Divine Madness

The Bacchaeof Euripides is about the essence of theatre. In Nietzsche’s terms, it is about the birth of tragedy, which was the most prestigious medium of the god of theatre, Dionysos. Ironically, the premiere of The Bacchaemarks the death of Greek tragedy as we know it, since it coincides roughly with the death of Euripides in 406 B.C. The historical evidence is too fragmentary to allow a more precise formulation.

To be sure, Euripides was hardly the last composer of tragedy in the history of Athenian theatre, but he turned out to be, retrospectively, the last of the canonical tragedians. In the second half of the fourth century B.C., when the city-state of Athens formally legislated its own theatrical canon, only three tragedians were deemed worthy of inclusion: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and, lastly, Euripides. From then on, the plays of these three tragedians — and only these three — belonged to the official repertoire of Athenian State Theatre.

The Bacchae, this last tragedy of the last canonical tragedian, features as its two main characters the god of theatre himself, Dionysos, and the god’s antagonist and persecutor, Pentheus. It is no coincidence that Dionysos and Pentheus also figured as main characters in one of the first tragedies ever performed in prehistoric Athens, the Pentheus. Tradition has it that the dramatist of this primordial tragedy was none other than Thespis, the prototype of all people of the theatre, all thespians.

There is an irony here, captured by a proverb current in the days of Euripides: “nothing to do with Dionysos.” By the late fifth century B.C., Dionysos the god of theatre was felt to be no longer relevant to theatre. In the era of Euripides, the multiple heroic themes of epic were predominant. In the earliest era of its evolution, by contrast, tragedy had been preoccupied with a single theme, central to Dionysos as patron god of the City Dionysia, the Dionysiac festival that served as the defining occasion for State Theatre. Complex in all its many variations, the theme was simple in its essence: the god Dionysos visits his own people without revealing his true identity. The god experiences a variety of ordeals in his role as the righteous model who suffers in order to uphold his identity, persecuted by those who fail to recognize his divinity. We may compare the wording of a later religious world-view: “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” In the end, Dionysos triumphs over his persecutors, who in turn experience their own ordeals at the climactic moment of the god’s self-revelation.

There is a further irony: although the last tragedy of the last canonical tragedian puts the god of theatre back into theatre, restoring Dionysos as the centerpiece of the festival of the City Dionysia, this restoration shows unmistakable signs of instability, uncertainty, even self-doubt. I have written about these signs:

“It is symptomatic of structures that have lost their elasticity, becoming too rigid to accommodate further development, to intensify the semantics of self-reference as a sort of final act of self-reassurance. The patterns of self-reference by drama to drama as we see them in The Bacchaeof Euripides reflect a crisis in the very genre of tragedy, in the context of drastic changes in Athenian society toward the end of the fifth century; the prospect is one of abrupt confrontation and loss.”

— Nagy, Pindar’s Homer p. 388

Part of the uncertainty is visible in the sympathetic characterization of Pentheus, the persecutor of Dionysos, in The Bacchaeof Euripides. The young king, first cousin of the mysterious and exotic god whom he fails to recognize as his near-and-dear relative, is rash, excitable, obsessive-compulsive. He is human, all too human. He cannot help becoming curious, ever more morbidly curious, about the god whom he resists so fiercely. His initial sense of unfamiliarity gives way to invasive feelings of familiarity, of maddening closeness. Repulsion gives way to fatal attraction. The magnetic force of this attraction is the essence of Dionysos as the god of theatre, as the inner source of tragedy itself. It is the lure of tragedy that draws Pentheus into his own fatal ordeal. The tragic is what causes Pentheus to desire to be tragic.

The magnetism of tragedy is what caused tragedy to happen in the first place. The Bacchaeis a tragedy that relives — as Nietzsche intuited — the birth of tragedy. The wonders of the god Dionysos pull people together to celebrate these wonders by competing with each other in song and dance. The speech of the herdsman says it all: “once upon a time, we humble herdsmen came together in the countryside, drawn by the wonders of the god to sing and dance in competition.”

There is a single Greek word for such coming together and competition, agôn. The word means, literally, “coming together.” In the same breath, it means “competition,” since any coming together is of and by itself the same thing as competition. Nietzsche understood this fundamental equation in ancient Greek song culture when he spoke of the “spirit of Agôn,” der agonale Geist. The spirit of competition is reflected in a derivative of this Greek word agôn, antagonism.

This same Greek word answers the all-important question: what, then, are the wonders of Dionysos? What are these wonders that draw all humankind toward to the center, the epicenter? The answer is simple: it all comes together in the central happening of the ordeal endured by the god, which reverberates in the aftershock of the next central happening, the ordeal of the hero who persecuted him. The word for this ordeal is the same word, agôn. And the spirit of ordeal is reflected in another derivative of this Greek word agôn, agony.

The agony of Pentheus, replicating the agony of the god that he persecuted, is a sad song. In ancient Greek, such a song of lament is penthos, which means not only “sadness” or “grief” but the song that expresses this sadness or grief. The sad song that is penthos shapes the identity of the tragic hero Pentheus, the man of tragic song.
The backdrop to the central figures of Pentheus and Dionysos is the chorus of The Bacchae, female devotees of the god. The word bakkhos (masculine) or bakkh (feminine) designates someone who has been possessed by the god, who literally has the god within. (The word entheos, meaning “having the god [= theos] within,” is the ultimate source of our word enthusiasm.) The feminine plural of this word, bakkhai, is Latinized as “bacchae,” whence the name of the tragedy, Bacchae. The play is named after the chorus, that is, the song-and-dance ensemble who stand for the true followers of the god. These women are Lydians and hence foreigners, accompanying Dionysos as he travels all the way from distant Lydia to the center of Hellenism, Thebes. Their possession by the god is benign, unlike the possession of the women of Thebes, who are led by Agave, mother of Pentheus.
The Theban women, unlike the Lydians, have failed to recognize the true identity of Dionysos as the native son who has come back home to Thebes in order to assert his origins: his father is Zeus and his mother is Semele, daughter of the founder of Thebes, Kadmos. Semele is now dead, and her sisters have failed to recognize their nephew. So also Pentheus, son of Agave, fails to recognize his maternal cousin. Agave and her sisters will now be punished by Dionysos, who possesses them. Their possession by the god is not at all benign: they are driven mad and head for the hills, where their bacchic excesses ultimately impel them to commit the unthinkable: they will unwittingly dismember Pentheus, who thus reaps his own punishment for having persecuted Dionysos.

The frenzied excesses of the Theban women are contrasted with the moderation of the Lydian Bacchae. Their positive possession belongs in the sphere of ritual, which highlights the moderation that the god can give mortals who recognize his true nature. The negative possession of the Theban women belongs in the sphere of myth, which contrasts the frenzied excesses experienced by those who fail the challenge of recognizing the god. The singing and dancing of the chorus of Bacchae, who stand for the Lydian women, is fundamentally an act of ritual, of worshipping the god. This ritual of bacchic moderation is predicated on the myth of bacchic catastrophe. Such a balance of moderation and catastrophe brings to life the theatre of Dionysos.

Gregory Nagy is Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.