In the story of Oedipus we saw the
disillusion of identity in Sophocles' play.
Turning now to the Bacchae of Euripides we're going to see another identity
dissolve before our eyes. It's going to happen in a slightly
different way in completely tied up with this figure of Dionysus.
Dionysus is a God who's details we're going to discover in this play are
fascinating inversions of normal ways that great Gods are suppose to behave.
He has another name. Dionysus and Bacchus.
Both of them are equally Greek. Sometimes, when we run into multiple names
on the gods. One of them belonged to the Greeks.
One to, the Romans or someone else. That's not the case.
I mean, he's known as both Dionysus and Bacchus in the Greek material.
He has a story behind him that is fascinating, complex, and interesting.
He is indeed a Olympian god, he belongs. He's definitely one of them.
He shows up early on in the tradition. Early mentions of Dionysus' name show up
on pottery. We have him, attestatations of him as a
standard Greek. God from as far back as we have stations
of any standard Greek god. But some of the things he does are a
little strange. And in fact seem to be purposefully
inverted examples of normal Greek custom. And normal ways of worshipping the Gods.
Most Greek rituals happen out in the open in broad daylight.
We do them in public. In crowds.
At very standard altars in large. Monumental temples.
Animal sacrifices performed. It's a carefully controlled killing of an
animal. The animal is then cooked, carved up and
served out to people to be part of their healthy diet that they then eat.
There was a pu, very public aspect to these general components or the rights.
Dionysian rights are the opposite in each of these times.
Rather than being at daytime, they happen at night.
Rather than being open, open and in broad daylight, they happen in secret.
Rather than being in the center of the city, they happen in the Hinter lands.
And their. Not at a main temple.
Their in the, hillsides, the crazy hillsides.
Kafirin is going to play another role, when it comes to the Dionysian rights.
We have a. Wild form of tracking down live animals
and ripping them up with their bare hands rather than the idea of kind of,
controlled killing of the animal in a temple sacrifice.
And then finally, eating the meat raw. This is what Dionysian celebrants do
rather than cooking it and eating it after it's been prepared.
The Dionysis and his rights seem. So, carefully, to.
Turn on its head each component of Greek sacrificial rite the main component of
Greek religious ceremonies. It seems to be, it seems as though this is
actually built in as a inversion of what normally counts as, as Greek practice.
In crucially important, here you see it in the vines and the little, small.
The grapes that are attached to them in the iconography around Dionysus included
in the wonderful ceramic behind us. Dionysus is a God of wine.
You take this beautiful fruit over here, and put it up in the in with some special
processes blend it together, let it ferment for awhile and you get this
beautiful drink over here. This drink tastes good.
It tastes a little strange maybe at first and after awhile you.
Might start to like it. And if you do, you get welcomed into
another world. It's understood that Diony-, Dionysian
wine takes you from the s-, world and the space that you're used to, and puts you
literally outside of yourself. There's an ecstatic component to being a
Dionysian revel, by Dio-, Dionysian reveler.
Wine, yes, is going to be a part of many religious ceremonies in antiquity, but
wine to extraordinary excess is characteristic of Dionysus.
It is of a sort of central part of what the Dionysian worship is all about.
The, the idea of being not just tipsy, not even just plain drunk.
But a being absolutely completely gone drunk.
That's a part of worshiping Dionysus. It's also a piece of the overturning of
all the other normal components of Greek ritual that Dionysian ritual seems to
involve. It is A consistent though a piece of the
Greek pantheon as we were saying. Dionysus is pretty commonly looked at with
some kind of strange eyes. Even in the Greek materials we're going to
look at he might be a foreign god, he might be a newcomer.
They kind of wonder where it is that he came from.
All of these though, are to be built on top of what we think to be historically an
indication that Dionysus is as old as any other Greek god.
And he seems to have been from the very beginning always suspect.
So he's that person in the family that has always.
Then wondered about as to whether he actually is fully a part of the family.
In the Bacchae, we're going to see some themes worked out, that same kind, that
are parallel to the kinds of themes we saw worked out in the Homeric hymns.
They'll be reference to Dionysus's birth. He'll be trying to secure his place in the
Pantheon, and find a stable position for himself.
He's going to busy, involved in establishing his rights, and making sure
that human beings. Perform those rights, rights for him, all
this is a lend itself to myth and ritual type of analysis we're going to see in the
plays of Dionysus, in the back I by Bacchae by Euripides, we're going to see a
welcoming of particular tool that we have of myth and ritual that's going to claim
that again, myths are there in order to give a background story behind ritual
activity that you and I normally do. It seems as though the Bacchae fits very
well into this kind of template for the myths and how they go.
The background of Thebes is something that came up when we started to talk about
Oedipus and Thebes again, shows up in the Bacchae.
Interesting for us to st, take a moment here and just look a little bit more
closely at this tradition. We mentioned last time Capaneus and his
own connection particularly the theme of [FOREIGN] birth that shows up in his
story. But there's a little more to it that we
want to make sure we pull out. Theme shows up in tragedies that survive
from Athens especially as a kind of mirror image of the Athens that Athenians like to
imagine. The Athens of stability, the Athens of
rationality, of clear-headedness. All of these things show up in the
Athenian, in the drama set in Athens. When the Athenians talk about a strange
place, where things are a little bit odd. Off kilter, everything's a little bit off,
a little bit off. They often times are going to talk about
thiep. Thiep represents to them a place that has
a deep background and important mythic rootedness in the past.
But when the Athenians spin it, they spin the stuff in the legends of Thebes, that
particularly looks odd, strange, and weird.
There's a strong background in Cadmus' family of a certain kind of violence.
Remember Cadmus, we talked about in previous lecture on Oedipus, was
originally a Phoenician, and he is, winds up coming over to Greece because he's
chasing his own sister, Europa. Europa's chasing after Zeus in the form of
a bull trying to she falls in love with the bull, and tries to make contact with
that bull. Cadmus is on his way to try to find her,
when he runs into his serpent, kills the serpent, sells the dragon teeth and
recall. And those teeth go into the ground.
The beings that sprout up, that become the founding families of Thebes, these humans
all turn on each other and start to kill each other.
Fratricidal violence shows up in Cadmus' family.
Then. Cadmus' Daughter.
So Ino, Semele, Actaeon, and Agave each has a troubling story.
Semele, some of you all will know is a very famous story, is actually the mother
of Dionysus. So Dionysus is deeply connected with
Thebes in his own family lineage. Yes Dionysus has on one hand a mortal
mother when Semele, the story famously goes is impregnated by Zeus she through
some trickery of Hera, insists that Zeus show himself to her in his full glory.
When Zeus does, She is immolated.
Zeus then snatches up the infant and Dionysus is then born from Zeus' own
thigh. In a kind of male womb taking over where a
female womb started. So Zeus then gives birth to Dionysus a
second time. And Dionysus then joins the Pantheon but
poor Semele is immolated. In addition, the daughter of to the
daughter of Semele there are the daughters of Autonoe and Ino.
Autonoe, her son Actaeon dies by being ripped apart by his own hunting dogs.
A terrible violent death that shows up also shows up also in the family of
Cadmus. Ino also dies.
She dies herself by plunging into the sea with her own son in her arms, when her
husband turns in a frenzy and chases her down and tries to kill her.
There's awful things percolating in Cadmus his family.
Agave who's story we're going to see in Euripides' Bacchae has a terrible,
terrible version of things happen to her too.
Each of these installments shows us that Cadmus' family is visited infected with
this kind of violence in a way that it's not quite like the house of Atreus where
that violence is constantly turning in on itself and unable to heal itself.
Instead it just seems that awful things. Seemingly at random, continuously visit
this poor family. Each of them has a connection with this
figure of Bacchus or Dionysus, who's story we'll talk about next.