The Bacchae

            Euripides, at the end of his life, wrote the Bacchae while he was living in exile in Mecedonia. The city in question is Thebes but there is a sense of a dying Athens. There is evidence of cult-worship that was on the rise in Athens at the end of the war. This play is about the resistance to divine power. Dionysus, who is the central character in this play, is unlike most gods in the fact that he is in human shape. He comes in the form of man and women and because he is a god his motives are not to be questioned. For when it comes to human fate the truth lies with the divine. Dionysus is a god who lacks mercy because of the punishments he inflicts on Cadmus's family. Pentheus has been a great king but he could not comprehend a god who came in the form of a man and for this Dionysus punished him. "Euripides has often been called a rationalist, a playwright who excelled in the workings of the mind, who celebrated logic and rational argument." In this play Euripides sho!.
             ws many cases of black humor. For example, when Pentheus is wearing woman's dress with his hemline all askew. .
             The Bacchae opens with Dionysus grieving over his mother's death. Hera outraged by Zeus's infidelity kills Semele, Dionysus's mother, with a lightning bolt while she is pregnant with Dionysus. Hera, however, did not know that Zeus hid Dionysus in the false womb of his thigh. Dionysus was therefore born again. Once he was grown he came to Thebes after he "set all Asia dancing" and proved himself to be a god. He made the women cry of ecstasy and clothed their flesh in the "skins of fawns". In their hands he put the thyrsus, a spear clothed in ivy. They wore this in memory of his mother. Dionysus has a hatred for his mother's sisters because they said that a mortal bedded Semele. They said that Zeus "put her to death" for claiming that she was pregnant with his child. For this Dionysus drove them mad into the wild mountains, which is now their home.