The Problem of the Bacchae

Extract

Few readers of the Bacchae will disagree with Professor Gilbert Murray's statement that ‘for excitement, for mere thrill, there is absolutely nothing like it in ancient literature’. Most readers will probably also feel that the whole thing is cruel and barbarous, and that it is difficult to suppose that Euripides had much real sympathy with the wild revellings and orgies so beautifully depicted, or that he thought it a good thing for women to get into a state in which they mistook men for animals, and deserted their own babies to suckle the offspring of wild beasts. Such being the results at Thebes of the new ritual, it is hard not to feel from the first that Pentheus is right in trying to suppress it, and right in denying the divinity of Dionysus. It is not easy to agree with Tyrrell in finding in all this the marks of an ‘ethical contentment and speculative calm’. The man who should be ethically contented with that would not be worth reading.