The danger of basing any analysis of the Bacchae on the assumption that it deals with the tensions inherent in Maenadism is that we have no evidence, barring the trieretic trip of the women of Attica to Mount Parnassus, of Maenadic cult at Athens in the period of Euripides’ composing. If there are cultic allusions in the play, and we know Euripides was fond of these, are they to be found in any other Dionysiac rituals?
Seaford (1981, 2006) sees the play as predicated upon initiation into the Dionysiac mystery cults, of which we do have evidence for the classical period – though of these, our only Athenian evidence comes from Aristophanes’ Frogs, where a chorus of Eleusinian initiates pays homage to the god as Iacchus.
Like Maenadism, these cults seemed to be viewed with suspicion and hostility – the story of the initiation of king Scylas of Scythia in Herodotus 4.79 is akin to that of Pentheus, whose death is seen as a failed initiation: a rite of passage never completed, in which the symbolic death of the initiate pending rebirth to a better state of life becomes actual slaughter as he refuses to accept the divine light and truth promised by Dionysus. In mystic cult, the sparagmos myth articulates the death of Dionysus (as the son of Zeus and Persephone) at the hands of the Titans.
This mythology never features in the Bacchae, so we should be wary of drawing analogies too strongly, or translating, as does Seaford (1996), every instance of teletai as ‘initiation rites’. From the Frogs through the Orphic Gold Leaves and Plutarch’s discussion of his own Dionysiac faith, initiation into this cult posits a blessed life after death – an eschatological element that Euripides seems to ignore. Perhaps it is better to see the ‘initiation’ as does Segal (1997), in terms of general ephebic initiation, in which Pentheus fails to separate himself from the female sphere and achieve his identity as an adult male.
Or, perhaps, to work outwards from this supposition – that the Bacchae, as do many tragedies, articulates the problems of incorporating any marginal group into the community, and the tensions and problems inherent in society’s rhetoric of incorporation.
Tags: ambiguity, Bacchae, Euripides, Greek gods, Greek literature, Greek myth, initiation, teaching, Thebes, transition
