Draft:Euripides and the Bacchae

Euripides’ The Bacchae concerns itself with dichotomies: between local and foreign, male and female, right and wrong, irrationality and rationality, chaos and order, and so on. One dynamic foundational to the tragedy is the interplay between sanity and madness; many of these contrasts connect back in some way to character’s perceptions of one another as insane—insane because they are foreign, Eastern, or insane because of their irrationality, or their femininity, or countless other reasons. The narrative, in fact (and Euripides through it) leaves no character’s (save Dionysus) sanity unexamined; readers witness this when Tiresias calls Pentheus “mad,” when Pentheus calls Cadmus “mad,” and when Cadmus calls Agave “mad.” This contributes to the “riddle of the Bacchae;” that is, discerning Euripides’ intention. His intention likely isn’t that the religious are insane, because Pentheus (a skeptic of Dionysus and Dionysian religion) is called “mad,” and later falls to madness despite his skepticism. Yet the inverse does not make sense, either—that Euripides meant skeptics are insane. Cadmus and Tiresias are both devoted to the Dionysian cults, and are called “mad” by either Pentheus or by the narration. A clue to Euripides’ intent may be in one of the few characters not described as mad: Dionysus. He is called arrogant, or strange, or insulting, but his sanity and soundness are above question. What about Dionysus distinguishes him from the rest of the cast? HIs divinity, for one, makes him

notable; Euripides seems to imply by using madness so liberally except in Dionysus’s case that it is man who is mad, and the only ones not mad are the Gods.