criticism. Abandoning his scene-by-scene approach, I am more concerned with the areas where the literary structure of the text intersects the social, ritual, and aesthetic structures in and around Dionysus in his various meanings and manifestations. Winnington-Ingram is chiefly concerned with the nature of the Dionysiac religion (in a broad sense) and with Euripides’ attitudes for and against it, whereas I am concerned, especially in the last three chapters, with the role of art, illusion, and fiction in Dionysiac drama. It is a mark of the depth and richness of the Bacchae that it invites and sustains such diverse readings.

1

The Elusive God

It is the function of the creative individual not only to represent the highest transpersonal values of his culture, thereby becoming the honored spokesman of his age, but also to give shape to the compensatory values and contents of which it is unconscious.

Erich Neumann,

The Archetypal World of Henry Moore

• I •

Nietzsche's basic insight about Greek tragedy, despite exaggeration, contains much truth. One of the destroyers of tragedy, in the Nietzschean view, was Socrates, a Socrates whose logical rigor, insistence on reason, and principle of noncontradiction both fascinated and repelled Nietzsche's other destroyer of tragedy, the author of the Bacchae.¹

In the Hippolytus Phaedra utters the famous lines, We understand what is right and proper, and know it, but do not work it out in acts (380-81). The passage has often been regarded, probably rightly, as a polemic against the rationalism of Socrates:² the problem of moral action and happiness is a matter of intellectual understanding (epistēmê, Phaedra's word above); if men know the good, they will follow it. Whether or not Euripides has Socrates specifically in mind, this passage, like many others, reveals a poet who exploits sophistic intellectualism and also explores the contradictions within the human heart, the mysterious crossings-over between logic and illogic in feelings and behavior.

This tension between the extremes of reason and emotion is one of the most characteristic features of Euripides’ art and one of the most difficult to grasp fully. It takes many forms. The scientific and rationalistic procedures associated with the Sophists, Anaxagoras, Socrates, and Thucydides contrast with the violence and instability of the passions that blaze forth on nearly every page of Euripides’ works. Debates of logical exactitude are juxtaposed with lyrics of wistful longing; nostalgia for an orderly world of just gods with relentless undercutting of the traditional Olympian theology; delicate romanticism with unsparing realism; intense patriotism with bitter disillusion about contemporary politics. In no ancient poet are the contradictions both so marked and so central to the art itself. They are deeply stamped on the traditions about his life, a life already mythicized by the time of the poet's death.³

The spirit of contradiction that seems so indispensable a condition of Euripides’ creativity is also the spirit of Dionysus, god of ecstasy, wine, madness, but also god of tragedy and comedy. It is probably not coincidental that the play that comes at the end of the grand creative tradition of dramatic performances in the fifth century brings on the stage the god of those performances. The Bacchae, I shall argue, is not only about the god of maenadic rituals and all that they imply, but about the god of the tragic drama and all that it implies: the paradoxes and the peculiar logic of the unreal and the illusionary that are Dionysus’ realm.

The poetics of the form that belongs to this god differs radically from the poetics of his opposite, the god of epic and lyric, Apollo, the god of the golden lyre that leads the bands of Muses and Graces in the brilliant festivities of Olympus, counterpart to the lyre of the mortal poet who leads the choral performances in the cities of men (Pindar, Pythian 1.1-12). Both gods’ presence assures the transfiguring joy of art that illuminates the moment of the performance with the immortality of divine radiance. But the pleasure of Dionysiac song, like the pleasure of Dionysiac wine and ecstasy, is full of contradictions, surrounded by dangers. It offers no simple validation, through the microcosm of art, of the established harmony, moral as well as musical, of Olympian Zeus. Rather, it opens into the unknown, the boundless, the wild realms beyond the ordered framework of the city-state, the places where the individual, surrendering too much to that joy, may lose himself entirely.

Let us listen for a moment to a celebrated modern critic on the ambiguities of aesthetic pleasure:

Fiction of an individual . . . who would abolish in himself the barriers, the classes, the exclusions, not by syncretism, but by simply getting rid of this old specter: logical contradiction; who would mingle all the languages, even were they considered as incompatible; who would endure, in silence, all the accusations of illogicality, of infidelity; who would remain impassive before Socratic irony (bring the other to the supreme disgrace: self-contradiction) and the fear of the law (how many juridical proofs founded on a psychology of unity!). This man would be the outcast of our society: the courts, the schools, the asylum would treat him as a stranger: who without shame would endure contradiction? Now this anti-hero exists: he is the reader of a text, at the moment when he takes his pleasure. Then the old biblical myth returns: the confusion of tongues is no longer a punishment; the subject reaches enjoyment by the cohabitation of languages, which work side by side: the text of pleasure is Babel, happy.

Roland Barthes, the writer of these lines in the opening pages of Le plaisir du texte, is concerned principally with modern literature;⁴ but much of what he says is directly applicable to Dionysus. He is intimating what we may call a Dionysiac poetics, a poetics that is a major theme (albeit not the only theme) of the Bacchae.

The Bacchae is about pleasure, and about resistance to pleasure. It is about man's urgent need and drive for pleasure, raised by Freud into a universal principle, which, like everything in the realm of pleasure, necessarily coexists with that which denies, obstructs, and destroys it. That drive for pleasure excites in the self, in the society, and in the authority-figures of the society a paradoxical resistance to pleasure. The paradoxes of pleasure are a theme of Socrates too, as we recall from the Phaedo. In the Dionysiac poetics of the Bacchae these paradoxes form a series of expanding concentric circles reaching from the conflicts within the state and the divided impulses of its rulers to the nature of drama, dramatic illusion, and ultimately all art.

• II •

Dionysus is an Olympian god, but he has chthonic attributes. Divine, he appears in the bestial form of bull, snake, or lion. He has a place at the center of the civic religion. The Greater Dionysia of Athens, where tragedies and comedies were performed, is the most familiar example. Yet his worship also involves ecstatic flaming torches on the mountains. He is a male god, but he has the softness, sensuality, and emotionality that the Greeks generally associate with women. He has the force and energy of a vigorous young man, but the grace, charm, and beauty of a girl. He is Greek, but he comes from barbarian Asia, escorted by a band of wild Asian women. He is a local Theban divinity, but he is also a universal god of many names, whose power, as Sophocles says in the last ode of the Antigone, extends from Italy to the East. As he crosses the geographical division between Hellene and barbarian, so he crosses the class division within society, offering his gift of wine as an equal joy to both rich and poor (421-23). Both a native by birth and a violently resisted intruder, he honors Thebes and threatens its destruction. He is neither child nor man, but, eternal adolescent, occupies a place somewhere between the two. He has the residual functions of both a fertility daimon and a chthonic deity.⁵

The opening of the play places his birth from Semele next to Zeus's lightning-fire (3). The memorial of a vegetation-god's birth is the smoking debris of a ruined house and a mother's cruel death (6-9)—intimations of what Euripides has in store for us in the rest of the play.

The opening lines also stress the process of mortal birth by which immortal Dionysus came into being (2f.). He has come to Thebes having taken mortal shape in exchange for divine. The collocation of mortal and divine is common enough in Greek literature and recurs elsewhere in this play (e.g., 42, 635f.). Not so common is the collocation of beast and god that characterizes Dionysus. He is the bull-horned god

100) and will make his epiphany in bestial as well as in divine shape. In 42 he will compel Thebes to admit that he was revealed a god to mortals

but in 1017f. his followers pray, Appear a bull . . . or serpent or lion for us to behold.

Dionysus can leap the boundaries between the three major categories of sentient life, but the mortals on whom he impinges have trouble. Semele, he says early in the prologue, encountered Hera's immortal violence (athanaton hybrin, 9). Cadmus eventually attains a godlike bliss in the Isles of the Blest (1339), but only after a painful metamorphosis into the savage form of a serpent (1338), a beast-god collocation as problematical as that of Dionysus. His wife, Harmonia, is the child of a god (cf. 1332, 1357), but also is forced to assume this bestial shape (1357f.). Like Semele and Agave, she is a woman who becomes an innocent victim of divine wrath.

Pentheus sees Dionysus as a horned bull (920-22)—how different an apparition from the soft and seductive adolescent of the first encounter!—but only then begins to perceive the god-man in the splendor and terror of his animal nature, full of a sharp, intoxicating beauty, but also impervious to human sensibilities, pity, mercy.

God of the new vegetative life that burgeons from the soil in the abundant clustering of the grapes (12f., 107-108, 874-76), Dionysus can also use the destructive power of earth against men, shaking the king's palace (585ff.). Those curling green shoots that attest his presence take on a different meaning near the end when the bloody head of his human victim is carried to the palace as a newly cut tendril (helix, 1170).

The thyrsus or narthex that his devotees bear reveals the essential ambiguity of the god. Covered with ivy (25, 709, 1055), able to open channels of life-sustaining fluids from the earth (702-11), it is yet a dangerous weapon, a missile (belos, 25) that can inflict wounds (761-63).⁶ In a later ode the chorus calls it a trusty pledge of Hades (1157f.).

The Dionysiac joy in the eating of raw flesh in the parode (ōmophagos charis, 139) paradoxically has a place beside the spiritual purity of the soul's mystic initiation into the Dionysiac thiasos or holy band (73-82). Annihilating the frontiers between god and beast, man and god, savagery and civilization, peace and frenzy, the god's rite is both sacrament and pollution.⁷ From the opening ode on purification we move to the most horrible of all defilements, a mother reeking with the blood of the son she has torn apart, fleeing the mountain of her pure ecstasies as cursed with uncleanness (miaros, 1383).

• III •

What the Dionysus of the tragic performance and the Dionysus of the maenads’ ecstasy most fundamentally share is the experience of what lies beyond familiar limits, the limits of civic space, social norms, the familiar boundaries of personality, energy, perception. As Apollo imposes limits and reinforces boundaries, Dionysus, his opposite and complement, dissolves them. From the Iliad on, Apollo embodies the distance between god and man. Dionysus closes that distance. His worshipers identify themselves with the god, and in the ecstasy of his cult they experience something like the divine joy and power. Dionysus and the Dionysiac bridge the gap that Apollo so threateningly guards. Often placed in close association with other gods—Zeus, Poseidon, Demeter, Aphrodite—Dionysus can serve as a principle of unification among diverse aspects of other divinities, able to join their energies to his in the heightened intensity of life that accompanies him. But he can also appear as a principle of encroachment on others’ prerogatives.⁸

Where Dionysus stands, limit gives way to what Victor Turner and others have called liminality, an in-between state where fluidity challenges stability, where fusion replaces boundary.⁹ In this space between, order and disorder lose their familiar clarity of definition and energies are released to combine in new ways, often with a thin edge between creation and destruction. Hence fruitful and imaginative possibilities can be engendered, but the risk of disorder stands close. It is the spirit of the carnival, also closely akin to the Dionysiac; and here too normal relations and normal inhibitions are suspended in a quasi-magical interlude characterized by joyful play, imaginative exuberance, and free energy.¹⁰ In the maenadic cult of Dionysus, however, that carnivalesque freedom has a more deeply and seriously religious dimension, and greater danger, in the mystical union with the god celebrated in the parode of the Bacchae.

In the Dionysiac performance, as in the Dionysiac ritual, the individuality of personal identity gives way to fusion. The actor, wearing the mask that has close associations with the Dionysiac cult from early times, fuses to some extent with the personage whom he represents in the theater. The spectator, watching the performance, at some point loses his separateness and identifies with the masked figure before him. Whether or not the sufferings of that masked actor also symbolically represent the sufferings of the god is a controversial point in the history of the Greek theater. Whatever the historical situation may be, this process of symbolic identification and dissolution of self into other is an important point of connection between the maenadic and theatrical aspects of Dionysus and will be explored more fully in Chapter 7. Though the point cannot be discussed here, this theatricality of Dionysus extends to comedy as well as tragedy. Indeed, as a number of recent interpreters have shown, there is a curious fusion of comic and satyric with tragic elements in the Bacchae, another aspect of the crossing of boundaries and fusion of opposites characteristic of this god.¹¹

The tragic performance itself exists in a kind of contradiction. In a sense, tragedy is the meeting point between the civic Dionysus worshiped by the citizen choruses within the walls of the city and the ecstatic Dionysus worshiped by the maddened women exulting in the mountains. As part of the civic ritual of Athens, the performances in the theater of Dionysus affirm the social order at a state-sponsored occasion in a public and holy place. Tragedy also endorses that order through its lofty poetic language, traditional and dignified, through the elaborateness of the state-financed costumes and the discipline of the dancers, and through the choral odes, which often celebrate the city or the moral and heroic values of the city or comment upon the action from the point of view of ordinary citizens. Yet the narrative material of the myths that tragedy dramatizes shockingly violates this order with the most feared and abominated pollutions: matricide, incest, patricide, fratricide, madness. The actual content of these works denies what their ritual context affirms.¹²

Sophocles gives us an imagistic representation of this contradiction in the last ode of the Antigone, an ode to Dionysus, a god of the city and a god of the wild. At this point when the rationality of the civic leader is engulfed by the irrational demonic energies both within man and in the world as a whole, the chorus invokes Dionysus as chorusleader of the fire-breathing stars, you who watch over the voices of the night, child born of Zeus

(Antigone 1146-49)

Here the chorus leader of stars in the mysterious, remote spaces of the nocturnal sky fuses with the civic god who watches over those civic choruses being performed at that very moment in the orchestra before the eyes of the spectator-citizens, the god celebrated as lord of Thebes in the first ode (Antigone 153-54). The civic space of the theater and its chorus is thus opened to the superimposed vastness and uncontrollable mystery of the orchestra of the night and its chorus of flaming stars.¹³

In this dissolution of the familiar, we lose old bearings and also old preconceptions. The Dionysiac performance and the Dionysiac gift of the vine are parallel and analogous means of access to the borderland of the self in the new psychic geography that Dionysus opens.¹⁴ Both the illusion of the drama and the intoxication of the wine bestow a fresh vision of a hitherto concealed reality, a vision that may either be enlightenment or (as in Pentheus’ case) delusion. Here we may meet an as yet untapped creative potential of the self, as of nature, but also a destructive darkness, like the Jungian shadow, in which we may be engulfed and lost. Dionysus’ realm blurs the clear line between conscious and unconscious, sanity and madness, exalted purity and wild abandonment, strength and weakness. The vision opened by Dionysus, whether through his wine and cult or through the illusion of the drama, makes us see in simultaneous perspective things otherwise kept apart.

By his very nature, then, such a god must exist in a framework of tension, ambiguity, paradox. Euripides expresses the profound truth of the god in insisting on his destructive force as the necessary and inevitable partner of his creative energies and life-fostering gifts. A play about Dionysus, then, is almost inevitably a play about the relation between illusion and tragedy and about the relation between tragedy and the social order. The problem of Pentheus’ Thebes is, mutatis mutandis, also the problem of the dramatist: how to bring into the bounded realm of form this principle that dissolves boundaries, how to make Dionysus live within the civic and aesthetic confines of city, theater, and festival without annihilating that space.

Historically these issues formed part of the problem of Dionysus to the city, a problem resolved at Athens by establishing the sanctuaries of Dionysus in the city, by creating and permitting such festivals as the Anthesteria, Lenaea, and Dionysia, and by connecting the mimetic performances of comedy, tragedy, and satyr play with Dionysus at the City Dionysia. By their very nature the Dionysiac cult and the Dionysiac drama contain a potential for disorder. Hence the concern to keep them within limits. Wine, freedom to mimic, joke, and dance, the emotional power of drama, and music, ecstatic religion, a loosening of sexual restraints all indulge the irrational, the need for escape in all of us. If two or more of the above are combined at the same time, major disruptions may easily result. In the face of such phenomena the sober citizens, the older and more powerful members of the society, and particularly those responsible for the maintenance of public safety and morality, are likely to fear for the civic order. We may compare contemporary attitudes to rock concerts, banned by many a town council out of just such concerns.

Dionysus’ role in the origins of drama is one of the most controversial questions in the history of Greek literature. Whatever the historical factors that led to the god's association with the dramatic festivals of Athens, Euripides’ play has its own view of what Dionysus has to do with tragedy. The Bacchae, as I shall argue in Chapter 7, reflects on the parallelism between the ambiguity of Dionysus in the city (of Thebes) and the ambiguity, even the subversiveness, of tragedy in the city (of Athens).

To center a play on Dionysus is to bring into the city that which transcends the city. It is also to bring into the realm of Dionysus that which both includes and transcends Dionysus. Can one surrender to Dionysus and enjoy the benefits of his gifts without losing oneself irrevocably in his madness? In the compounded dialectics that form Euripides’ answer to these questions lies the essence of the contradictory and difficult Dionysiac poetics of his play.

In this conjoined polarity of the creative and the destructive in Dionysus stands the deeply rooted ancient recognition that nothing comes into being without the destruction of something else, without loss, sacrifice, violence. From Anaximander to the isonomia of Epicurus, this principle finds rationalized, philosophical expression in Greek thought. In Euripides it surfaces not only literally in the Bacchae but in one way or another in all of his plays. Elsewhere too in his work, as Pietro Pucci has suggested, it takes the form of sacrifice, the sacrifice that the poet makes in order to create, the sacrifice to the Muses (HF 1021-22)¹⁵ and the violence done to the quiescent surface of life by the questions, the unsatisfied yearnings, the dreams of impossibilities raised by art.

This aspect of the Dionysiac coniunctio oppositorum is an essential constituent of all tragedy. In the waste of something inestimably precious there is a hopeless sadness but also the recognition that that essence cannot be confined and possessed within the familiar continuities and prosaic durability of the everyday, the predictable, the rationally known and knowable.

• IV •

In other areas of the myths of Dionysus, too, destruction and creativity coexist. On the one hand Dionysus appears as a culture-hero, bringing to men the boon of the cultivated wine.¹⁶ On the other hand he comes as a threat to civilization, leading dangerous bands of raging women and strangers, exciting in civilized lands hostility and resistance. ¹⁷ In the stories of Lycurgus in Thrace, the daughters of Minyas in Boeotia, the daughters of Proetus in the Argolid, his arrival not only excites opposition, but causes suffering for the royal house, a suffering which, as in the Bacchae, involves change or confusion between man and beast.

In the Antigone, where Dionysus has a small, but important role, Creon makes his appearance just at the moment when the chorus celebrates its Dionysiac dance. Dionysiac exultation thus stands in immediate contrast with the most un-Dionysian of men, a confident, platitudinous rationalist who has many traits in common with Pentheus. The Dionysiac joy of the end of that ode, moreover, contrasts with the dangerous violence of one of Thebes’ attackers, also characterized as Dionysiac, Capaneus’ unbridled bacchantic delight in war (Antig. 135-37). And the civic Dionysus of that ode has a further contrast with the expansive, universal Dionysus of the fifth stasimon, where the god fuses with the vast stellar spaces far beyond the limits of the city (Antig. 1146-49).

In Euripides’ Heracles too, Dionysiac emotionality spans the two poles of triumphant joy and wild sorrow. The song of Heracles’ victory is connected with the ecstatic happiness of Bromios, giver of wine (HF 680-82); but the hero's murderous insanity, with its crazed, out-of-tune music, is also Dionysiac (HF 893, 899, 966, 1085, 1122); and the hero himself moves from the songful joy of the Olympian god's benefactions to his chthonic madness as Hades’ bacchant (HF 1119). Everything involved with Dionysus partakes of the precarious, unstable quality of his gifts. Like his bacchants, Dionysus himself embodies the volatility of emotion, that within us which lies beyond our full control and, if released from the usual discipline and restraint, may suddenly rush to its diametrical opposite.

In so often connecting the music of tragedy with Dionysus, Euripides may be intimating his own art's place at the crossing-over between the extremes of emotion. The poet, like every artist, has always been more exposed and more open to the extreme ranges of feeling in his own, and all men's, natures, to the outer limits of horror and beauty. But instead of repressing these contradictions, he forces them into the open in the form of symbols and images. The Bacchae itself forms a liminal space where the creative potential in ourselves can reach its closest proximity to the destructive. The god's and the human protagonist's changes of dress and form visually enact this momentarily fluid state of the new, suspended reality opened up by the tragic moment. We take from the god what we bring to him. He reflects back upon us the destructiveness or the creativeness hidden deep in our own natures, our capacity both for ecstasy and for annihilation of self and others, both joyful self-affirmation and tragic disintegration.

What the poet brings forth in his Dionysiac vision, what he sees and makes us see, partakes necessarily of both the sublime and the terrible. Through the play Euripides enters deeply into both the Pentheus and the Dionysus in himself, and leads each of us on the same inner journey. The risks of Pentheus are, in a sense, also the risks of the poet who has experienced the truth of Dionysus in his own soul, and the risks of the spectator as well who surrenders fully to the magic of the poet's vision. As Walter Otto remarks, He who begets something which is alive must dive down into the primeval depths in which the forces of life dwell. And when he rises to the surface, there is a gleam of madness in his eyes because in those depths death lives cheek by jowl with life.¹⁸

• V •

Does Euripides approve or disapprove of Dionysus? Does he view his worship as a blessing that leads to an experience of a world otherwise closed to us by the limits and definitions that we allow society to impose upon us? Or does he regard Dionysus with the fascinated horror of a humane intelligence confronting the frightening violence of untamed instincts, better left unsatisfied and even unrecognized, which lurk beneath the ordered regularity of civilized life? Interpretations have ranged from notions of a heartfelt glorification of Dionysus (Gilbert Murray)¹⁹ to the idea of the sweeping horror of Dionysus’ triumph (Grube), a god at least as devilish as he is divine,²⁰ More recent critics have stressed Euripides’ demonstration of the inexorable interdependence of the cruelty and the beauty in the god and his cult (Winnington-Ingram)²¹ or the divine inscrutability which, as in the case of the Aphrodite of the Hippolytus, makes it hard to take any final position for or against Dionysus (Kirk).²²

Winnington-Ingram and Kirk are, I believe, basically right, though I would formulate the answer in another way, namely that Euripides dramatizes the fundamental ambiguity of Dionysus’ nature and that therefore the problem can have no resolution and is meant to have no resolution. To pose an alternative of praise or blame, attraction or horror, is to dissolve that mysterious and perhaps ultimately unformulable coexistence of opposites that is the essence of Dionysus and of the realm of mythic and symbolic representation to which the Dionysiac stands so close, in music, mask, and drama.

What Euripides gives us in the Bacchae is not a choice between one side or another, but an experience, an experience that involves the doublings, ambiguities, crossing of opposites into one another that form the essence of Dionysus himself. The play forces us to live not just the unresolvable antithesis of two worlds, in Lesky's phrase (unausgleichbaren Gegensatz zweier Welten),²³ but the melting of those worlds into one another in an experience that questions the very thought-processes that make reality intelligible and therefore manageable. Euripides brings us to the verge of what, next to death, is the most terrifying experience of human life, madness, the loss of our hold on the clarity of those relations on which we depend for that boundary between fusion and otherness that we call sanity.

The play shows major clashes of opinion about the god: Pentheus and Teiresias disagree violently in the first episode, Pentheus and Messenger near the middle of the play, Pentheus and Chorus throughout. This multiplicity and reversibility pervade even quite small details of language. In his first bitter attack on Dionysiac rites, for example, Pentheus denounces the presence of the god's sheen of the vine at the banquet

261) as a sure source of debauchery. Some hundred lines later the identical phrase recurs in a choral ode to mark the joyous song, laughter, and release from anxiety that the god brings

when the vine's sheen comes at the banquet of the gods," 382f.). The studied repetition brings out two antithetical perspectives on Dionysus’ gifts and their effects. As Dionysus himself puts it at the peripety,

Pentheus will come to know Zeus's son, Dionysus,

By nature a god in full perfection, god

Most terrible and to men most mild.

(859-61)

The dissolution of boundaries in the Dionysiac cult represented in the play occurs on two planes, the psychological and the cultural. On the psychological plane Dionysus signifies the free flow of the emotional life, untrammeled by the restrictions of family, society, traditional religion, or personal morality. Though Euripides makes it clear that we cannot associate Dionysus simply with physis, wild nature, he is, in the terms of fifth-century thought, closer to physis than to its opposite, nomos, the imposed, artificial conventions of the social order. As a god close to the free passage of instincts and the open expression of emotions, Dionysus becomes for Pentheus, who has blocked that expression, the return of the repressed. In a metaphor which recurs throughout the play, he is Dionysus the looser (Lysios), he who unbinds what Pentheus has bound up; he releases what Pentheus has held constrained and tight. Psychologically he lets loose in Pentheus his own interior bestiality and sexuality. On the cultural plane he confuses distinctions between city and wild, mortal and immortal, man and beast, male and female, Greek and barbarian, heavens and earth. For those who accept him, this dissolution of oppositions is liberating, energizing. For those who resist, it throws city, house, and psyche into chaos.

For Aristotle and the Greeks generally, the city is the necessary locus of human life, placed between the gods who are above the human condition and the beasts below it (Politics 1. 1253a 28-30). The city walls demarcate the wild from the tame; the family regulates the potential violence of the sexual instinct, civilizing the quasi-savagery of the children and the untamed virgins; agriculture brings the vital forces of the earth into the service of man; ritual makes the supernatural less terrifying and provides a means of regular access to the gods.

In compensation for the collapse of the usual barriers that man erects between himself and nature, Dionysus creates a new relation. As Winnington-Ingram remarks à propos of Aristotle's definition of the city, When Aristotle remarked that the solitary man must be either a beast or a god, he forgot perhaps that there were social groups which make a man both at once.²⁴ Here man loses some of his distinctively human capacities in the ease with which he blends into the world of nature; but he also surpasses his normal human capacities in a sudden, almost divine access of strength, speed, or supernatural powers.²⁵ The long account of the Theban maenads in the center of the play shows their subhuman bestiality as they tear apart cattle and stain themselves with the gore (734-47) or swoop down on cultivated fields and carry off children (748-51). Yet a mysterious fire blazes harmlessly around their hair (757f.), an attribute of divinity that recalls the Olympian fire of Zeus in the prologue. The snakes that licked their faces as a sign of a harmonious accord between man and wild nature at the beginning lick off the drops of blood, traces of the maenads’ murderous violence against animals, at the end (cf. 697 and 768).

• VI •

As Vernant, Detienne, and others have pointed out, sacrifice and the myths about sacrifice are entwined into a complex coding system, linking together marriage, agriculture, limit, and moderation as the privileged values of civilization, over against promiscuity or rape, hunting, excess, and violence.²⁶ The word that describes the rite of ōmophagia in the parode, charis, "delight"

the delight of raw-eating, 139) is the very word that elsewhere denotes the favorable mediations established between mortal men and the distant Olympian gods by the burnt offering of normal sacrifice.²⁷

This passage, with its deliberate destruction of the mediatory function of sacrifice, begins with the language of mystical beatitude, "Sweet in the mountains, when from the running bands (thiasoi) he falls to the ground"

135). It is symmetrical with the beatitude of the first strophe, "Blessedly happy he who . . . hallows his life and joins his soul with the holy band (thiaseuetai psychan), reveling as a bacchant on the mountains

76; cf. 115) amid holy purifications (73-77). What follows the second passage is not serene purity" (hosioi katharmoi, 77), but the god himself or his worshiper (the subject of 135ff. is ambiguous, but probably the god is meant) as he hunts down his quarry. The purity of blood spilled in sacrifice is here rendered even more ambiguous by the details of the bloody hunt. This meat is devoured raw, not burnt in the fire of sacrifice. The victim, a goat, might be the domestic animal led to the altar in the solemn procession of normal sacrifice, but here it doubles with a wild animal caught after desperate running in a hunt on the mountains. The rite takes place not in the well-defined space of city or sacred precinct, but on the exposed mountainside, where a more terrible and still more bloody rite of sacrificial ōmophagia will take place later. Then he who leaps to the ground 136) will not be the god-hunter who devours, but the hunted human victim who is devoured

falls flung to the ground, 1111f.), not with shouts of joy, but with myriad groanings (1112).

By numerous turns of phrase and verbal echoes throughout the play Euripides calls attention to this deliberate breakdown of normal sacrifice and its mediatory, hierarchical functions. To take one small example, Dionysus warns Pentheus, just before the latter's discomfiture, that if he engages the maenads in battle, he will cause bloodshed 837). This shedding of blood proves to be the blood of Pentheus himself, the king sacrificed as beast-victim; and the chief celebrant, his own mother, is left bloodied all over 1135). That phrase of Dionysus in 837, has no exact parallel in Greek.²⁸ Its closest analogues denote ritual pollution of an altar or sanctuary, as in Euripides’ Ion 1225 and 1259, where bloodshed between mother and son is also in question.

This ritual, then, rather than clarifying the limits between the sacred and the profane, the pure and the impure, is, as Dodds remarks, both holy and horrible.²⁹ The status of victim, celebrant, and deity becomes confused and problematical. The victim is torn by hand, not killed with a sacred cult implement. The remains are eaten raw rather than cooked by the civilizing fire which separates what is mortal from what is immortal, what is bestial from what is lawful for humans to consume. The mood is one of orgiastic passion rather than of stately ceremony. Our reactions are, as Dodds says, "a mixture of supreme exaltation and supreme repulsion . . . , the same violent conflict of emotional attitudes that runs all through the Bacchae and lies at the root of all religions of the Dionysiac type."³⁰

Sacrifice is important in itself as an example of the special kind of religiosity that Euripides is exploring in the Bacchae. It can also be regarded as part of a code, one language among several that give implicit definitions of civilization as opposed to savagery, normality as opposed to the abnormal. It is a microcosmic reflection of the total order, parallel to other microcosms—family, space, architecture, food. Each of these elements is a strand in the total bundle that comprises the value system of the society. Each area forms a coherent semantic system, a code, congruent with every other code, each defining the limits and modes of behavior acceptable in its area.³¹

When we turn from such a structuralist view of the society to a work of literature like the Bacchae, we move into a more complex situation. The literary work utilizes the precoded patterns of the social norms; but it also imposes its own secondary structures of meanings, its own internal system of signs, metaphors, and symbols, upon those given by the society. It thereby rearranges, transforms, distorts, or interweaves the codes in new and unpredictable ways. The familiar relation between signifier and signified in the semantic system of ritual or spatial definition or dress becomes part of a new internal coding within the work. Here the relation between overt and latent meaning, between word and act, between literal and figurative, changes from familiar expectations to fluidity, questioning, more or less violent derangement. In all of literature, but especially in tragedy, the message of the specific text may bring out something that was not in the code and may actually threaten to destroy the code itself.

One of the most characteristic and powerful effects of Greek tragedy lies in its specific and systematic interweaving of all the codes of the civilized order through metaphor and other forms of analogy in language and action. The Oresteia brings together language, ritual, sexuality, family in a continually expanding representation of the entire cosmic order at a precarious and threatened moment. Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus operates with an elaborate parallelism between the doublings in the area of language and those in the area of kinship (incest) and ritual (coincidence of king and scapegoat, purifying savior and polluted outcast).³² The mind is forced to reach beyond the familiar demarcations in a painful questioning of the given principles of order or the admission that no such order exists. Here we are forced beyond normal definitions of men and actions to the unclassifiable, the interstitial, the unique.

Such an approach does not deny the psychological interpretations that have dominated the criticism of the play. It rather attempts to restore to the play an area of significance that the psychological approach has obscured, that is, the relationship of the action to the kind of language that constitutes that action, the play's implicit definitions of civic values and social norms, and the relationship of the Dionysus of the maenads to the Dionysus of tragedy.

Even the madness of Pentheus has its cultural as well as its psychological dimension. Madness in Greek literature is a social as well as a purely individual and interior phenomenon. It manifests a violent disturbance of all the civilized codes, an imbalance in the relations between man and nature. The madman belongs to the raw and the wild, rather than the cooked and the civilized.³³ He is more akin to the beasts than to men. He cannot use speech properly, is ritually impure, has no settled abode, but wanders in place as in mind, beyond the familiar limits of civilized men, often in the mountains. Pentheus’ neurosis, however interesting, has blocked our vision of the totality of the social order, including language, ritual, and art, which is equally a victim of Euripides’ tragic action.

¹ Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, chaps. 12-16.

² Bruno Snell, Das frühste Zeugnis über Sokrates, Philologus 97 (1948) 125-34. Though the polemic against Socrates has sometimes been doubted (e.g., W. S. Barrett, Euripides, Hippolytos [Oxford 1964] 229), it is widely accepted among recent scholars: see Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 186f. with note 47; Conacher 37-38; Di Benedetto 8ff. For a full discussion and bibliography see Bernd Mannwald, Phaidras tragischer Irrtum, RhM 122 (1977) 134-48, supporting Snell.

³ See Mary R. Lefkowitz, The Euripides Vita, GRBS 20 (1979) 187-210, esp. 208f.

⁴ Barthes