EURIPIDES' BACCHAE

By Steve Esposito, Boston University

APPENDIX FIVE

The Uniqueness of the Bacchae

(Last Updated June 17, 1998)

  1. The only extant tragedy to present a god in human disguise.1
  2. The only extant tragedy in which a god summons the chorus into the orchestra (Dionysus even tells the maenads to start playing their drums).2
  3. The only extant tragedy in which two main characters are mad.3
  4. The only extant tragedy about Dionysus; the only other surviving drama on a Dionysiac theme is Euripides' satyr play Cyclops (408 B.C.).4
  5. The only detailed early account of a kind of sacrifice that can be detected also in reports of other Dionysiac myths and rituals from various places.5
  6. The tragedy most closely tied to the setting of ritual and sacrificial feast.6
  7. The richest source of Dionysian imagery to survive from fifth century Athens (after vase painting, which is by far the richest source).7
  8. One of only two tragedies in which the protagonists die at the end; also Hippolytus. 8
  9. One of only three tragedies to begin and end with divine appearances; also Euripides' Hippolytus and Ion.[ibid.]
  10. One of only three tragedies in which the gods who appear on stage are malevolent and destroy the protagonists (also Hippolytus and Heracles). [ibid.]
  11. No other Greek tragedy, not even Oedipus Rex, makes so much of seeing and not seeing, of seeming to see correctly but really suffering from (or taking pleasure in ) an illusion.9
  12. No other extant tragedy has such extensive interaction between the agency and the victim. [ibid. 115-6]
  13. No other extant tragedy plays so much with the the theatrical and dramatic potential of disguise; the Bacchae is "almost a play about costumes." It includes the following:

    a) a man dressed as a god disguised as a man
    b) a man dressed as a young military prince dressed as a woman
    c) men dressed as women dressed in animal skins and other exotic trappings
    d) old men dressed as young women wearing long Bacchic costumes and ivy crowns.10

Footnotes
  1. O.Taplin "Comedy and the Tragic" in Tragedy and the Tragic ed. Michael Silk (1996) 195.
  2. R. Seaford Euripides' Bacchae (1996) 154 at lines 55-61.
  3. B. Simon Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece (1978) 113.
  4. Seaford (n.2) 28 and 42.
  5. Seaford Recipirocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State (1994) 318-19.
  6. Simon (n.3) 114.
  7. T. Carpenter Dionysian Imagery in Fifth-Century Athens (1997) 104.
  8. A. Michelini Euripides and the Tragic Tradition (1987) 315-20.
  9. Simon (n.3) 117.
  10. T. Gould The Ancient Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy (1990) 234.
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