Garth Ball
Euripides’ The Bacchae is one of the final plays he wrote before his death in 406 BCE. By this time, he had left Athens for good and was living in Macedonia (Kitto and Taplin). The play was never performed during his lifetime—however, it was later produced by one of his sons posthumously. It clearly made a splash at the festival of Dionysus: it was awarded first prize, one of only four awards that Euripides ever earned there (Kitto and Taplin). By contrast, the two other ancient Athenian tragic playwrights who are remembered today, Aeschylus and Sophocles, won 13 first prizes and 24 first prizes, respectively (Conversi and Sewall). These awards were basically ancient Athens’ version of the Tonys, celebrating the very best, which suggests that Euripides wasn’t well-regarded in comparison. Despite this, many modern playwrights feel that Euripides’ work—which also includes Trojan Women and Medea, perhaps his most famous tragedy—speaks more to today’s audiences. Why might this be the case?
To better understand The Bacchae and its reception across eras, it’s helpful to understand its place in the ancient Greek tragic canon, rather than simply assessing it according to modern sensibilities. Thankfully, the philosopher Aristotle left behind an aesthetic treatise, The Poetics, providing an ancient perspective on what the artistic goals of tragedy were. Through comparing The Bacchae with the traditional tragic “formula,” we can better appreciate what makes it (and the rest of Euripides’ work) unique. Was Euripides truly worse than his peers at plot development? Or was he an avant-garde, ahead of his time in his experiments with dramatic structure and skepticism toward traditional religious belief? We encourage you to come to your own conclusion as you peruse this exhibit!
While a comprehensive summary of The Poetics isn’t possible in this space, only a few aspects of Aristotle’s theory are salient here. First, he believed that the most important element of tragedy was its plot (mythos), over and above character, thought, language, music, or spectacle. A tragic plot involves a change in fortunate from good to bad, a tragic reversal of fortune (peripeteia). In terms of character, the protagonist should be a person of high rank who is generally virtuous and deserves their fortune, yet possesses pride (hubris) or another tragic flaw that leads them to make a mistake or miscalculation (hamartia). The plot’s reversal of the protagonist’s fortunes builds and eventually climaxes in a moment of recognition (anagnorisis) of their flaw(s) and tragic fate, which excites feelings of pity and fear in the audience because of their ritual identification with the protagonist. This produces catharsis in the audience or the “purging” of these negative feelings through experiencing them in the fictional setting (Aristotle), while coming to better understand and appreciate the human condition along the way.
The exemplar that Aristotle based his analysis on was Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle, which readers may be familiar with from the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s infamous “Oedipus complex.” A cursory breeze through Sophocles’ plot seems to be a checklist of Aristotle’s formula: the hubris of Oedipus’ father in sending him away to avoid the prophesied fate of being killed by his own son; Oedipus’ mistake in killing the old man who, unbeknownst to him, was his father; and the reversal of fortune when Oedipus experiences the recognition that the woman he married is in fact his mother, while the old man he killed is his father.
By contrast, Euripides colors outside the lines, engaging in more complex characterizations that lead to his tragic plot not hitting all the same notes that Aristotle would’ve expected from the “formula” he created through his analysis of more standard tragedies like Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle. Our protagonist in The Bacchae isn’t a mortal, but the god Dionysus, who communicates directly with the audience, implicating them in his plot to enact revenge on King Pentheus and his mother Agave. King Pentheus may possess hubris in his disavowal of Dionysian rites, but he isn’t portrayed as a character the audience ought to identify with; rather, he seems to be presented as a warning of who they should not become. We can’t help but identify with Dionysus, the true protagonist of the story. As such, King Pentheus’ deadly mistake in agreeing to go into the mountains to observe the Dionysian rites doesn’t produce catharsis. We’ve been primed to view King Pentheus’ death as a victory for Dionysus. The true catharsis comes after Agave’s eventual recognition that the mangled flesh she holds in her hands is that of her own son, whom she has slain in her Bacchanalian ecstasy. Dionysus feels justified in his actions because Agave helped to spread the rumors doubting his divinity in the past. However, because this is un-staged backstory for Agave, rather than negative characterization developed in the plot as performed before the audience (as was the case with King Pentheus), it seems we can’t help but feel bad for Agave. The play’s catharsis, to the extent it exists, is thus ambiguous; we have the thrill of the hunt in Dionysus’ luring and destruction of King Pentheus, yet an intuition that Dionysus was excessive in his treatment of Agave—along with a guilt in our own implication as an audience, who have been privy to Dionysus’ plan all along. Rather than the tidy catharsis of the Oedipus cycle with its fulfilled prophecy, we witness a profoundly disturbing scene of destruction that seems less a result of impersonal fate than the focused will of a vengeful god. In The Bacchae we’re on a roller-coaster of identification in which the twists and turns of “good” and “bad,” “white” and “black,” lead us to a deep but fascinating confusion over how we should feel in this ambiguous world of gray.
Euripides: avant-garde dramatist who was ahead of his time in anticipating the modern era’s preference for ambiguity and nuance over stories of “good guys” and “bad guys”? Or a cultural degenerate who illustrates the descent of Athenian tragedy from its height in the Golden Age with Sophocles? Read the plays and see for yourself!
Works Cited
Aristotle. Poetics. Perseus Digital Library, www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0056%3Asection%3D1447a. Accessed 29 July 2024.
Euripides. Bacchae. Perseus Digital Library, https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0092%3Acard%3D1. Accessed 29 July 2024
Conversi, Leonard W. and Sewall, Richard B. "tragedy". Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 Jul. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/art/tragedy-literature. Accessed 29 July 2024.
Kitto, H.D.F. and Taplin, Oliver. "Euripides". Encyclopedia Britannica, 23 Apr. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Euripides. Accessed 29 July 2024.