| Title | : | The Bacchae and Other Plays |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0140440445 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780140440447 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 234 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 415 |
The Bacchae and Other Plays Reviews
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The Bacchae is one of the most disturbing plays in the ancient Greek genre. Euripides delves into the religiousity of the time with the " beware of spying on secret rites". The other three plays, Ion, The Women of Troy and Helen, are noble but not as good.
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Ion 4⭐️
Women of Troy 5⭐️
Helen 3⭐️
The Bacchae 3.5⭐️ -
Finished this yesterday and RTC of each play breakdown and my thoughts on each.
Overall, this was one of the most enjoyable compilation of Euripides plays with most of the plays rating a 4 or 4.5****
Rtc -
49. The Bacchae and Other Plays : Ion, The Women of Troy, Helen, The Bacchae by Euripides
Translated by Philip Vellacott, 1954, revised 1973
format: 249 page Penguin Classics paperback
acquired: from my library
read: Aug 7-11
rating: 4 stars
These are all late plays from Euripides. They show a lot of developed complexity compared to the collection of earlier plays I read previously. His understated satire is still prominent, but has become much more sophisticated and not entirely negative. His play structure no longer feels like a selection of long dull monologues that only affect in sum, and that are entirely disturbing. They are more dynamic, they keep the reader/viewer entertained, and still, there is so much going on behind the words that is completely counter to what is overtly being said. In sum, these are complex and interesting works that deserve multiple readings...but I have only read them once so far. They are also largely anti-war statements, a reflection of his times.
Euripides lived from c. 480 – c. 406 bce. This meant he lived through Athens 50 years of Greek dominance that lasted from roughly the battle of Salamis in 480 to the beginning of the Peloponnesian war in 431. Athenian citizens would struggle during the long wars with Sparta, especially during the last tens years, and Athens eventually lost in 404 bce. Euripides left Athens late in life, retiring in Macedonia.
Ion 414 bce
I can't recall how I know the story of Ion, but it must be somewhat common knowledge. Fathered by Apollo, his mother, Creusa, abandons him, then later becomes wife of the ruler of Athens, and barren. Ion is raised in Delphi by Apollo worshipers and becomes and attendant at the temple. Years later Creusa comes to Delphi to ask Apollo about her son. In the ritual process, her husband, Xuthus, is told that Ion is his own son and Creusa and Xuthus take him home to Athens to be their heir.
The play has many comic elements, such as when Ion and Creusa first meet and, not knowing who each other are, tell their parallel stories. Creusa's are told as if they are the tragic story of her close friend. But the heart of this story seems to an exploration of truth and how to deal with its uncertainty. Ion is quite a lovely character, but the more he learns the less he can be certain of. Even Athena's appearance does not really help. We sense, along with Ion, a great deal of uncomfortable doubt as the play closes.
The Women of Troy 415 bce
A really sad play set in Troy just after its fall. The Trojan women have lost their luxury, their sons and husbands and any hope for the future. They are to become slaves. Hecabe, queen of Troy, morning the loss of her husband and most of her children, including Hector, is the focus as she looks ahead to her future life of slavery. She is assigned to Odysseus. Cassandra, not yet raped, and knowing all that will come ahead, makes an appears, as does Andromache, who still has her and Hector's son. Then Helen appears. Her situation is in notable contrast to the hopeless defeated lives around her. Helen still has a future. Her speech is striking for its lack of guilt. But her words can be read in contrasting ways, making her the most interesting part of the play.
The Women of Troy was written in the shadow of the Battle of Melos in 415 bce. Melos had tried to stay neutral between Athens and Sparta. Athens attacked and had every man who could bear arms executed and enslaved the women and children.
Helen 412 bce
A surreal plot, has Helen sits in Egypt, trapped. She never was taken by Paris to Troy, but instead a ghost made of air was taken. The play is about her getting reunited with her husband, Menelaus, and their comic escape from Egypt. But, the unstated point is that Trojan war and all it's consequences were for nothing but a puff of air. It's a very strong antiwar play, told in a way to get past the Athenian censors.
The Bacchae 405 bce (posthumous)
Written in exile, and free of Athenian wartime censorship, Euripides put his whole life of play-writing into the
The Bacchae. On the surface it's the story of how Dionysus, still a young unproven god, takes revenge on his family, rulers in Thebes. His cousin, Pentheus, bull-headed ruler of Thebes, has fiercely banned worship of Dionysos and this Bacchanal frenzy. But, worship continues. Dionysus uses the frenzy as his tool. He sets up Pentheus to be torn apart alive by his own mother and his aunts.
It's, first, a curious look into (the mythology of?) Bacchic worship and its rituals. Worshipers are viewed as promiscuous and insane, but are actually quite modest in their actions. A contrast is explored between the controlled cities and their view on what they see as civilization (think war-time, repressive Athens) and humanity's animal natures. It's the most interesting play of Euripides that I've read. -
I wanted to read The Bacchae because I had a sense that it had something to do with Dostoevsky's
Demons, which I recently finished. It did, in the sense that both works tell the story of a city visited by Dionysian frenzy. In Euripides's drama, the frenzy is Dionysus's revenge on the women of Thebes for insulting his mother by claiming that she lied when she said that Zeus was his father. The dramatic conflict centers on Pentheus, king of the city and grandson of its founder, who wants to suppress the outbreak of Bacchic worship among the city's women. This draws him into combat with a disguised Dionysus himself, who eventually leads the proud Puritan--disguised as a female worshiper, ostensibly to spy on the reveling women--to his doom as he is torn to pieces by the frenzied women, including finally his own mother. The whole play reads like a mysterious rite that should have some official mythological title--The Sacrifice of the Stern King or something. The locus of the audience's sympathy is exactly nowhere--the raving puritanical leader, driven to increasing displays of power that reveal only his impotence, is, considered as a political "type," always bad news; while the vindictive god and his manipulated worshipers, who go by degrees from good anarchy (freedom and play in nature) to bad anarchy (violence without limit), offer a painful reminder of the checkered career of "revolution" in human history.
In the translator's preface to this volume, Philip Vellacott offers a kind of Freudian reading of the play in which Euripides is warning us that if we deny the claims of the Dionysian impulses to play and drunkenness--that is, if we become puritanical--these repressed urges will return with a vengeance and destroy us. That's as good an interpretation as any. Dostoevsky, writing after both monotheism and the Enlightenment, can't explicitly credit the Dionysian urges themselves--the necessity for relief from order, for a bit of creative destruction--because history offers them to him only under the sign of universalist political ideology (communism, anarchism, socialism), to which he counterposes Christianity. Maybe Euripides had the better poetic opportunity in being able to start from a polytheistic premise in which the different dimensions of human thought and feeling are each honored with autonomy. Then again, his tragedy moves with grim inevitability toward its violent end, so perhaps the translator's 20th-century optimism is misplaced because, whether in 5th-century Athens or 19th-century Russia, the rite must happen in full, including the bloodshed.
As for the rest of this volume:
I've owned it for almost 15 years, having bought it for a Greek civilization class in which we were assigned The Women of Troy. I only skimmed that play this time around, revisiting my undergraduate annotations, but it remains a remarkable work, less a drama than a series of lamentations by the eponymous women as they go into Greek slavery after the Trojan War. But the play is ironic--dramatically ironic, in fact--in that the Greeks have by their desecration of Troy's temples earned the gods' displeasure after their victory and are themselves about to be scattered over the seas, subject to the same violence from on high as the women they prey upon.
Helen is a strange comedy--a self-parody, acceding to the scholars, possibly first performed for an all-female audience at a festival honoring Demeter and Persephone. Fast-moving and uneven in tone, it posits (in an idea
apparently derived from Herodotus) that the Helen taken by Paris to Troy was just an illusion generated by Hera to revenge herself on Athena, which means, as our translators points out, that the whole Trojan War was fought for literally nothing. This play finds Helen in Egyptian exile and dramatizes her reunion and escape with Menelaus.
The first and earliest play in the volume, Ion, is a bitterly and grotesquely funny story of paternity in which the title character, Apollo's son conceived in rape of a mortal woman, is reunited with his mother and both are convinced by the gods to pretend to go along with the idea that he is the illegitimate child of another man entirely, his mother's current husband, so that he can go on to found Greek settlements in Asia. This is Euripides at his most corrosive, with the gods as rapacious schemers and mortals as their changeable pawns; by the "happy ending," everybody stands accused.
Speaking of Dionysus and women and irony and intellectual reactionaries: I am reminded that Nietzsche hated Euripides for his subjection of the gods to ironic portrayal and criticism and for his sympathetic depiction of women and slaves and other untermenschen. For Nietzsche, Euripides was a kind of Ibsen of antiquity, a Socratic Enlightener dispelling the ritual quality of tragedy by forcing reason into the proceedings. But what makes Euripides great, sublime because not in spite of his pervasive mockery, is that his irony is so total--it encompasses the universe, so that we sympathize with the victims of history without imagining that much can be done about their plight, even as we also see that their tormentors and rulers are caught in the same capricious machinations of the amoral and immoral gods. If this is Ibsenite, it is more like The Wild Duck than like The Doll's House: a dramatic world in where there are no answers, where truth does not console, and where the innocent and the guilty alike pay the price. -
The Bacchae
- I have seen the holy Bacchae, who like a flight of spears
Went streaming bare-limbed, frantic, out of the city gate.
- What, woman? What was that you said? Do you exult
When such a cruel fate has overtaken the king?
- I am no Greek.
I sing my joy in a foreign tune.
- When bull led man to the ritual slaughter-ring.
He'd have been my god, were I Greek (or one of these foreign women). Even without him, I believe that his forces or his spheres, unacknowledged, are dangerous; whether religious or psychological, this play always spoke to me. Perhaps the part where Agave triumphs ignorantly with her son's head, is drawn-out, over-milked, but that's theatre for you. The effeminate foreigner who is Dionysus in disguise -- who celebrates that 'rare goddess', Peace; who cross-dresses the king to make a laughingstock of him; whose worshippers abandon the loom to tear wild beasts limb from limb... what's not to love and fascinate? So much, too, is uncannily familiar.
My personal no. 1 ancient Greek play. -
bacchanal anyone?? jkjk........unless ?
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My edition has four plays: Ion, The Women of Troy, Helen, and The Bacchae.
Ion -- The orphan Ion tries to discover his origins. The play begins with a prologue by Hermes, the messenger god, who arrives at the temple of Apollo at Delphi. He recounts the tale of how Creusa, the mother of Ion, was raped by Apollo and secretly gave birth to a son. She abandoned him and Apollo sent Hermes to bring the boy to Delphi. I thought this was not as interesting as the other three plays.
The Women of Troy -- The fates of Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra and the other women of Troy after their city has been sacked, their husbands killed, and their remaining families about to be taken away as slaves. It takes place near the same time as Hecuba, which is not in this volume. I have read this one before in a newer translation. It is stunning.
Helen -- The play uses a variant of Helen's story that differs from the one in
The Iliad: Helen of Sparta was in Egypt during the Trojan War while a phantom look-alike created by Hera and Hermes was carried off to Troy. (Herodotus, among others, had suggested that this is what really happened in his Histories.) Euripides has Helen taken to Egypt by the gods, and by the time the play opens, the real Helen has been living in Egypt for seventeen years. The Egyptian king Proteus, who had protected Helen, has died. His son Theoclymenus, intends to marry Helen, who after all these years remains loyal to her husband Menelaus.
The Bacchae -- One of the most disturbing Greek plays. This is probably my favorite play by Euripides. This is Euripides's last surviving tragedy. It premiered posthumously at the Theatre of Dionysus in 405 BC. The play begins with the god Dionysus, the son of Zeus and Semele, announcing that he has arrived in Thebes to disprove the slander, spread by his mother's family, that Zeus is not his real father and that he is not a god. As the play opens, Dionysus has driven the women of Thebes into an ecstatic frenzy, and they have gathered on Mount Cithaeron to dance. -
3.5
yeah anne carson should be the only person allowed to translate greek tragedies -
This collection included Ion, The Women of Troy, Helen, and The Bacchae. I have reviewed these plays individually, so I won't discuss them here again. Let me just say that overall these plays were great, in particular the last three; in fact, I was so impressed by Euripides that I ordered the complete 5-volume edition of his plays as published by the University of Chicago Press. I will definitely be reading (and reviewing) the rest of his works at some point in the near future.
Links to reviews:
Ion
The Women of Troy
Helen
The Bacchae -
just read the bacchae!
very unhinged, fucking bonkers
book 3 for my drama & transgression: from prometheus to faust module -
I have no idea what was going on tbh
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Beautifully written, even in translation. It depends heavily on knowledge of works like those of Homer and ancient Greek mythology, but even with only a superficial idea one should be able to enjoy the plays for what they are. The aspect which made Euripides stand out for me personally was his use of plots which question the relationship between the human experience against godly explanations. His mixing of rationality and mythology is certainly worth analysis.
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The Bacchae is a family tragedy, but as any audience will attest, it is more singularly Agaue's tragedy, which is all the more remarkable given that the queen only appears on stage for one scene. In fact, besides Pentheus, the Cadmus family (Cadmus and Agaue) only appears in the first and last scenes, while the core of the drama exclusively involves Dionysus and Pentheus. By keeping the Cadmus family at the periphery of the main action, Euripides uses them as background, frame and context. They amplify and filter the core events, but have no part in those events as physical characters on the stage. They also serve as commentators and critics (in theatrical terms they are an audience) on the core events and it is largely in the last scene that they get to flesh out various themes. Both members do accept responsibility for what happened to Pentheus, but in two different ways they also criticize Dionysus's justice. Agaue's heart- wrenching grief and murderous guilt testifies to Dionysus's excessive, harsh and cruel revenge. Cadmus reproaches Dionysus twice, directly saying that the god's retributive justice did not fit the offense. However, the god merely brushes these two laments aside with the fatalistic comment that Zeus set up a world of harsh gods.
While Euripides follows a number of formal classical traditions in The Bacchae, such as a complicated chorus and the use of messenger, he diverges quite starkly from Aristotle's ideal of drama. In classical Greek drama, and as defined by Aristotle in his Poetics, there is also a moment of recognition at the very end when our hero, full of hubris, realizes his error and passes from ignorance to knowledge. This is tied to the moment of catharsis for the audience, or the moment of the release of the emotions that had been built up before. Finally, there is a hearty lament. Pentheus does not truly repent and re-evaluate his mistake, nor indulge in metaphysical musings. He merely uses the word "error" in the one line where he begs his mother not to kill him. Importantly, too, the audience does not explicitly learn anything about Dionysus except that he wants Pentheus to show deference toward him. And the main "secret" of the play, Dionysus's disguise, is known from the start. Instead, Euripides writes a shocking, long, and pathos-filled lament. This disproportionate (in classical terms) emphasis on the lament signals two things: both the excessive cruelty and the absolute power of Dionysus.
One of the reasons that the last scene—depicting a demented Agaue proudly brandishing the head of her son—is effective because it is a acted out on the main stage instead of being relayed by messengers. Previously, all the gory, disturbing and violent actions of the play, such as the killing of the cattle and the palace miracles, had taken place offstage and were subsequently retold to the audience as a story. When this scene is actually played out, the audience is still fresh and able to be deeply shocked. Euripides does not flinch from gruesome touches such as having Agaue piece together the son she tore apart. Moreover, in this last gesture, the audience realizes that it is not just Pentheus's body that must be reconstructed but also the moral of the story and the future of both Cadmus and Agaue. Tragically, some pieces will always be missing. -
The translation done by Philip Vellacott in 1954 was later revised in the 1970s; originally Vellacott had modified the structure of the plays so that they were prose instead of verse, a change which he later reverted. Both editions are comparatively sterile and accessible, with his translation of Βάκχαι’s being the least so. There’s a very funny moment when Pentheus first meets Dionysos. Here’s what Pentheus says, and I quote verbatim:
Well, my man: you have a not unhandsome figure—for attracting women, which is your object in coming to Thebes. Those long curls of yours show that you’re no wrestler—cascading close over your cheeks, most seductively. Your complexion, too, shows a carefully-preserved whiteness; you keep out of the sun and walk in the shade, to use your lovely face for courting Aphrodite...
SIR? EXCUSE ME, SIR?
Ah, well; tell me first what country you were born in.
The compilation includes Ἰφιγένεια ἐν Ταύροις (Īphigéneia én Taúrois), ��άκχαι (Bákkhai), Ἰφιγένεια ἐν Αὐλίδι (Īphigéneia én Aúlídi), and Ῥῆσος (Rhēsos). Also included within are a general introduction providing context, individual prefaces to each play which supply a brief overview of the plot and structure, notes, a chronology, a bibliography, and a glossary. This is an edition I’d recommend to someone unfamiliar with Euripides, or ancient Greek tragedy in general, or honestly even the concept of theatre as a whole. I’m personally not the biggest fan of Vellacott’s translation but most of the reasoning behind that is because it feels too mainstream and inoffensive, and I believe that these plays—especially Βάκχαι!—ought to shock and confuse the audience. (For all her issues I do have some grudging respect for Dr.
Anne Carson’s translation of the same—it’s not only more stylistically nuanced but also far more experimental and complex. It is a less “accurate” translation in the sense that Dr. Carson does not adhere to the letter of the text, but it more accurately in my opinion conveys the surreality and horror of the original. It’s not my personal favourite, but it’s the one I’d recommend to someone with no knowledge of Ancient Greek.) -
My edition contained 4 plays of Euripides - Ion, The Trojan Women, Helen and The Bacchae. I had mixed feelings about them and thought that each play went downhill, in the order that I read them above. Overall, still a fantastic worth while read.
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I can't believe this was written so long ago.
Different millennium, same blame game for rape victims. -
What is more terrible - a world with vengeful gods, or a world without them?
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This volume collects Bacchae, Iphigenia among the Taurans, Iphigenia at Aulis and Rhesus.
Bacchae
So much can be said about this play and I'm interested to see what better minds have to say about it. As a complex tragedy on madness and reason as well as the divine and mortal this play is able to, at the same time, blur the lines between opposites in the mind while clarifying the distinction through morality.
Iphigenia among the Taurans
An excellent play on the presumed dead Iphigenia who survived through the sacrifice by means of a scapegoat (or scapedeer in that instance) who, after many years as a priestess, meets Orestes and finds the possibility for salvation. If the purpose of tragedy is to heal us through catharsis, then Iphigenia among the Taurans heals us through the love of siblings overcoming their shared trauma.
Iphigenia at Aulis
I admit I'm divided on this play. The first half is an excellent set up for a brilliant tragedy, in which Agamemnon must decide whether to sacrifice his daughter or face death with the pieces already in motion. The second half of the play, in which Iphigenia accepts her death "for Greece" and is ultimately saved, is incomarably lesser dramatically to the first half. While it fits Euripides' support of women's agency, it does leave a lot to be desired in a classic story of tragedy.
Rhesus
While the plot and style are interesting it still stands far enough away from the greatness of the other plays in this volume to be noticably non-Euripidean. As a retelling the events of book 10 from the Iliad from a Trojan perspective, the drama centers on the arrival of Rhesus, King of Thrace, and his sudden demise at Greek hands. While it is a brief play only around 1000 lines long, much is conveyed in so little speech but still less than we could expect from Euripides. -
The introduction of the murder of Iphigenia allows for the blatant distruction of female characters that Homer consistently portrays to be fixed. Clytemnestra becomes an actual human being, no longer just one of the vessels to spite men of their living for something as ‘insignificant’ as bringing in his rape victim to their shared household. The multiple murders of Clymenstra’s kin by Agamemnon is the motivation we had all been waiting for, hatred nurtured throughout the years of war. Additionally, Odysseus being a leader of the advocation of Iphigenia only furthered to highlight the disingenuous nature of Homer’s ability to write women in anything beyond an object to focus the male rage upon. Therefore, f men. Euripides can be be spared if he so wishes.
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In Bacchae the god Dionysus arrives in Greece from Asia intending to introduce his orgiastic worship there. He is disguised as a charismatic young Asian holy man and is accompanied by his women votaries, who make up the play’s chorus. He expects to be accepted first in Thebes, but the Thebans reject his divinity and refuse to worship him, and the city’s young king, Pentheus, tries to arrest him. In the end Dionysus drives Pentheus insane and leads him to the mountains, where Pentheus’s own mother, Agave, and the women of Thebes in a bacchic frenzy tear him to pieces.
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Such a good collection of plays, a lot of my new favourites in this book now.
Ion- Solid play. Interesting premise but expecting something with more pathos/dramatic. Also tf was that slave who was intent on fire/death/murdering someone lol.
Women of Troy- timeless classic, very much underappreciated I think. I could see the events happening in the Ukrainian war or any war tbh. Beautifully written, and people say Euripides is a misogynist...
Helen- interesting concept and just in general a good story, although slightly dragged on but still a bop.
Bacchae- probably like the 4th time I've read this play but still *that kiss chefs do* perfecto. -
I interrupted my reading of Nietzche’s The Birth of Tragedy in order to read this, since Nietzsche makes much of the distinction between Euripides and the earlier Greek tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles (with whom I was somewhat more familiar). (NB: I only read The Bacchae and did not delve into the other plays included in this volume.)
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I read the Philip Vellacott translation of Bacchae and adored it so much better than the one by Anne Carson that I read before this, which while poetic, was more experimental and stylistically complex. I wouldn't recommend starting off with the Anne Carson translation if it's your first time reading Euripides' Bacchae or if you're not yet familiar with Anne's work and style.
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easily 5⭐️
euripides’ dramatic and heart-wrenching plots combined with davies’ brilliant and easy to read translation makes me forget that this was something written over a thousand years ago and not something more modern.
my favourite play was either orestes or iphigenia at aulis, i love the drama honestly, all of these plays are amazing.
