Euripides: ‘The Bacchae’

 What kind of wisdom does it take to confront one of those powerful forces in life —  so powerful that it’s unavoidable and so in some sense necessity?

Death is like that. So are sex and grief. Some forces are so strong that the ancient Greeks personified them as gods.

Euripides held that extreme religious experience is like that. The Bacchae is his attempt to portray how a wise person would respond to the religious impulse that is within most human beings.

Dionysus has brought his new, ecstatic religion to Thebes. He wants people to embrace the new rites. When they resist, he drives all the women mad with religious ecstasy. All of them, including King Pentheus’ mother, Agave, go to the mountains for a frolic.

Pentheus is a boy, maybe 16 or 17. He’s appalled by the irrationality of ecstatic religion and tries to suppress it.

Dionysus appears to him in the form of a devotee of the new religion, not as a god, and tries to persuade him.

If you size this up as a fight between rational and irrational forces, it doesn’t work. As Dionysus tries to persuade him to accept the new religion, Pentheus quickly becomes unreasonable. He can’t imagine rites that violate the traditional ways. He’s so sure he’s right, so full of hubris, that he gets angry and violent. He can’t imagine being wrong, and since his imagination is limited, he can’t imagine what it’s like being in the stranger’s shoes. He feels no compassion for this stranger and throws him in jail.

The play turns when the god gives up trying to persuade Pentheus and decides to destroy him.

In Euripides’ mind, you can argue about whether it makes sense to personify forces as gods and goddesses. But only a fool would question whether those forces have power over humans.

William Arrowsmith, who translated the play, points out that Euripides contrasts sophia, the usual word for wisdom, with amathia, which is the kind of willful ignorance that we might call being unteachable.

To the ancient Greeks, wisdom began with a knowledge of oneself, which led to an understanding of one’s place in the universe. The wise person accepts that.

But wisdom has a range of meanings. Old king Cadmus, who turned the throne over to his grandson, accepted the new religion not out of conviction but because it’s the politically “wise” thing to do. Some versions of wisdom simply mean being shrewd, in a cunning, self-serving way.

People accommodate religious impulses in many ways, some wiser than others.

This is a stunning, powerful play. I marked many passages on the gods and wisdom. I like these best:

 

Far in the air of heaven,

The sons of heaven live.

But they watch the lives of men.

And what passes for wisdom is not;

unwise are those who aspire,

who outrange the limits of man.

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on The Bacchae is on pp. 392-404.

The Bacchae, translated by William Arrowsmith, is in Euripides IV in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 141-228. The quotation is on p. 170.