A brief introduction to Euripides’ Bacchae in its cultural context
Roger Travis, Associate Professor of Classics in the University of Connecticut

Euripides’ tragedy Bacchae (Dionysiac Women) was performed for the first time in Athens’ Theatre of Dionysus, at the foot of the Acropolis, in the spring of 406 BCE.

In the spring of 406, if our report is true (and there is little real reason to doubt it), Euripides had just died in Macedon, at the palace of King Archelaos, far from Athens.  The Athenian polis (city-state) was not as she had been, and Euripides’ absence must have been one of the least noticeable changes for the worse, though we are told that Sophocles, himself an older man than Euripides, made the moving gesture of bringing his own chorus on in mourning at that festival.

The Peloponnesian War was winding to its terrible conclusion. The Spartan fleet, must have seemed unstoppable. Even Athens’ great naval victory at Arginusae later that year would prove to be worse for the Athenian victors than for the Spartan-allied vanquished. The lightning-rod Alcibiades—he of the Sicilian expedition, he of Plato’s Symposium, perhaps the most perfect embodiment of the times that might be imagined—had been removed once again from command, and was gone into exile. The end of the war would come two years later, in 404, but from far off Macedon Euripides could see it looming.

His response was Bacchae, his greatest tragedy. In it, he destroys the city of Thebes, as a way of showing the destruction of Athens. It may have been in part because he held a grudge against the more old-fashioned members of the Athenian public, who (it seems clear) refused to honor the exciting changes he had brought to Athenian tragedy. Or he may have felt no anger at all, and, simply, with the same clear-eyed critique with which he had excoriated his fellow citizens for the atrocities of Melos in Trojan Women, he could see what had happened in Athens and to Athens in the course of his life, and could see where things were headed.

During his lifetime, said to have begun during the battle of Salamis itself, his polis, at his birth the freedom-bearing savior of Greece, had become the capricious, Machiavellian imperial overlord of the Aegean. Euripides laid on the line in Bacchae the thesis that the more tightly a government tries to maintain order, the more destructive the forces of disorder become. Just so, in the case of Athens, so prone to brilliant success and forceful backlash, as in the case of Alcibiades. The brilliant, self-willed, disorderly Alcibiades himself may well be behind the figure of Dionysus in Bacchae. Dionysus brings blessing, if you will accept his disorderly ways. Woe to you, and to your city, if you will not accept them—a falling palace, an overthrown mind, and dismemberment at the hands of those who nurtured you.

Are there powers of the modern world that seek, as Athens sought, to ensure that, as Pericles put it, “The things of the rest of the world flow into them because of their greatness”? Euripides’ Dionysus might say to them, as he said to Athens in the guise of Pentheus, “You do not know how you live, nor what you do, nor who you are.”