You think you've got mummy issues?

Leave it to Euripides to put your family drama into perspective

A wee announcement before we get into the meat of this newsletter, I now have TWO events coming up in February ~ one is all about Achilles & Patroclus, the most famous and most HOTLY debated couple from ancient history (Saturday the 7th at the Common Press bookstore) and the other is a panel discussion all about the history of female rule (Thursday the 19th at Conway Hall). Come along, bring friends, heckle me. Proper info can be found here: cosisodyssey.com/upcomingevents 💜

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The aftermath of the festive season seems like a good a time as any to quote Tolstoy, specifically the opening lines of Anna Karenina:

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

The holidays are a tricky time for most people; I was speaking to one of my best friends a few weeks ago and she described her own “Christmas cranks.” These feelings can be attributed to the cumulative hangover customarily associated with this period as well as what I described as the “general family faff.” Whether you’ve got a racist uncle, you’re shit at wrapping gifts, or your family designate culinary responsibilities in a way that has you descending into fight or flight, I can almost guarantee you don’t have it as bad as the not-so-happy family that is the topic of this essay.

I suspect this is the start of an annual tradition where I dig out one of the more harrowing myths concerning families in order to make you feel better about whatever melodrama or passive aggressive gift giving you’ve experienced during the festive season. This time last year we delved into the House of Atreus:

And now we are swapping out non-consensual cannibalism and murder in a bathtub for pregnancy explosions and ritualised dismemberment. Allow me to present the one, the only, Euripides’ Bacchae.

Pentheus being torn apart by Maenads. Roman fresco from the northern wall of the triclinium in the Casa dei Vettii (VI 15,1) in Pompeii.

This play is so dear to me I think I’ve been deliberately avoiding it as I wasn’t sure I’d be able to contain my thoughts let alone present them coherently (the jury is still very much out on that). Also some of what we’re going to cover here isn’t necessarily/explicitly IN the play, but having a handle on the broader mythic backstory can’t hurt as you wade your way through this mess.

It all starts with Zeus. Of course. And his wandering eye. Of COURSE.

I dread to think how much of Greek mythology can be explained by this one gif.

Zeus’s pesky eye wandered right on over to Semele, a young Theban princess who quickly fell in love with the king of the gods. Hera, Zeus’s wife (and sister), was not exactly thrilled about this so she tricked the young princess, telling her that if Zeus really loved her he would show her his true form. Doubt was successfully planted in Semele’s mind so she, in turn, tricked Zeus into doing just that. She asked to see his true form, he turns into whatever the hell that is, and Semele got incinerated or obliterated or blown up (ancient sources fail to lock in a particular verb but you get the gist). Did I MENTION that she was six months pregnant? As his side-piece is exploding, Zeus happened to register the half-cooked fetus flying through the air and actually decided to step up for once, grabbing the unborn (or half-born?) baby and sowing it into his thigh so it could reach full term alongside his femur 🦵

So, to recap, we have a sister-wife bringing about the untimely obliteration of the other woman and an unborn infant that gets blown up, plucked out of midair and sown into daddy’s leg. You with me so far?

Apulian red-figure volute krater, ca. 4th century BCE, National Archaeological Museum of Taranto.

This wee one is none other than Dionysus, god of wine, theatre, and transformation (and this story is where his epithet, the twice-born god, comes from). He provides us with our first case of mummy issues, in spite of the efforts made by his philandering father.¹ These mummy issues bring us to the beginning of Euripides’ play, which takes place in Thebes, Semele’s hometown.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, Semele’s two sisters remain rather cynical about the whole I-slept-with-the-king-of-the-gods thing. They think it’s far more likely that their dear sister got blasted because claiming such a thing was so wildly blasphemous. This sisterly doubt ALSO calls into question the legitimacy—and therefore divinity—of Dionysus himself. The play opens with a disguised Dionysus delivering the prologue, where he essentially says I’m here to instil my cult amongst the nonbelievers and avenge my mum. His main target is Pentheus, the son of Agave (Semele’s sister which means that Pentheus is technically Dionysus’ cousin) and ruler of Thebes.

Dionysus kicks things off with a real bang; he uses his divine powers to whip the Theban women into a frenzy, they flee to the mountains and get stuck in to some good old fashioned orgiastic worship. Pentheus is not exactly thrilled about the women abandoning their households and domestic duties so, echoing the cynicism of his mother and auntie, he claims that Dionysus is a false god and devises a plan to shut this nonsense DOWN (which is rather ironic as his mum and the rest of the ladies are rolling around in the mud and getting up to god knows what else right about now). In his quest to restore order he goes a bit overboard, ignoring the warnings of his grandfather Cadmus and the prophet Tiresias, he imprisons the priest of Dionysus (who IS actually Dionysus but only we, the audience, know that). Pentheus also happens to be quite fascinated, nay, obsessed, with what exactly the women are getting up to but more on that later.

As Dionysus is getting chucked into prison he warns Pentheus, saying “my god will release me” (a healthy dollop of dramatic irony for the audience). There’s a massive earthquake shortly after and out pops the god without a scratch on him. Pentheus then receives a report from the Messenger that the Theban women, including his mother Agave, are ripping apart cows and just getting up to all sorts (as if he didn’t have enough on his plate with the tectonically-aided prison break). Pentheus rather bizarrely chooses that moment to voice his niggling curiosity and is somehow convinced by Dionysus to cross-dress and go spy on the women. He struts away, decked out in a lovely dress and veil, and the Chorus delivers a rather sinister ode (I’m sure you can guess where this is going as we’re dealing with a Greek tragedy but the details may surprise you). The Messenger returns to the stage and delivers the horrific, though not entirely unexpected news, that Pentheus has been killed by the Theban women. He had the bright idea to climb a tree to get a better look but the women spotted him, mistook him for a lion (as you do), and promptly tore him limb from limb with their bare hands.

Death of Pentheus, Agave and maenads [detail]. Attic red-figure kylix, attributed to Douris/Python, ca. 480 BCE.

This sort of ritualised, bare-handed dismemberment was known as sparagmos and was actually one of the rites observed by the female followers of Dionysus (but it was typically reserved for rabbits and other small animals so the Theban women really levelled up).

Detail from a red-figure pyxis lid, ca. 424-375 BCE, in the manner of the Meidias Painter.

Pentheus’ mother Agave returns to the palace victorious, waving around her son’s decapitated head, showing it off to her dad Cadmus as she’s still firmly under the impression that she’s killed a lion. There’s some ancient girlboss feminism (look at me go, us gals didn’t even need weapons unlike you penis-driven pansies etc. etc.) followed by a truly excruciating moment as Agave slowly returns to her senses and realises what she has done.

This moment is what’s known as ✨ anagnorisis ✨ (I’ve kept it relatively jargon-free up until now but I hope you can make an exception for this particular noun):

There’s actually an incredibly cool/moving/extra tragic part of the play right about here that they don’t teach you in school (possibly because there’s only a tiny shred of rather questionable evidence but I had to delete an entire paragraph about it from my masters thesis so if not now, WHEN?). Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the missing Euripidean passage (drawing from Apsines, a third-century rhetorician, and the twelfth-century cento Christus Patiens), which has Agave and Cadmus gather up the pieces of Pentheus, with his mother mourning each body part individually:

“Come, Father. We must restore his head to this unhappy boy. As best we can, we shall make him whole again.”² She goes on to say “I shroud your head, gathering with loving care these mangled bloody limbs, this flesh I brought to birth.”³

I concede in my retired paragraph that “the notion of a grisly jigsaw puzzle [is] met with warranted suspicion by scholars,” but if there’s even the tiniest chance it’s correct it’s too fascinating not to include. Also my goal is to take you beyond a google search and this particular chunk of scholarship is not exactly canon (I found it in the appendix of a book from 1958).

Detail from an Attic red-figure hydria, ca. 525-475 BCE. Photo courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Circling back to the alleged POINT of this essay, I hope the brutal dismemberment of Pentheus at the hands of his mother, perpetrated by his own damn cousin, has provided you with some perspective after the holidays 🌈 I guess the main takeaways are if your sibling is telling you a story that sounds insanely far-fetched maybe go along with it anyway because you never know???? And if a bunch of women have fled to the mountain to rip apart animals and dance around maniacally maybe you should leave them to it????

So that’s the family drama portion over with, but what does it all mean? There’s a bit more to sink your teeth into (literally so much but I will try my absolute hardest to be succinct). There’s obviously a whole gender thing going on so I’ve pulled out the big guns:

“Greek tragedy, like Greek myth and literature generally, presents a complex and ambivalent image of woman. As the one who bears and cares for children and tends house and hearth, she is at the center of what is secure, nurturing, life-giving; but in her passionate and emotional nature and the violence of her sexual instincts which she is felt as little able to control, she is regarded as irrational, unstable, dangerous. Hence she is seen as an integral part of the civic structure on the one hand, but also regarded as a threat to that structure on the other. In this aspect she is associated also with what is hostile or threatening to the organized and formed inner space of the city. She has her place within the sheltered inner domain of the house, but also has affinities with the wild, savage world of beasts outside the limits of the city walls.”⁴

Charles Segal everybody! So we’ve got the idea that women are more closely aligned with the natural world, both untameable and dangerous, denying the imposition of order and boundaries.⁵ Euripides also rams home the idea that the feminine body is inscribed with both desire and revulsion, a notion that’s perfectly encapsulated by Pentheus’ horror and relentless curiosity about what the women are getting up to (not to mention his cross-dressing).⁶ The Greeks also had rather mixed feelings about motherhood (they didn’t fully understand how exactly women could create life and it really freaked them out) so Bacchae provides a horrific version in which the maternal instinct is fully turned on its head with a mother ripping apart the body of her own child. Whether this is because Euripides wanted to provide an externalisation of a deeply held fear or because Dionysus was working out his OWN mummy issues we may never know but it’s an intriguing question!

Another point to fling at you briefly, Euripides’ Bacchae also stages the unending battle between the rational and irrational (the Apollonian and Dionysian if you’re familiar with Nietzsche). It’s a bit too simplistic to say that Pentheus represents the rational order as he himself is doomed by his own voyeurism but there’s certainly a bit of nature vs. civilisation going on here.

There’s also a race thing! Dionysus is an Eastern (technically Asiatic) god getting adopted into the Greek pantheon so he also epitomises the threat posed by the foreign stranger. It’s worth noting that Thebes is already a non-Athenian city and was typically the setting for some of the more batshit plays, thereby relegating and containing the looming, abstract threat of the “Other.”

My FINAL point is that the lack of resolution or so-called happy ending is also a resolution in and of itself. Calling Charles Segal up to the plate one last time:

“Euripides, so often the critic of his society’s accepted values, reveals the paradoxical truth that male identity is achieved not by rejection or violent domination of the female and of the “feminine” forms of experience associated with Dionysus, but by a more complex process of balance and integration.”⁷

Let’s wrap up with a slightly more ominous quote from Katrina Cawthorn:

“The spectre of the destabilising feminine is frequently left alive in tragedy.”⁸

Spooky…

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References:

Arrowsmith, William. Translation of Bacchae (appendix on page 610) in Lattimore, Grene, Lattimore, Richmond, and Grene, David. Euripides. IV. eds. By David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Cawthorn, Katrina. Becoming Female: the Male Body in Greek Tragedy. Bloomsbury, 2008.

Easterling, Pat. “Putting together the pieces: a passage in the Bacchae.” Omnibus 14 (1987): 14-16 [Unpaginated when accessed online].

Euripides. Bacchae. Translation and commentary by William Allan and Laura Swift. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.

Konstantinou, Ariadne. “‘To the Mountain’: The Ritual Space of Maenadism in the Athenian Imaginary.” In Ascending and Descending the Acropolis: Movement in Athenian Religion, edited by Wiebke Friese, Søren Handberg, and Troels Myrup Kristensen, 23:145–60. Aarhus University Press, 2019.

Oranje, Hans. Euripides’ Bacchae: the Play and Its Audience. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1984.

Segal, Charles. “The Menace of Dionysus: Sex Roles and Reversals in Euripides’ Bacchae.” Arethusa 11, no. 1/2 (1978): 185–202.

Thumiger, Chiara. Hidden Paths Self & Characterization in Greek Tragedy: Euripides’ Bacchae. London: University of London, School of Advanced Study, Institute of Classical Studies, 2007.

Zeitlin, Froma I. “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama.” Representations, no. 11 (1985): 63–94.

1. The idea of Zeus’ so-called “male womb” is another example, much like the birth of Athena from his head, that positions the king of the gods as finding sneaky ways of doing away with the procreative powers of women.

2. Arrowsmith, 1958, 604.

3. Ibid.

4. Segal, 1978, 185.

5. A point that’s echoed brilliantly by Froma Zeitlin: “[I]n the gender system the role of representing the corporeal side of life in its helplessness and submission to constraints is primarily assigned to women.” Zeitlin, 1985, 71.

6. I’m sneaking in another quote from Zeitlin that didn’t quite fit into the main body (if you’re actually reading these, I see you with the studiousness): “But if feminization is the emblem of Pentheus’ defeat, Dionysus’ effeminacy is a sign of his hidden power. Here are two males, cousins in fact through their genealogical ties, both engaged in a masculine contest for supremacy. One, however, gains mastery by manipulating a feminized identity and the other is vanquished when he finally succumbs to it.” Zeitlin, 1985, 63-64.

7. Segal, 1978, 188.

8. Cawthorn, 2008, 17.