the middle knitter

Masks of Madness: Contextualizing Euripides' Bacchae

Initially, my project was going to be about Greek mystery cults, with a focus on the Eleusinian mysteries to Demeter and the Dionysiac mysteries and tragedy. After I started, I quickly narrowed the focus down to just Dionysus and tragedy, and more specifically, to Euripides' Bacchae.

Dionysus was the patron god of theater. The major theatrical performances in Athens happened during the City Dionysia (also sometimes called the Great Dionysia), in honor of Dionysus, when contests were held for both tragedy and comedy. During days of the festival leading up to the theatrical performances, a statue of Dionysus was brought out of the city and then carried back inside in a procession. This statue would have been present at the performances, and it has been argued (I think rather convincingly), that the performances were intended as entertainment for the god.

But this is where it gets interesting: out of all of our extant tragedies, the only one to actually put Dionysus on the stage as a character is Euripides' Bacchae. There are Dionysiac themes all over tragedy, and he's frequently invoked, but he doesn't seem to have set foot on the stage until the Bacchae. What's more, the Bacchae is quite late. It was performed after Euripides' death in the late fifth century, and it is actually (although the Greeks couldn't have known this) our last surviving tragedy.

With that in mind, I set out to compare the treatment of Dionysiac themes in the Bacchae to similar themes in earlier tragedies, to try to determine the significance of staging Dionysus only once, so late in the history of tragedy.

The Bacchae
First, for the uninitiated, a brief summary of the plot of the Bacchae. (This next part will be accompanied by a helpful Powerpoint slide with a diagram of the major characters.)

The Bacchae is set in Thebes, the city of Dionysus' birth. (Thebes is also famous as the home of Oedipus. Yes, that Oedipus. If you ever go back in time to ancient Greece, I'd suggest that you not pick Thebes as a place to raise a family.) The play opens with Dionysus returning to Thebes from Asia, disguised as one of his own followers. Thebes is his first stop in Greece, and he plans to establish his cult there. He meets with resistance from the city's women and the young king, Pentheus, who deny his divinity and his parentage. In retaliation, Dionysus maddens the women of the city and sends them up onto the mountain as maenads. Over the course of the play, he engages in verbal sparring matches with Pentheus, who is both disgusted and intrigued by the thought of the women on the mountain--his mother Agave among them--whom he imagines must be engaging in all sorts of exciting sexual capers. (They're not.)

Eventually, Dionysus uses this interest to bring Pentheus fully under his power, convincing him to put on the clothing of a maenad and go to the mountain to spy on his mother and the other women. When Pentheus does, he is discovered by the maenads. In her madness, his mother Agave leads the other maenads in tearing him limb from limb. She then returns to Thebes with his head, thinking it the head of a lion. Her father, Cadmus, discovers her, and gradually brings her back to her senses. As the horror at what has occurred sinks in, Dionysus appears and banishes the royal family. (And he turns Cadmus and his wife into snakes, for some reason. A lot of the ending is missing, so it's a little weird.)

The Bacchae and Aeschylus' Oresteia
Because my goal is to see how the presence of Dionysus affects themes that were already present in Greek tragedy, now we turn back to earlier tragedies, starting with Aeschylus' Oresteia. The Oresteia is a trilogy comprised of the Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, and the Eumenides. In the first play, Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War only to be killed in his bath by his wife, Clytemnestra, who takes over rule of the land with her effeminate lover, Aegisthus. In the next play, Agamemnon's son, Orestes, comes to avenge his mother. He kills her, but is afterward driven away by the Furies, who avenge kin-killing. The final play stages Orestes' trial, with Apollo as his lawyer and Athena as judge.

Froma Zeitlin wrote a very smart analysis of the trilogy ("The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in Aeschylus's Oresteia"). At one point in her article, she provides a table of antitheses developed in the Oresteia. From her list, it is remarkable how many of the distinctions she describes are ones that are deliberately blurred in the Bacchae. Here are a few examples:

Male/Female
Olympian/Chthonic
Father/Mother
Center/Limit
Greek/Barbarian
Future (young)/Past (old)
Clarity/Obscurity

(The table is on page 112 of Zeitlin's Playing the Other, University of Chicago, 1997. These will be on my Powerpoint in the finished presentation.)

Because I don't have time to treat all of these right now, I'll focus on one: Male/Female. The Oresteia has clear gender issues at stake. Clytemnestra is repeatedly described as man-like, and she certainly takes on that role when she kills her husband and takes over rule of the land. On the other end of the scale is her lover, Aegisthus, who, although he is a man, is weak and effeminate. This state of affairs, with a strong, man-like woman in charge, is overturned in the final play of the cycle. At Orestes' trial, Apollo successfully clears him of charges of kin-killing by arguing that children share none of their mother's blood, because the mother is a mere vessel. Athena affirms that this is true by pointing out that she has only a father, and that no mother was necessary for her birth. Men and women are clearly divided and sorted into order.

On the other hand, we have Dionysus in the Bacchae, who is sexually ambiguous. Even the circumstances of his birth break down the distinction between male and female. First, he was in Semele's womb, but after her distruction by fire, Dionysus was concealed in the thigh of Zeus, and was thus born twice, once from a woman and once from a man. The Bacchae makes a point of the circumstances of Dionysus' birth distinction--it is the subject of Dionysus' opening speech, and treated again later in the play by the prophet Tiresias.

The ambiguity only increases over the course of the Bacchae, culminating in Pentheus' eventual costume change, when he enters the stage dressed as a maenad, in a wig and dress. At the very point when he falls under the influence of Dionysus, Pentheus is visually remade from a young man into a woman. This issue of costume changes and masks is one I'll deal with in greater detail later on.

The Bacchae and Sophocles
The three great tragedians (translation: the three tragedians whose plays actually survived to the present) are, in roughly chronological order, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Aeschylus is often seen as representing a more traditional point of view, while Euripides is regarded as more radical. We can see this sort of division in, for example, Aristophanes' Frogs, where Dionysus holds a contest in the Underworld between Aeschylus and Euripides, eventually choosing Aeschylus.

And that leaves Sophocles. I spent somewhat less time with Sophocles, but there are a few points of interest. In Sophocles' Ajax, the character Ajax, having been driven mad by Athena, falls on a herd of cattle and slaughters them because Athena has made him believe that they are human, and his enemies. When he discovers what he has done, he falls on his sword in shame, in the only known instance of on stage violence in Greek tragedy.

Now, madness is very often associated with Dionysus, and it is a major theme in the Bacchae. There are, however, significance differences between this instance and those in the Bacchae. Ajax is an enemy of Odysseus here, and Odysseus is a favorite of Athena. When Athena induces this madness in Ajax, it is for the purpose of protecting Odysseus. She redirects rage that Ajax already possessed, and makes it less destructive than it otherwise would have been. This madness occurs at the beginning of the play, and it contains the damage of Ajax's anger so that the only one destroyed in the end is Ajax himself.

But in the Bacchae, the madness Dionysus induces is destructive and punitive. While Athena's madness allows Ajax to vent his rage against cattle instead of murdering humans, in the Bacchae we have the murder of a son, under the delusion that he is a young lion or a bull. The Bacchae reverses the Ajax.

These two instances offer important observation on the nature of the gods in question. On the one hand, we have Athena, the profoundly civic goddess of Athens. It seems somewhat uncharacteristic of her to be involved in madness at all, but we can see that her madness has a way of restoring order rather than breaking it down. On the other, we have Dionysus, who breaks down distinctions and dissolves social order. These differences are played out distinctly in the two plays.

Dionysus in Euripides
The thing about Dionysus is that he is very difficult to pin down. In Athens, he functioned on the one hand as the god of wine, promoting agriculture and merriment, and he had a civic role in the polis. On the other hand, he was a frightening god, associated with madness and kin-killing, the god of sparagmos, the ripping apart of a sacrifice, and omophagia, the eating of raw meat.

The Bacchae seems mostly to focus on the latter aspect of Dionysus, but another Euripides play, the Heracles has a clear invocation of both sides of Dionysus. Heracles has been gone performing labors in the Underworld, while above in Thebes (interestingly enough) his family is being persecuted by the ruler, Lycus. Heracles returns from the Underworld just in time to save his family from their deaths at the hands of Lycus, but shortly after he saves them, Hera (the wife of Zeus, who hates Heracles), sends down Lyssa, Madness personified. Heracles is struck into madness and murders his wife and children.

Dionysus is not involved firsthand in any of this--as I said earlier, until the Bacchae, Dionysus was largely absent from the stage. However, he is explicitly invoked twice in the play. First, before Heracles' victory over Lycus, the chorus sings a joyful song, and in the midst of it, they say, "I still sing / Heracles' victory song / beside the wine-giving Bromius" (lines 680-682), Bromius being a cult name for Dionysus.

And then, only about two hundred lines later, at the very moment that the maddened Heracles is murdering his family, the Chorus invokes Dionysus again.

Oh Zeus, the Poinai, crazed, eating raw flesh,
acting unjustly, will at once lay low your race
with ills and make it childless.
. . .
The dances without drums begin,
not pleasing to the thyrsus of Bromius.
. . .
The spirits go for blood, not for the streams
of a Dionysian libation of wine. (887-893)

Dionysus has not caused Heracles' madness, but the madness is described with Dionysiac imagery and associations. The eating raw flesh mentioned strongly recalls the eating of raw flesh, omophagia associated with ecstatic Dionysiac rites. In fact, in the Bacchae, when Agave still believes that she has killed an animal, not her son, she offers to share his body in a feast with the chorus of Asian maenads.

The Heracles is also interesting for its use of another Dionysiac theme, that of masks and disguises. Before Heracles' return to Thebes, his wife and children are about to be killed by Lycus. Before they are, however, they persuade Lycus to allow them to put on funeral clothes. When Heracles arrives, he finds his family dressed quite literally as corpses. In this case, their costume change is all too literal a representation of what is to come.

In the Bacchae, Pentheus undergoes a major costume change as he falls under Dionysus' influence. When he appears on stage, dressed as a maenad and fussing with his skirts and his wig in a most uncharacteristic manner, Dionysus congratulates him. "Your previous mind was not healthy, but now you have the kind of mind that you should have" (947-948).

Masks of Madness
Throughout tragedy, Dionysus runs along in the background, present in recurrent themes, and in invocations from the characters on stage. It is as if tragedy is the mask worn by the god of masks himself. In the Bacchae, here at the very end of tragedy, Dionysus is temporarily unmasked as he takes his final bow.