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Home , Agave (Theban princess), Dirce, Ino (Greek mythology), Menoeceus, Pentheus

Origins: Thebes an “Anti-Athens”: In Ion, the problematic aspects of birth from the soil were avoided: • violence is transformed into reunion and love • barrenness and sterility into continuity and a flourishing lineage, Creusa and her descendants eventually populate all of and the islands.

Darlinghurst graffiti

©HardieBoys http://www.flickr.com/photos/jlpt/3799557419/sizes/l/in/photostream/

http://www.keiointernational.com/exchange/diary4/ / Remains of the Cadmea destroyed by Alexander the Great, 335 BCE

http://jackiabroad.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/delphi-greece-and-surrounding-area.html Thebes a mirror of Athens: 1. Thebes had a fortified acropolis, the Cadmea and a lower city 2. Like Athens, the Thebes of myth and tragedy was ruled by kings whose ancestors emerged from the earth and the Theban people were descended from them. 3. There is divinity in the Theban lineage, however it is not as direct as the Athenians who were engendered from Hephaestus’ semen. 4. There is a problem of continuity and survival of the autochthous lineage. As with Kekrops and his daughters, there were no survivors to continue the line of Amphion and Zethus, builders of the walls of Thebes. 5. The Thebans also have a tradition of an autochthonous child who, like the daughters of Erechtheus, voluntarily sacrifices himself for the sake of the city: ’s adolescent son .

Froma I. Zeitlin, 1990. “Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama”, in J. Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin (eds.), Nothing to Do with ? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, Princeton U.P, 130-67. ------, 1993. “Staging Dionysus Between Thebes and Athens”, in Masks of Dionysus”, in T. Carpenter and C. Farone, Cornell U.P., 147-82 Thebes an “Anti-Athens”:

The tragedians represent Thebes as a city : 1. that fails move past its origins, repeating them over and over 2. that originated in violence which it cannot escape. 3. that fails to establish regular heterosexual marriage and reproduction . 4. that fails to establish legitimate and stable rule 5. that fails to establish ordered relations between the generations and between the sexes 6. the dramatists never depict the establishing of civic institutions such as law courts at Thebes or 7. alliances with other cities Dionysus and https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/ prec/www/course/mythology/ Amphora, ca 500 BCE 0700/dionysus.htm

Dionysos, the dangerous god of wine, wet, wild and fertile nature, the god, as I said last time, of altered states of consciousness; the god of the drama; the god of masks, illusion and changed identity Death of . kylix, ca. 480 BC.

https://www.kimbellart.org/sites/default/files/tms/AP2000_02_MAIN_VIEW2_1.jpg Αpollo and Artemis killing the children of Niobe. calyx krater. 450 BCE

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ 27906589@N05/5224478999/sizes/l/in/photostream/ ©License All rights reserved by La Fuente Egeria tied to a bull by Zetes and Amphion Roman wall painting, Pompeii ca 60–79 CE

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zetoyanfion.jpg Kills the Dragon of Calyx-Krater C4th BCE.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kadmos_dragon_Louvre_N3157.jpg The surviving (sown men): Oudaios, Chthonios, , Pelor, Hyperenor.

Great Yarmouth sand sculpture festival, 2006 Image©TheScian.com http://www.flickr.com/photos/63965847@N00/212326297/sizes/z/in/photostream/ The Line of Cadmus

Amphion and Zethus

Cadmus

Autonoe Aristaios Polydoros Nycteis Echion

Actaeon Dionysos Pentheus

Amphion and Zethus abducts Pelops’ son Chrysippos Menoeceus Laius Creon

Oedipus Adrastos

Argelia Polyneices Eteokles Menoeceus

Thersandros Birth of Dionysus. Proto-Apulian volute krater 5th - 4th BCE.

image source: http://poster.4teachers.org/ imgFileWizard/46541.jpg / Bacchante. white-ground kylix, 490–80 BCE.

One struck with her thrysus and cold fresh water leapt forth. Another touched her fennel staff to earth and up flowed springs of wine. Those who longer for milk dug with bare fingers and it came welling up. Pure honey began to flow from their ivied wands. If you had been there and seen What I have seen, you’d supplicate and pray to Dionysos, not condemn him …

At the appointed time, the women whirled their thrysoi for the revels to begin, calling on Bromios [thunderer], “Iacchos son of Zeus”. At this cry, everything that lived, all the beasts and all the mountain, went wild with divinity. And when the women ran, everything ran with them. 700ff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:Mainade_Staatliche_Antikensammlun gen_2645.jpg Bacchae

They swooped down on our grazing cattle, not with weapons of iron, but with their bare hands. You would have seen one woman, by herself, with just her hands, tear in two a young udder-gorged, bellowing heifer while others were dismembering full-grown cattle,clawing them to pieces. You would have seen ribs and hooves scattered everywhere, flying through the air, and scarps smeared with blood hanging in the fir trees…. 730ff Images from ,! National Theatre, 2002 directed by Peter Hall

image source: http://microsites.nationaltheatre.org.uk/? lid=1191&dspl=images&imgid=1923 PENTHEUS: It seems to me I see two suns blazing in the heavens and two cities of Thebes, each with seven gates. You lead me forward, so it seems, as a bull with two horns upon your head. Were you all this time an animal? For now I see a bull. 917ff.

Follow, I shall take you safely there; another shall bring you back. PENTHEUS . . . She who gave birth to me. DIONYSOS You'll be set apart, remarkable to all. . . PENTHEUS It is for that I go. DIONYSOS You will be carried home— PENTHEUS You speak of pampering me— DIONYSOS In your mother’s arms... PENTHEUS Utter luxury...you will spoil me DIONYSOS Spoil you, indeed... PENTHEUS I go to my reward... 964ff

image source: http://microsites.nationaltheatre.org.uk/? lid=1191&dspl=images&imgid=1923 His mother, like a priestess with a victim, was the first to begin the slaughter. She fell on him, and he, desperate for wretched Agave to recognize him, tore the headband from his hair, and touching her cheek, shrieked, “Its me, Mother. Pentheus your son, the child you bore to Echion! Pity me, spare me, Mother! I have done a wrong but do not kill me.” But she was foaming at the mouth, her eyes rolling in frenzy. She was mad stark mad, possessed by Bacchos; what Pentheus said was nothing to her. Seizing his arm and planting her foot against his ribs, she tore the arm out of the shoulder socket—not by her own strength but the god made it come away easily in her hands.

http://sunnysideup2006-7.blogspot.com.au/2007/09/ contemporary-masks.html DIONYSOS: Upon you, Agave, and on your sisters I pronounce this doom: you shall leave this city in expiation of the murder you have done… [He turns to Cadmus.] You, Cadmus, shall be changed to a serpent, and your wife, the child of Ares, immortal Harmonia, shall undergo your doom, a serpent too. With her, it is your fate to go on a journey in a cart drawn on by oxen, leading behind you a great barbarian host. … so huge its numbers cannot be counted. 1335 You shall ravage many cities; but when your army plunders the shrine of Apollo, its homecoming shall be perilous and hard. Yet in the end the god Ares shall save Harmonia and you and bring you both to live among the blest. So say I, born of no mortal father, 1340 Dionysos, true son of Zeus. If then, when you would not, you had understood your mortal natures the son of Zeus would have been your ally. You would now be in blessedness. … CADMUS: We have learned. But your sentence is too harsh. DIONYSOS: I am a god. You outraged my divinity. CADMUS: Gods should be exempt from human passions.

http://www.mvdaily.com/articles/2002/06/bacchae1.htm 1. Dionysus blurs all boundaries and dissolves all rigid oppositions: master/servant, male/female, human/animal, hunter/hunted, rational/irrational, human/god, nature/civilization.

2. The violence in the play is an externalization of the internal, psychological violence in the human characters. Dionysus is a catalyst for human beings to enact their true natures.

3. The wearing of women’s clothing dramatizes the regressive and neurotic elements already present in Pentheus’ character.

4 What we witness in this play is Pentheus’ psychological disintegration into psychosis:

(a) Dionysus triggers/releases in Pentheus his own uncontrollable, repressed desire to see his mother and aunts (and the other Theban women) in sexual and drunken abandon .

(b) Once Pentheus succumbs to his repressed neurotic desire to see the women, he regresses still further to an infantile desire for the "softness" and "luxury” of being held in his mother’s arms (968-70).

5. Ultimately, Pentheus' physical dismemberment is an enactment of/ symbolic of his psychological disintegration. Euripides Bacchae structure

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