The Bacchae

I wanted to include a review of Euripides’ play in this issue because, while it is clearly the inspiration for Natasha Pulley’s novel, it differs significantly, and is in some ways much more queer than Pulley’s gay romance. I should note that I am by no means an expert on ancient Greek theatre. You need Juliet McKenna for that. She studied it at university, and has written (under her JM Avery penname) three books featuring an Athenian playwright turned detective. As with Edith Hall’s book on the Iliad, the more I read about Euripides, the more I realise I do not know.

Unlike the novel, The Bacchae opens in full in media res. Pentheus is already king of Thebes, and Dionysus has already persuaded all the women of the city (including Agave) to head out into the forest and worship him in a drunken frenzy. Pentheus is furious, and demands to have everyone involved arrested.

Dionysus then turns up and hands himself in. He pretends to be a priest of the god from Lydia (western Turkey in modern geography). His interaction with Pentheus is weirdly reminiscent of Jesus talking to Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate. Both are presenting as men, but claiming to be representatives of a god. Apparently some academics have even suggested that Saint John used The Bacchae as inspiration when writing his gospel.

But while Dionysus claims to be a man, Pentheus sees something very different. He is struck by, fascinated by even, how effeminate this young priest is. Dionysus is both an insult to Greek masculinity, and strangely sexually attractive. Having failed to make the young man see the error of his ways, Pentheus has him imprisoned in the stables. Ominously, the god replies:

“But be sure that Dionysus will extract punishment for this violence—the god you say does not exist. For in wronging me, you put him in chains.”

Dionysus escapes easily and frees those of his followers that Pentheus managed to catch. Pentheus becomes more and more angry, and orders his army into the forest to arrest all of the women. At this point Dionysus re-appears and suggests an alternative. Would Pentheus not like to see what these women are getting up to? Of course the king is tempted, and soon Dionysus has him dressing as a woman so that he can sneak amongst the female celebrants undetected. Pentheus seems quite excited by this, but also desperate that none of the men of the city see him least they laugh at him. Inevitably the disguise fails, and the women, led by Agave, kill him.

Scholars fail to agree spectacularly on the question of what the play means. Perhaps Euripides is warning his Athenian audience against the dangers of tyrannical rulers, which is certainly an issue that exercised them greatly at the time. But perhaps he is instead suggesting that populist mobs, especially those that allow women to escape traditional gender roles, are dangerous and should be feared. Perhaps he is warning of the dangers of disrespecting the gods, or of the dangers of foreign religions (Dionysus having claimed to have come from Lydia and to have travelled through Persia to Bactria and Arabia.) What is clear is that Pentheus fails at kingship, though whether that is because he is too autocratic, or because he lets his emotions get the better of him, is unclear.

Euripides himself is also a fascinating character. He is often accused of misogyny, and yet his plays contain more and better roles for women than any other Greek playwright. Harry Tanner in The Queer Thing About Sin suggests that Euripides was part of the throuple with two other poets, Pausanias (not Pausanias the geographer, nor the man who assassinated Philip II of Macedon) and Agathon, and that they fled together to Macedon when public sentiment in Athens started to turn against gays. But that’s a book I am working through very slowly because way too often I see Tanner assert something as fact that I’m pretty sure is actually hotly contested. Everyone seems to agree that Agathon was a notorious twink, but the exile in Macedon is thought by many to be an invention.

Part of the problem is that most of what we know about Euripides’ life comes from his being featured as character in other people’s plays, particularly those of Aristophanes. And Aristophanes rarely put someone he knew in a play unless he planned to mock them mercilessly.

Nevertheless, the plays of Euripides (or rather the few of them that have survived, he wrote a lot more) are so full of queer themes that I have an entire academic collection of essays called Queer Euripides. That includes a piece on The Bacchae by Glasgow-based trans woman, Professor Isabel Ruffel. She’s by no means the only trans classicist to be fascinated by that play.

Having thought a bit about it, I tend to agree with Ruffel that the trans message in The Bacchae is not really centred on Pentheus. To start with, the women of Thebes can be said to be behaving in a highly gender-non-conforming manner. They are not being good little trad-wives at all. Also there are two other characters who cross-dress: Cadmus and Tiresias, who also join the revellers. Cadmus does so because he has come to the realisation that Dionysus is his grandson and he wants the glory of this to reflect upon his family. This is the wrong motive, and Dionysus punishes him for it. But Tiresias, who has spent much of their life living as a woman, is spared. They are allowed into the women-only space of the Bacchanal, because they are accepted as a sister.

As I noted, there are many interpretations of the play, but the image of an angry, misogynist, transphobic ruler being brought down by a gang of wild women and a trans person is perhaps one we should focus on right now. Perhaps it might even come true.

Title: The Bacchae
By: Euripides
Publisher: Oxford University Press
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