Euripides The Bacchae

Written: 407-406 B.C. Staged 405 B.C. The same year as THE FROGS!!

The Conflict of the Play: PENTHEUS vs. DIONYSOS.

PENTHEUS...............................................DIONYSOS

The enclosed, walled city..........................natural, mountain world

Masculine -------------------------------------feminine

Human-----------------------------------------Animalic

Greece-----------------------------------------Asia

Order discipline------------------------------- liberation

Imprisonment, chaining---------------------- Breaking free

Reason------------------------------------------'Emotions’ Passion

Control, restraint------------------------------ Release

Earthbound, masonry--------------------------flowing, liquid

Fixed reality-------------------------------------Shifting reality

Limited identity----------------------------------Changing shapes

'I am PENTHEUS,son of Echion"--------------- You know not who you are

Confined polis----------------------------------- Mysterious cosmos

Unity----------------------------------------------Dismemberment

Military guards-----------------------------------Choric dancers

Sanity---------------------------------------------Madness.


THE THREE ACTORS:

1. PENTHEUS-AGAVE
2. DIONYSOS-Teiresias-Messenger
3. CADMUS-Herdsman-CADMUS

The Condition of Athens in Peloponnesian War

After over 30 years of war between the city states, after year after year of fighting, truces, fighting again, of demagogic war-mongers, of growing disgust with the war and with its leaders, Athens was coming to the end of a period of greatness that began with the defeat of the Persians. An Athenian could have been proud of the victory over the Persians; no Greek could be proud of the wars between the Greek city-states.. Above all, the militaristic mentality required to continue the war, simplified and brutalized our humanity.

Euripides depicts Pentheus as representative of the militarist mentality; a young military leader in command of his troops giving orders, jailing, imprisoning, always reacting violently. Because he is unyielding, rigid, he is unable to see the power of Dionysos and his Bacchantes until he is led to his own destruction..

His contempt for the effeminate priest of Dionysos and his women followers, the Bacchae from Asia will result in the most ironic nemesis possible: Pentheus is made a ludicrous parody of the female 'softness' he despises.

The play offers a cluster of contrasts and parallels that can keep interpreters occupied for some time. The revelation of the savagery underlying Greek civilization: civil war, horrible massacres, war-madness, all undercut the optimism with which the period opened with Aeschylus. (The Oresteia, 458 B.C. 50 years earlier) set out the terms for the creation of the just polis. Now, however, Athens was close to collapse. It sent out a major expedition force in order to control the Mediterranean - the Sicilian Expedition - that had been destroyed eight years before The Bacchae was performed.-

Athens then suffered a series of military defeats and knew the end was near. Most Athenians believed they were about to be massacred and enslaved and their city destroyed - this was what her enemies, especially the Thebans, were demanding and it was what Athens itself had done to its enemies. In this mood they staged their dramatic festival and gave the first prize to their old radical thorn in the side - Euripides. And, in the same year (at the same festival?) they also staged Aristophanes' comedy, The Frogs, a play in which Dionysos appears again, this time, seemingly, as a buffoon, to rescue tragedy in order to save Athens. It is hard to say which account of Dionysos is the more astonishing.

Euripides in 'exile'.
Three years before the play was put on (a year after his death) Euripides went into exile to Macedonia, the growing power in the north which, in the next century, was to conquer Greece and begin the conquest of the “known world” with Alexander the Great who took over from Athens' abandoned imperial ambitions. Tradition says that Euripides died by being torn to pieces by hounds; this seems apocryphal - too close to the fate of his tragic hero, Pentheus, to be true - the Greeks preferred good symbolic myths to factual truth. The play was performed posthumously, like Oedipus at Kolonos Major tragedy did not survive the defeat of Athens. Aristophanes, in The Frogs, shows he is aware of the situation. The crisis of the city was also a crisis of the theater.

The drama was the sacred festival to Dionysos and central to the community’s communal identity. In an age of growing skepticism and disillusion with the polis, and with the whole metaphysical ’supertext’ of the festival, the political and religious nature of the theater was bound to be in jeopardy. The Bacchae, The Frogs and Oedipus at Kolonos all seem to be about the theater and the city-state in crisis. The evidence of Aristophanes implies there was no-one after Sophokles and Euripides. And the later Hellenistic scholars seem to agree.

What will be born out of the ‘death of tragedy’? Philosophy, science. - what Nietzsche proclaimed was the triumph of Socratic rationalism; of Apollo over Dionysos. The quest for truth now is by individual thinkers, not the community - as Aristophanes foresaw and warned against in THE CLOUDS. 'Socratism' is a narrowing of the idea of truth - making it an individual search, not a communal possession/creation: unlike the dramatic festivals it is a separate intellectualist pursuit in a classroom, divorced from the emotions and senses. Philosophy's desire to establish certain truth contrasts with and opposes theatre's ability to validate the imaginative truth of myth.]

5. Reputation of the Play
Fashions in Greek tragedy change. Antigone has had one of the longest runs as the favorite Greek tragedy. The Bacchae at present, probably is the most popular Greek tragedy at least with directors. I think it is the most performed at present. I have seen a versions where Dionysos is a rock star, bringing in a wild new music to a conservative culture, and followed by adoring groupies. (Sam Shephard’s The Tooth of Crime has a similar plot)

In 1969, Richard Schechner staged the play as an orgy of sexual liberation, DIONYSOS 69 - and, so far, Dionysos seems not to have punished him. The plays speaks to our sense that it is our so-called sanity, not our irrationality, that can lead us to destruction.

By now you will have worked out the 'doubling' in the play, where the Pentheus actor, (who plays the victim torn to pieces by his mother) also plays his insanely murderous mother, the actor now presumably carrying, as the head of her son, the bloodied mask of his previous role. The play is violent, with bodies torn to pieces: something that, in the myth, happened to Dionysos too, as well as to Pentheus' other cousin, Actaeon. The play seems to be about, among other things, physical and mental disintegration. It sets up a collision between Passion and Reason, between the desire to release emotions and the need to control them, that seems particularly modern. Maybe because of our sense that rational control, that created, for instance 'Mutually Assured Destruction' and the devastation of the planet, has betrayed us into greater violence than irrationality ever could.

Also there is Euripides' radicalism. Unlike Sophocles, who grew wonderfully wise in old age, Euripides seems to stay wonderfully radical, still exploring at the frontiers, still taking great risks with subject matter and form, as with the ORESTES and ION. He is more radical than Brecht, who took shelter from chaos within rationalist Marxian ideology. There seems to be no 'safety net' in The Bacchae (or the Medea or Herakles) to protect us against the chaos that so many of his plays confront.

The Bacchae may be Euripides last play (at least one of the last three which included Iphigenia in Aulis). It explores the nature of tragic/theatric showing - of the alarming powers tragic art is capable of summoning. It is hard to decide what it means: but not hard to see what is does, what it shows. It clearly sets forces in opposition with one another and shows one set of forces destroyed by the other.

Pentheus sees the cult of Dionysos as irrational, mad and anarchic. Pentheus represents military control, order restraint. The Bacchic breaking free of all reason for instinctual and emotional abandonment is, from his point of view, a threat to all civilized achievement. However, from the Dionysian point of view (expressed in the Choruses of Bacchantes) Pentheus’ military control or repression of the instincts and passions is the greater madness, the madness of a rationality that fears free expression of life and humanity. It is the madness of law and order and repression. Dionysos reconciles us to the natural and animal world to which we belong. However, the play is definitely not a ringing endorsement of what Dionysos stands for: it is more a warning not to deny its power. This is similar to the ‘argument’ of the Hippolytos, where Aphrodite was the neglected and offended power.

6. Who/what is DIONYSOS?
The myth:
Dionysos' birth: Zeus, married to Hera, became the lover of the mortal girl, Semele, sister of Agave). Hera got jealous and decided to destroy Semele. She disguised herself and told Semele, once he agreed to promise her anything, to ask that Zeus should make love to her, Semele, as he did to his goddess-wife, Hera. Zeus was horrified, but a god cannot go back on his promise: So, on the love-night Zeus appeared, as he did to Hera - as a bolt of lightning, and Semele was incinerated by the approaching god. Zeus saved their child, Dionysos by snatching the foetus from Semele’s womb and sowing it in his thigh. (Handel has written a lovely opera on the subject).

‘Dionysos’ was, therefore, “twice-born” (the meaning of his name), the second time from the male god, Zeus. And, in fact, Dionysos was to be born a third time: as a baby he was torn to pieces by the Giants, or Titans, the barbaric enemies of the Olympian gods: but was gathered together like Pentheus, Unlike poor Pentheus, the god was resurrected.

Dionysos, then, is like primal energy itself: born in violence, suffering dismemberment, coming back to life again, indestructible: always changing form and identity, like Nature itself. His mysteries with the goddess Demeter at Eleusis in Athens involved Bread and Wine and have close similarities to other resurrected gods, Osiris, Jesus. And, in fact, the passage of text of The Bacchae where Agave is lamenting over the dismembered body of her son, was incorporated into a Christian hymn to the crucified Christ.

His cult:
In Athens, Dionysos was worshipped in strangely violent cults of animal sacrifice. Through wine and other means the worshipper of Dionysos could achieve a state of religious ecstasy. His worshipers put on animal skins to acknowledge their kinship with animals and performed wild dances outside the city, in the mountains. They were 'taken outside themselves' and their civic identities, just as, in the theater of Dionysos, the actors take on other identities, both gods and humans; and the audience, too, leaves its contemporary world and enters another time, a time of myth. At the height of the sacred ceremonies, the worshippers of Dionysos actually would tear living animals to pieces and eat their raw, warm flesh (sparagmos). This was felt to be like devouring the god, Dionysos himself in which one gained the strength and vision of a god.

Worshipers of the god also were snake-handlers. The mother of Alexander the Great, Olympia, performed snake handling and Euripides might have had these Macedonian cults in mind while writing the play - in Macedonia. The Macedonian rites probably represented a throwback to earlier Greek practices that Athens had abandoned. The play seems to represent on Euripides’ part a conscious return to earlier ritual forms; just as the play returns to an almost Aeschylean insistence on the predominant role of the Chorus.

And this seems appropriate to a play about the Introduction to Greece of this religion of a new God who is also god of the theater. Dionysos is the god of intoxication, frenzy, madness, of the breakdown of reason, of closeness to the wild aspects of the natural world. Yet, to those who worship him, like the Bacchae, he brings peace and joy. Those who oppose him, like the women of Thebes, the young king Pentheus and his mother, are driven insane

8. Dionysos, as god of theatre,is the god of changing roles, masks, shifting identities, of tragedy. In Greek drama, the three actors put on many masks, take on many identities, and each identity is as 'true' as the other. Behind the illusion is only another personae, another shifting shape: and that is all there is to all reality. It is like a speeded up version of biological evolution, of species changing shapes. In the very opening Prologue an actor comes on stage telling us that he is an illusion:

You see me now at the rivers...........
But my godhead you cannot see, because I've changed it
for this, the body of a man.

Right at the opening of the play, we are in a world of appearances: an actor playing a god playing a priest. The play seems to tell us appearances, shifting shapes are all there is to reality. All through the play Dionysos, like a playwright/director ‘plays with’ the characters, directing the action. He is the god of masks, and his theatre is the art of masks. He wears the same mask throughout, yet his identity is fluid and continually changes. On the theologeion (rooftop) at the end of the play he proclaims himself as a God. Until then he has put on the disguise calculated to antagonize and unhinge Pentheus. (In later Greek art, Dionysos gradually evolved into a more ‘feminine’ beardless form: earlier he had been a wild, bearded figure)

The two contestants: Penthèus - Dionysos. In Euripides version, both cousins, divine and human, are adolescent. Adolescence is a stage of transition, - in males from indeterminate gender to masculine gender attributes. Pentheus reverts this biological direction. A ‘feminized’ Dionysos confronts an athletic Pentheus. As their contest continues, Pentheus is visually 'feminized', while Dionysos becomes more and more aggressively masculine.

Pentheus exits the stage dressed as a woman. This actor will return as Agave his mother, a madwoman, carrying the bloody mask of the previous annihilated identity, The Pentheus identity, onstage, involves the complete feminization of the role and the actor. Both actors, therefore, Pentheus and Dionysos have to be virtuosos: one going from masculine to feminine, the other from seemingly ‘feminine’ weakness to terrifying power. The play is about theater, about role playing, shifting shapes, and the transience of individual identities: in fact, what Greek theater always implied.

Individual identity is an ephemeral, artificial construction made up of the accidents of place and time (e.g. Athens in 6th. century B.C.E; Pittsburgh, 2003) Beneath that identity are the communal identities of nationality, then race, then species then ‘carbon life-forms’ and ultimately whatever forces or entities brought the cosmos into being. As Carl Sagan used to say, we are all “star stuff”.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY, saw this as the deepest truth about Greek tragedy and about Dionysos. He saw Tragedy as the creative union and tension between the two gods, Apollo and Dionysos, in which Dionysos represented that primal force that emerges from the ‘primal oneness’ of existence, before it takes on particular identities: something like the ‘life force’. This force has no form by which it can be apprehended. It can only be experienced by ‘us’ when it is given temporary form and shape by our imaginations. In Tragedy it is the god Apollo god of Reason and of Art, who imposes on these Dionysian energies the beautiful forms that allows us both to approach this “primal oneness” without being destroyed, and to convert it into works of reason and art. Nietzsche's argument seems to derive from the Kantian notion of the unknowable thing-in-itself and its transformation of the 'manifold', via the imagination, into the 'ideas' of consciousness.

The Greek gods themselves were given their forms by the Apollonian poet, Homer. No-one believed they were “really like" their Homeric persona. The Homeric identities were beautiful fictions by which we could picture reality. In this play Pentheus, the ‘Apollonian character will find his assured identity dissolve under the power of Dionysos .

You do not know
What you are doing, or who you are.

Pentheus, in reply, cries out:

I am Pentheus, son of Echion and Agave

The invisibility and protean nature of the gods means we never see Dionysos, who could be a mass of energies. All we see is the shape he decides to put on, either as priest or as god. What Dionysos is like, in himself, we cannot know. Pentheus, in Agave's eyes, is a young lion, though he is dressed as a woman and is ‘actually’ a man. What is ‘identity, here? In her madness, what world is she inhabiting. A Dionysian reality the other side of Reason?

Thebes itself was founded on shifting identities.
Cadmus killed a dragon, sowed its teeth in the ground. Warriors then sprang up who killed each other: only five survived. Pentheus father, Echion, was a "snake man" and at the end of the play we hear that Cadmus and his wife Harmonia will become snakes. Cadmus' daughters had sons who were torn to pieces: Acteon by his own hunting dogs, Pentheus by his mother and Dionysos by the Titans. The Athenian audience was familiar with this myth and it must have spoken to their sense of radical instability of things - for they gave the play first prize.

This idea that our human identity contains animal and reptilian identities is like an evolutionist's view of what is human: a creature evolving, from amoeba to human, putting on one shape after another, along the evolutionary tree, and being a mixture of mineral, plant, animal, human and divine identity. And we will all go back into the cosmic stuff we emerged from.

The situation before the play starts: after being born and reborn Dionysos, after many years, has returned to Thebes from Asia, to claim his right to be worshipped as a new god in the place where he was conceived.. Agave and her sisters deny that Semele is the mother of a new god and try to prevent his worship. Violence almost always accompanies introduction of a new religion or even any new offshoot of a religion. The new form is not recognized, and at first violently opposed. To punish the city, Dionysos drove its women mad and they all left the city to live on the slopes of Mount Cithaeron, where they live with animals, nursing and feeding them.

Thebes, when the play opens, is an all-male citadel, a military camp, under its new young commander, Pentheus, who intends to restore order, capture the women and restore masculine discipline to the walled city. So there is already a major conflict between the male and female worlds, the city and the world of nature, discipline and anarchy. Just at this moment an effeminately beautiful young man, claiming to be a priest of Dionysos, followed by a group of ecstatic women followers appears in the city,. The very thing, given the current situation, to drive Pentheus out of his mind - which will happen.

Furthermore, the priest and his followers have come from ASIA, the very un-Greek source of irrational religions and cults {cf. Medea} Two characters, old Tiresias and old Kadmos, have decided to play it safe and go along with the new religion: trying to keep up a common-sense caution: but this, too, will be blasted away by the action of the play. They, too, have changed identities into followers of Dionysos, together with appropriate costumes. To the uptight Pentheus, they are disgraceful traitors letting down the city just when it needs order and discipline against the anarchy of the women.

Prologue

DIONYSOS' identity is itself a mystery. His divinity can take many forms, including animals. He has chosen a human form which is not his 'true likeness'. Therefore, the 'effeminacy' and seductiveness of the god is only the strategem he chooses for his purpose against Pentheus. To the athletic Pentheus (who sneers that Dionysos obviously does not go in for wrestling) this would be an un-Greek, 'Asiatic' appearance. (cf. the Phrygian slave, in the ORESTES)

Parados. We must distinguish between two female groups.

(a) The Bacchae - not mad, enjoying blessings of Dionyos
(b) The Theban women who, now mad, denied the god and are
driven from the city into the surrounding mountains.

This is a Chorus of hostile outsiders, women from Asia, who are totally detached from the suffering of the city. Music costume and movements would be Asiatic and exotic: They celebrate Dionysos of wine, of the mysteries, of the earth of the bull (strength) and serpent (subtlety, chthonic). The mood of their Ode is that of joy. They insist their god cannot be contained by a city and its walls and prisons, for he belongs to the mountains and the animal world. He is the polar opposite of the 'civic' leader of the polis, Pentheus, who has no sympathetic chorus to sustain him.

THE DIALECTIC OF THE PROTAGONISTS
The imagery and actions surrounding Dionysos are those of a terrifying freedom: of bursting down walls, snapping chains, mastering an entire landscape, - of fluidity and freedom as an exhilarating, alarming, anarchy.

The imagery and actions surrounding PENTHEUS) are those of confinement: of city walls and gates, of the palace, the prison, the chains he fastens upon Dionysos. - the contrast between Discipline and Anarchy, of holding in, or of releasing emotion, forces. And it is associated with the city and its walls and its menfolk, on one side, and the natural world, its passionate openness, and women on the other side. Also between Greece and Asia, Western logic and control and 'Oriental' extravagance of feeling.

First Episode[402]
Enter Teiresias and Cadmus, two who, for not very admirable reasons, are 'going along with' the new religion. Theirs is a cautious pragmatism: best not meddle with traditions but also best to go along with a popular movement.

Enter Pentheus.
Physical identity, very young, fatherless. Vulnerable in new high office. Even for an older man, like Creon, to be newly king is to be vulnerable. One must issue orders and stand by them. And Pentheus’ disgust with the disorder in the city is understandable. Dionysos' physical appearance is cleverly chosen to create ambiguous contempt in the adolescent Pentheus, a mixture of repulsion and attraction.

A difficulty for us is to see whether Teiresias, in his defense of Dionysos, is to be taken seriously. He etymologically corrects one myth (the sewing of Dionysos) into another myth: one assumes Euripides is showing the old priest as eager to benefit from the new religion. Similarly, Cadmus' acceptance (that the myth, even if a fiction, will bring honor to the family) is a dubious motive . They do the right thing for the wrong reason. Tiresias, in this play, has none of mantic power of Sophokles' character. But his warnings to Pentheus will prove prophetic.

1st Choral Ode The Bacchantes.
In honor of reverence for holiness and against hybris.
(Strophe 1).

The pleasures, (Aphrodite, etc.) attendant upon piety: (Antistrophe 1)

Punishment of those who don’t honor the god (Strophe 2)

Cyprus, Aphrodite and Dionysos as sources of joy, art, civilization (Antistrophe 2.)

14. SECOND EPISODE
Dionysos is brought in prisoner

Pentheus’ response to events is to control reality, to enclose, imprison, bind: first to ensure order within his city's walls; then to lock Dionysos within the walls of the prison; then actually to shackle the body (of Dionyos) within the prison cell - greater and greater degrees of confinement. Dionysos' method, on the contrary, is to release, open up: to remove the shackles by miraculously snapping chains: to free the imprisoned women, to burst open the prison doors, to open the city gates and release the women to the world outside.

At first, Pentheus circles round the 'feminine' figure of Dionysos in a mixture of repulsion and fascination while the god plays with him, leading him on to more and more blasphemy. From now on Pentheus shows himself unable to see the manifestations of Dionysus' power. It is the juxtaposition of two ways of seeing reality. The logical vs. the mystical.

Pentheus threatens to cut the god's hair, a supreme blasphemy. The audience, watching the play, would see Pentheus destroying himself. Next, he has the god bound, believing this will defeat him. All through this scene, Pentheus has an illusion of power over his prisoner. He exists in complete self-delusion. As Dionysos warns him":

You do not know
What you are doing, or who you are.

Pentheus, in reply, cries out

I am Pentheus, son of Echion and Aagve

to which DIONYSOS responds

No, sorrow is what your name means,
Pentheus, and pain. It fits.

That is, Dionysos, being a god, already sees how the whole action will turn out. Pentheus takes refuge in the ‘illusion’ of his nominal identity, Dionysos already is looking at the dismembered body of Pentheus as he speaks and he can hear the screams of pain that Pentheus will give as he is being torn to pieces. The illusion, "I am Pentheus” will not help him when he screams out to Agave "It's me, mother, your child, Pentheus..." Agave sees, not her son, but the young lion she believes she has hunted down.

As he is led to prison, Dionysos says:

I'm ready, I'll go now-
though I cannot be hurt
by an act that cannot take place
But you, Pentheus, can be certain
that the god you call "dead' -
is Dionysos.


2nd Ode
Strophe: Recalls the birth of the god, ‘born again’ from Zeus The Chorus contrasts the fortunate people who honor Dionysos with
Antistrophe: those who, like Pentheus, go against him.

It is important to see that this Chorus of Bacchantes speak (sing, dance) of the great joy and peace of worshipping Dionysos, not the tragic madness of Agave and her women.

Epode: Calls on the various 'powers' to check the rage of Pentheus Answered by the tremendous response of Dionysos

Choral Dialogue: The Chorus and the god now call to each other, the god’s voice from within the building, the Chorus in the Orchstra. It must have been a terrific theatrical ‘effect’.

THIRD EPISODE
Tri-partite episode:
(a) Triumphant re-entry of the god followed by a dazed Pentheus
Dionysos bursts from his bonds, fire blazes over his mother's tomb and the palace crumbles. Pentheus, on the other hand, is now in the god's power, hallucinating, chasing phantoms,in fact in the same state of ecstasy as his mother and her companions.
As St. Paul was to say, "It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living god."

(b) The Messenger from the mountains
Now a Messenger comes from that outside world.
Dionysos already knows the Messenger is on his way and knows in advance what the Messenger is going to say for, from the first words in the Prologue, he is directing this whole show. So he tells Pentheus, even before the messenger speaks:

This man brings you news from the mountain.
Listen to him.

The Messenger (already visible to the audience approaching along the parodos) comes with a terrifying story of the superhuman power and strength of the women: At first they are gentle, even nursing and suckling the animal young. But then, as the men try to capture them to bring to Pentheus, their mood changes to a terrible destructive fury as they tear apart the limbs of animals, even strong bulls. {This is the state of the Dionysos worshipper).

The Messenger implores Pentheus to accept the new god.
This is a clear warning to Pentheus not to go against these women and their god. Dionysos says:

Pentheus, you will reject my advice, but even though
you wrong me, I'll warn you again: don't use force
against a god.. Keep the peace. The Loud One won't
let you clear his maenads off that mountain

Pentheus won't listen to Dionysus' warning he makes a last desperate effort to maintain order -

“Put men on the towers and seal off the city”.

- and falls into the power of the god. He is now to be the sacrificial victim necessary to establish the new religion.

(c) Pentheus' collapse
There is an extraordinary moment. Even while he is is still angrily attacking Dionysos the god suddenly asks him:

Would you like to see the maenads
sitting together, up there on the mountains?

and immediately, Pentheus replies

I would give all the gold I have to see that.

What has happened? In the theater it could be signaled by a gesture from Dionysos that, in one line, the god has used his power to totally trap his victim. So that the scene ends with the god telling his followers:

Women, no need to aim our net-
he plunges into it.

3rd. CHORAL Ode
Strophe: The joys of honoring the gods the ‘lucky’ and ‘blessed’ man/woman
At one with nature and its animals, playing with them.

Antistrophe Contrasts with the unlucky and tragic, blasphemer, hunted down like an animal by the gods.

Episode 4. Enter Pentheus 'feminized'
The next time Pentheus appears, obediently following the god, he is dressed as a woman, a maenad, in a state of complete hallucination, seeing two suns and two cities of Thebes, fussing over the fall of his dress and a loose curl.

The Pentheus actor now comes out with perhaps a new mask or just wig and costume. His new costume is no less real than any other costume in the theater. His identity has shifted to its feminine opposite. The suggestion masculine and feminine are only opposite sides of the same (human) identity. In a drama in which male actors play female roles, and where the Pentheus actor will evolve into the Agave role this equates theater conditions with biological conditions.

'Difference' is the illusion under which our everyday identities appear. This is Pentheus’ final exit, but it is not the actor's. After the second Messenger's speech, which describes how Pentheus was torn to pieces by his mother and her companions, the same Pentheus actor re-appears, this time as his mother, wearing a new, female mask and carrying the bloody mask of his previous masculine personification.

4th Ode
Strophe 1. Eagerly anticipates the trapping of Pentheus and Agave’s’s frenzy. IT REJOICES IN PENTHEUS’ DESTRUCTION

Antistrophe: 1. The reason for Pentheus’ destruction: transgression against the gods instead of the reverent, careful life.

Epode: Concludes with Epode asking Dionysos to execute justice.

The Messenger's speech telling that this justice has been executed follows immediately after - emphasizing we are in theatrical time controlled by the rules of drama, not of life. It also adds to the terrifying nature of the action: its dreadful swiftness.

5th Episode:
The Messenger's speech. This superb speech is long enough for the Pentheus actor to change into the Agave mask and costume. And it is as the Agave actor in the fully feminine role that he must act out the greatest tragic role. The Messenger is shocked at the Chorus's exultation. His account of Pentheus’ death gives a powerful idea of the mystery within the landscape itself, the mysterious (Pan) energy within the world. It draws upon the Greek sense of wonder, awe, at the natural world..

5th Ode
Brief ode of exultation. A violent clash of mood, after the ‘terrible’ Messenger speech.. The two perspectives on the tragedy.

5th. Episode
Pentheus actor returns to the stage wearing the mask of Agave and holding mask of Pentheus. Two identities, living and dead, simultaneously! What does this tell us about masks in Greek theater? Obviously, here, it is used as a highly sophisticated symbolism or theatrical sign-system.

The Pentheus actor exited in a trance, a dream, and returns as Agave in a trance or dream. Now there will be the reverse process: not of drawing him out of the everyday world into the trance, but of drawing her out of the trance into the everyday world. One sees, here, the effectiveness of using the same actor.

Theatrically, the mad trance movements of the Pentheus figure being led off might resemble the mad trance movements of Agave being led in! Before, we had heard of Pentheus as the punished victim, dying horribly. Now the same actor will present us with Agave coming to horrifying consciousness. (It has been claimed that Cadmus’ method of bringing Agave back to sanity is good accredited therapy.

6th Episode Dionysos’ victory
Re-appearance of Dionysos in triumph.
Dealing out terrible destinies from Zeus. Humans, as often in Euripides, reach out in sympathy and pity in contrast to the implacable gods. Contrast the last words of the god and the humans. The tragedy ends with a divine victory and a total human defeat. And a prediction of the grotesque future of Cadmus and Agave.

What has the play shown us? Shifting Identiies.
Pentheus represented one aspect of Athenian identity: its militaristic, rational, athletic 'arete' but the festival of Dionysos and other Athenian rituals showed they knew this was an incomplete human identity. Greek culture, including Athens, did not rigidly divide gender identities as later, European culture was to do. In many Athenian ceremonies the sexes changed costumes (I believe even on the wedding night!). The dialectic of the sexes was not ignored.

In the theater men sought to portray women convincingly. Agave, here, is as strong a presence as her son. The Chorus of ephebes seems to have as frequently played women as men: and both sexes of all ages.

In the Antigone, Creon, of the male polis, is destroyed when he turns against the ‘feminine’ values of the family held by Antigone. In Medea the Greek, Jason, was destroyed when he turned against the feminine and semi-divine Asiatic Medea: and this seems to be a continual theme of Greek drama and especially of Euripides; as if reminding the rational, masculine Athenian democracy that true wisdom meant acknowledging it represented only a small part of reality.

It was the message, also, of Aeschylus, who, in the Eumenides, insisted that Athenian democracy had to find a place for the Furies, the Erinyes. The victory of the god Dionysos is brought about by the destruction of a human world; perhaps suggesting forces in the universe, in nature - energies, powers out of which we have emerged that will destroy us if we oppose them. It is, I think, a very modern message: that we live in a non-human, perhaps hostile universe of which we understand (if at all) only a fragment. Our link with cosmic processes and with the animal world is something we continually need reminding of.