Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Does Dionysus intend to punish all the people of Thebes? If so, why?

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Chris Groeger said...

Dionysus punishes Thebes by driving all the women crazy and sending them into the mountains as Maenads, who then also attack two villages, stealing children and wounding villagers with their thyrsuses. He punishes the ruling house of Thebes in the persons of Pentheus, Cadmus, and the daughters of Cadmus. Finally, he predicts that the Thebans will be "driven from their city to wander East and West over earth; for Zeus will not suffer a godless city to remain." (Velacott translation)

We could assume that Dionysus is just carrying out a collective punishment on an entire city even though only the ruling family is guilty. Alternatively, we can ask if Euripides isn't suggesting a problem larger than the anger of Dionysus at his relatives. Perhaps the play is making some kind of judgment on Athenian society or even Greek society as a whole. The historical context suggests at least two possibilities:

(1) Greek city-states at the time of the play were nearing the end of the Peloponnesian War, in which Sparta and its allies (including Thebes) eventually defeated Athens and its allies, in a long and brutal struggle, marked by massacres, plagues, and the breakdown of social order. Euripides might be making a judgment on the madness of Greek society and its inability to control the "Dionysian" forces unleashed. What is the evidence in the text for this kind of interpretation?

One clue is the way Euripides rewrote the story of Cadmus to create a kind of neat symbology, with Cadmus marrying Harmonia (usually thought of as a goddess of order and unity) and founding Thebes, thus establishing political order and a harmony between mortals and the gods. Then, two generations later, Theban society comes to an end with disharmony between two cousins, a mortal (Pentheus) and a god (Dionysus). Euripides conveniently eliminates from the story Cadmus' son Polydorus, whose descendents include Laius and his son, Oedipus, thus making the destruction of the House of Cadmus in the Bacchae complete. The physical dismemberment of Pentheus might be read as a symbol of the disintegration of Greek civilization.

Another clue is the frequent use of sophistical kinds of arguments and wordplays by many of the characters. Cadmus asks Pentheus to pretend to believe in Dionysus even if he doesn't, Tiresias makes up absurd etymologies to the story of Dionysus being born from Zeus' thigh. At one point Tiresias remarks "We entertain no theories or speculations in divine matters. The beliefs we have received from our ancestors--beliefs as old as time--cannot be destroyed by any argument, nor by any ingenuity the mind can invent." (Velacott translation) In my opinion, Euripides is describing what he saw as a bitter conflict between sophistical approaches to religion and the old "reverence" and traditions. Tiresias emphasizes the danger of words and rational argument at another point when talking to Pentheus: "But though you seem, by your glib tongue, to be intelligent, yet your words are foolish. Power and eloquence in a headstrong man can only lead to folly; and such a man is a danger to the state." (Velacott translation)

(2) Another possible reason for making Dionysus deliberately punish all Thebans is suggested by the fact that Euripides' plays won very few drama contests, unlike those of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some scholars think he left Athens for Macedonia at the end of his life out of disgust at the lack of recognition for his work. Since Dionysus is the god in whose honor dramas were performed, perhaps Euripides identifies closely with a god who is not honored in his own country!

The Bacchae could also be seen as Euripides' commentary on the origins and future of drama. Pentheus, whose name means "grief" or "sorrow," becomes the central figure in the first "Greek tragedy," the first drama carried out in honor of Dionysus upon the introduction of his cult to Greece. But Pentheus is not a tragic hero. He doesn't resist fate, he doesn't go to meet it with dignity; instead he is led like an animal (scapegoat?) to the slaughter. In his death, and the scattering of the ruling family, there does not seem to be any further possibility for tragedy, nor for any reconciliation between the forces tearing apart the political order.

There are a lot of different ways of reading the Bacchae, and I think that's part of what's so fascinating about it, along with its sheer strangeness. The different interpretations don't cancel each other out -- they seem to all be valid at different levels, running along in parallel. It's almost like an inkblot into which any number of meanings can be read. Besides the ambiguities and contradictions, I think this is due to the density of symbolism and the many dualities it plays with: men/women, city/countryside, sanity/madness, vision/blindness, gods/humans, order/disorder, speech/music, native/foreigner, reality/illusion, rational/irrational, etc.

February 20, 2008 at 9:02 PM

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