The Coming God

This time is as good as any to provide some basic background information about the Bacchae and the context of its origin. Unless otherwise specified, this information comes either from myself or from the introduction to E.R. Dodds' commentary on the play (a text which perhaps is of great significance for the seasoned scholars, but which was utterly inadequate for the needs of a second-year Greek student).

Euripides was chronologically the third of Athens' great tragic poets, after Aeschylus (best known for the Oresteia) and Sophocles (best known for the Oedipus cycle), and by far the best attested. At least eighteen of his plays survive (one is of doubtful authorship), along with numerous fragments, and the Bacchae is, as far as we know, his last completed work. It was written during the last stages of the Peloponnesian War, Athens' colossal (by the standards of Greek city-states, many of which were no larger than a good-sized suburb) struggle against Sparta and various other cities for hegemony over the Greek world. As the story is told in our dubiously-reliable sources, Euripides left Athens permanently in 408 BC, taking up residence in the court of Archelaus, the king of the semi-barbarous Macedonians (it may be worthwhile to note that the Greek conception of "barbarians" encompassed anyone who did not speak Greek well - and still sometimes even then). He died in the winter of 407-6 BC, leaving behind three plays - the lost Alcmaeon at Corinth, the unfinished Iphigenia at Aulis, and our Bacchae. They were later recovered by the playwrights' son (or nephew), also named Euripides, and won the first prize the following year.

It may possibly be useful when regarding the play to imagine the conditions in which Euripides found himself: past 70, voluntarily estranged from his homeland after his criticisms of the demagogues of a disastrous war now twenty years old, a relatively unsuccessful dramatist among his peers (only later was Euripides counted amongst the literary giants of Greece).

The play opens with the arrival of Dionysus in Thebes, the home city of his mother, Semele, who was impregnated by Zeus and demanded of him to see his true form. Unfortunately for her, the sight of naked divine power caused her to be incinerated, and Zeus handled the situation by sewing the fetal Dionysus into his thigh until he was ready to be born. Dionysus, in terms of the other Olympian gods, was recognized by the Greeks as from a later generation than his half-siblings (Athena, Apollo, etc.), and as a divinity whose origin lay somewhere in the undefined East (Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Persia). His comparative youth and place of generation are both seen in the opening speech of the play, which is, as was traditional, a soliloquy, in which he desires mortal confirmation of his status as a god.

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(Enter Dionysus)

I, Dionysus, son of Zeus, have come to the Theban land,

where Semele, daughter of Cadmus, gave birth to me,

giving birth to me through lightning-borne fire.

Having changed my shape from a god's to a mortal's,

I passed by the stream of Dirke, and the waters of Ismenos.

I see the memorial of my mother's thunderbolt,

near the ruins of her house and home, struck

by the still-living flame of Zeus' fire,

Hera's undying outrage against my mother.

I approve of Cadmus, who set this upon

undefiled ground, his daughter's sacred precinct:

I have covered it all around with the first

grape-clustered bloom of the vine.

Having left behind the rich, golden lands of Lydia and Phrygia,

I passed through the sun-burnt plateaus of Persia,

the walled cities of Bactria, the wintry land of the Medes,

fortunate Arabia, and all Asia, which lies

beside the salty sea, with Greeks and barbarians

mixed about all together, and which has

cities with beautiful towers, and full of people,

and came to the foremost city of the Greeks, after

I had initiated dances and set down my mystic rites,

so I would be manifest as a god to mortals.

I roused Thebes first amongst Greek lands

with a shout, having donned a fawn's skin

and placed a thrysus in my hand, an ivy weapon.

Since my mother's sisters, who should have known better

most of all, said Dionysus wasn't sprung from Zeus,

and that Semele, having been seduced by some mortal,

attributed her bedroom misdeeds to Zeus, through

the contrivances of Cadmus, and they boasted that Zeus

had killed her in order to cheat her out of marriage.

So I stung her sisters out of their houses with madness,

and with minds in frenzy they now dwell on the mountain.

I forced them to wear the costume of my revelries,

and drove the offspring of Cadmus, as many as were

women, out of their homes in madness. They are mingled

all together with Cadmus' actual daughters, sitting

on roofless rocks beneath verdant fir trees.

If they're unwilling, the city must learn fully

to defend my mother Semele on my behalf

by being in a ceaseless state of my Bacchic revels,

making clear to mortals that she bore a god from Zeus.

Cadmus has given the honor and the office of tyrant

to Pentheus, a child of his daughter, who fights a god,

fights against me, withholds libations from me,

and remembers me nowhere in his prayers. Because of this,

I, born a god, will display myself to him and to all the Thebans.

Having shown myself, and set this place to rights,

I will take my feet to another land. If the city of Thebes seeks

to push my Bacchae from the mountains with anger and weapons,

I, general of the maenads, will engage them in battle.

Because of all this, having changed my shape, I have

a mortal's form, and I've changed my nature to that of a man.

But, O women who left Tmolus, the bulwark of Lydia,

my sisterhood of worshippers, whom I brought from

the barbarians, my companions and fellow-travelers,

seize the Phrygian country's native drum,

invention of both myself and mother Rhea,

come and beat it about both sides of Pentheus'

kingly house, so that the city of Cadmus might see.

I'm going to the Bacchae, so they'll go to the sides

of Mt. Cithaeron, and I'll partake of dances with them.

(Exit Dionysus)

Notes:
Dirke and Ismenos are rivers near Thebes.
Lydia and Phrygia are regions of Asia Minor (modern Turkey).
Bactria and the lands of the Medes are in the regions of modern Afghanistan and Iran.
Tmolus is a mountain sacred to Dionysus in Asia Minor.
Mt. Cithaeron is an important mountain in Greek history/mythology which lies a short distance from Thebes.