604. Greek Myths: Sex, Drugs & Tragedy (Part 3)

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Agave was foaming at the mouth.

Her rolling eyes were wild.

She was not in her right mind, but possessed by Bacchus.

and she paid no heed to Pentheus.

She grasped his left arm between wrist and elbow, set her foot against his ribs, and tore his arm off by the shoulder.

It was no strength of hers that did it, but the god filled her and made it easy.

On the other side, Ino was at him, tearing at his flesh, and now Autinoe joined them, and the whole maniacal horde.

A single and continuous yell arose.

Pentheus shrieking as long as life was left in him, the women howling in triumph.

One of them carried off an arm, another a foot, the boots still laced on it.

The ribs were stripped, clawed clean, and women's hands, thick red with blood, were tossing, catching like a plaything, Pentheus's flesh.

So, that is the devastating climax of the most shocking, the most blood-soaked and notorious of all Greek tragedies, the Bacchae by the great Athenian dramatist Euripides.

It's a terrible scene.

Pentheus is being ripped ripped into pieces by these women possessed with the spirit of Bacchus, as he describes it, and the little bits of his flesh are left scattered under rocks and over trees.

Tom, you chose this lovely reading.

Yeah, I did.

In the episode,

why?

It's unbelievably dramatic.

And it, I mean, it reads like, you know, a kind of description from The Walking Dead or 28 Days Later.

It has a kind of real zombie vibe.

And the scene where this is happening is Mount Kytheron, which is the very same mountain range south of Thebes in central Greece, where the infant Oedipus in Sophocles' play, which we talked about in the previous episode, was taken from his parents' palace.

So generally, it's not,

it's a place where terrible things happen.

But the action in this play in the Bacchae, with this poor man being torn to pieces, is set four generations before the time of Oedipus.

So Pentheus, the guy who's being torn to pieces, he was the grandfather of Jocasta, who was Oedipus' mother's straight wife.

And he ruled as Oedipus was going to rule in due course

as the king of Thebes.

And we highlighted in the previous episode how the Theban royal family is the most dysfunctional dynasty in the whole of Greek myth.

And this episode absolutely sets the seal on this reputation because Agave, who you described ripping off Penthus' left arm, is Penthis' mother.

Oh, my God.

And Aino and Otonowe, who are joining in the fun, are his aunts.

So

it's, you know, as family rendezvous go, picnics up on the mountain.

This is a very, very bad one.

And what's going on here is not that they are, you know, you used your The Walking Dead parallel.

They're not zombies, although in a kind of way they are, they have become possessed, haven't they?

They become ravers, I see in your notes.

So what's that?

Mynads.

Mynad, yes.

So they've become what the Greeks called mynads, literally ravers.

And they have been gripped by a frenzy that in Greek was called a bacchaea.

And when you join a bacchae, if you're a mynad, you dress up in the skins of fawns or leopards and you roam the uplands, you know, you leave the kind of the plains,

centers of civilization, and go up into the hills.

And up up there, you either you suckle wild animals, so you put them to your breast,

or you tear them to pieces with your bare hands.

And this is a rite of kind of ecstatic dismemberment called sparagmos in Greek.

And if you are a mynad who is particularly off her face,

then you might go one step further and eat,

tear the flesh off your victim and eat it raw, which again, the Greeks called omophagia.

And the excitement of it is that you are subverting every norm that governs conventional society in Greece.

So you are abandoning your city for the uplands, for the wilds.

You're human, but you're turning into a wild beast.

And if you're a woman, then you are casting off all the kind of the rules, the assumptions, the decorum that are supposed to govern your behavior.

And in the Bacchae, Euripides describes the mynads turning men to flight.

So men are playing the role of women.

So subverting gender norms, as critics would say now.

We love doing that in the rest of this history.

And this is what the Bacchaea is all about.

But having said that, it's not just mynads who are doing it.

You also get men who are called satires, and the satire has a hint of the goat.

Like David Lloyd George.

Yes.

Yes.

Well, like Lloyd George, it's this kind of the exciting sense that you're casting off the norms and you can do whatever you like.

And Minad's satires both are following the same god.

And one of the names that this god has is Bacchus, for obvious reasons.

He's the god of the Bacchaea.

He's also known as Omestes, the eater of raw flesh.

He has a whole host of other names.

But his...

His original name,

the name by which the Greeks generally refer to him, him is Dionysus.

Right.

So Dionysus.

Of all the Greek gods, Tom, I have to say I've always found him the most mysterious.

And obviously, he's the most unsettling because of the rites that are associated with him.

And

we talked in previous episodes about how people generally encounter the Greek myths when they're children, as children's stories.

But Dionysus doesn't really fit in them at all.

When people think of the Olympians, he's not one of the names that first comes up.

But as we'll see, as I know you're going to talk about, scholars have become more and more interested in Dionysus

over the last century or so.

And he's moved from the periphery really to sort of center stage in historians' understandings of the Greeks and their, and I was about to say their religion.

I know you questioned the word religion and their experience of the

supernatural.

Yes, exactly.

Yes.

Yeah.

So Dionysus tends not to feature in.

children's books.

And also he has always been a challenge to

those who have an idea of ancient Greece as

a world of serenity and kind of harmony,

light and rationalism and all of that.

And this was a stereotype of ancient Greece that was very popular, particularly in Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries.

So

enthusiasts for ancient Greece were always kind of mooning over the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur, as one of them put it, of Greek civilization.

But there was a kind of reaction against that bubbling under in 19th century Germany.

And the classicist who most famously reacts against it is the great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche,

who oddly ends up talking to a horse in a quite kind of Dionysian manner.

But very early on in his career, long before that, he published a book called The Birth of Tragedy.

And he was only 28 when he did it.

He was already a professor of Greek.

And essentially in that book he is doing for dionysus what freud would do for oedipus a couple of decades later kind of make him into i guess you'd call him a meme now um something

an expression of something that seems simultaneously very ancient but kind of thrillingly modern, thrillingly 19th century.

And what Nietzsche is doing in the birth of tragedy is to contrast Dionysus with Apollo, who for the Greeks is the god of light, of beauty.

And Nietzsche insists that you can't really understand Greek civilization if you just emphasize the light and the beauty.

You also have to recognize the deeply Dionysian qualities that Greek civilization had as well.

And, you know, I mean, Nietzsche is more than familiar with the Bacchae.

The Bacchae plays a key role in the birth of the tragedy.

And he, you know, he, in all this kind of tearing people to pieces and things.

He says, he recognizes the darkness.

He said, an effusive transgression of the sexual order whose waves swept away all family life and its venerable principles, an abominable mixture of sensuality and cruelty.

So he's saying that's a bad thing.

Right.

Not in favor of that.

But then he is also saying that it has, you know, there's a brilliant size to it.

Essentially, it's fun, or as he puts it, the blissful rapture which rises up from the innermost depths of men.

I mean, that is German for fun, basically.

Right.

Yeah.

I'm sure that he expressed that in one word.

Yeah, in one

huge German word.

The essence of the Dionysian Nietzsche says, basically,

it's like getting drunk.

It's like getting pissed.

It's intoxication.

And Dionysus, for the Greeks, is the god who invents wine.

So famously, Dionysus is the god of getting drunk.

But he's also the god who...

is there when humans experience the thrill of nature that has not been tamed by humans.

So the thrill of the wild.

And also, and I think very germanely, and this is part of what Nietzsche found so fascinating about it.

And it's certainly what people have found fascinating about it in the 20th century: the sense of ecstasy that you get when you dissolve your own individual sense of yourself into a crowd.

A huge theme of 20th century writing and 20th century criticism, right?

So, I mean, I know you're going to make a comparison with the 1960s.

You know, having read loads of sort of countercultural stuff in the 1960s, people were always going to be

about the joy of Dionysian revels.

And that was what the 60s represented and you know that was the spirit and we were you know sort of absolutely reveling in the idea of of sort of that there being something

it is quite a kind of freudian idea that there's something deep down buried that needs to be let out by drinking or by taking drugs and and by forgetting your individuality and becoming one with your friends you will express some deeper more authentic truth and that's a as you say massive thing in the 60s but going into you know rave culture culture, I mean, a Mainad is literally a raver.

Yeah.

And the idea of going off to a field in Hampshire and taking ease and whiz, this is, you know, you could dignify it by saying this is Dionysian.

But there is also kind of a much darker side to Dionysan, the notion of the Dionysian in the 20th century.

So

there was a seminal study of the Bacchae written by a guy with the splendid name of R.P.

Winnington Ingram, which came out in 1947.

So immediately after the Second World War, called Euripides and Dionysus.

Winnington Ingram had witnessed the Nuremberg rallies.

And in the introduction to his book, he wrote, we have lived through events which have demonstrated tragically the dangers of group emotion.

He doesn't specify what it is, but in 1947, everyone knows what he's referring to.

And so you can see why the idea of the Dionysian, I mean, it's a very powerful one, because if it can embrace both, you know, the counterculture of the 60s and the Nuremberg rallies, you know, you're covering a lot of bases there.

And I think that although today classicists do not accept the kind of the precise details of of the technical arguments that nietzsche goes into in the birth of tragedy what they do accept is his broader case which is that dionysus has a really central role in greek civilization in greek culture and and more generally the irrational right you know there's a famous book by ir dodds the greeks and the irrational i mean you know even apollo i mean apollo apollo is counterpointed to dionysus by nietzsche but apollo is an absolute bastard as well.

I mean, you know, he's killing everyone left, right, and center, too.

So the sense of the dark and the strange and the weird and the ecstatic is crucially a part of Greek mythology.

But a Greek myth, but not of the legends, right?

So here's the thing.

A lot of people, when they saw we were doing a series about Greek myths, would have been like, oh, they're going to do Heracles.

They're going to do Perseus.

Oh, Dionysus.

That's a slight niche one to choose.

And is that because Dionysus, he doesn't really feature in a lot of the kind of canonical stories.

Now, why is that?

Why is he even mentioned in the Iliad at all?

There are very fleeting references to him by Homer, by Hesiod, and he's not a central figure in any way, as you say.

And that is crucially important because, as we've said already, the Greek understanding of the gods is mediated by poets, not by priests or prophets.

What about temples?

Are there temples to him?

Not many temples either.

And in fact, as happens in the plot of the Bacchae, Dionysus seems much keener on kind of pulling temples down than than having them erected to him.

And I think a further reason why Dionysus seems slightly at the margins of the kind of conventional understanding of Greek myth is that he is conventionally portrayed as a very young god, kind of very youthful.

And he is also described as coming from beyond Greece and particularly from the east.

So in the Bacchae, for instance, Dionysus describes himself as arriving in Thebes from Asia, the fields of Lydia and Phrygia, fertile in gold.

And Willington Ingram, in that book, which published in 1947, he completely takes for granted that Dionysus is a very recent import, that he's only just come to Greece.

And this is why he's not really mentioned by Homer or by Hesiod.

But actually...

Our understanding of who Dionysus is has been completely transformed since the 1940s.

Because in the 1950s, tablets from the Mycenaean citadels in Greece and from

Crete were cracked.

And these kind of very ancient tablets.

And it revealed that actually Dionysus is one of the oldest Olympians.

And he has a temple on one of the islands in the Aegean that has been dated as far back as the 15th century BC.

So he is actually, you know, I mean,

he's been part of the Greek imagination for a very, very...

long time.

And although he's kind of hazy, perhaps in the public imagining as a figure of myth, and although his cult does seem weird and strange when compared to the the cults of other gods he is no less greek than apollo and that's basically what you know what nietzsche had had kind of intuited and so his strangeness is not you know it's not a bug it's an absolute feature it's it's it's there at the heart of greek culture right from the very beginning well let's try to tell his story a little bit so obviously the fact that he's not covered by these great poets or he's not really covered in the same detail means that it's harder to piece together his to create a canonical story for him, as we did for, you know, you, you told the story with Zeus, for example, or you could do it with Hermes or Apollo or whoever.

Now, there are lots of different rival traditions, aren't there?

So, one of them is that the Titans tore him apart, and then they ate him, and then they put him back together, which strikes me as it's kind of drawing on the rituals that he's associated with.

And then the other is that he's the son of Zeus and Persephone, who's the queen of the underworld.

Which one of those do you go for, or do you go for neither?

I go for all of them.

Okay.

And bear in mind that

Persephone was Zeus's daughter.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

By his sister.

So there's a whole load of incest going on there.

There's a lot going on there.

And there's also there were traditions that there were actually two gods called Dionysus.

So essentially, I think what you have is that the stories told of Dionysus are like, you know, haze of smoke.

It's impossible to get a finger on them.

They're always kind of drifting away.

But having said that, in Thebes, there is a very distinctive tradition.

and it derives from the one significant reference to Dionysus that we do get in Hesiod.

So we talked about him in the first episode.

He wrote

a poem called The Theogony that discusses where the gods came from.

And to the extent that there is a kind of canonical account of the origins of the gods, Hesiod provides it.

And so what Hesiod has to say about Dionysus, even though it's very fleeting, has a lot of weight.

So what Hesiod said, Cadmus's daughter Semele bore Zeus a resplendent son in shared intimacy, married Dionysus, immortal son of mortal mother.

And Cadmus, who we talked about in the previous episode, the Phoenician...

Sewing dragon's teeth.

Sewing dragon's teeth, the Phoenician prince who had gone to look for his sister Europa, never finds her, comes to Thebes and founds Thebes.

He is the father of Agave, the mother.

of Pentheus, who tears him to pieces.

And that means that Pentheus, the son of Agave, is the cousin of Dionysus.

So very much a a family affair.

Very much a family affair.

And this is the story that Euripides, who is in Athens, you know, just down the road from Thebes, is drawing on for the opening of the Bacchae.

So the play opens with Dionysus himself.

He's standing on the stage and he announces to the watching audience who he is.

I am Dionysus, son of Zeus.

My mother was Semele, Cadmus' daughter.

From her womb, the fire of a lightning flash delivered me.

And as so often in tragedy, we don't get the full story because the playwright is assuming that the audience already knows it.

And the reason that Euripides can assume that people know this is because another famous playwright called Aeschylus had actually written a celebrated play about exactly this drama.

And so,

as far as we can tell, the story that is told in Thebes and then recycled by the Athenian tragedians about the birth of Dionysus in Thebes goes as follows.

So, Zemele is a priestess of Zeus in Thebes and she's very beautiful.

And so inevitably she attracts the attention of Zeus, who transforms himself into an eagle and repeatedly descends on her and very rapidly gets her pregnant with Dionysus.

And it's evident from the beginning that Dionysus is something special because you only have to touch Semele's pregnant belly.

and you are driven into a kind of ecstatic madness.

Hera, the wife of Zeus, relentlessly jealous, understandably, because of Zeus's record of philandering, she finds out about this.

And it's a slightly kind of Snow White in the Disney film vibe.

She transforms herself into an old crone and she visits Semele

and she says, you know, you think that this

eagle coming every night is Zeus, but I mean, how do you know?

Are you sure about this?

And Semele starts to worry about this and says, well, how can I find out?

And Hera says the only way that you can know it is zeus is if you ask him to reveal himself in the full refulgent glory of his divine splendor and semele says okay well that's i'll do that and so she's she's in bed with zeus i don't know whether he's turned into a yeah zeus or whether he's still an eagle i mean stroking his feathers or whatever and she says darling um we you know promise me something.

And Zeus says, I promise you whatever.

And Semele says, absolutely swear swear it, solemnly, you cannot break it.

And Zeus says, fine.

And then Semele says, I want you, if you are Zeus, to show me your full glory.

And Zeus desperately tries to back out of it, you know, try to say, please don't make me do this.

But Semele insists.

And so Zeus has no choice.

And he reveals himself, this kind of scorching blaze.

It's like looking into the heart of,

I don't know, an atom bomb going off or something.

It completely shrivels and destroys Semele.

And she's left as kind of charred, smoldering ash.

And Zeus picks up the unborn baby who's been left undamaged by this manifestation, and he sews the fetus into his thigh.

And then a few weeks later, Dionysus is born.

So a very, a very improbable, implausible story your father would probably describe it.

He would.

This is what the Thebans absolutely thought had happened.

This is the story that is being invoked at the start of Euripides' play, because Dionysus describes in it how his mother's house smolders with the still living flame of Zeus's fire.

And Dionysus notes approvingly that Cadmus, who is still alive, so the very, by this point, aged founder of Thebes, has consecrated the house of Semele

as holy, as sacred to the gods.

And Dionysus himself boasts of having decked it round with sprays of young vine leaves.

So the vine, of course, is holy to Dionysus.

Yeah.

So that's Thebes.

But there are Athenian traditions as well, aren't they?

They're kind of rival traditions because the Athenians say, okay, fine, you know, he was born in Thebes, but he came to Athens.

And they have a festival to celebrate it, don't they?

The Anthesteria, which is held in the spring.

It is.

And it's, as is the way with Dionysus, it's simultaneously ecstatically joyous.

and deeply, deeply unsettling.

So the fun side first, essentially, the Anthesteria is a kind of great communal celebration.

And all of Dionysus's festivals are communal.

It's all about the ecstasy of becoming part of a huge crowd.

And it marks the opening and the drinking of the previous year's vintage.

And everybody in Athens shares in this.

So slaves share in it.

And women who normally are discouraged from drinking wine, they also are,

they can have a tipple.

And it's great fun.

There's a huge, huge procession.

Dionysus is escorted into Athens from Piraeus, the port, in a cart.

And this cart has been made up to to look like a ship.

As the cart is led into Athens, it's surrounded by huge phalluses.

And the whole celebration is inspired by a famous poem that describes Dionysus' victory over pirates.

The pirates are taking Dionysus as a passenger.

They try to kidnap him and murder him.

And Dionysus turns into a lion.

And as he does so,

vines start to grow out from the mast and to wrap, wrap the tendrils wrap around the the rigging and then the oars and everything.

And all the pirates are turned into dolphins.

Just on the festival, this is a very boring and banal question.

Sorry, but you said Dionysus is escorted into the city in a cart decorated sort of like a ship.

When you say Dionysus, do you mean a statue?

Is it an effigy of the story?

Well, we will put

someone playing the part.

We will come to exactly who Dionysus is in this celebration in a minute.

I mean, you're absolutely right to fix on that because the thing that is representing Dionysus is incredibly interesting and then ties into the second festival that we'll be be talking about.

Exciting.

Tantamizing.

But just sticking to the anthosteria at the moment, this idea of a great festival, of Dionysus arriving in a city, is clearly something that Euripides is echoing in the Bacchae.

And the other thing that he is echoing in the Bacchae is the absolutely central role in this festival that is played by women.

So there is a band of women who are called the venerable ones.

So presumably they're kind of more elderly.

They are appointed to make a nighttime sacrifice to Dionysus Dionysus in one of the few temples that have been erected to him.

But it's telling that this temple is not in the city.

It's out in the marshes.

And it is only ever opened during this festival.

And they all go out there.

And one of them who has been appointed queen of the venerable ones, then we are told has sex with Dionysus.

And what exactly that means.

I mean, we will never know.

We have no idea what that actually means.

But there are illustrations on vases made in Athens that shows the venerable ones at this shrine out in the marshes.

And they're drinking and they're dancing and they're making sacrifice before the idol of Dionysus.

And this idol, Dominic, this is what you were asking about.

It's very primitive.

It's not the kind of, you know, the glowing sculpture that you would get in the museum today.

It's not what you kind of imagine as a Greek statue.

It's essentially a pole with a mask.

hanging from it.

How would you have carnal relations with a mask?

Well, it's a mask hanging from a pole.

But who knows what's on the pole?

Yeah, the pole.

But I mean, the mask, what part of that?

Anyway.

Anyway, I mean,

who knows?

Who are you overthinking this element?

You're not overthinking it because it is an intriguing question.

And, you know, if you've got a festival with huge fallacies, I mean, we don't know.

Yeah.

And I think lots of Greeks didn't know.

I mean, that was part of the fascination of what were these women getting up to in their temple.

And so you can see that it would, as with us, kind of inspire all kinds of male fantasies and questions.

Yeah.

that is then part of the context for what Euripides is doing.

And that mask, from the evidence of Athenian pottery, which is really the only evidence that we have, does seem from very ancient times to have been specifically associated with Dionysus.

And the mask plays a key role in the other great festival that is celebrated in Athens.

And in this festival, the huge mass of

the city's male citizens assemble in a theater on the slopes below the Acropolis to watch the staging of myths by actors who are wearing masks.

And this is a festival called the Great Dionysia, and it was staged in late spring.

And unlike the Anthisteria, it's of relatively recent origin, so the late 6th century BC.

Anthesteria origins reach back centuries and centuries.

This festival is inaugurated while Athens is still under the rule of tyrants, but the tyrants get expelled.

The democracy is founded.

And this festival, and particularly the

acting out of

stories by people wearing masks, becomes a key part of the culture of democratic Athens.

It has at its heart this amazing cultural innovation that the Athenians call drama.

So that obviously includes tragedy, but it also includes comedy and it includes things called satire plays.

And these are plays that have satires.

So the male followers of Dionysus

as a chorus.

That's its own genre.

That's his own genre.

How many of them survived?

Yeah, kind of.

We have fragments of it.

Tony Harrison kind of wrote one to give you people a sense of what it might have been like.

Right.

Was it good?

Yeah, it is good.

Yeah.

I mean, if you like a satire play.

Yeah.

Actually, I mean, check it out.

I mean, I don't know anything about satire plays, so I don't know if we'll give it a go.

I mean, I should give it a go.

Open-minded.

Yeah, I'm very open-minded.

You know me.

So you've got your satire plays.

They're clearly clearly dionysian but actually the the tragedies and comedies even though they don't always i mean most of the surviving ones don't have dionysus at its center nevertheless it's clear i think that the whole festival is very very dionysian so to quote richard seaford who wrote a excellent book on on Dionysus, the drama festival was performed in a sanctuary of Dionysus along with rituals for Dionysus during a festival of Dionysus.

And on top of that, Dionysus is viewed as one of the key sources for poetic inspiration.

I think we can conclude from that that Dionysus definitely had a part to play in drama.

He absolutely does.

And also think about the communal nature of it.

Right.

Oh, yeah.

But the crowd, the audience.

Huge, huge numbers of people gathering.

Do women attend?

We're never told that they don't, but probably not.

There's probably not room for them.

I mean, maybe a priestess or two there, but probably this is a, you know, it's the mass of the male citizens who are there.

And they're sitting down to watch stories that may not feature Dionysus himself, but these stories tend to have themes that echo stories that are told about Dionysus.

So royal dynasties tearing themselves to pieces.

So you get that in Oedipus, for instance.

Yeah.

Dramatic moments of revelation, dramatic moments where fortunes are upended and reversed, and the downfall of someone who thinks to defy the gods while a chorus watches on.

So all of that you get in Oedipus.

But what you get in the back eye is Dionysus himself.

So he is there nakedly.

You know, for the Greeks, it's the equivalent of drinking wine unmixed with water.

If you think about a conventional tragedy, Dionysus isn't present.

That's the watered down wine.

If you have Dionysus at the center of the tragedy, that is like drinking neat wine.

And the Greeks tended not to do that because they knew that it was incredibly dangerous.

Oh, it's exciting.

So we've got to the neat wine.

It is powerful.

It's intoxicating.

It's dangerous.

And that is the back Backey.

And we're going to be asking the second half, why and when was it staged?

When it was, what did people think of it?

What on earth was the point of it?

And what did people think of it when they first saw it?

And how does it point towards an excitingly radical interpretation of myth, Tom?

I'm just reading from your notes here.

Yeah, you're doing it brilliantly.

Yeah.

One that continues to influence how we tend to conceptualize the world to this day.

I don't think we've ever had a more exciting cliffhanger.

So come back in a minute.

Dominic, can I just say, I mean, you could give it more welly, because it really is exciting.

What is happening in Athens at this point, and the Bacchae is channeling it, is something that is going to profoundly affect the way that the Greeks understand the world, but also continues to influence the way that we understand the world to this day.

So after the break, probably the most important half hour of your lives,

like a half hour of Tom Holland chat that will change the way you see the world, that you see the Greeks, that you understand the meaning of your own life and your purpose on this earth.

Come back after the ads, or if you're a member of the Restus History Club, plunge in right away to this intoxicating bath of undiluted wine.

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Welcome back to the rest is history.

I can only imagine the excitement and the tension as people look forward to this, the most thrilling 25-minute of

we will ever produce.

25 minutes that will probably change all our lives because Tom really wanted to give this some welly because he thinks it's so important.

It's the Backeye.

It's Euripides' play.

It was first staged in 405 BC.

And even then, did people know how important this would be all these years later for listeners to the rest is history?

I don't know.

Maybe they did.

No, I don't think that was uppermost in their minds.

No.

Because in 405 BC.

They think about other things.

They absolutely are thinking about other things.

So it is a posthumously produced play.

Euripides had died the previous year, according to tradition, in Macedon.

And one year later, so in the spring of 404 BC, Athens is going to surrender to Sparta.

So we talked in the previous episode, there's been this great war that's been raging since 431 BC.

Athens is on the brink of defeat.

And when the defeat comes, it is absolutely total.

So everybody who is taking a seat to watch the Bacchae when it is premiered knows what they're staring down the barrel of.

They're staring down the barrel not just of defeat, but of potential annihilation.

Their city could be

flattened to the ground by the Spartans.

And so I think that that raises two obvious questions.

And the first is, what exactly were they watching that spring morning of 405 BC?

And then secondly, how did it impact them, bearing in mind what the horrible political context was?

Okay, let's start with the plot.

So what are they watching?

What's the story?

So we've described how Dionysus arrives and tells the audience who he is.

He has come from across the sea, but his own family have rejected him.

And part of the reason for that is that although he has revealed himself as divine to the audience, he hasn't done so to other people in Thebes.

He's kind of in disguise.

And already the punishment that he's visiting on his family for refusing to acknowledge him is kicking in.

So we're told that Dionysus' aunts, so that's Agave, Aino, Otonoe, have been driven mad.

They've gone out onto the uplands.

They've put on their kind of, you know, their dainty fawn outfits and they are roaming the mountains.

Pentheus is,

he's an absolute square.

He's not into this.

He doesn't find it groovy at all.

And he is shocked in all kinds of ways.

So women running free, that's bad.

His grandfather, Cadmus, and Tairesius, you remember our old friend Teresius from

the stint as a woman.

Yes, and that then become a man.

But now he's got back into dressing up as a woman because he and Cadmus have both dressed up as my nads.

They're very elderly.

You know,

they look ridiculous.

So again, Pentheus is not approving of that.

And the claims of Dionysus' followers that he's a god,

Pentheus also thinks this is utterly blasphemous and shocking.

And so he orders that Dionysus should be captured, brought into his presence, and then stoned into death.

And he also orders that a squad of

a cracked squad of elite picked men should go up into the mountains and capture the Mainads and stop them getting up to their shenanigans.

However,

obviously

it doesn't work out.

Dionysus is captured, but it doesn't take him long to reveal to Pentheus, to the Thebans, to the audience, his terrifying divine power.

So Pentheus thinks that Dionysus is being tied up, but in fact, it's a bull that's being tied up.

Pentheus can no longer distinguish between this bull in the stable and Dionysus.

Dionysus then makes Pentheus's palace shake, collapse, and then the rubble of the palace is consumed by a great blaze of fire.

And Pentheus emerges back onto the stage, completely bewildered by this, stabbing at the air.

You know, he's starting to lose it.

At this point, a herdsman arrives.

He's come down from the heights of Mount Kitharon, and he reports what he's seen there.

And basically, he's seen the mynads.

And they are picking up snakes, twining them into their hair.

They are putting Pentheus's elite squad of crackpick men to flight.

And the women are doing this armed only with staffs tipped with pine cones.

So very, again, kind of very, very unsettling.

And they are going around and every time they find a cow or a bull, they tear it to pieces.

And so the herdsman reports, you'd see some ribs or a cleft hoof tossed high and low and rags of flesh hung from pine branches, dripping blood.

Now, by this point, it's as though, you know, the ease and whiz are kicking in for Pentheus.

He's getting increasingly spaced out.

And he essentially is putty now in Dionysus' hands.

He does whatever Dionysus tells him to do.

And Dionysus persuades Pentheus that what he should really do is go up into the heights and spy on the Maenads.

And that the best thing, the best way to do that would be for Pentheus to dress up as a woman.

to dress up as a menad.

I feel like nothing good is going to, well, I know that nothing good is going to happen to Pentheus.

He's making some bad choices he is making some but but you know then again he's kind of off his face and so pentheus says yeah that's a brilliant idea and by now he's really tripping so he says i seem to see two sons are double thebes um he looks at dionysus and he sees a pair of horns sprouting from from his head and he is starting to recognize the god for what he is

so he um he he puts on his you know his fawn fawn skin dress um and then dionysus leads him off stage and they're going up to the mountain and it doesn't take long for a messenger to appear on the stage and to report what happened next and we're told that Pentheus had reached the heights of Mount Kytheron and he wants a good view of the menads who are you know rampaging around having their rave all of that and so Dionysus pulls down a pine tree and he puts Pentheus on the top of the pine tree and then he twang you know he lets the pine snap back up so that Pentheus is then at the top of the tree looking down at the menads And then Dionysus, the rotter, yells over to the Maenads and says, hey,

look at this.

There's a spy pointing up at the hapless Pentheus who's on the top of the tree.

And the Menads go absolutely mad and they start shaking the tree.

And then the herdsman says, from his high perch, plunging, crashing to the earth, Pentheus fell with one incessant scream as he understood what end was near.

And that passage that you read at the beginning of this show, that is what happens.

He is torn to pieces.

And shortly afterwards, on stage, Agave appears and she is cradling her son's head.

And effectively, you know, what the actor must have been holding is the mask of Pentheus.

And presumably, Agave is played by the same actor who'd been playing Pentheus.

So Agave thinks that what she's holding is the head of a lion.

She thinks that's what she's torn to pieces.

And it's only gradually in obedience to the promptings of Cadmus, her father, that she kind of comes out of her ecstatic state and realizes what it is she's holding and what it is that she's done.

She's devastated.

She and her sisters are sent into exile, and Cadmus and his wife are turned into snakes.

So,

a bad day for the royal family of Thebes.

And the moral of the story is summed up by Cadmus at the very end of the play.

If any man derides the unseen world, let him ponder the death of Pentheus and believe in the gods.

So, a blood-soaked denouement, an absolutely devastating play.

And the obvious question is, what does it mean?

What's the point?

Because

are we to see Pentheus as the villain, as it were, who's been punished for not embracing the spirit of Dionysus?

Or are we, you know, is Pentheus a martyr, a victim?

And should we feel sorry for him?

And is Dionysus actually a terrible person or terrible god?

Yeah.

And I guess that's the point about the Green Myths, isn't it?

That

it's impossible to fix a simplistic meaning on something that seems so slippery and so nuanced but also so frankly so strange and so terrifying absolutely there are there are there are critics who see pentheus as the villain see him as as as or dionysus the villain you can stage it i mean you could stage it as being about the coming of the nazis you could cast dionysus as you know as hitler or you could stage it with um you know, Pentheus as some boring square who is refusing to drop out and join the hippies.

And as you say, that is a kind of the measure of the richness of this of Greek myth and of tragedy, is that two and a half thousand years on,

it still has this kind of richness.

It can be interpreted and adapted.

But I'm guessing that that's a very modern way of viewing it, right?

That the Athenians, when they saw it as part of a communal experience, that is a central part of their city's calendar, and you know how important their civic culture is to them.

They would not have said, oh, this has multiple meanings and it's very slippery and nuanced.

They would have said, it has one meaning and the meaning is this.

So what is it?

Well, I think the context is is key.

The fact that they are staring down the barrel of total ruin and they're sitting there watching the dramatic portrayal of a city being utterly destroyed.

So

Euripides is very precise about this in the Bacchae, that the ruin that's visited on Pentheus is also a ruin that is visited on Thebes.

So to quote Euripides, the city's streets tremble in guilt as every Theban repents too late.

his blindness and his blasphemy.

And I think it's impossible to believe that Athenians wouldn't have felt those lines as incredibly chilling and thought about how

the ruin that's going to be visited on Thebes is going to, you know, might well be the ruin that's visited on them.

Right.

Yeah.

And what's more, it's the men who are sitting there thinking about it.

And they're watching Pentheus, the king, who has responsibility for the day-to-day affairs of his city.

In a democracy, it's the mass of the male citizens who have that responsibility.

So they're watching Pentheus lead Thebes to disaster, and they must have been reflecting, well,

you know, Pentheus is us.

We, the citizen body, who have responsibility for the day-to-day running of this city,

whether it goes to war, how we conduct that war, we likewise have led our city to ruin.

I mean, I think it must have been devastating.

But their mistakes, if they are mistakes, have been political, military, diplomatic ones.

Pentheus's mistake is that he doesn't fully embrace what you would call, Tom, to do a Tom Hollandism, the dimension of the supernatural.

Right.

Is Euripides arguing that that is also the Athenian's mistake?

Is he a sort of, is there a slightly Savonarola aspect, Savonarola Florence aspect to this?

Well, basically, you haven't, this is an opportunity for you to revive your gravelly voice, Tom.

Savonarola's voice.

Is he, but is Euripides the mistakes, you know, the political mistakes are merely a symptom of a deeper kind of moral, spiritual malaise?

Well,

as in the Bacchae, so in the dying days of the great war with Sparta, the Athenians would take for granted that the gods are actors in the drama

of what is happening.

And normally for the Athenians, the readiness of the gods to intervene in the affairs of their city is seen as a positive.

So So to quote Greg Anderson, who I've already cited in this series in his book, The Realness of Things Past, for the Athenians, the gods of Attica were not some group of faceless superhuman hired contractors.

They were something closer to benevolent governors or caring parents, beings who perpetually monitored and managed the shared local environment, taking a personal interest in the life and well-being of their chosen people.

And the chosen people is the deimos.

That is what...

the democracy is.

It's the rule of the chosen people of Attica, the chosen people of Athena.

And this notion of the Athenians as a chosen people of Athena and of other gods as well worshipped by the Athenians, this embraces women as well as men.

And in fact, it is women far more than men who are entrusted with the rituals that exist to please the gods and thereby to keep the deimos secure.

So that's why these women are going off to the temple of Dionysus in the swamp.

You know, they're the ones who preside over the sacred rituals, but there are other rituals as well.

So from childhood, they've been doing it.

So at the age of 10, we're told the girls of Athens go out to a shrine of Artemis,

the goddess of the hunt, on the shores of Attica, and there they turn into bears and they run with Artemis, or they tend the sacred snake on the Acropolis, or they weave robes for Athena, which are carried up onto the Acropolis and are used to adorn her statues.

And Euripides himself is in, you know, he is fully conscious of this role that women are mandated to play in securing the health of the Deimos and of Athens, because we have a fragment from an otherwise lost play in which he states this explicitly.

So to quote this fragment, as regards relations with the gods, matters which I judge to be more important than anything, it is we women who have the leading role to play.

So he's ventriloquizing a woman in this fragment.

For there are many rites which cannot legitimately be performed by men, but which flourish when women conduct them.

The order which prevails in the engagements of mortals with the gods is then, it can be said, a female one.

And so that being so, again, imagine how terrifying it must have been to sit there knowing that your city is on the brink of total ruin, watching women running amok,

worshiping Dionysus in a way that causes ruin for the state.

In the Bacchae, women are embroiled in the collapse of Thebes just as much as men are.

And I, again, I think that the relevance of this for the first audience of the Bacchae would have been stupefying.

They must have thought that, I mean, what's the lesson of the Bacchae?

That men can adopt policies that are disastrous, but also

that

women who are mandated to keep the gods on side can run completely amok.

and be complicit in the destruction of the city as well.

So I think that that is a theme that must have been overwhelming overwhelming for the audience.

This sense that men and women alike are embroiled in the disaster that the Athenians, like the Thebans, are facing.

And what is the argument that Euripides is making then?

What is the argument that he's, you know, how is he, how does this story illustrate the deeper failings?

You know, is it that they've that they haven't honored the gods?

That they've lived in

an ungodly way?

That they have.

Yes, I think that's absolutely.

I think Euripides is saying that, well, I mean, it's a drama.

He's not saying it.

But it's a possibility that is haunting the contours of the drama.

He's saying that men, like Pentheus, in the day-to-day running, they can disrespect the gods.

They can lead their city into disastrous policies.

But also that it's possible for women who are mandated to honor the gods and to keep the gods on side, that they can also fail in that responsibility.

And that if men and women...

both fail, then the consequences for a city is disastrous.

Now, that, of course, is to assume that the gods are real.

Yeah.

And there is another possibility, one that is not countenanced in the Bacchae, where the god, you know, Dionysus is on the stage.

The last messages believe in the gods.

But Euripides was notorious for having explored the possibility that the gods did not exist in other plays.

So we, again, another fragment that hasn't survived in total from a play called Bellerophon.

And Bellerophon was a hero who

fights the chimera and rides around on Pegasus, the magical flying horse.

And in it, Bellerophon describes murderous leaders.

So, you know, the leaders of cities that come to disaster.

And he says, he describes these murderous leaders, people

who deprive citizens of their property and break their oaths to sack cities.

And despite this, they prosper more than those who live piously in peace every day.

I know two of small cities that revere the gods, which are subject to larger, more impious ones, overcome as they are by a more numerous army so that has a real resonance in the you know the the terrible war between athens and sparta all these kind of things have happened and in it bellerophon argues therefore there can be no gods because if there were gods they wouldn't commit crimes like this happen exactly and of course i suppose you could say bellerophon's just a character euripides doesn't believe this himself But for Euripides to imagine a character who thinks like that suggests that there must be people who think like that.

He's not going to imagine the unimaginable.

So Euripides is countenancing the possibility, at least, that there is an argument to be had about whether the gods are real.

Yeah, well, we don't know what Euripides himself thought.

And it's worth, I mean, emphasizing that Bellerophon does have a magical flying horse.

And in the play,

he flies on Pegasus up to Mount Olympus to see whether the gods are real or not.

And is

thrown.

They are because he gets, yes.

So in the play, his doubt is answered in a kind of tragic way.

But it is a staple of the comedies which are being staged in the Dionyser, as well as the tragedies.

Euripides appears in comedies by Aristophanes, the most famous of all the great Athenian comic writers.

And for Aristophanes, it's a kind of standing joke that

Euripides is an atheist.

To quote Aristophanes, he's always persuading men that there aren't any gods.

And for Aristophanes, Euripides is the spokesman for a kind of a real,

a sinister elitist trend.

Metropolitan atheists.

Metropolitan liberal trend.

And this trend essentially is to believe that

the stories that are told by Homer and by Hesiod and by the other ancient poets are inadequate to

explain.

and characterize the true character of the divine.

And this is a trend that is more than a century old by the time that Euripides is writing the Bacchae.

And it originates on the opposite side of the Aegean to Athens.

So in what's now Turkey, Anatolia, in the mid-6th century BC.

And in time, so just a few decades after the death of Euripides, this kind of intellectual trend will come to be called philosophia, the love of wisdom.

So philosophy, which is probably the most, well, I mean, not probably, I mean, it is the most radical and influential of all the intellectual achievements of ancient Greece.

And

it originates as a reaction against the stories that were told by the poets very specifically.

And so it's kind of manifests itself in all kinds of ways.

So its critique of the kind of Homeric anthropomorphic gods, the gods who look like humans, is completely devastating.

So there's a guy called Xenophanes who writes, if cattle and horses and lions had hands or could paint with their hands and create work such as men do, horses like horses and cattle like cattle also would depict the gods' shapes and make their bodies of such a sort as the form they themselves have.

We only think that their gods look human because we're human.

If we were horses, we'd think they look like horses.

And Xenophanes goes on to say that black people worship black gods and that red-haired people worship red-haired gods.

The red-haired gods, I'm not connected with any red-haired gods.

The Thracians, Dominic.

Apparently, the Thracians had red hair and they worship red-haired gods.

Okay, well, there you go.

I stand corrected.

Other philosophers insist that Zeus doesn't hurl thunderbolts, that the sun isn't a fiery chariot,

that the universe instead is formed out of air or moisture or fire, out of kind of universal eternal substances.

And the very word mythos, which in Homer signifies a story that is infused with authority with truth that actually it means the opposite that a mythos a myth is a fable a fantasy and the philosophers oppose this to another word logos which means recent argument so you have you have myth fantasy and you have logos recent argument so in a sense this answers the question i asked in the very first episode of this series which is did the Greeks genuinely believe this?

Did they believe there were people with heads with the head of a bull or people on flying horses and all this kind of stuff?

And the answer is clearly, no.

A lot of Greeks, not some Greeks, not a lot, maybe.

But some say how many?

Did not and said, come on, this is rubbish.

This is a,

it's interesting.

They are that philosophy is born in opposition to story.

Right?

That's basically what you're suggesting.

It absolutely is.

And the most famous philosopher of all, who was

a young man in his 20s when the Bacchae was staged and then when Athens fell the following year, he goes so far as to argue that in an ideal state, the poets, Homer, Hesiod, and so on, should be banned.

And that man, of course, is Plato.

And Plato in the Republic, his attempt to describe the ideal form that a city should take, wrote, poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up.

She lets them them rule although they ought to be controlled if mankind is ever to become happier and better and so therefore he says you know his shouldn't be allowed in all this stuff about a kronos cutting off the testicles i mean it's just unacceptable um it's kind of you know contravenes to all kinds of health and safety regulations well i don't think that's i don't think that's the prime objective but i mean he essentially what he says is that this is an invitation to insurrection yeah you know i mean before you know it all kinds of people will be having their testicles cut off and we can't have that and he also thinks that um uh here are seducing zeus and you know all this that it's just blasphemous and he doesn't want any of it so he still he still very much believes i mean if he thinks it's blasphemous he believes there is a supernatural element that needs to be treated with respect but he thinks these are basically silly children's stories

yes that that that

traduce the gods and actually demean them yes and so therefore homer should be banned right and so you know you said lots of people believe this so the question then is does does this mean the end for the myths With the emergence of philosophy, with Plato and so on, is myth going to die?

And it doesn't.

And for two reasons.

And the first of these is that the stories that are told of the gods, of the heroes and so on, are so intimately interwoven.

into the fabric of Greek life, you know, all the cults, the festivals and so on, but also just the mental headspace.

I mean, these stories are so powerful, they're so strong, They can't just be banished.

And the Sandbrook perspective on this surely would be.

Most people don't think about this at all.

They're just people tilling their fields.

Exactly.

Exactly.

They're not intellectuals.

They're not worrying about philosophy or whatever.

So myth remains part of, you know, it's just the kind of the air that they're breathing in.

Exactly.

That would make total sense.

They don't actually, if you said to somebody, are you interested in the stories of Zeus and Kronos or whatever, they'd say, sure, everyone knows these stories.

Do you believe them?

They'd say, I don't really think about them that much, to be honest with you.

I mean, we observe the rituals, of course, but I've got better things to think about.

So if we look at Plato, he sets up this school outside Athens called the Academy.

And it's so influential that in the long run, you know, it gives us the word academic.

But it's worth emphasizing.

It stands outside Athens.

It's not in the city.

And it is named after the tomb of a hero, Academus.

So, you know,

the presence of

myth is there right in the heart of Plato's school.

And

the academy cannot remotely compare for kind of splendor and cost and prestige with the temples that continue to stand in Athens.

No one is going to say

the academy is more important than the Parthenon.

Right.

So it's the equivalent of a, I don't know, a liberal arts college in upstate New York where they're coming up with all kinds of wacky theories and whatnot and they're living outside capitalism.

But actually in New York City, no one cares and they're just, you know.

Kind of.

Yes, I suppose kind of.

But the other thing to emphasize is that philosophy doesn't banish myth.

It just creates a new one.

So Xenophanes, even as he's saying,

you know, cows would worship cows.

What he's really disputing is the fact that the gods look like humans.

He absolutely believes in a god.

Yeah.

I mean, and it sounds very much, you know, it will sound familiar to monotheists today.

Xenophones wrote, there is one God, greatest among gods and men, similar to mortals, neither in shape nor in thought.

And those who are arguing that,

the cosmos is made of air or fire or moisture or whatever, the assumption is that these elements are themselves divine.

So in that sense, the whole cosmos is divine.

And Plato is himself the greatest of all mythmakers.

And what he does with momentous consequences for the way that we continue to think today is that he makes the real unreal.

and the unreal real because what he's arguing is that beyond the world as we perceive it there is another world which is

perfect, immortal, unchangeable.

And the way that this is always summed up is that there are, you know, you have tables, all kinds of tables, but these are merely reflections of the perfect table that kind of exists as in an ideal state.

So what Plato is doing, he's banishing the Homeric gods.

but he's enshrining new gods.

And these are kind of essentially abstract nouns, you know, kind of the just, the beautiful, the good, whatever.

And rather than a bakea, so going out and celebrating on the mountain, what Plato is offering his followers is

an ascent, the idea that the individual has an ideal form, namely, you know, in the form of a soul or whatever you want to call it, and that the soul can ascend from the dimension of the material to, as Plato puts it, the best of everything which can be comprehended by thought and which is eternal.

And this, in effect, is God.

And this concept is going to be a massive influence on Christianity,

on Islam.

And so to quote Wolter Burckhardt in his great book on Greek religion, since Plato, there has been no theology which has not stood in his shadow.

So there's a sense in which the Greek reaction against myth that Plato exemplifies, but you also have Aristotle and other philosophers too, this is...

this is part of the great river which will feed into the emergence of Christianity and

Islam and

therefore is of titanic significance, I think.

So now with Plato and with his ideas, we are heading towards, we're not quite there yet, but we're heading towards the Hellenistic era, the age associated with Alexander the Great and his successors.

And I guess the obvious question is, after Plato and after the, you know, the massive political disruption of the emergence of Macedon and Alexander and his empire, what does this mean for Greek mythology and the Greek stories of the gods?

And how does Alexander in particular, how does he come to, because he assumes such massive existential significance, how does he change the way that Greeks think about the relation between mortal and the immortal?

And Tom, this takes us to one of my favorite Greek myths, which is the story of Jason and the Argonauts, the quest for the golden fleece.

And this is what we'll be doing next time, isn't it?

And the exciting thing is, so we actually have our own crew.

We have our own Argonauts and they can listen to that episode episode right away.

Is there any way that somebody who's not on the Argo right now could join the Argo?

Do you know of any such way?

They absolutely could.

They could sign up to the Argo by going to therestishistory.com and joining the merry crew there and going to win the Golden Fleece.

And

if you think this last half hour of this show was absolutely mind-blowing and life-changing, let me tell you, that episode on Jason and the Argonauts will knock everything that's gone before in the restaurants history into a cocked hat.

So don't delay, join the Argo, sign up at the Restus History and listen to it right away.

Goodbye.

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