Posts Tagged ‘Thebes’

It’s all about the Mysteries? Bacchae lecture 2

June 3, 2011

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.

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To the Mountain!

May 4, 2011

It’s a new term here in Oxford, and the fact that I’d only given 4 lectures out of my Faculty stint of 12 caught up with me this week – I have 4 to do on Euripides’ Bacchae, and 4 on Greek Literature of the 5th Century BC. This Monday saw me (despite a hideous computer virus that caused me to lose several hours’ worth of work) starting the Bacchae course with a lecture on Greek Maenads.

One of Euripides’ last plays, detailing the opposition of the Theban king Pentheus to Dionysus’ establishment of his rites in the city, the play is unmistakably ‘Dionysiac’, made more so by the meta-theatricality of its performance in the Theatre of Dionysus during the City Dionysia festival. But how far is it actually connected with, or does it reflect, the realities of his cult in the ancient world? Whether you follow Seaford in pinning your colours to the flag of initiatory ritual, or Dodds, Henrichs and Bremmer in trying to make sense of the play through the lens of (or even by reconstructing) Maenadic cult, the question remains: how far does the play inform our understanding of Dionysiac ritual, and vice-versa? How far is it “to do with Dionysus”, how far does it reflect general cultural concerns about women’s cults and place in society, and how far is it just good drama?

The first lecture focused on Maenadic ritual, reading the Bacchae against several Hellenistic inscriptions and documentary evidence in Plutarch, Pausanias and Diodorus Siculus. Where there were crossovers, a terminology of Maenadism could be established: their rites were called orgia and hiera, tended to be biannual, took place outside the city in the mountains, used ritual implements such as the thyrsus, and featured dancing and ritual invocations such as “Euoi!”, that celebrated the god as epiphanic and present in manic possession. Maenadic cult took place in many areas of the Greek world, including Magnesia, Miletus, and Attica/Delphi, but its spiritual home was Thebes where the daughters of Cadmus were held up as paradigmatic Maenads.

There were, however, fundamental differences. Our evidence points to a civic-sponsored ritual, to the existence of thiasoi (bands) that included men, and to the eating of raw flesh (omophagion) being a toned-down mimicry of the Maenadic sparagmos in the Bacchae. The myth exaggerates and explains the ritual: it gives a more extreme version of events – the dramatic and threatening aspects of which are then further highlighted by the playwright. It warns against the rejection by the city of a cult which, in ‘real time’, had become an accepted and beneficial part of the civic framework.

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Greek myth 5: The Theban cycle part 2

November 5, 2009

This lecture continued our exploration of the House of Labdacus, from the death of Oedipus to the sack of Thebes by the Epigonoi. I wanted to start to do more with this course this week, moving away from a straightforward narrative and identification of themes to a more detailed explanation of the representation of the myth in various texts, and to think about why it might have been manipulated in these ways – but without just giving the answers to the students (never an easy task!).

Yet even on its most superficial reading, the myth still makes some interesting points. For example, in the epic Thebaid, Oedipus curses his sons because they, like he, violated some sort of taboo – this contrasts markedly with the expression of the curse in tragedy, which seems to occur simply because they mistreated him, and may show the hero as remaining the transgressive character he appears in Sophocles’ OT.

The violation of taboos and the transgression of social norms seems to lie at the heart of this myth – even taking aside the violation of divine imperative, crossing of gender boundaries, parricide and incest of the last lecture, we see the cycle continuing in curses, treason against one’s fatherland, fratricide, desecration of the dead, violation of the will of the gods and the demands of the state, multiple suicides, vengeance, and matricide in the second half of the myth. If myths are, as Csapo (2005) states, representative of social ideologies, norms of behaviour must be defined in this myth through the exploration of their extreme opposites.

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Greek myth 4: the Theban Cycle

October 21, 2009

Leading on from the story of Heracles in last week’s lecture, this session looked at the beginnings of the story of Thebes – it’s a big enough topic that it has 2 lectures devoted to it: this one, which covered the foundation of the city to the death of Oedipus, and one to follow next week, on the Seven against Thebes to the razing of the city by the Epigonoi.

Oddly enough, the character that students seemed to associate most with Thebes was Theseus, rather than Oedipus. But it was easy enough to lead from that into the main discussion by looking at the opposition between Thebes and Athens; the transgressive House of Labdacus and Theseus as the hero who rights their wrongs (apparent also in Euripides’ Heracles, set in Thebes).

What characterises the Theban line seems to be this issue of transgression, from Cadmus’ slaying of the dragon of Ares (for which expiation is demanded in Euripides’ Phoenician Women) to the mutual murder of the sons of Oedipus. Zeitlin’s (1990) theory of Thebes as the ‘other’ space on the Athenian stage is a good lens through which to view this tendency towards transgression, but although the myth has mostly survived in tragedy, this doesn’t fully explain the use of the theme in epic or other genres.

There seems to be a layering of meaning as the myth develops in the Classical period – not least because there may be 2 different traditions at work here (Cadmus as the founder of Thebes/Amphion and Zethos as the builders of its walls). Folkloric elements (Edmunds 1985) come through and are juxtaposed with the function of the topos in the Athenian psyche. Yet trying to narrate the myth makes it seem somehow simplistic – next week, I think I may try some more detailed textual comparison with the class.

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