The Bacchae

The play is one movement of reversal, and almost nothing in it can be lifted out. The prologue states the god’s purpose and the shape of the end, and each scene between god and king turns the screw a notch: the king binds the stranger, and the stranger walks free; he threatens the women, and the herdsman shows them invincible; he would see them, and the god offers him the sight. The scene of the two old men in fawnskins looks removable and is not: it shows the accommodation with the god that Pentheus refuses and that saves neither of them. Held below the top by the second stasimon’s appeal to Thebes and the Dirce, which restates more than it moves, and by the inherited matter of the snake prophecy at the close.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the force a mind and a city refuse in themselves does not go away but returns in the shape of what was refused, and the same power gives peace and dismemberment. The herdsman sees the maenads at rest on Cithaeron, nursing fawns and wolf cubs; provoked, the same women tear cattle apart with their hands. Pentheus, who calls the rites lechery, is undone by his wish to watch them. The chorus names it: “to sophon d’ ou sophia”
“cleverness is not wisdom” (first stasimon). And the play will not settle whether the god is just. What it discloses is a meaning, not a mood: religion’s double face, and the limits of reason before what is older than it.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Height and frequency both. The parodos rises at once into the cult’s ecstasy, “eis oros, eis oros”
“to the mountain, to the mountain”; the god’s voice sounds from within the palace, fire leaps on Semele’s tomb and the house falls; the herdsman’s idyll turns to slaughter; the third stasimon’s fawn escapes the hunters’ nets. Then terror: the dressed king seeing two suns and the god as a bull; the fir bent to the earth and let go with the king on top; Pentheus tearing off his headband to show his mother his face; Agave entering with his head on her thyrsus. The last two hundred lines hold dread without relief. Held from the top because the lost passage takes part of the lament where the height would come to rest.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Myth built, not cited. The action is the cult myth of the god whose festival it served: the god arriving from Asia unrecognised in his own city, his mother’s line denying his birth, the king who resists, the women driven to the mountain. The hunt bears weight at every level: the hunter becomes the hunted, the fawn of the third stasimon becomes the maenads’ prey, and Agave triumphs as a huntress over a lion. The tearing apart, and the procession of the victim through the city to the mountain, take the shape of sacrifice, with Pentheus dressed and led as the god’s own double. Each figure stays particular: Pentheus young, prurient, anxious about his curls; Cadmus old and ambitious for the family; the god smiling and inscrutable.

Score: 9.6 / 10

The departure is real, and part of it is a return. Euripides took a subject Aeschylus had treated in plays now lost, and in his last years turned back to a full chorus at the centre of the action, to the archaic trochaic tetrameter, and to a god’s epiphany as the whole plot. Against his own human, domestic tragedy that is a swerve; against the tradition it looks like a revival, and that holds it lowest of the five gates. The turn is in what he made of it: a god as protagonist in human disguise for nearly the whole play, who costumes his victim on stage and leads him out as an actor in his own death. The stake: a cult play whose god behaves monstrously, offered at that god’s festival by a poet who had won few first prizes.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Change the form and the play loses what it knows, because the conditions of Attic tragedy carry its knowledge: masks, costume, a chorus, a festival of Dionysus. The chorus are the god’s Asian maenads, so the play’s lyric voice is the cult’s, beautiful and pitiless, and the ecstasy is heard from within before its cost is seen. An actor in a smiling mask plays a god who plays a man; the dressing scene makes costume, the theatre’s own means, the instrument of destruction. The messenger convention keeps both great acts of violence off stage and in the mind, as the god keeps the king’s desire to see; the one thing brought on is the head. A narrative could tell the story; only this form makes the spectator complicit in the watching it punishes.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Evidence rather than promise: opposed readings sustained for two centuries without settling. The play has been taken as a recantation of Euripides’ rationalism and as his bitterest attack on the gods; as a celebration of ecstatic religion and as an anatomy of mass frenzy; as a study of repression, a ritual drama of the scapegoat, a political play of city and cult, a play about tragedy itself. Dodds’ commentary, R. P. Winnington-Ingram’s study, Charles Segal’s Dionysiac Poetics and René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred each found it bearing their weight. The formal yield matches the semantic: the imagery of the hunt, of seeing and the net, and of the bull runs through the whole. On return the play keeps changing which of its two faces one believes.

Score: 9.4 / 10

The field is Attic tragedy, and Greek drama as a repertory for the centuries after. The force is high: the fullest dramatisation of the genre’s own god, and a reorganisation of what a god in tragedy could be, agent, actor and director at once. It did not redirect Attic tragedy, which was ending; its reach is delayed, credited and discounted, and it redirected the modern idea of the Dionysian. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a repertory staple in antiquity, when the actor Jason of Tralles played Agave with the head of Crassus at the Parthian court (Plutarch, Crassus); a Byzantine passion play, Christus Patiens, built from its lines; and, later and wider, Nietzsche’s Dionysian, the Cambridge ritualists, Mann’s Death in Venice, Henze’s The Bassarids (1966), Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides (1973), Schechner’s Dionysus in 69, and Girard.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over some twenty-four centuries, and the charge falls on the form. The play survives near whole and legible, but the passage lost after line 1329 takes Agave’s lament over the reassembled body of her son and the opening of the god’s closing speech, the place where the recognition would come to rest. What happens there can still be followed; a part that carried meaning is gone, and that holds the axis below a text whole and read without break. Presence adds little: read and played in antiquity, reworked in Byzantium, thinner in the medieval West and the Renaissance, and now among the most performed and translated of Greek tragedies. The surface pays nothing beyond the loss.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Judged on Euripides’ Greek. The dialogue is supple and dangerous: in the interrogation the god answers every question with a truth the king cannot hear, and in the temptation a single cry, a, turns Pentheus from command to desire and the play on its hinge. The two messenger speeches are among the finest in tragedy, the first moving from idyll to violence, the second from the bent fir to the dismembering with a terrible plainness. The lyric range is wide: ionics for the cult’s sway, trochaic tetrameters after the miracle, dochmiacs for the fourth stasimon’s cry for vengeance and for Agave’s madness. Held from the top by the stiff closing distribution of fates and the slacker second stasimon. The music is lost, and neither credited nor charged.

Score: 9.3 / 10

The two most distant elements are the parodos’ blessing on the initiate, “ō makar”
“O blessed”, and the head of Pentheus in his mother’s hands. They obey one law, the god’s double nature, which he states of himself: “deinotatos, anthrōpoisi d’ ēpiōtatos”
“most terrible, and to men most gentle” (third episode). The comedy of the old men dancing and of the king dressed, fussing with his hem, is the same law at work, and laughter at him is complicity in his death. The god’s harshness at the end is the law carried through, not a contradiction. The range is wide, idyll to butchery to judgment, and coherence holds across it. Charged: the abrupt passage from lament to judgment the lost lines leave, and the snake prophecy, at an angle to the rest.

Score: 9.3 / 10

A single play of under fourteen hundred lines, not marked down for its length and weighed on what it holds. In one structure: the sacred, in the god, his cult and its truth; the city, in Pentheus’ law against the rite and Thebes as the god’s denied birthplace; the family across three generations, from the slander of Semele to Cadmus, his daughters and Pentheus; gender and sexuality, in the women’s withdrawal to the mountain and the king dressed as a woman; the natural order of Cithaeron, its animals nursed and torn; the foreign and the Greek; a mind divided against itself. Each is a face of the same refusal and return. What holds it lowest of the twelve: history’s sweep, labour and the long span of a life lie outside one play.

Score: 8.5 / 10