---
To discern the distinctivenessof the Bacchae’s effect, we need to ask how a culture could arise which was intrinsically ‘Faustian’- or Promethean- seeing itself as opposed to the gods in certain fundamental respects. Some other religious traditions recognised gods who might be awesome rather than benevolent in an obvious sense, but the Greeks set up the code of human excellence often in contradistinction to the gods.
Homer’s writings portray the gods as frequently ‘fickle’ and unfair. And yet they are the gods, so what does that say about our human notions of right and wrong? As far as I can see, the answers lie in the period of the foundation of Greek civilization. We need to study ancient Hellenic and Near Eastern history very carefully, especially Babylon, perhaps using the Epic of Gilgamesh. No doubt we need to consider ‘humanism’, the glorification of recent figures of the Trojan wars etc. Consider the stories connected with Tantalus, Thebes and The House of Atreus. These feature primal sins committed by a human and his house, whose consequences are born by their whole family in appalling and tragic circumstances. Redemption (if we may call it that) is at length attained through the noble suffering of great heroes like Oedipus and Orestes who exemplify that peculiarly tragic heroism of a life that is horrific, yet exemplary.
The Bacchae probably comes as close as any Greek document to addressing this problem. Rather than suggesting that the kind of civic order commended by the examples of Oedipus and Orestes is able to hold the balance of life, Euripides seems to show that the ‘irrational’ forces of Dionysus are deeply antipathetic to the civic order. Or does he? The maenads are nomadic and at peace with the god’s ecstasy; apparently the civic values of Thebes are too rigid to accommodate Dionysian ecstasy, which thus works on the city as a poison, rather than an elixir.
Naturally, contemporary readers don’t want a simplified morality. In any case, it’s not really available, as we can’t say what the ‘sin’ of the Theban nobility was, beyond inferring the general (and rather trite in our contemporary over-psychological culture) principle that if you ‘suppress’ the Dionysian urge, the god will (naturally) punish you for it. But is this interpretation so wrong? After all, Dionysus’ followers do not act out the horrible Dionysian frenzy of the maddened Theban women. Maybe the history of our species did involve horrific (to us) violence: human sacrifice, blood drinking, family murder etc. Yet these rites were adapted into a mythic form. Perhaps the Thebans ‘regress’ through their imbalance!? In any case, even if there is no explicit critique of civic values, it is hard not to read it that way: a warning against the hubris of 5th century Athenian confidence. The Aeschylean ‘solution’ offered in the Oresteia stood before the Peloponnesian war. Euripides' was writing at the end of Athens' golden age.
PENTHEUS AND DIONYSUS
But perhaps this issue is better approached through the pairing of Pentheus and Dionysus.
The first point to grasp is that this story clearly derives from an archaic Mystery story, probably used in an Initiation, in which the candidate is the Pentheus - the sufferer or 'mourner' - who dies and is then reborn through identification with the god to become a 'Dionysus'. Hence the identity of persecuter and sufferer, the lower ego killed and subsumed into a higher self.
But Euripides offers no easy spiritual answers because the Bacchae shows an out and out opposition between the two characters - as if Pentheus is the unwilling or failed initiate. Why?
One reason is that the Greeks were obsessed with the ‘individual’, the tragic hero, and that Pentheus is a glamorised victim inasmuch as that’s part of FAME. They sensed that separation from the norm, from the group, involved suffering, excess etc. But perhaps they were misled by the desire for fame, a situation whereby humans deify themselves too much and personalize gods correspondingly. Their deities resembled a certain kind of aristocracy. Yet they projected all their noble qualities onto their heroes, and their amoral ones onto their gods?
The preoccupation with individuality and fame surely relates to the fear of death ( as shown by Achilles’ lines in the Odyssey) as central to Greek culture - which is why Christianity was so significant for the Greeks. In this respect that Greeks were unsophisticated, like children without antiquity of knowledge or knowledge of antiquity, as the Egyptian priest told Solon.
Achilles' choice exemplifies the craving for glory, for separate existence, and this has been carried into Western culture as the craving for money, fame, and ‘success’ in general. Yet this cannot remain unchallenged, if one really cares about the species and the continuity of life in general.
So how do we evaluate Pentheus? Do we judge him, or do we praise him as somehow sharing in the glory of Dionysus himself? This leads to the question: what is the status of Greek Myth in the context of beliefs in a ‘spiritual world’ and an afterlife? Here I present no answers, but some preliminary thoughts:
- The Greeks saw the gods as mysterious powers who were nonetheless perfectly capable of manifesting in human form.
- The gods are the ‘immortals’, humans are mortal and that is that.
- The Greeks don’t seem to have loved their gods, if the poets are to be believed. Their gods are, after all, portrayed as cruel dilettantish aristocrats.
- Greek religion appears as a more anthropomorphic development of the polytheistic religious frameworks of Babylon, Egypt and India
- The Iliad even shows Greeks fighting the gods - a particular development of the Aryan civilization seen in its purity in India
- Compare Valhalla and Elysium: bravery, heroism is a way, perhaps the way, to immortality
- In important distinction opened out between popular religion and humanism & naturalism - remember Cicero's quotation on popular religion versus the Mysteries
- There was a strong undercurrent of daring and sacrilegious paranoia in Greek belief: there are gods, and they are malicious.
J. North 1999