5/22/2023 0 Comments The bacchae sparknotesHe convinces Pentheus to dress up as a woman so that he may spy on the Bakkhai without being seen-thus quenching the young man’s curiosity and luring him inexorably into Dionysos’ followers’ claws. Dionysos, who has put on human form as a swoony, longhaired religious leader with “bedroom eyes” and “cheeks like wine” (Pentheus’ own words) is all too aware of this. As is true for most radical conservatives, Pentheus’ fury and intolerance are mixed with irrepressible obsession. Pentheus, the young and hotheaded new ruler of Thebes, thinks this is all giving his town a bad name, so he imprisons the god’s followers-the Bakkhai, including his mother Agave. He drives them into the mountains where they worship him with wild dances, ritual hunts, sexual escapades, and feasts on raw flesh and wine. From this “masculine womb” he is born again, which earns him his second nickname: “twice-born.” He stings the women of Thebes into madness with his thyrsos: a wand of giant fennel topped with a pinecone. He is nicknamed Bromios (or “boisterous”), after his birth from Zeus’ thunderbolt, which killed his mother Semele and caused the god of gods, his father, to sew Dionysos into his thigh. Dionysos is a perpetual stranger, and his religion a constant other. Dionysos has just arrived from the east though Anne Carson is quick to remind us in her new translation that his presence in Mycenaean tablets dates all the way back to the 12th century BC. The protagonists of Euripides’ Bakkhai (New Directions, Dec 2017) are a new god and a cross-dressing conservative.
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