Looking at Bacchae 82
division in the articulate the fluid binary In to 6 human nature. helping articulate the fragile world chorus also help to of the the topography play of order and reason on the one the coexistence the human psyche and within The and liberation of disorder on the othe. beauty with and Mysteries and Politics in Bacchae hand passion chorus describe in the parodos senses which the surrender to and the passion on reason is persuasive. A a narrow focus real. And their hostility to Richard Seaford is very without a of surrender without and degree lived rationally passion life wholly to comes at a is arid. But surrender passion transient sensory experience to confine and can as be released is dificult to easily risk, in that emotion once force. a destructive as a life-enhancing the The idea that ancient Greeks have much to tell us can shade into the idea that were like us. But of if 'they just course, they really were just like us, Notes there would be no point in studying them (other than as self-legitimation). - In fact was - Greek culture unlike some cultures similar to be Roselli (2011) Wilson (2000) 6, Cartledge (1997) enough I See Carey (2013) 155, 23-5, to us, but at the same comprehensible time very different in a way that justifies 18, and Slater (1995) 100, 108 Csapo Karamanou and efforts to understand it. dimension of the see Hall, 2 For the intertextual play This with force to the Sommerstein in this volume. point applies particular modern staging of ancient
- Orestes Greek drama. It can be and - which revisits elements of Choephori, generally is so as to 3 E.g. Electra 508-76, Aeschylus staged express something Orestes in Eumenides, Phoenissae within the mainstream of our 866-935, which reprises the trial of range preoccupations. Alternatively, a brave which revisit the dialogue between director to a 103-201,737-53, 1104-40 (if genuine), might attempt stage production which contributes to expanding Thebes. the In one sense such Eteocles and the scout in Seven against range. an attempt should be easy, given the narrowness 4 Easterling (1997b) 163-4. of our mainstream: from within any culture (including our own) the 5 Swift (2013) 132-3. mainstream looks much broader than it really is. But on the other hand such 6 Fragment 57. an is attempt risky, and requires a kind of effort on the not this time he has died and his special part only 7 The last instance, however, is ironic; by horribly of the translator, director and mother is holding his head in her hand as she complains about his poor performers, but also of the audience. Consider, from this perspective, the problem of staging Bacchae. There is hunting skills. at the heart of the a is to 8 Cf. Sophocles, Antigone 471-2, 853-6. play mystery. Dionysus bringing Thebes something mysterious, and Pentheus wants to know what it is. We have the vague sense 9 Phoen. 205-7. that beneath the surface there is 10 Phoen. 218-20. just something profound, even though it is and never made clear what it is. 11 Twenty-one times, as against five occurrences in the rest of the plays Mysteries can of course be solved. But our culture also fragments. equips us with the idea of a mere atmosphere of mystery, mystery without 12 81, 106, 177, 702-3. content, and this is what is generally conveyed by productions of Bacchae. 13 Finally in 1141 the thyrsos becomes the spike on which Agave carries her The ancient Greeks would not have understood this. Our word 'mystery sons head on her return from the hunt. derives from a Greek word (musterion) which refers to a kind of ritual. There 14 For the ubiquity of hunting in Bacchae and its association with the duality of were various Greek mystery-cults, notably those celebrated in various Dionysus see Segal (1997) ch.2. places in honour of Dionysus and those celebrated in honour of Demeter and her 15 Cf Cretans fr.472. daughter Korë at Eleusis near Athens. These cults are sometimes called simply 16 For choral mainadism in the play see Bierl (2013). the or But not about -or 17 West (1987) 61-3. mysteries' (Dionysiac Eleusinian). they were not just about - creating a mysterious atmosphere. They had a speciic purpose. 18 For the role in Greek see of narrated space tragedy Kampourelli (2015). Mystic initiation was a rehearsal for death, which subjected the initiands to 19 62,661,751, 797, 1045, 1142,1177, 1219, 1292, 1384, 1385. individual suffering, to the fear of death, and then to a joyful conclusion. The Looking at Bacchae Mysteries and Politics in Bacchae 85 4 sequently, at their real death would subsequ be confident that was they that father who had almost certainly been initiated into pagan mystery-cult from suffering to joy they had pointof this transitiontion from the experienced before his conversion to Christianity. As a result of his conversion, he did not experiencing that in And it is mystery-cult Dionysus Bacchae of rehearsal. is feel obliged to respect the secrecy of the pagan mystery-cult. And he was in the mystic ofofall this has played any part in the attempts t But none Thebes. aware unlike all subsequent commentators of the mystic content of the bringing to scholars, translatslators or theatre whether directo Bacchae, by This Bacchae. In the last chapter of his Protrepticus ("Exhortation') he describes interpret understood of all ancient dramas. There: least Bacchae the three being guided by god as being 'initiated into those holy mysteries' (i.e. makes of understanding. for this failure and then launches an attack on various cult actions in reasons ritual. It had too be Christianity), depicted surrounding mystic kept first is the secrecy secret, the Bacchae, comparing them unfavourably to corresponding elements in The betorehand of the joyful concl. had known if the initiands they what he calls the mysteries of the Word (tou logou ta mustëria), the 'truly because terrihed in the initial the. sufficiently stages of not have been ritual. sacred mysteries' of Christianity. These, he says, 'are the bacchic revels would secrets of the for proraning mystery-cult Aeschylus was prosecuted (baccheumata) of my mysteries. Conversion to Christianity is mystic coula not make expicit the joytul of dramas. Euripides in Bacchae outcome initiation that is superior to the mystic initiation in Bacchae. In its elimination the Homeric Hymn to Demeter The narrative of ludes of the mystery-cults, Christianity claimed to be the true mystery. the mystic ritual. is he of men on the earth who has seen these with the goddess saying'blessed The third reason for the failure to understand Bacchae is this. It is emphasized and portionless will never have a share af but he who is uninitiated in the play that the cult that Dionysus brings to Thebes is for everybody. things, This dead below in the dank darkness. refers to initiation He wants to have honours from all' (208). This universal participation was such things when but the content of the ritual cannot in the into the Eleusinian mystery-cult, a general feature of Dionysiac cult. Such universal accessibility seems to Similarly n Bachae, the chorus of (narrated) myth be made explicit. contradict the confinement of secret knowledge to a few in mystery-cult. arrived in the theatre, blessed is he Dionysus' female followers, once sing However, there is less contradiction than it may seem. At the heart of the relation to the knowing the teletas of the gods, who, eudaimön (in right gods), Dionysiac festival we sometimes find a secret ritual performed by a small his soul to the thiasos (sacred band).... Teletas refers group on behalf of the whole polis. An example is the Athenian festival called is pure in life and joins - but - here the content of the ritual And I that it was secret to the Dionysiac mystery-cult, again Anthesteria. suspect ritual of this kind that, at the City be made Nevertheless, there are in Dionysia towards the end of the sixth century BC, was intriguing enough to cannot in the (dramatized) myth explicit. events which reflect develop into the public spectacle of tragedy. Moreover, at Eleusis large numbers both Homeric Hymn and Bacchae strange undoubtedly reflection is of the kind of were initiated every year, with the result that probably most citizens were the content of the mystic ritual. Such typical came to established. ('aetiological) myth that explains how a ritual Both initiates, and the secret initiation ritual together with its splendid public Bacchae and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter embody an aetiological myth of procession were regarded by the Athenians as important for the well-being of mystic ritual: both deities after long wandering arrive in disguise at a place their polis. Dionysus in Bacchae (39-40) insists that the polis must be initiated. (Thebes, Eleusis) where they manifest themselves in an epiphany and The emotion of a ritually enacted transition from the individual suffering of we know a certain death to collective joy in the afterlife was of political significance. Modern establish their mystery-cult. Despite the secrecy, do amount about what occurred in the ritual, for instance from Christian writers, democracy is an arrangement between autonomous individuals, whereas who did not respect the secrecy, or from some gold strips that were inscribed Athenian democracy was reinforced by - perhaps even dependent on - the with mystic formulae and then buried with the initiated dead. collective emotion of spectacular rituals. The second reason for the general failure to understand Bacchae is more The mystic transition from suffering to joy, and from individual isolation fundamental. With the triumph of Christianity, mystery-cult disappeared to joyful community, emerges clearly from what is - though brief - perhaps from Europe, leaving a large and permanent gap in religious imagination and the best ancient account of mystic ritual, in a fragment (178) of Plutarch. The practice. Because mystery-cult is so alien to our culture, we do not notice the soul on the point of death: indications of it in Bacchae. Mystery-cults of various kinds controlled the passage to the afterlife, and so were of vast significance to many ancient has an experience like that of those being initiated into the great Greeks, and could not fail to be serious rivals to Christianity. An example or mysteries... At first wanderings and tiring runnings to and fro and this is anxious journeys without completion through darkness; and then before rivalry provided by Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-c. 215 AD), a church Looking at Bacchae Mysteries and Politics in Bacchae 87 86
and and sweat the terrors, shuddering trembling as in the Plutarch description - from fear, the threat of darkness, falling to the completion itself all met (him), and pure places and this a wondertul light the ground, trembling and individual isolation to joyful salvation in which and awe. But from voices and choral and having dancings as a Pentheus too suffers - as an isolated individual meadows received (him), they greet Dionysus light. which he - now sounds and visions, among - the sufferings of initiation, but when he identifies the miraculous light with solemnities of sacred holy and around at and become tree moving large, he does not it as his salvation the chorus do as complete and initiated, Dionysus greet (as Dionysus and is with and pure men, looking down crowned -celebrates rites holy greatest light') but rather attacks it. Pentheus, here and throughout the play, mob here (on earth) in mud and darkness is imagined as the anxious and isolated mystic initiand who resists the on the uninitiated and impure in fear of death clinging to trampled by itself and driven together, transition to salvation and community. As is often the case with the disbelief in the things there (in the next sufferings through their good aetiological myths of rites of passage, the experience of Pentheus is confined world). to expressing the negative phase of the ritual. Two necessary secrets of mystic ritual are that the 'death' of the mystic initiand is entirely fictional and that his
in which Pentheus is as Now consider the passage in Bacchae described fearful isolated resistance is in the end followed by the transition to communal that he is the god) within his trying to imprison Dionysus (not realizing joy. But the myth, being public, must not reveal anything that precludes the house. I have shown in my Commentary on Bacchae how the whole scene initial fear that must be created in the intitiand: it describes the death as real. reflects in numerous details the ritual of mystic initiation. Here I confine and can do no more than hint at the transition and incorporation into the of Pentheus. He tries to tie a myself to the very strange behaviour up bull, and group. So it is in the myth dramatized in Bacchae: Pentheus does in a sense as he does so pants, sweats and bites his lips. Dionysus then creates an abandon his resistance and dresses as a maenad, but is horribly killed.
thunder and and the tomb of Semele. Pentheus, now more earthquake, lightning, ignites I will say about two themes that I have only touched on: firstly thinking that the house is on fire, rushes here and there until - thinking that the identification of the deity with light, and secondly an aspect of the Dionysus has fled he seizes a sword and rushes into the dark house, transition that accompanies the appearance of the light, namely replacement whereupon the god makes in the courtyard a light,' which Pentheus attacks of individual isolation by community. 'as if slaughtering' the god. The god then brings the house crashing to the The identification of the deity with light in mystic initiation is not confined ground, and Pentheus collapses exhausted. to Bacchae. For instance, in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which we saw Commentators have not thought that this odd behaviour requires a reflects mystic initiation, Demeter appears in an epiphany in which light in often behave specific explanation. After all, people tragedy oddly. But the shines from her body and the house is filled with light 'as with oddity of Pentheus' behaviour and experiences is very specific, both here and lightning' (278-80). There is evidence to suggest that the mystic vision at Eleusis elsewhere in Bacchae, for instance when he dresses as a maenad and sees might include statues of deities illuminated from within. And the mystic Dionysus two suns and two cities of Thebes. In case there is - as I show in every my in Sophocles' Antigone is called 'chorus-leader of the fire-breathing stars' Commentary correspondence with what we know about the experience of (1146-7). Scholars have been so puzzled by the attack made by Pentheus on mystic initiation. The strange behaviour of Pentheus within the house the light (why attack a light?) that they have changed the Greek text, replacing corresponds in various respects with the account of initiation in Plutarch: the the word for light with a word for apparition. This completely misses the Sweating, runnings around vainly, anxiety, exhaustion, darkness and then the point. Pentheus is right to identify the light with Dionysus (just as the chorus miraculous light.? have called Dionysus in his epiphany a light), but rather than this There is more. accepting While Pentheus is trying to imprison Dionysus within the mystic epiphany as the cause and expression of his salvation (as the chorus the house, chorus of maenads, of the are in fearful that follower s god, despair, do), instead he attacks it: in this of to they will fall into the dark enclosures of Pentheus' (611-12) and fall to the persistence isolated resistance his own salvation there is something supremely horrific. But ground. Dionysus creates the and to his earthquake, appears terrified It is worth adding that the experience of mystic initation resembles in followers, telling them to stand take and up, courage stop trembling. They detail and seems to have been influenced the so-called respond thus:'O greatest light of the by knowledge of joyful-crying bacchanal. How I that has been over to look on rejoiced Experience (NDE) extensively recorded the you in my lonely desolation' Near-Death (607-9). or Most NDEs exhibit a of This us years typical sequence features that gives a contrast between the chorus and last thirty so. Pentheus. The chorus pass is found in different cultures. A central feature is transition from fear and Looking at Bacchae Mysteries and Politics in Bacchae 89 88
associated with the appearance in often theatre than is mystery-cult. And so I end with an aspect of Pentheus transition that is to bliss, a the form of the so-called suffering which often takes destructive hyper-individualism that has special resonance for us. I mean his wonderful light, darkness of a A small of the somehow a person. minority obsession with money. When urged by Teiresias to accept the god. Pentheus that is also - of a light consist of some of the Being Light throughout: they accuses him of being motivated by the prospect of fees for performing the recalled as unpleasant NDEs are however, resisted; and the NDE, which are, new rituals (255-7). That says more about Pentheus than it does about as the positive same elements - exhaustion. Pentheus' in When Pentheus is asked whether he would like to see end - like Teiresias. by Dionysus resistance may the NDE is the loss of epo blissful conclusion of the maenads sitting together on the mountains, he replies that he would. This Another feature of the account the transition is from individual introduces Pentheus' sudden strange compliance and eventual death, and is In Plutarchs and sense of harmony. darkness, on each the turning point of the play. What Pentheus actualy says is 'Yes, I would give around in people trampling isolation (running vainly a where there is choral an enormous weight of gold to do so' (812). and pure men' in place to the company of 'holy other) chorus had fallen to the ground in Pentheus sees the motives of Teiresias, and even the sight of secret each member the dancing. In Bacchae of the of the in terms Such a state - a was ended by mystic epiphany cult, of money. sad is two and half isolated desolation' that joyfully Dionysiac is scored in football, one team comes joyfully millennia later in the history of money well known to us. We are reminded Notice how, when a goal god. is in isolated of another Greek myth - of Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold. member of the other team desolation. together while each the maintains through most of the drama with disastrous consequences. The chorus of Bacchae ask what is the best Pentheus, in his resistance to god, with whom he comes of individual isolation. Those thing, and answer by comparing the uncertainties of wealth and power an extraordinary degree the servant, Teiresias, Cadmus and the unfavourably with the permanent happiness of the here and now bestowed - the chorus, into contact Dionysus, him from the new cult, but in vain. by mystic initiation." Midas is a man of money who puts the same question - all to dissuade resisting messenger try - 'what is best?' - to another follower of Dionysus, Silenus, and receives the manifest in the collapse of Pentheus house, and in the The power of the god maenads, makes no difference. When Pentheus answer that best for humankind is never to have been born, second best miracles performed by the from a sudden to die as soon as possible. From the perspective of the ancient wisdom of a maenad, this results personality change does agree to dress as the Pentheus is an extreme example of nature embodied in Silenus, the man of money is pitiful. But one version of that we feel has been induced by god. stubborn to the of the has a with whom we are all familiar, point Midas story happy ending: he is initiated into one of those people Dionysiac mystery- - He embodies - among other things the isolated cult, recognizes Silenus as a fellow member of the thiasos, is saved from his seeming trapped in himself. initiand taken to an extreme. own monetary power by Dionysus, and thereafter dwells in the wild' In the and anxious resistance of the mystic the of the highly political genre of tragedy, on the other hand, Pentheus is killed and The chorus of maenads, on the other hand, embody solidarity initiation means the soul to the his family exiled, but all the other citizens receive the benefit in perpetuity of initiated group. For them mystic joining as do the thiasoi of the cult that in the prologue Dionysus promised to establish in Thebes." As thiasos (sacred band). They dance and sing in unison, whose movement is to a so ofen in Athenian the demise of the or maenads on the mountainside (725), compared tragedy, powerful individual family is rising flock of birds (748). accompanied by new and lasting benefit for the community. This opposition between the stubborn isolation of the 'tyrant' (775-6) members has we Pentheus and the solidarity of the anonymous chorus The - it has have seen a ritual dimension. But also political significance. Notes instance in Athenians regarded mystic ritual as important for their polis (for is also to be found in a whole Aristophanes' Frogs). And the opposition I I read in 628 kelainön (genitive plural) and in 630 the manuscript reading number of Athenian tragedies. Think for instance of the ignorant isolation phös: see my Commentary. (leading to downfall) of Agamemnon in Aeschylus' Agamemnon or of Creon 2 If Plutarchis account is drawn specifically from the Eleusinian mystery-cult, in Sophocles' Antigone. then either the Eleusinian and Dionsyiac experiences of initiation were As for the political significance of the opposition, this is something similar, or the Bacchae passage conflates the Dionysiac with the Eleusinian experience - as does Plato's Phaedrus and Aristophanes' Frogs. that we can and should appreciate - in our age of destructively acquisitive hyper-individualism. It is a feature of Bacchae that is easier to convey in our 3 See my Cosmology and the Polis (Cambridge University Press 2012) 41-2. Looking at Bacchae
90
277. and the Polis Cosmology his Rex also acc See and Oedipus in Oedipus 4 my Antigone in Sophocles leiresias that b 5 Creon 1o responds he motivated by money. reon Teiresias of being typIcal preoccupation of the onto him the projecting (leiresias) (Creon) is 1062, always mistranslated): i.e. he ccuses money (Antigone a line A tyrant with with Horrid in preoccupied money. Big Laugh': Laughter the one Creon of being Dodds: see my Commentary misunderstood by 897-912, a passage Drama in Arion (20031 Euripides' Bacchae 6 Money, and 11.2. see Dionysus, 7 For references my 17 n.5. establishment James Morwood presumably announced its has in which Dionysus 8 The passage course Dionysus had no reason to manuscript. But of been lost from the his mind. suddenly change
If ld known what I was laughing at when I was laughing, I wouldn't have laughed. (overheard by Alan Ayckbourn after a performance of one of his darker plays)
In one of his Elizabethan essays published in 1934, T.S. Eliot suggested that we should take Marlowe's Christopher grisly Jew of Malta 'not as a tragedy, or as a of blood', but as a farce. "tragedy He went on to say that he was talking of the farce of the old English humour, the terribly serious, even savage comic humour.. a (p. 28). In famous Royal Shakespeare Company staging of the Clifford play by Williams in 1965, I recollect the audience falling about with as it laughter responded with horror to the hellish cosmos which Marlowe was Then in 1979 exploring. Nicholas Brooke developed Eliot's insight - though without strangely acknowledgement - in his Horrid Laughter in Jacobean He Tragedy. justly remarks that Lear's fool should be funny if he can, but his do - jokes not relieve they aggravate the tension. The Gravedigger in Hamlet is but he is lighter, light about death, just as Macbeth's Porter is about Hell. And so on ..(p. 4). Michael Silk, in his Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy (2000), clearly believed that the appreciation of the profoundly serious jesting which can so tragedy eloquently exploit had not to students of Greek meaningfully spread tragedy. He remarked that 'it is to easy point to amusing scenes or characters in even if the tragedy, amusement often has a black edge: the porter in Macbeth, the foot-shuftling guard in Antigone, the cross-dressing in Bacchae are cases in but he point' (p. 59); still felt the need to conduct an extended discussion to break down unreal oppositions between comedy and tragedy (pp. 42-97).