SOURCE: Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, "Bacchae and Ion: Tragedy and Religion," in The Masks of Tragedy: Essays on Six Greek Dramas, University of Texas Press, 1963, pp. 103-52.

[In the following essay, Rosenmeyer questions whether Bacchae and Ion are "religious tragedies in the proper sense of the word" and concludes that the plays express very different attitudes about the relationship between gods and men.]

Appear, in the shape of a bull or a many
 headed
serpent, or lion breathing fire!
Come, Bacchus, and with laughing face
coil the deadly rope around the huntsman
of the Bacchae, to be trodden under by the
      women's stampede!

Thus the chorus, immediately before the messenger enters to describe the death of Pentheus (1017). The invocation is significant on many counts; for the moment we are concerned with the god's laugh. "With laughing face" or "with laughing mask," the Greek may mean either. The expectation is geared pictorially rather than auditorily; the epiphany will be centered in the cast of the holy countenance. But how are we to imagine it—that is to say, how did the Athenian craftsman shape the mask of Dionysus? Did he mold it into an archaic smile, gentle, refined, charmingly supercilious, the smile of the handsome marble youths who died in the Persian Wars? Or are we to visualize a Gorgon grin, a grimace of malformed jaw and lolling tongue? Is Dionysus' laugh bestial or Olympian, subhuman or superhuman? The latter, no doubt, at least so far as the maskmaker is concerned. The stranger is a handsome man, a pretty fellow, as Pentheus readily admits (453), and an archaic smile would be just the thing to create the visual effect of effeminacy. But if we can forget the maskmaker and the stage and the awkward requirements of a physical production, and listen to the poetry itself, the laugh turns out to be both a smile and a grimace, a token of blessing and the sealing of a curse. For such is the will of Dionysus.

In any case, the laughter is expressive of the gulf between god and man. It is remarkable how few references there are in Greek literature, particularly in the epic and in tragedy, to men smiling or softly laughing. We find much about derision and ridicule and triumphant scoffing, the exultant shout which comes from the fear of defeat temporarily diverted. Ancient man, in most of the tragedies, is too busy seeking the means of safety or of greatness to achieve by his own strength the equilibrium and the wisdom without which happiness and gentle laughter do not occur. The sea laughs; a meadow smiles; so will the god, on occasion. But man cannot unbend and relax, for he lacks the unselfconsciousness, the simple assurance of the natural being. Except in the escapist genre of the romance—and that includes the Odyssey—men are characterized by toil (620):

Breathing hard he was, and sweat was
 trickling down his frame,

his teeth were clamped on his lips, while I,
  close by,
sat quietly and looked on.

This is how Dionysus describes the difference between the man of action and himself, the breach separating human struggling from divine unconcern.

Divine laughter has nothing to do with sympathy or fellow feeling. The god does not love his children, though the Stoics in a later generation talked as if he did. In classical Greek thought the love of God is a matter of social distinction; God loves only those who are manifestly successful in the temporal affairs of this world. Divine love is not an axiom of theology but an explanatory concept ready to be cited whereever prosperity appears to be undeserved. Nor is the laughter of the god a chuckle of amusement. In the Odyssey, it is true, Odysseus manages to amuse Athena, but that is a sign of his uniqueness. Generally the gods of the epic amuse one another but they are not amused by the antics of men, and that is doubly true of the gods of tragedy. We may contrast the post-Romantic conception of Zorba, in Kazantsakis' recent Zorba the Greek, that Zeus smiles pityingly at the touching weakness of women, and that in fact he turns philanderer out of a mixture of sympathy and amusement. God is also a man, capable of suffering and sensing the sufferings of others. But this is not what we find on the Attic stage. Dionysus always stands apart from men; when he smiles—and he smiles throughout the play—it is the smile of the Sphinx, the icy mask of unconcern and abstraction.

Zorba tries to bridge the gulf between the divine tradition and social exigency. To find a fulcrum for his world of sentiment and temptation he remakes Zeus into a figure mixed in equal portions of Jesus and Don Juan. The Greeks of the classical period also were faced with the same difficulty, how to make sense of their accounts of the gods in the light of new social experiences, of the laws of the city, of marital ethics, of the values of a progressive civilization. But unlike Zorba, the Athenian of the fifth century B.C. is too enlightened to allow his god the benefit of human affections, particularly of human sympathy. Or, to put it differently, classical Greek tragedy does not permit sympathy or fellow feeling to provide solutions for the tragic dilemma. The gods do not willingly lower themselves to help men. But, if we are to believe the old stories told about them, the gods often behave as if they were the worst of men.

Apollo's fatherhood of Ion is a direct intrusion of the divine into human life. As for the Bacchae, the myth has it that Pentheus and Dionysus are grandsons of Cadmus. The presence of Cadmus on the stage continually reminds us that the man and the god are blood cousins. This is not exceptional; both Greek myth and Greek religion range god and man in the closest proximity. Of Heracles and Niobe we are given to understand that they were both human and divine. Of Helen we know that she was a goddess before she came to be featured as a mortal heroine. Amphiaraus and Brasidas and Alexander were worshipped as gods though they had once, as everybody would admit, been men. Man is potentially a god; and yet the gods are infinitely apart. This is a paradox with which every Greek thinker worth his salt came to grips sooner or later. Plato and Aristotle wrestle with it in their discussions of the soul; the soul, they find, is both divine and human, both immortal and subject to change. Here we have the basic crux of the pagan creed, perhaps of all religion, but most pressing in a society that worships heroes and recognizes deification.

All Greek drama to some extent touches on this ambivalence. But usually the religious predicament is marginal, an element used for the dramatization of other, nonreligious issues. Only occasionally, as in the two plays under consideration, the question about the gods comes to inform the very heart of the drama. In one thing, however, all plays are agreed: the god must not be made to mingle with the mortals on the stage. The stage is reserved for sufferers and potential sufferers, and this disqualifies the gods, for, in spite of some thumping frolic in the Iliad and the extravaganzas of Orphic myth, the gods cannot suffer pain or grief, much less death. Hence when a deity appears in a tragedy he is set apart from the other actors and the chorus, often towering above them on a raised platform. If the god were to be one of the crowd, the effect would be comical, as is convincingly shown in Greek comedy. Generally, also, tragedy features him only in the Prologue and the Epilogue, outside of the dramatic action proper. Thus by virtue of the conventions of tragedy the god is kept free of the pollution of human involvement. The only extant play in which Euripides departs from the tradition and puts the god on the floor of the orchestra is the Bacchae. But even there he makes a distinction between the god who speaks the Prologue and the Epilogue—the true and undisguised divinity who has his epiphany on the roof of the palace—and the unearthly stranger who mixes and yet does not mix with the other characters. In spite of the disguise the audience knows that the stranger is Dionysus. Actually, can we speak of a disguise? It is unlikely that the Dionysus of the Prologue wears a costume and mask different from those of the Dionysus in the play. The pretty face and the delicate bearing were becoming recognized as important facets of the Bacchic personality; in art, too, the majesty of the black-figure Dionysus was being replaced by the languorous elegance of the fourth-century portraits of the god. If there is a disguise, then, it is one of conduct rather than clothes. The god in the play seems to be human. This is a daring attempt to picture the intrusion of the divine into the human scene in the form of living drama. Whether it is unique we cannot say; there were other plays about Dionysus, notably by Aeschylus, in which a similar technique may have been used. But those other plays are lost; for us the Bacchae remains an unparalleled experiment, an example of what can be done with the traditional material and the traditional forms by way of almost destroying tragedy as it is usually understood. For in writing this play Euripides seems to come close to creating the medieval mystery play. There is a critical widening of the tragic frame; human heroism and human suffering appear to be pushed into the background, and the miracle of divine being occupies the center of the stage. It is perhaps significant that the Bacchae was written at the end of the fifth century B.C., when classical tragedy had run its course. But this is not to say that the play is anomalous. As we have seen, Greek tragedy is a vehicle for many different ideas and many different intentions. The religious focus of the Bacchae is merely another realization of the rich potential of classical drama.

The stranger has no name. Even if he had one it would not be understood. "Does anyone understand the name of something when he does not know what the something is?" (Plato, Theaetetus, 147B). He is a walking mystery, an unintelligible mask. He refers to himself as a follower of Dionysus. But in the salient passages Euripides exercises a great virtuosity to avoid a clear-cut statement of duality. Those who know, the audience attuned to the ambiguities of the genre, will understand that when the stranger talks about Dionysus he is really talking about himself. Pentheus asks him (469) whether the god "forced" him—that is his term for "possessed" or "converted"; the verb he uses also means "to rape"—whether the god forced him at night or with his eyes open. The answer of the stranger, freely translated "face to face," is in fact untranslatable. Suffice it to say that he uses two participles of the verb "to see," one in the nominative and one in the accusative case, but without the assistance of a personal pronoun to apportion the activities distinctly and objectively. This is verbal conjuring. There are more tricks of the same sort (477):

PENTHEUS: YOU say you saw the god; what is his shape?

DIONYSUS: Whichever he chooses; it is not my decision.

Or again (495):

PENTHEUS: Come, then, release the thyrsus; hand it to me!

DIONYSUS: You'll have to force me; the staff belongs to Bacchus.

Compare also: "My locks are those of Dionysus" (494); "The god will free me whenever I wish" (498); "In injuring me you are imprisoning him" (518). The effect of all this is that in the minds of those who are alert to the divine charade, the stranger and Dionysus merge into one, as indeed they are one. In the unseeing eyes of Pentheus, the stranger produces the worst kind of mystification. But without some mystification a god cannot show himself on earth. Like an oracle, an embodied god must hedge his divinity with darkness and punning and formal proliferation. At any event, in spite of the tricks, the stranger does not become sufficiently part of the human scene to appear just cunning or deceitful. With his fixed smile he preserves his separateness and a kind of sublimity which even Pentheus can sense.

In the Ion Apollo does not show his face at all, neither within the drama nor in the Prologue or Epilogue. And no wonder, for a sovereign god in a tragedy ought to be shown as an august species of machine, colossal, imperious, automatic. But this will not do for Apollo the cosmic rake, the morganatic spouse of Creusa. So Euripides keeps him off the stage and has him represented by counsel, Hermes, a poor cousin, and Athena, a cheerful suffragette. Both of them are at best half-hearted advocates. Behind the expressions of solidarity and the diplomatic explanations one perceives a note of detachment, as if Hermes and Athena were not in their hearts convinced that Apollo has a case. Of course he doesn't; that is the burden of the play. And not having a case he forfeits bail and stays away from the courthouse on the day of the trial. In the Bacchae much of the power of the play derives from the presence of the god; in the Ion the important thing is the absence of the god. Here, then, are two plays, both working with a religious subject, with the intrusion into the lives of men of the world of the gods, both dealing with the gods' cruelty to man. And yet, how different in conception, in mood and form!

But are these religious plays, and if so, in what sense? We are inclined to think that the ancient repertory must include some religious drama, for we suspect that religious tragedy is possible only in a pagan world. Jewish monotheism has no room for it. True tragedy presupposes the unresolved coexistence of two opposed poles, of man and god, or of god and god, or god and devil. No such coexistence is possiblein the terms of serious Jewish thought. In the realm of Christianity, too, tragedy can live only where pagan lingerings are strong, where being can be pitted against being and where the outcome is not foreordained by the omnipotence of the good. One may go further and say that tragedy cannot flourish except where paganism asserts itself over Christianity. Some of Shakespeare's tragedies are obvious cases in point. Goethe's Faust ceases to be a tragedy, if it ever is one, the moment the Queen of Heaven begins to exercise her grace. But if it is true that tragedy is uniquely a function of pagan thought, of the belief in many gods and in the godliness of some men, then it is only fair to expect that there is some ancient tragedy which is so closely tied to the religious experience as to merit the designation "religious drama." Both the Ion and the Bacchae are about the gods and their dealings with men. But are they religious tragedies in the proper sense of the word, that is, tragedies arising out of, and only out of, the problematic nature of religious faith or religious action, and grappling with the problems in a manner somehow parallel to that of the theologians or the philosophers?

The answer is that they are not, or at any rate that to call them religious tragedies pure and simple would do violence to the special intentions of each. In the Ion the divinity of Apollo is the demonstrand or refutand of a debate. With the telling of the myths Apollo's divine nature has become questionable, and with it the whole tradition of religious tales. A god is weighed in the scale of human standards and found seemingly wanting, a god with a hamartia, a flaw which causes a disturbance in the lives of men. Euripides has managed to write an inverted Oedipus, with the flaw located in Olympus rather than in a now unheroic humanity. Apollo is the real object of the play's search, he is not a symbol. But we should not forget that the Apollo whose sordid biography we are invited to contemplate is an Apollo of myths, a god of nursery tales and family trees, not the god whom Socrates saw fit to follow and whom Plato adopted as the inspirer of moral philosophy.

In the Bacchae Dionysus, in spite of his presence on stage, or perhaps because of it, is largely a symbol; the entity weighted in the scale is not a god, but men, as in all great tragedy. The precariousness of human greatness is here shown from a special angle: the godlikeness of man. For Pentheus, as a fighter against the god, places himself on the same level as his adversary. It turns out that this god-likeness is a trap and a deception, and that man is not so close to God as he may suppose. But this shows us that the concern of the poet is with man. As we shall see directly, even the religious experience described, the ecstasy and the hallucinations and the holy rolling, are not there as ends in themselves but mean to tell us something about the nature of man, man as a whole being rather than man as a worshipper. Thus, strange as it may seem, the Bacchae is less of a religious drama than the Ion is, and even the Ion is a very unusual specimen of the class.

ii

In the Bacchae the action of the god is direct and immediate; he touches the people and they respond. In the Ion it is not the god himself who affects the characters but what is told about him. As in the history of Herodotus we have here a distinction between what the Greeks call ta onta and ta legomena, between things which are and things which exist in reports, between reality experienced at first hand and reality mediated by word of mouth and pondered and analyzed. Both can be shattering in their effect. Some critics have said that the Ion deals with a rape, but that the plot is not sordid or squalid because the rape is committed by a god. One wonders what Xenophanes or Plato or Voltaire might have said to this. The truth is that the reality which sets the plot going is not a rape but the memory of a rape. The characters are affected, more or less directly, by a memory; their revulsion—and such it surely is—is not aesthetic, but intellectual and moral. It is of course true of all Greek tragedy, in contradistinction to that of Seneca, that it bypasses the bodily senses and makes its appeal to the imagination. Like death, a rape must not be communicated directly. To preserve the intended effect it must be stripped of its accidents and be entrusted to a messenger, who will unfold its essential magnitude. In the messenger's telling, or in the evocation of the memory, the rape attains an ideal status, and acquires the special purity which comes with isolation. At the same time this ideal concentration is brought about at the cost of material force. The rape does not shock, it merely worries and perplexes, and in the end generates questions as the viewing of the gross event could not have done.

Likewise the disappointment within the play is not so much for what Apollo has done or not done, but largely for what he has said or not said. He is a cad, but more important, he appears to be a liar. Again it is the intellectual phase of the problem which interests the poet. Apollo's failure to speak the truth is particularly disconcerting because he is supposed to be the exponent of oracular truth. Above all, this must be disturbing to Ion, the unspoiled youth, simple and good and credulous like Daphnis or Candide or any other adolescent hero of romance, with this distinction that he grows up to be a man. Ion thirsts for the truth, and in this he is more Apollinian than Apollo. He expects his god to behave like a god. As a matter of fact his expectation is unwarranted. If you have been raised on the kind of tales which Ion is bound to have heard from earliest youth, it is unrealistic to suppose that the gods do not lie and commit adultery. As it turns out, even this faithful servant of the god does not require much evidence to turn against his idol. The tales had conditioned him, and the present intelligence comes as a final confirmation. True, Euripides makes out that he is an unsuspecting youth and that Creusa's tale shocks him to the marrow of his bones. But Greek tragedy with its large-scale compression does not leave much room for a precise recording of the slow process of attrition which is involved in the overcoming of piety by doubt. Hence Ion begins to doubt as soon as the tale is out, and this makes psychological sense only because the speed with which his conservatism succumbs has its analogue in the hearts of the audience. Ion, like Creusa (1017), likes to think that the good and the bad do not mix. But he is an intelligent boy, and so he is quick to notice it when he finds Apollo offending against the canons of his strait-laced morality (436):

       What is happening to Phoebus?
I must admonish him. To ravish young girls
And then betray them? To beget sons in
 secret
and callously let them die? No! As our lord,
you ought to set an example …

Outwardly the Ion shows the same development as the Oedipus Rex: progressive self-recognition accompanied by an increasing insight into divine irresponsibility. But the analogy is trivial. For Oedipus the experience is deadly; it destroys his very being as a king and a man. In the Ion the knowledge gained is not ruinous but merely frustrating. Frustration is one of the keynotes of the play; at one time or another all the main characters are made to fret over the obstacles in their way. Even Hermes, ostensibly an uncommitted bystander, is subjected to frustration, for the play does not come off as he had predicted in the Prologue (69):

When Xuthus enters this oracular shrine
Apollo will hand him his own son, and say
that Xuthus fathered him, so the boy will go
to Athens and Creusa accept him, and
Apollo's wenching will not come to light.

Everything said about the gods tends to associate them with meanness but even more with ineffectualness. Apollo is a bounder, and with him the gods in general are reduced to a low level of force and authority. With little respect for human feelings, they try to arrange things as smoothly as they can, and fumble their operations. The accent is on the fumbling rather than on the intention. Eventually Ion and Creusa and Xuthus turn out to be luckier than the gods, for their mistakes are righted and their blindness is cured, while Apollo, in spite of Athena's busy glossing, could not possibly forget all the botching he has done. One may feel, though Ion does not, that a god has the right to offend against human moral standards. But clearly a god should be able to follow through with his actions and not have his plans aborted. His rape of Creusa still leaves him a god; but this cannot be said of his various ill-fated attempts to cover up the affair.

Ion's discovery of his parentage is also a process of maturation. Within the confines of the play the boy grows up to be a man. But the mature Ion is no more understanding than the boy, only less at ease with himself and less at ease with others. The simple, slightly domineering familiarity which characterized his relations with the chorus (221 ff.) is replaced by suspicion and resentment. In the Oedipus the acquisition of knowledge touches the hero's relation with himself; in the Ion it affects his relation to society. This is true also of other plays by Euripides. The poet is interested in the group, in the interaction between purposes and wills and destinies, rather than in the fate or the feelings of an isolated individual. Often we are given to understand that there is no reason why society should not function happily, that the intentions of men if left to themselves are quite compatible, and that friction sets in only when the gods decide to interfere and use men for their own amusement. That this is the case in the Ion requires no demonstration; the idea that human beings misbehave toward one another only at the instigation of the gods is basic to the dramatic plan.

The idea is powerfully supported by the use of specific elements of language and dramaturgy, such as the business of the Gorgon's blood (987 ff., 1054). When Creusa finds her position threatened by Ion, the availability of the Gorgon's blood suggests to her a way of eliminating him. That this is the heavy hand of the gods steering the human agent is made apparent by the form of the scene. Creusa does not simply say: "Here I have a vial with a deadly poison; let's use it." Nothing so straightforward as this, for it would saddle Creusa with the guilt. Instead she lectures the old man on a chapter of mythology. Pedantically, laboriously, she conducts him through the labyrinthine turns of the ancient story: the gods fought the giants at Phlegra, Earth bore the Gorgon to help the giants, Athena killed the Gorgon and used her dead form for manufacturing the aegis; later when Erichthonius, the founding father of Attica, was born, Athena gave him two drops of the blood of the Gorgon, stored in two golden capsules now attached to Creusa's wrist. One of the drops heals, the other kills, and this Creusa now proposes to use against Ion. Our brief summary does not convey the true feeling of the passage. Extending over thirty lines of text it proceeds with a slow, circumstantial monotony, as if every single step in the chain of causation leading back to the holy wars of the gods had to be fully cited to provide the plot with the proper authority. There is something of the rhythm and the mood of a ritual service about this rehearsal of the divine beginnings. Before she can kill her man, Creusa has to communicate with the gods through a sort of mock litany and assure herself of their participation.

Mythology furnishes many examples of the iniquities of the gods. The Ion bursts at the seams with mythological detail, especially as affecting the Athenian royal house. In the light of the stories about the gods' dealings with Creusa's ancestors, Apollo's failure to live up to his responsibilities becomes only the latest in a long series of divine mischief. The chorus begins by describing scenes from the fights between gods and giants and monsters engraved on the metopes of the temple (206 ff.). Then Ion asks Creusa to tell him about Athens, and she obliges with detailed information about earth-born Erichthonius, Cecrops and his daughters, and Erechtheus. The Bacchae has nothing like this mythological fullness, not even in the speech of Cadmus, where we might have expected to find it. In the Ion the mythological decor is pervasive, it is a significant aspect of the style of the play. That style is perhaps best described as baroque. The writing and the structure are not pared down to bare essentials, as they are in some other plays by Euripides. In contrast to the unpretentiousness of the action and the obviousness of the emotions released by the action, the language is lush and gilded. Take the description of the woven tapestries in the tent where Ion almost meets his death (1146):

And traced into the scheme there was a
 pattern,
the Sky marshaling stars in his bright vault;
the Sun driving his chariot near the glow
of dusk, with glittering Hesperus in his
 wake.
Black-mantled Night escorted by her stars
careened along in a two-horse equipage.
The Pleiades and Orion with his sword
coursed through the midway of the sky;
 high up
the Bear twisting his golden back around
 the pole.
The orb of the Moon, divider of the month,
pierced high into heaven; and the Hyades,
the sailors' clearest sign, and, scattering
the stars, light-wielding Dawn …

The description of the design on the tapestry continues. The translation tries to give a sense of the irregularities of syntax; the catalogue seems to stumble along in a breathless and ill-organized fashion. The significant thing about it is that all this is part of a messenger speech which starts out as a call to the girls of the chorus to flee for their lives. The terrible danger seems to be forgotten temporarily as the girls absorb the colorful spectacle of the tent. There is no doubting the lavishness of the decoration; expense is no object as Ion celebrates his new-found importance. But what do the sun and the moon and the stars have to do with this phase of the action?

Again, take the design on the cloth in the cradle (1421 ff.); Athena's aegis and the Gorgon seem to grin down upon the action throughout. In this case the choice of the decor is meaningfully tied to the plot. But the particular choice is less significant than the emphasis on the pictorial as such. This insistence on externals and, on occasion, irrelevancies is a hallmark of the play. I suggest that the baroque quality and the concentration on the gods are strands of the same cord. For once, the life on Olympus forms the sum and substance of the drama. Homer is at his most colorful when he describes the comings and goings of the gods. When dealing with men a Greek writer must probe into their souls, into those intangibles of choice and action which call for compression and abstraction rather than for richness of color and expansiveness. The gods have no souls, particularly the species of gods with whom Euripides is here concerned. The life of the god is all on the surface; its meaning exhausts itself in splendid appearance and tangible façade. And when the god under consideration is a busy body or a rake, when the life placed under the lens is a night life, the tendency toward color and flourish is given full rein.

But the analogy with the Iliad is not complete. Homer shows us that the life of the gods among themselves has no real substance. They cannot die, they cannot suffer for long, and so their actions and interactions unfold themselves in an air of unreality, of weightlessness. It is impossible to take seriously the threats of an Ares or the boasts of a Zeus, for they are not supported by peril or doubt. As is well known, Homer often uses his gods for something very much like comic relief. When the human battle has reached its most critical stage, when mortal suffering has risen to its peak of intensity and pain, Homer changes the scene to the palaces of the gods and gives our sensibilities a chance to relax as we watch the escapades of those who can do all and risk nothing. In their affairs with men, on the other hand, the Homeric gods ask to be taken very seriously. When Athena counsels Achilles or when Poseidon rallies the Greeks to resist, they become part of the human scene. Their personalities are affected by the weightiness of the situation which prompts their intervention. Not so in the Ion; here divine insubstantiality remains untouched even as Apollo descends to earth and performs his human business. A god who is concerned with preserving his reputation in the face of men, who tries to squirm his way out of the consequences of an ill-considered act, is a god who makes us laugh so long as he does not make us angry. The temple background suggests an aura of solemnity, but that is an illusion. The god of the drama is a funny god; and that means that the drama, in addition to being unusually colorful and extravagant in form, is unorthodox in spirit. In fact, it is not a tragedy in the modern sense at all.

The touches of humor are, some of them, broad; others are more subtle. Ion is perfectly satisfied with his lot as Apollo's spiritual son; in his piety he refers to him as "the father who begot me" (136); the sequel indicates that he is using a liturgical metaphor. But as soon as he finds out that the metaphor may not be a metaphor at all, his satisfaction changes into displeasure. Every blue-blooded Greek counted it an honor and a social necessity to be descended from a god, but it never occurred to them to understand this fiction literally. Ion's scruples coincide with the values of Plato's Symposium, in which we read that a spiritual progeny is more valuable than a physical child. But put in the mouth of this long-lost prince, such sentiments are bound to amuse rather than convince. The old servant also contributes to the fun. Creusa is not an Antigone, she needs an agent who will do the plotting for her. But the old man is not one of those wise and trusted counselors who direct the steps of heroes and heroines in other plays. He is drawn as a caricature of old age and of doting zeal. He is so ancient, so decrepit, that he can barely move his legs and has to be pulled along the Sacred Way as if it were a perpendicular ascent (738 ff.). And when he proposes to burn down the temple of Apollo (974) he is a comic and therefore pardonable Herostratus. Compare the Clouds, in which a somewhat different temple is actually burned, in response to a heartfelt desire on the part of the audience. The old man is a fool, but he is the sort of fool whom the people will suffer gladly, for his recklessness is a comic variety of their own.

One of the prominent features of Greek comedy is the parabasis, an address to the audience in which the members of the chorus disrupt the dramatic illusion by divesting themselves of their role in the play and talking about some topical issue which as a rule is unrelated to the subject of the drama. The Ion, too, has its "parabasis." This is the famous defense of women against the slander of unfaithfulness (1090 ff.), part of a choral ode sung immediately after Creusa and the old man have botched their plot. It is generally acknowledged that the thought of this passage has no discoverable connection with the theme and the plot, though Euripides takes some pains to pretend that it has. True, Euripides uses such choral thought pieces also in plays which contain no element of comedy. But here the lack of relevance is more than usually startling. The stanza reads as if Euripides needed to get this criticism of masculine prejudice off his chest and decided that this was as appropriate an occasion for it as any other. Similarly Ion's speech against the discomforts of being a prince in Athens (585 ff.) is a forensic argument which moves off on a tangent from the line of the play. Such ventures are possible only because the movement of the plot is not so compellingly aimed at an immediate target as to spurn embellishment and digression. The baroque brilliance of the drama leaves room for many things whose relevance is questionable but which in their turn contribute to the total effect of glitter and flourish and tumultuous fullness, of a kaleidoscopic world which teases the understanding.

This, then, is a play which is not high tragedy, which does not concern the inner man but god and society, which deals not with suffering but with adjustment. Its characters fight not for issues or causes but for survival and status. And the central character, who does not appear in his own person, is shown up as an irresponsible weakling, causing the human group dependent on him to forsake their decent ways for plotting and trickery and, almost, murder. Let us call the work a theological romance. As in the late Greek romances, decency is on trial, and men are herded through a baptism of pillage and rape and attempted slaughter before the hero and the heroine can once more settle down in domestic comfort. But in the novels the gods are not involved except to prophesy, to protect, or to punish. In the Ion the god is cast in the role usually reserved for the villain, the pirate, or the landlord who assails the virtue of the lady and sets off the chain reaction of pains and revenges. In some romances, as in the Aethiopica of Heliodorus, villains reform and turn into friends. In the pulp literature of antiquity this kind of conversion can be effected without much ado; characters count for less than the extraordinary events by which they are buffeted about, and the moral dividing-line between heroes and villains is remarkably thin. In fifth-century drama an analogous conversion must leave a residue of uncertainty and embarrassment. Apollo, through his representatives, attempts to see to the happiness of Creusa and Ion and Xuthus, but he comes up against the hard fact that human beings are not as easily manipulated as the romances would seem to suggest, and as the gods would like to believe. Men want their dignity and their rights; they think back and forward and connect the past with the future, and they worry if the accounts show a discrepancy. So the conversion from ravisher to protector runs into heavy opposition, and by the time the issues are settled the honor of the god is smudged beyond repair.

But in spite of the absence of smoothness and clichés, the story is a true romance. There is no tragic hero, and some measure of happiness comes to all. Men have something to which the gods are largely insensitive: kindness and sympathy. Oiktos, pity, is one of the key-words of the play (47, 312, 361, 618); even the temporary renunciation of pity, explicit as it is (970, 1276), testifies to the same emotion. In spite of the murder plot, and though Ion very nearly commits sacrilege and matricide, there is more downright humaneness in this play than in most other Euripidean dramas. The characters are civilized, generous people, easily injured, easily pleased, kind to slaves, ready to worship. Their warmth and their charity shame the gods. In the end Athena recognizes the strength of human benevolence. Ex machina she recommends a deception, from humane motives: to have Xuthus go on believing that Ion is his son (1601 f.). The whole play may serve as a lesson that deception is often kinder than the truth. This is also the strength of the myths. Intelligent people know that the stories are lies or based on lies; at the same time they admit that the myths have a civilizing force of their own. The gods whose bungling and whose erratic ways are analyzed in this play are the gods of the myths. Euripides has his fun with them, by mixing the divine with the human, the mythical with the religious, the fictitious with the real. It is hardly likely that a romance such as this would seriously affect the faith of the worshipper. After all, the myths are myths, and worship is worship, and though there may be a tie between them, to relate them to each other as Euripides does is entertaining rather than disillusioning, much less heretical. A play about the deeds of the gods and their effects on men must, in the nature of things, border on the whimsical. It cannot be a tragedy.

iii

But does not the Bacchae show that this conclusion is wrong? Is it not about a god, and is it not a true tragedy? Above I made a passing reference to the great contrast between the two plays. The list of differences could be extended indefinitely. Ion deals with a dreamy youth foiled in his endeavor to lead a contemplative life: the Bacchae pictures a powerful man foiled in the conduct of an active public life. In the Ion the contemplative life is frustrated by scruple and doubt; in the Bacchae the active life is undone by raw experience. Both plays are full of irony. But that of the Ion is almost genial; it produces the pleasantries that we associate with a comedy of errors, signaling the fallibility of men and gods. When the incredulous Creusa replies to Ion's command that she leave the altar (1307):

Go, dictate to your mother wherever she is!

irony reaches and perhaps overreaches the limits of good taste, but it remains within the bounds of reason. In the Bacchae the irony is diabolical; it reflects not questions of personal identity but the identity of meaning and the problem of identity itself. The stage of the Ion—I am speaking figuratively, for the real stages are of course indistinguishable—is filled with the clear bright light in which the metopes are admired by the tourists from Athens (184 ff.). In this merciless light the truth will out. It is the type of truth with which scholars and detectives deal; as Ion says at one point (1547),

I'll go indoors to scrutinize Apollo,

using the verb which a historian applies to his research. We are confident that the truth can be discovered, and we expect its formulation to be simple and straightforward; for the vision of Apollo is plastic and limited.

The illumination of the stage of the Bacchae is that of the womb; it is the darkness of birth and passion and death. Within this darkness the fire of Semele, the flame on the house, flare up with a foreboding sheen. Only the remoter vistas opening up with the messenger speeches are filled with the brightness of day: a contrast which marks the inner contradictions of the Dionysiac. In the Ion we hear the boy-grown-man say (1517):

The incandescent ambience of the Sun
opens our eyes to all that this day holds.

It is the same Sun whom Ion greets when he first enters the stage (82 ff.), and whom Creusa invokes at the moment of her greatest happiness (1445, 1467). But the Sun had shone also on the scene of her first suffering (887):

You came to me, Apollo, your hair
shining with gold, as I was gathering
into the fold of my dress yellow flowers,
gleaming with a gold of their own bloom.

The golden radiance of the Sun is pervasive; only the catastrophe is set in the chiaroscuro of the tent, with its artificial mirroring of Sun and Moon and Stars on dark canvas. In the Bacchae, Pentheus asks the stranger (485):

When do you worship, at night or during
 the day?

The answer:

Mostly by night; there is prestige in
 darkness.

Finally, the plays are far apart in structure and movement. The Ion is a lively play, spirited and intricate, full of heated discussions, songs and arias, spoken exchanges of unparalleled length, extended messenger speeches. Now and then an oration is interrupted by song or chant, with chorus and actors performing responsively. Every formal means of creating a complex and varied structure has been utilized for the sake of the romance. There are surprises, reversals, true and false recognitions, plottings and resolutions: all the baroque elements which Aristotle desired in a tragedy and which to spite him are so much more frequent in plays which are not tragedies. Here is one example among many. Xuthus bids the chorus not to reveal what has happened (666); a little later the chorus does just that (760). Fewer than a hundred lines pass between the request and the expose. Meanwhile the audience wonders whether the chorus will tell all, and when. This sort of suspense and this sort of technical brilliance are completely absent from the Bacchae. There the statement is terse, the pace regular, without the rallentandos and the accelerandos of the Ion, without elaborations or tricks, almost relaxed, if relaxation and compulsiveness can be said to go together. The fixed smile of the god suggests they do.

In the Ion the early scenes of temple worship, of rites performed happily and unaffectedly, are presented with great charm. As Ion addresses the broom on a note of homely camaraderie (112), the old-fashioned identification of simplicity and excellence, of beauty and virtue, seems securely established. We assume that the god is cherished and respectable and pure—for the Prologue, though disturbing, cannot by itself inaugurate a mood or a perspective—and repeated references to pure speech and pure thought (98 ff., 134 ff.) lull our senses into a false confidence. It is only with a violent effort, with a forcible reorganization of our feelings that we can face the scramble which follows. The Bacchae offers no similar misguiding; the disaster hangs over Pentheus from the moment he enters the stage. There is no rising curve, no choral acceleration, no emotional ups and downs, only an insistent heading toward the inevitable, formulated with economy and restraint. Here, in the case of a true tragedy, Euripides chooses to dispense with the frills, with dynamic and emotive refinement, and come straight to the point. It is like a return to the hieratic stiffness of the Seven Against Thebes. But Euripides goes even further than Aeschylus in removing the action from the undisciplined ferment of daily life. Both in the Prologue and in the entrances information is given out mechanically and abruptly. Whenever a character enters—Tiresias, Cadmus, Pentheus—he explains his status and his motivation, as circumstantially and undramatically as any clown in a Roman comedy. This makes for a full spectral illumination from the start; there is time enough later for dramatic confrontation. But it is not the random rhythm of the life of the streets, or of a work of art created in the image of that life.

iv

The Bacchae, like the Ion, is a tale about a god, but that is all they have in common. The Ion I called, perhaps for want of a better term, a theological romance. What, then, can we say about the Bacchae? Earlier I suggested that it is not intrinsically a religious drama. This flies in the face of certain critical assumptions which have recently gained currency. It has been suggested that Euripides' chief object in writing the drama was to give a clinical portrayal of what Dionysiac religion, hence Dionysus, does to men. According to this view, the Bacchae is a more or less realistic document, perhaps an anthropological account of an outburst of manic behavior, of a psychosis analogous to certain phenomena reported from the Middle Ages and not unknown in our own troubled times. The play has even been compared with a modern imaginative treatment of mass psychosis, Van Wyck Brooks' Oxbow Incident. I feel that this is mistaken, and for a very simple and obvious reason. Whatever one may say about the ancient tragedians, about the extravagant character of many of the plots, about the implausibility of much that is said and done, the fact remains that the writers are interested in what is typical, in the generic, or, as Aristotle has it, in the universal. To attribute to Euripides a study in abnormality is to indulge in an anachronism. Euripides is not the kind of dramatist, like Sartre, whose poetic urge is stimulated by small grievances rather than catholic insight. Nor is Euripides a scientific observer of sickness; he does not record, he creates. His material is ritual and mythical, and some of it clinical; but the product is something entirely different.

Pindar once uses the tale of Perseus cutting off the head of the Medusa as an image symbolizing the act of poetic creation: living ugliness is violently refashioned into sculptured beauty. The ferocity of the Bacchae is to be seen in the same light. By an act of literary exorcism the cruelty and the ugliness of a living experience are transmuted into the beauty of a large vision, a vision which is not without its own horror, but a horror entirely unlike that felt at the approach of the god. It is the kind of horror which Plato touches on in the Symposium and the Theaetetus, the sudden weakness and awe which get hold of the philosophic soul at the moment when she comes face to face with a like-minded soul and jointly ventures to explore the ultimate. Dionysus is only a means to an end; Euripides exploits the Dionysiac revels to produce a dramatic action which helps the spectators to consider the mystery and the precariousness of their own existence.

Aeschylus, notably in his Agamemnon but also in some of his other extant plays, appeals to the audience with an interplay of sounds and sights. With Aeschylus, language is not an instrument but an entity, a vibrant self-sufficient thing, working in close harmony with the brilliant objects filling the stage of the Oresteia. The word textures pronounced by the chorus, like the sentence patterns of the actors' speeches, stir the audience as violently as the sight of a crimson tapestry or the vision of evil Furies on the roof. Behind this sumptuous drapery of color and sound, personality takes second place. The characters are largely the carriers of images and speech. Sophocles introduces the personal life, the bios, into drama. Now a man is no longer largely the pronouncer of words, the proposer of ideas and emotions, but an independent structure involving a past and a future, a point of intersection for ominous antecedents and awful prospects. This emergence of the organic character, of the heroic life as the nucleus of drama, was a fateful step in the history of literature. Aeschylus also, in some of his later plays, adopted the new structuring for his own purposes.

Euripides goes further. He rejects the autonomy of speech as he rejects the autonomy of the personal life; instead he attempts to combine the two in an organic mixture of his own. In the Ion he gives us a parody of the pure bios form; mythology is squeezed into a biographical mold, with unexpectedly humiliating consequences for the great hero. In the Bacchae, on the other hand, it is in the end not the persons who count, nor the words or sound patterns though the play may well be the most lyrical of all Euripidean works, but the ideas. The Bacchae, in spite of its contrived brutality and its lyricism, is a forerunner of the Platonic dialogues. The smiling god is another Socrates, bullying his listeners into a painful reconsideration of their thinking and their values. That is not to say that we have here an intellectual argument, an academic inquiry into logical relations. That would fit the Ion better than the Bacchae. Rather, the Bacchae constitutes a poet's attempt to give shape to a question, to a complex of uncertainties and puzzles which do not lend themselves to discursive treatment. There is no clear separation of thesis and antithesis, of initial delusion and liberating doubt, nor is there anything like a final statement or a solution. Nevertheless the poem is cast in the philosophical mode. Sophocles, in the Oedipus Rex or the Ajax, takes a heroic life and fashions its tragic nexus to the world around it or to itself. Euripides, in the Bacchae, takes an abstract issue and constructs a system of personal relations and responses to activate the issue. He builds his lives into the issue, instead of letting the life speak for itself as Sophocles does.

The issue derives from a question which is simple and raw: What is man? As Dionysus remarks to Pentheus (506),

Your life, your deeds, your Being are
 unknown
to you.

For Plato, the human soul is a compound of the divine and the perishable, a meeting place of the eternal beyond and the passionate here. In the Phaedrus he puts the question more concretely. Socrates suggests that it is idle to criticize or allegorize mythology if one has not yet, as he himself has not, come to a satisfactory conclusion about his own nature and being (230A):

I try to analyze myself, wondering whether I
  am some kind of beast more
  heterogeneous and protean and furious
  than Typhon, or whether I am a gentler
  and simpler sort of creature, blessed with
  a heavenly unfurious nature.

The word that I have translated as "creature" is the same that appears in Aristotle's famous definition of man as a "political creature," or rather, as "a creature that lives in a polis." "Political animal," the usual translation, is unfortunate, for in his definition Aristotle clearly throws the weight of his authority behind the second alternative of Plato's question. Man is not a ravaging beast, but a gentler being. But perhaps Aristotle is not as fully sensitive as Plato to the difficulty posed by the alternative. Is man closer to the gods or to the beasts?

Another question which is linked to the uncertainty about the status of the human soul is: What is knowledge? Or, to put it differently: How much in this world is subject to man's insight and control? Greek philosophical realism, beginning with the Eleatics and reaching its greatest height with Plato, taught that reality is unchanging, static, difficult of access, and that in general men come to experience it only through the veil of ever-changing patterns of sensory impulses. There is an inexorable friction between total Being and partial Appearance. Man is constrained to deal with the appearances, but at his best he comes to sense—or, according to Plato, to know—the reality behind the phenomena. The break-through to the reality is a painful process; it can be achieved only at the cost of injuring and mutilating the ordinary cognitive faculties. The perfectionists, including Plato in the Phaedo, submit that the break-through becomes complete only with the complete surrender of the senses whose activity stands in the way of the vision of reality. That is to say, the perceptual blindness and the phenomenal friction cannot be resolved except by disembodiment and death.

Now if this, or something like it, is the philosophical issue which Euripides is trying to dramatize, he is at once faced with a grave artistic difficulty. How is he, as a dramatist, to convey the universal scope of reality and the beguiling contradictoriness of Appearance, without rendering the formulation banal or bloodless or both? The statement "Dionysus is all" would be worse than meaningless. It should be emphasized again that Euripides is not trying to say poetically what could also, and better, be said discursively. What does a poet-metaphysician do to clothe the range of abstract issues in the living and self-authenticating flesh of poetry? Is it possible for a dramatist to convey ideas without having his characters preach them ex cathedra, which is by and large the situation we find in the Prometheus Bound? Can a philosophical idea which is refracted by a process of poetic mutation continue to score as a factor in a metaphysical argument?

To begin with, the Greek writer has an advantage over his modern colleagues. The ancient conventions of tragedy stipulate that the dramatic nucleus be essayed from a spectrum of approaches. From Prologue to chorus to characters to Epilogue, each constitutive part of the drama contributes its specific orientation. In the end the various perspectives coalesce into one and invite a unified though never simple audience response. This is the desired effect; sometimes the merging of the lines of coordination is not complete, and the spectators are left without a certain key to gauge their participation. Goethe's Faust is, perhaps, once again a fair example of such a case on the modern stage. The author is saying something profound about man and reality, but for various reasons the play leaves us with the impression of partial statements instead of a total imaging, because of the vast scope of the action, because Goethe has inserted certain curious elements of diffusion and fragmentation, and because he tries to play off one culture against another in an attempt to universalize the compass of the theme. Any Greek play is likely to be more successful on this score. The traditional spectrum of perspectives is offset by an extreme succinctness of speech and thought, by a narrow conformity to Greek ways, by an economy of character, and, last but not least, by the condensatory effect of hereditary myth. Myth is itself a condensation of many experiences of different degrees of concreteness. Greek drama simply carries forward the business begun by myth.

Dionysus, who is Euripides' embodiment of universal vitality, is described variously by chorus, herdsman, commoners, and princes. The descriptions do not tally, for the god cannot be defined. He can perhaps be totaled but the sum is never definitive; further inspection adds new features to the old. If a definition is at all possible it is a definition by negation or cancellation. For one thing, Dionysus appears to be neither woman nor man; or better, he presents himself as woman-in-man, or man-in-woman, the unlimited personality (235):

With perfumes wafted from his flaxen locks and Aphrodite's wine-flushed graces in his eyes …

No wonder Pentheus calls him (353) "the woman-shaped stranger," and scoffs at the unmanly whiteness of his complexion (457). In the person of the god strength mingles with softness, majestic terror with coquettish glances. To follow him or to comprehend him we must ourselves give up our precariously controlled, socially desirable sexual limitations. The being of the god transcends the protective fixtures of decency and sexual pride.

Again, Dionysus is both a citizen, born of Semele, and a Greek from another state, for he was raised in Crete, like the Zeus of the mysteries—surely this is the implication of lines 120 ff.—and a barbarian from Phrygia or Lydia or Syria or India, at any rate from beyond the pale of Greek society. It is not as if the conflicting pieces of information had to be gathered laboriously from various widely separated passages in the play. All of them are to be found in the entrance song of the chorus. After the introductory epiphany of the god himself, the women of the chorus begin to assemble their picture of Dionysus, and it is indicative of what Euripides means him to be that even these first few pointers should cancel out one another. It happens to be true historically that Dionysus is both Greek and non-Greek; recently discovered Mycenean texts have shown that the god's name was known to the Greeks of the Mycenean period. It now appears that the foreign extraction of Dionysus may have been a pious fiction of Apollinian partisans. Dionysus the popular god, the god of mysteries, the emblem of surging life in its crudest form, of regeneration and animal passion and sex, was endangering the vested interests of Apollo, grown refined and squeamish in the hands of the gentry and the intellectual elite. One of the defense measures, and there were many, was to declare Dionysus a foreigner, a divinity whose ways, so the propaganda went, offended the true instincts of the Greek. There was some apparent justification for this. The genuinely foreign deities who were being imported into Greece often were kindred in spirit to Dionysus. At any rate the propaganda took hold. At the end of the fifth century all Greeks tended to believe that Dionysus came from abroad; and yet they considered him one of their own, a powerful member of the Olympian pantheon. Euripides exploits the discrepancy to the advantage of his purpose; he uses it to emphasize the unbounded, the unfragmented nature of the ultimate substance. But the arrival from foreign lands signifies a special truth; it highlights the violently intrusive character of the Dionysiac life, of the unlimited thrusting itself into the limited and exploding its stale equilibrium, which is a favorite theme of Pythagorean and Greek popular thought.

But all this would be bloodless metaphysics, dry-as-dust allegory, were it not for Euripides' grasp of the essential irony enunciated in the passage of the Phaedrus and skirted in Aristotle's aphorism. Man is both beast and god, both savage and civilized, and ultimate knowledge may come to him on either plane, depending on the manner in which the totality communicates itself. It is as an animal, as a beast close to the soil and free of the restrictions of culture and city life, that man must know Dionysus. But that means that in embracing Dionysus man surrenders that other half of himself, the spark of the gentle and celestial nature which, the philosophers hope, constitutes the salvageable part of man's equipment. The incongruity of the two planes, the political and the animal, becomes the engrossing puzzle and the energizing thesis of the play. The double nature of man is what the play is really about; the ambivalence of Dionysus is pressed into service largely in order to illumine the ambivalence of human cognition reaching out for its object, for the elusive pageant of truth.

v

How does Euripides use the animal in his art? In the Ion the relation between men and animals is simple and candid, though not devoid of some humor. At the beginning Ion wages a mock battle against the birds because they interfere with his daily cleaning operations. The kindly gruffness with which he rebukes them deceives no one. Once he threatens death to a swan that approaches too closely to the altar (161 ff.), but he does not take the threat seriously himself (179):

To think I would murder you,
messengers of the words of gods
to men!

Ion is not so cynical as to remember that the swan is said to sing his truest song when he is about to die. Later Ion's life is saved when a dove consumes the poison meant for him (1202 ff.); he accepts the sacrifice gratefully but without comment. Near the beginning of the exodus Ion calls Creusa (1261) a "serpent … or a dragon"

with murderous fire blazing from his eyes,

but this is a metaphor induced by rage, and in any case Ion is mistaken about her, as he acknowledges in the next scene. The history of Athens may have been crowded with serpents and half-serpents; the decoration of the tent features many beings half-man half-beast, including Cecrops himself with his serpent's coils. But the somber tent, as suggested earlier, is the exception. Through most of the action, and certainly at the end of the play when the causes of ignorance have been removed, men know their distance from the animals. Their humaneness entails this; the gentleness which characterizes the true inclinations of Io and Creusa and Xuthus takes us far away from the murky borderland where human nature and animal nature merge and where satyrs and centaurs ply their brutal trade.

In the Bacchae this borderland is always present. Men are identified with animals, not as in Aesop where the beasts aspire to be men and become moral agents, but as in a Gothic tale where intelligence and social grace and responsibility are renounced and the irrational, the instinct of blood and steaming compulsion, take their place. Characteristically this way of looking at life paralyzes value judgment. The gulf between men and animals is erased, but whether this is a good thing or not is by no means clear. When the women of the chorus, for example, call Pentheus a beast they do not mean to flatter him. He is the son of Echion, who was sprung from dragon's teeth, and there is dragon blood in his veins (1155). He is said to be a fierce monster (542) whose acts make one suspect that he was born of a lioness or a Libyan Gorgon. His mother also in her moment of visionary bliss sees him as a lion rather than as a man. For her, however, this is not a matter of disparagement; if anything, embracing a lion seems to her to offer a glimpse of perfection. Not so the chorus; in the passages cited they show an incongruous pride in human shape and human achievement.

But in the fourth choral ode, as they reach their highest pitch of passion and frenzied insight, they issue the call which is quoted at the beginning of our chapter (1017):

Appear, in the shape of a bull or a many
 headed
serpent, or a lion breathing fire!

In their first ode also they refer to Dionysus as the bull-horned god wreathed in snakes (100 f.). The god Dionysus, the stranger-citizen, the hermaphrodite, at once superman and subman, is a beast, for which the chorus praise him. This is the sacred dogma. Even Pentheus, once he has fallen under the spell of the god, acknowledges him as a bull (920):

And now, leading me on, I see you as
a bull, with horns impacted in your head.
Were you a beast before? I should not
 wonder.

And Dionysus answers:

Yes, now you see what is for you to see.

But what of Pentheus' own beast-likeness? Are the women suggesting that human beastliness is a mere parody of divine beastliness, and therefore to be condemned? Or have the ladies of the chorus not yet travelled the full length of the Dionysiac conversion, and retain a vestige of civilized values? Their abuse of Pentheus is couched in terms which expose them as imperfect Maenads. Contrast that other chorus, the band of Bacchantes hidden from our sight, whose mysterious acts of strength are reported to us in the messenger speeches. From them rather than from their more civilized sisters on the stage we expect the pure lesson of the new faith. And in fact they preserve no trace of a false pride in human separateness. They carry the tokens of animal life on their backs and entertain the beasts as equal partners (695):

And first they shook their hair free to their
 shoulders
and tucked up their fawnskins …
     … their spotted pelts
they girt with serpents licking at their
 cheeks.
And some clasped in their arms a doe or
 wild
wolf cubs and gave them milk …

Under the aegis of Dionysus, men and animals are as one, with no questions asked. The philosophical message is tolerably clear. But the vestigial bias of the pseudo-Maenads on stage is more than a temporary deviation from the orthodox Bacchic faith. In the interest of the message it would have been wiser to abuse Pentheus as a man, incapable of going beyond the limitations of his anthropomorphism. The beast imagery in the choral condemnation of Pentheus is cumulative and emphatic. The praise of Dionysus does not blot it from our memory. It is, in fact, intended to serve as a counterpoint. The animal shape rules supreme; but when all parties have been heard it is not at all clear whether one ought to approve or not. The judgment is suspended, and values are held in abeyance.

It is a mistake to consider the Dionysiac ecstasy a perversion of social life, an impasse, a negative situation. The Bacchae does not tell a story of maladjustment or aberration. It is a portrayal of life exploding beyond its narrow everyday confines, of reality bursting into the artificiality of social conventions and genteel restrictions. Waking and sleeping are deprived of their ordinary cognitive connotations; who is to say that sleeping, the drunken stupor which succeeds the rite, does not expand one's vision beyond its commonplace scope? In the Ion the premium is on wakefulness; in the Bacchae we are invited to rest in a gray no man's land which is halfway between waking and sleep, where man shelves the tools of reason and social compact and abandons himself to instinct and natural law (862 ff., tr. Phillip Vellacott):

O for long nights of worship, gay
With the pale gleam of dancing feet,
With head tossed high to the dewy air—
Pleasure mysterious and sweet!
O for the joy of a fawn at play
In the fragrant meadow's green delight,
Who has leapt out free from the woven
 snare,
Away from the terror of chase and flight,
And the huntsman's shout, and the
 straining pack,
And skims the sand by the river's brim
With the speed of wind in each aching limb,
To the blessed lonely forest where
The soil's unmarked by a human track,
And leaves hang thick and the shades are
 dim.

This is the strophe of a choral ode; in the antistrophe the chorus invoke the divine order of things—physis, nature—which will assert itself eventually in spite of men (884)

who honor ignorance and refuse
to enthrone divinity …

The verses cited picture the pleasure and the awe of identification with nonhuman nature, with the life of the fawn bounding free of the snare but never quite eluding the hunter, a life of liberty which is yet not free. The animal senses the sway of natural law even more strongly than the man. Strophe and antistrophe, the vision of animal escape and the address to natural compulsion, are part of the same complex. But in the text they do not follow one upon the other; they are separated by that rare thing in Greek poetry, a refrain which is repeated once more identically, at the end of the antistrophe. Refrains in Greek tragedy always have a solemn ring; they are felt to be echoes of ritual hymns. The fixed severity of the repetition is something foreign within the headlong flow of the dramatic current. The mind accustomed to pressing on after the determined advance of ideas and plot is abruptly stopped in its tracks; time ceases for a while and the cold chill of monotony reveals a glimpse of Being beyond the Becoming of the human scene.

Here is an attempt to translate the refrain as literally as the sense allows (877, 897):

What is wisdom? Or what is more beautiful,
a finer gift from the gods among men,
than to extend a hand victorious
over the enemy's crown? But beauty
is every man's personal claim.

Wisdom equals tyranny, beauty equals vengeance. The hunted and the hunter have their own jealous notions of wisdom and beauty, but their pretensions are drowned in the vast offering of the gods, the dispensation of natural law and the survival of the strongest. This is what the refrain seems to say; the message agrees well with the propositions of strophe and antistrophe. But note the didactic quality of the speech, the question and answer, and particularly the academic formulation of the last line which in the Greek consists of only four words: "Whatever beautiful, always personal." It is a line which might have come straight from the pages of Aristotle; better yet, it reminds us of a similarly scholastic passage in a poem by Sappho in which she contemplates various standards of beauty and preference and concludes: "I [think that the most beautiful thing is] that with which a person is in love." The poetess speaks of a "thing," using the neuter gender, and of "a person," any person, desiring the thing. Like a good teacher she starts her discussion with a universal premise. Then, as the poem draws to its conclusion, she discards the generality and focuses on the living girl and on the I, the specific poles of her love whose reality constitutes the authority for the writing of the poem. But the philosophic mode of the earlier formulation remains important; it reminds us that the specific poles of her present love are at the same time representatives of a universal rhythm. In Euripides' ode, also, it is this universal rhythm which comes into view through the hieratic stillness of the refrain and particularly through its last line. The words are almost the same as those of Sappho; the difference is that between a vision intent upon the small joys and sufferings of love, and a vision which comprehends man in the sum total of his powers and feebleness. The refrain may well be the closest approach to poetry shedding its disguise and showing itself as metaphysics pure and simple.

But the glimpse is short-lived, and the clarity immediately obscured. Again it is the chorus itself which is the chief agent of confounding the analysis. It does so by combining in the Dionysiac prospects of its songs the two sides, the real and the ideal, which are inevitably connected in the experience. Both ritual and hope, slaughter and bliss, dance and dream, the cruelty of the present and the calm of the release, are joined together as one. The paradise of milk and honey and the orgy of bloody dismemberment merge in a poetic synthesis which defies rational classification. Of this creative insight into the contradictoriness of things I have already spoken. To complicate the picture even further, Bacchic sentiments are superimposed on traditional choric maxims. In an earlier ode which begins with a condemnation of Pentheus' words and an appeal to the goddess Piety, the women sing (386, 397):

Of unbridled mouths
and of lawless extravagance
the end is disaster …

Life is brief; if a man,
not heeding this, pursues vast things
his gain slips from his hands.
These are the ways, I believe,
of madmen, or of
injudicious fools.

We recognize the familiar adage of "nothing in excess," the motto of bourgeois timidity and sane moderation, at opposite poles from the Dionysiac moral of vengeance and expansiveness and the bestialization of man. The injunctions of moderation and knowing one's limits run counter to the hopes of those who worship Dionysus. The two people who live up to the injunctions, Tiresias and Cadmus, come very close to being comic characters, as we shall see directly. Why, then, does Euripides put the pious precept into the mouth of a chorus whose primary artistic function is to communicate precisely what it is condemning, the spirit of unbridled mouths and lawless extravagance? It may be noted that such injunctions in Greek tragedy are often illusory. Setting off as they do a heroic imbalance or a cosmic disturbance, they underscore the poignancy of the action. But in this particular instance the use of the Delphic motto is even more startling than usual. The direction of the metaphysical impact is rudely deflected and the opacity of the poem enhanced by this conventional reminder of irrelevant quietist values.

While the Theban women are away celebrating, the foreign votaries are in Thebes. This is a mechanical displacement necessitated by what Greek tragedy permits; for the Dionysiac revels must be reported rather than seen, and so the true Maenads are off stage. But that puts the chorus in an anomalous position. They are worshippers of Dionysus, but they must not behave like worshippers. Few Euripidean choruses are less intimately engaged in the action and in fact less necessary to the action. It is the chorus off stage that counts. Hence the curious mixture of halfhearted participation and distant moralizing, as if the poet were not entirely comfortable with the choral requirements. This may account for the perplexing admixture of Apollinian preaching which I have just mentioned. It may account also for the remarkable poetic color of many of the choral utterances. The poet, making a virtue of the necessity, calls attention to the detachment of the chorus from the heart of the plot—though not from the heart of the philosophical issue—by giving it some of the finest lyrics ever sounded in the Attic theater. This is not the place for a close appreciation of the poetry; that can be done only in the original. The analysis of ancient poetry is a difficult thing; there are few men who combine the necessary scholarly equipment with an understanding of what poetry is about. Further, some of the clues to such an understanding which in modern poetry are furnished by the experience of living speech are missing for the Greek. Nevertheless few readers can expose themselves to the choral odes of the Bacchae without realizing that this is poetry of the highest order. Imagery has little to do with it; in this as in most Euripidean plays the choral poetry is even less dependent on metaphor and simile than the dialogue. There is some pondering of myth, to be sure. But perhaps the most important thing about the odes is the wonderful mixture of simplicity and excitement. The women do not beat around the bush; their interest in life is single-minded, and they declare themselves with all the fervor of a unitary vision. This does not, of course, say anything about the poetry as poetry, but it may explain why the lyrics of the Bacchae touch us so powerfully.

There is one image, however, or rather a class of images, which ought to be mentioned: the container filled to the bursting point. In their first ode the chorus use the trope three times. They sing of Dionysus stuffed into the thigh of Zeus, golden clasps blocking the exit until such time as the young man may be born (94 ff.). They call on Thebes, nurse of Semele, to (107)

teem, teem with verdant
bryony, bright-berried;

the city is to be filled to the rooftops with vegetation, as a sign of the presence of the god. For illustration we should compare the famous vase painting of Exekias in which Dionysus reveals himself in his ship to the accompaniment of a burst of vegetation. Finally the women caution each other to be careful in their handling of the thyrsus, the staff of the god (113):

Handle the staffs respectfully;
there is hubris in them.

In all three instances it is the fullness of the container which is stressed, not the spilling over. But as the play advances, containment proves inadequate. At the precise moment when the stranger is apprehended by Pentheus' men, the Maenads who had been imprisoned earlier are set free (447):

All by themselves the bonds dropped off
 their feet;
keys unlocked doors, without a man's hand
 to turn them.

Their liberation is as real as the binding of the stranger is false.

The most striking mise en scene of the inadequacy of the container is the so-called palace miracle. Like that of the other passages, its function is symbolic rather than dramaturgical; after it has happened it is never mentioned again. It is not necessary to the progress of the plot, only to the effect and the meaning of the poem. We need not worry much whether the stage director engineered the collapse of a column or a pediment, or whether the spectators were challenged to use their own creative imagination, though I am inclined to assume the latter. At any rate, the vision of the palace shaking and tumbling is the most explicit and the most extended of a series of images pointing to the explosion of a force idly and wrongfully compressed. Eventually this concept converges on what I have called the friction between total Being and fragmentary Appearance, the friction which is worked out also through a series of antinomies: the brute wildness of the thyrsus versus the spindles abandoned in the hall, the fawnskins versus the royal armor, the civic proclamation versus the bleating shout, the beating of tambourines versus the steady clicking of the loom. Dionysus disrupts the settled life, he cracks the shell of civic contentment and isolation. Probably the most important word in the play, as a recent critic has well pointed out, is "hubris." It occurs throughout, and always in a key position. But it is not the hubris of which the tragic poets usually speak, the hubris which figures also in the legal documents, the thoughtless insolence which comes from too much social or political power. In the Bacchae, hubris is quite literally the "going beyond," the explosion of the unlimited across the barricades which a blind civilization has erected in the vain hope of keeping shut out what it does not wish to understand. That is not to say that the word is not used also in its more conventional sense, especially with reference to the campaign of Pentheus. As a result, the efforts of Pentheus take on the aspect of a parody of Dionysiac impulsiveness.

Similarly the hunt is a principal symbol because it catches the futility of organized, circumscribed life. From the vantage point of the larger reality, all worldly activity appears both hunt and escape. Hunting and being hunted are the physical and psychological manifestations of Appearance, the monotonous jolts of the process of generation and decay. Agave cries when approached by the herdsman (731):

     Run to it, my hounds!
Behold the men who hunt us! Follow me,
brandish your thyrsus and pursue them!

The Maenads are resting; they are communing with the god and sloughing off the sense of separateness when they are violently pulled back into the world of Appearance and resume their game of hunting and being hunted. In this case it is Appearance which causes the disruption; Being and Appearance are so related that one as well as the other may be the cause of disturbance and dislocation. There is a perpetual pull between them which never allows either to win a lasting victory. Without the constant friction there would be no tragedy; without the violent disruption of one by the other there would be no dismemberment. Sparagmos, the sacred dismemberment of the Dionysiac rites, is both a means to an end and an autonomous fact. As a means to an end it supplies the frenzied exercise which terminates in the drugged sleep. The explosion of energy, the tearing and mutilation of a once living body, leaves the worshipper exhausted and readies the soul, through a numb tranquility, for the mystic union with the god. But the dismemberment operates also as a self-validating event. Through it, symbolically, the world of Appearance with its contradictions and insufficiencies is made to show itself as it really is. The destruction of Pentheus, then, is not simply a sardonic twist of an unspeakable bloody rite, but a fitting summation of the lesson of the play. The limited vessel is made to burst asunder, refuting the pretensions of those who oppose Dionysus, of the partisans of unreality.

vi

Who is Pentheus, and why is it he who dies rather than one of the other Thebans? When the stranger raises the question whether the King knows who he really is, he answers (507):

Pentheus, the son of Agave and of Echion.

Thus Pentheus identifies himself as a member of the ruling house, as an officer of the State. He bears a name which establishes his position within the hereditary political structure of his city. Even at the moment of death he throws off the leveling disguise of the ministrant and cries (1118):

     Mother, it is I, your son
Pentheus, the child you bore in Echion's
 house.

In the judgment of Dionysus this pride in the house, the emphasis on the limited life, is ignorance. But is it commensurate with the punishment which Pentheus receives? Is there not something about him as a person which is more likely to justify the violence of his undoing? To ask the obvious question: Does Pentheus not exhibit an arrogance which cries out for retribution?

Here we must step gingerly. It is to be remembered that the action of the Bacchae is not primarily borne or promoted by the characters. Euripides does not in this play operate with idiosyncrasies but with lives. Suffering is constructed as the measurable content of a life, not as the unique unquantifiable experience of a specific irrational soul. And the lives, also, are largely catalysts for the release of social complications. These complications have nothing to do with the arbitrary contours of individual dispositions, but answer directly to the needs of the author's metaphysical purpose. The personal relations brought into play are devised chiefly as one of the means for the author to invoke his philosophical riddle. In the Alcestis, as we shall see in the essay on that play, character is all; in the Bacchae it counts for very little. It is sometimes said that the tragedy of Pentheus is not that he tried to do what was wrong but that he was the wrong man to do it—that he was, in fact, not a political strongman but precisely the unbalanced, excitable type of person who most easily falls a victim to the allurements of the Dionysiac indulgence. In other words, the character of Pentheus is too Dionysiac to allow him to oppose Dionysus successfully. But this argument will not stand up. Pentheus is no more and no less excitable or unstable than most of the heroes of Greek tragedy. An Odysseus, or a Socrates, is no more fit to stand at the center of a high tragedy than a Pecksniff or a Tanner. Odysseus is not a whole man, as Helen is not a whole woman; they are exponents of a partial aspect of the human range: intelligence in the case of Odysseus, love in the case of Helen. But Pentheus is a whole man, precisely as Oedipus is, or as Antigone is a whole woman. And because he is whole he is vulnerable, more vulnerable than the men and women who are weighted in one direction or another.

Of course he is not a moderate. His order to smash the workshop of Tiresias (346 ff.) is not well considered. He happens to be right; Tiresias appears to have turned disloyal to Apollo, and so will no longer need his oracle seat. Under the democratic spell of Dionysus, everybody will do his own prophesying. But even if Pentheus were unjustified in his harshness toward Tiresias, his lack of moderation, or, to put it more fairly, his capacity for anger, does not necessarily discredit him. Stability, self-control, discretion smack too much of asceticism and puritan artifice to provide a solid basis for tragic action. Pentheus is a whole man, with none of his vitality curtailed or held in check. But he is also a king, a perfect representative of the humanistic Greek ideal of the ordered life, a political being rather than a lawless beast. Being Aristotle's "creature living in a polis," he is destined to ask the wrong sort of question, a political question, when faced with the reality of religion. His query (473),

What profit do the celebrants draw from it?

shows the political or educational frame of his thinking. The twentieth century, unlike the eighteenth, is once more inclined to the view that the question of usefulness when applied to religion misses the point, that religion cannot be adjusted to a system of utilitarian relations. But where did Euripides and his contemporaries stand on this issue? In all probability Pentheus' question did not strike the audience as irrelevant; it may, in fact, have impressed them as noble and responsible. At the end of the fifth century, as we can see in the History of Thucydides, the preservation of social and political institutions and traditions had become the overriding topic of discussion to which all other values tended to be subordinated. The Bacchae demonstrates that this sort of nobility, the exaltation of the political and educational thesis, is as nothing before the primary currents of life. But a nobility which goes under is not the less noble for its defeat. Pentheus dies, and the nature of his death, particularly of the preparations which lead to his death, is deplorable. But the fact remains that his stand, and only his, can be measured in positive moral terms. Clearly the force which kills him eludes ethical analysis.

Because Pentheus is a king he offers a larger area to be affected by the deity. His responses differ from those of other men less in their specific quality than in their intensity. As a king he suffers for the group; his name, as Dionysus reminds him (508), means "man of sorrow." But there is nothing Christ-like about him. He proposes to live as a rational man, to leave everything nonrational, everything that might remind us of man's original condition, behind him. Love and faith, the Christian antidotes of the dispassionate intellect, have not yet been formulated. In Plato, characteristically, it is love and reason together, or love-in-reason, which refines man and weakens the animal in him. Nonreason, in the fifth century B.C., is neither love nor hatred but religious ecstasy. This Pentheus means to fight, for he knows it is wrong. Pentheus is not a romantic hero, he does not search for a hidden truth. The same thing is true of the others; both the characters and the chorus are, each of them, convinced that they know best and that their way of life is best. For Pentheus the best is Form, the tested and stable limits of responsibility, law, and control. Against the chorus, which espouses the cause of excitement, of formlessness and instability, Pentheus is the champion of permanence and stability. Neither his anger nor his defeat are valid arguments against the merits of this championship. Like Ajax, as we shall see in the following essay, Pentheus is identified with armor (781, 809); like Ajax, the armed Pentheus, confined in the panoply of embattled civic life, turns against the forces which are wrecking his fragile cause. As a functionary he represents order and limit; as a man he is whole and robust and fully alive.

This cannot be said about Cadmus and Tiresias. For one thing, they are old men, their life force is diminished and stunted. This means that they cannot suffer as Pentheus can. It also means that they have come to terms with the world; there are no issues left for them to battle out, no difficulties over which to fret. Cadmus is a fine specimen of the arriviste, proud of the achievements of his grandson, but even prouder of the inclusion of a genuine god in the family. The god must at all costs be kept in the family, even if it becomes necessary to mince the truth a little. Here is Cadmus' humble plea to Pentheus (333):

And if, as you say, the god does not exist,
keep this to yourself, and share in the fine
 fiction
that he does; so we may say that Semele
 bore
a god, for the greater glory of our clan.

The distinction between truth and falsity, between order and disorder, is of no importance to him. At his time of life, a good reputation is a finer prize than a noble life, no matter whether the reputation is deserved or not. Tiresias likewise is not concerned with essentials. This Tiresias is not the Sophoclean man of truth, the terrible mouthpiece of mystery and damnation, but, of all things, a clever sophist, a pseudo-philosopher who strips away the mystery and the strangeness of the superhuman world and is content to worship a denatured, an ungodded god. A squeamish deist, he does not hold with the miracles and the barbarisms of popular faith. In his lecture to Pentheus he pares down the stature of Dionysus to render him manageable and unoffending (272 ff.). Point one: he is the god of wine (280)

  which liberates suffering mortals from
their pain.

That is to say, he is wine (284), precisely as Demeter is grain. By allegorizing the old stories and identifying the gods with palpable substances, we can dispense with whatever is not concrete and intelligible in the traditions about Dionysus. Point two: he is a perfectly natural god. The distasteful tale about Zeus sewing him up in his thigh produces a quite satisfactory meaning once it is understood that the grating feature is due to a pun. Like Max Mueller in a subsequent era of facile enlightenment, Tiresias believes that the mystery of myth is caused by a linguistic aberration; with the discovery of the cause, the mystery disappears.

Finally, in the third part of his lecture, Tiresias does pay some attention to the irrational virtues of the god, to his mantic powers and his ability to inspire panic in strong men. But this part of the assessment is underplayed; it is briefer than the other two, and one feels that Tiresias adds it only in order to have a weapon with which to frighten Pentheus. The reference to soldiers strangely routed and to Dionysiac torches at home in the sanctuary of Delphi is not a confession but a threat, calculated to appeal to Pentheus in the only language he understands: the language of military and political authority. Tiresias' heart is not in the threat; what interests him is the theological and philological sterilization of the god. Neither he nor Cadmus really understands or even wants to understand what the god has to offer. But they know that his triumph is inevitable, and so they try to accept him within their lights. They are fellow travellers, with a good nose for changes of fashion and faith. To take them seriously would be absurd; a Tartuffe has no claim on our sympathy.

They do not understand; hence nothing happens to them.' Pentheus, on the other hand, is fully engaged, and he is a big enough man to perceive the truth beyond his own self-interest. He is capable of appreciating the real meaning of Dionysus; though he does not approve, he understands. But understanding, in a man of his power of commitment, is tantamount to weakening, and in the end, to destruction. This is what Euripides dramatizes with the sudden break-up of Pentheus' royal substance. Abruptly the officer of the State turns into a Peeping Tom. One shout of the god (810) and the manly general becomes a slavish, prurient, reptilian thing, intent on watching from a safe distance what he hopes will be a spectacle to titillate his voyeur's itch. The civilized man of reason is gone, and in his place we find an animal, living only for the satisfaction of his instinctual drives.

Is the rapid change psychologically plausible? Once more, the question is not pertinent. There is no character in the first place, only a comprehensive life-image to symbolize one side of a conflict which transcends the terms of a uniquely experienced situation. Whether it is possible for such a man as Pentheus is shown to be in the first half of the play, to turn into the creature he becomes after his conversion by Dionysus, is a question on which psychoanalysts may have an opinion but which does not arise in considering Euripides' purpose. The truth is that the change is not a transition from one phase of life to another, much less a lapse into sickness or perversion, but quite simply death. When a tragic hero in the great tradition is made to reverse his former confident choice, especially if this happens at the instigation of the archenemy, the role of the hero has come to an end. We remember Agamemnon stepping on the crimson carpet, after Clytemnestra has broken down his reluctance. The blood-colored tapestry is a visual anticipation of the murder. Instead of the corporeal death which will be set off stage, the audience watch the death of the soul. With Agamemnon slowly moving through the sea of red the contours are blurred and the king of all the Greeks is annihilated before our eyes. Aeschylus uses a splash; Euripides, less concretely but no less effectively, uses a change of personality.

That the hero has died in his scene with Dionysus becomes even clearer when the god, with a Thucydidean terseness, announces the physical death (857):

Now I shall go and dress him in the robes
he'll wear to Hades once his mother's hands
have slaughtered him …

His death, then, is an agreed fact both while the chorus sing their ode to Natural Necessity and also during the terrible scene which follows in which Pentheus arranges his woman's clothes about him. The King joins the Maenads, but he goes further than they, for he adopts the bisexuality of the god. All this is meaningful as a picture of the complete and devastating victory of reality over unreality, of the natural over the institutional life. But it is not without its psychological aspect, and here, curiously, we may see an ironic parallel to one of Plato's most troublesome concerns. In his discussions of dramatic poetry, Plato takes it for granted that the spectacle affects the soul of the spectator, even to the extent of transforming it in its own likeness. This is what drama demands; the audience must allow what they see to shape their souls, without struggling against the impact. Plato recognizes the legitimacy of the demand, and decides that therefore drama is too dangerous to have around in a healthy body politic, except the kind of drama whose effect is beneficial. Pentheus also is about to see a spectacle, a Dionysiac drama of the type which as a responsible man of the city he had condemned. Euripides knows that Plato's act of censorship is in a hopeless cause. A life which does not reach out to embrace the sight of a greater reality which tragedy affords is incomplete. Watching a play may mean a partial sacrifice of the soul, a surrender to the unlimited and the irrational, but we cannot do without it. Pentheus holds out against it for some time, but in the end he throws down his arms, with such finality that his soul comes to be transformed and enriched even before he goes off to spy on the mysteries.

Pentheus is drunk, without the physical satisfaction of strong drink (918):

Ho, what is this? I think I see two suns,
two cities of Thebes each with its seven
 gates!

This is one way of formulating his conquest at the hand of Dionysus. Drunk he sees more keenly, or at any rate more completely:

And now, leading me on, I see you as
a bull …

And Dionysus replies:

Yes, now you see what is for you to see.

For the first time Pentheus' eyes are sufficiently opened to see the god in his animal shape. His vision is broadened; but his role as Pentheus is finished. The disintegration of the king is made particularly painful by the emphasis on the feminine clothing. With Dionysus assisting as his valet (928) the one-time upholder of the vita activa becomes fussy and vain about the details of his toilette. Does the cloak hang properly? Is he to carry the thyrsus in his right or in his left hand? The energies which had once been directed toward the mustering of armies and the implementation of public decisions are now bestowed on the arrangement of his Bacchic vestments. Along with this attention to the correct fashion—behold, another Tiresias—to the external signs of his new-found anonymity, there goes an internal change which is equally preposterous. The blocked doer turns into an uninhibited dreamer (945):

I wonder if my shoulders would support
Cithaeron and its glens, complete with
 Maenads?

His speech, formerly royal and violent and ringing, has become pretty and lyrical; he pictures the women (957)

      like birds in the thickets,
contained in the fond coils of love's
 embrace.

Compare this with his earlier comment (222) that the women

      slink off by devious ways into
the wild and cater to the lusts of males.

His imagination has been fired, his surly prejudices are gone. The vision which neither Cadmus nor Tiresias was able to entertain has come to Pentheus and is inspiring him. The Bacchianized Pentheus is a visionary and poet. But it is a poetry which lacks the saving grace of choice. He contemplates the prospect of his mother carrying him home from the mountains, and the prospect pleases him. The political man has become woman and child. Having rid himself of the social restrictions and classifications, he savors infancy, a sentient creature for whom the mother's cradled arms offer escape and bliss. He is woman and child and beast, an amorphous organism susceptible to all influences and realizing itself in a life of instinct and unthinking sense. The victory of Dionysus is complete; the king is dead, and the man has been found out, in the god's image.

vii

This, roughly, is what the Bacchae is about. The vast recesses of mystery and abomination which it explores make it difficult to talk about the play without some measure of doubt and uneasiness. Not so with the Ion. The Ion deals with a portion of Greek mythology. Selecting an ordinary incident from the traditions about the gods, the poet turns it this way and that to highlight its absurdity in the light of modern culture, and incidentally also to re-emphasize the worth of the human achievement. The spirit in which this is done is, on the whole, playful. But the plot which Euripides sets up features enough scheming and resentment and disillusionment to make us wonder whether the author's purpose is not quite serious. It is indeed, but the seriousness is that of a dramatist who takes no human suffering lightly, who regards the feelings of men as more precious and essential than the events which befall them. He finds that even the silly nonsense about gods fathering human sons can, if taken at face value, produce momentary effects which threaten to cripple generosity and fellowship. Eventually kindness triumphs; human culture is too tough and too secure an institution to be disrupted for long even when one of its chief supports, the veneration of the gods, is jarred.

The Bacchae questions what the Ion extols, by asking: Precisely what is human culture, and what is man? Plato chose to believe that, at his best, man can divest himself of his animal trappings and rise to a station in which the divine in him remains in sole control. Euripides shows that the divine equals the bestial, and that man's special achievement, the social graces and comforts fondly sketched in the Ion, are at the furthest remove from the reign of the god. Pentheus is a "political animal" whose veneer is stripped off, who is forced to return to his origins as a creature of instinct and sense, without the protective coloring of social conventions, without the benefit of activist illusions. In this original state before the fall into grace he will be a simple beast, with the pleasures and the dangers of an animal existence. To save his dignity, the king must die; the death images the ephemeral nature of the civilized veneer. A few seconds of consciousness are given to him to double the pathos and to ratify the horror (1118):

      Mother, it is I, your son
Pentheus, the child you bore in Echion's
 house.
Have pity, Mother, do not kill your son,
though my transgressions furnish cause
 enough!

This brief abortive glimpse of what has held him up in the past and what is now becoming the instrument of his defeat, the social compact, is like a trope of all cultured life. Between the realm of the beasts from which man is born, and the realm of the gods presided over by the great beast of heaven, civilized existence and human fellowship are a minute enclave, hardpressed and short-lived and utterly without hope. Social conventions are fictitious, they offend against nature and the natural law. However noble and glorious the human achievement may appear to the enlightened, it makes barely a dent upon the true structure, the real being of the animate world which defies reason and order and progress and engulfs man in its eternal rhythm of animal necessity.

Everyone will agree that this is a most depressing moral. But it is the moral pronounced by the play, and we cannot doubt that it is a view held by the author. Fortunately we know that it was not Euripides' only view, for we have the Ion, in which men are very substantial indeed, far removed from the realm of the wild beasts, and where the god is so civilized himself—and, we should add, so ineffectual—that the vista of a greater reality which is neither rational nor cultured does not even suggest itself. I said earlier that the Ion is about the gods and the Bacchae about man. But that is only a matter of emphasis. In truth both plays are about God, both are about man. But they have to be read together so that we may understand the full range of Euripides' thoughts on the subject of religion. As dramas they are autonomous; each exercises its own special effect and wants to be taken on its own grounds. But once we begin to think about the issues developed in them, we must in all fairness admit that what for want of a better term may be called Euripides' philosophy is not fully presented in either play. Even together they do not give us a complete picture. But they help us to realize that a good drama, especially a good Greek drama, must bear down significantly on a narrow front. If it tries to say too much and to cover too many stations it dissipates its strength. A Greek drama is, ideologically or philosophically, an unbalanced thing, especially if, as in the Bacchae, its objective is to dramatize a philosophical truth. But the imbalance is our gain; the force generated by the concentration is unmatched in the history of dramatic literature.

Notes

¹ The metamorphosis which Dionysus inflicts upon Cadmus in the Epilogue is a datum from mythology. Because of the bad state of preservation of the final portion of the play we do not know how Euripides motivated the metamorphosis, and what the punishment—for such it is said to be (1340 ff.)—is for.