EURIPIDES

BACCHAE
EDITED WITH
INTRODUCTION AND COMMENTARY
BY

E. R. DODDS
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

SECOND EDITION

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
 INTRODUCTION
UNLIKE most Greek tragedies the Bacchae is a play about
an historical event—the introduction into Hellas of a new
religion.‘ When Euripides wrote, the event lay in the far
past, and the memory of it survived only in mythical form;
the new religion had long since been acclimatized and
accepted as part of Greek life. But it still stood as the
expression of 'a religious attitude, and the memorial of a
religious experience, different from anything implied in the
cult of the traditional Olympian gods; and the forces
liberated and embodied by the original movement were
active in other forms in the Athens of Euripides’ day. If
we are to understand this play, we must first know some-
thing about Dionysiac religion—the intention of certain
of its rites, the meaning of certain of its myths, and the
shapes it had assumed in Euripides’ time. The disagree-
ments of nineteenth-century critics should warn us that if
we attempt to seize the poet’s thought by a frontal attack,
in disregard of the contemporary background, we shall be
at the mercy of our own or other people's prejudices.

I. D I O N Y S U S
1 . The Nature of Dionysiac Religion”
To the Greeks of the classical age Dionysus was not
solely, or even mainly, the god of wine. Plutarch tells us
‘ The characteristics of Dionysiac worship are so different from those
of most other Greek cults that we may justifiably speak of it in this way.
But in its Greek form it was never a separate ‘religion’ in the sense of
excluding other cults.
2 The first modern writer who understood the Dionysiac psychology
was Erwin Rohde ; his Psyche (1st ed. 1891-4, Eng. trans. 1925) is still the
fundamental book. See also Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, vol. v,
chaps. 4-7, Wilamowitz, Glaube der Hellenen, ii. 6o ff., O. Kern, Religion
der Griechen, i. 226 ff., W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greeks and their Gods,
xii INTRODUCTION
as much, confirming it with a quotation from Pindar,‘ and
the god’s cult titles confirm it also: he is Aev8pt-mg or
".Ev§ev5pos', the Power in the tree; he is 211/6.-.0; the blossom-
bringer, Kdipmos the fruit—bringer, <l‘5Ae6g or <15Aéwg, the
abundance of life. His domain is, in Plutarch’s words, the
whole of the :5-ypcl ¢o'cns—not only the liquid fire in the grape,
but the sap thrusting in a young tree, the blood pounding
in the veins of a young animal, all the mysterious and
uncontrollable tides that ebb and flow in the life of nature.
Our oldest witness, Homer, nowhere explicitly refers to
him as a wine god ;= and it may well be that his association
with certain wild plants, such as the fir and the ivy, and
with certain wild animals, is in fact older than his associa-
tion with the vine. It was the Alexandrines, and above
all the Romans—-with their tidy functionalism and their
cheerful obtuseness in all matters of the spirit-—-who depart-
mentalized Dionysus as ‘jolly Bacchus’ the wine-god with
his riotous crew of nymphs and satyrs.3 As such he was
taken over from the Romans by Renaissance painters and
poets; and it was they in turn who shaped the image in
which the modern world pictures him. If we are to under-
stand the Bacchae, our first step is to unthink all this: to
forget the pictures of Titian and Rubens, to forget Keats
and his ‘god of breathless cups and chirping mirth’, to
remember that dpyta are not orgies but acts of devotion
(cf. 34 n.), and that Banxedeiv is not to ‘revel’ but to have
a particular kind of religious experience—the experience of

chap. 6. Miss Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion

and W. F. Otto’s Dionysos are interesting but should be used with
caution. Some illuminating modern parallels are cited by H. ]ean-
maire in his comprehensive but in parts decidedly speculative book,
Dionysos (1951).
1 Is. et Os. 35, 365 A, quoting Pindar, fr. 140 Bowra.
1 This may of course be accidental; but it is odd, as Farnell says, that
Maron, though a Thracian and a vine-rgower, is represented as a priest
not of Dionysus but of Apollo.
3 Horace is an exception : Odes, 2. 19 and 3. 25 show a deeper under-
standing of the gocl’s true nature.
 INTRODUCTION xiii
communion with God which transformed a human being
into a Bdxxog or a Bdrcxr) (cf. 115 n.).
To this experience the Greeks, like many other peoples,‘
believed wine to be in certain circumstances an aid.
Drunkenness, as William James observed, ‘expands, unites,
and says Yes: it brings its votary from the chill periphery
of things to the radiant core; it makes him for the moment
one with truth’? Thus wine acquires religious value: he
who drinks it becomes é‘v9eos—-he has drunk deity. But
wine was not the only or the most important means to
communion. The maenads in our play are not drunken:
Pentheus thought they were (260 ff.), but we are expressly
told that he was mistaken (686 f.) ; some of them preferred
to drink water, or even milk (704 ff.). In this Euripides is
probably correct from a ritual point of view: for the other
acts of his maenads belong to a winter ritual which seems
not to have been a wine festival, and would not naturally
be one.3 The right time for holy drunkenness is in the spring,
when the new wine is ready to be opened ; and it is then that
we find it, e.g. at the Athenian ‘Feast of Cups’ which formed
part of the Anthesteria.
But there were other ways of becoming é'v6eos. The
strange dpetfiuaia or mountain dancing, which is described
in the m£po8og of the Bacchae and again in the first messenger-
speech, is no fancy of the poet but the reflection of a ritual
which was practised by women’s societies at Delphi down
to Plutarch’s time, and for which we have inscriptional
evidence from a number of other places in the Greek world.‘
The rite took place in midwinter in alternate years (hence
the name rpterqpig, Ba. I 33). It II111St have involved C011-
siderable discomfort, and even risk: Pausanias says that
‘ Cf. Frazer, Golden Bough, iii. 248, and for an excellent modern
example Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 85.
1 The Varieties of Religious Experience, 387.
3 Farnell, Cults, v. 198 ff. Cf., however, Ion, 550-4.
‘ See my article ‘Maenadism in the Bacehae’, Harvard Theological
Rev. xxxiii (1940), 155 ff. (reprinted in part, with some additions and
corrections, as an appendix to The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951).
xiv .INTRODUCTION
at Delphi the women went to the very summit of Parnassus
(over 8,000 ft. high), and Plutarch describes an occasion,
apparently in his own lifetime, when they were cut off by
a snow-storm and a rescue party had to be sent out.‘
What was the object of this practice? Many peoples dance
out of doors to make their crops grow, by sympathetic
magic. But such dances elsewhere are annual like the
crops, not biennial like the dpeifiaota; their season is spring,
not midwinter; and their scene is the cornland, not the
barren mountain-tops. Late Greek writers thought of the
dances at Delphi as commemorative: ‘they dance’, says
Diodorus (4. 3), ‘in imitation of the maenads who are said
to have been associated with the god in the old days’.
Probably he is right, as regards his own time (or the time
of his source); but ritual is usually older than the myth
by which people explain it, and has deeper psychological
roots. There must have been a time when the maenads
or thyiads or Bdxxat really became for a few hours or days
what their name implies---wild women whose human per-
sonality has been temporarily replaced by another. Whether
this might still be so in Euripides’ day we have no sure
means of knowing: a Delphic tradition recorded by
Plutarch” suggests that as late as the fourth century B.C.
the rite sometimes produced a true disturbance of person-
ality, but the evidence is slender.
There are, however, parallel phenomena in other cultures
which may help us to understand the mipooos of the Bacchae
and the punishment of Agaue. In many societies, perhaps
in all societies, there are people for whom ‘ritual dances
provide a. religious experience that seems more satisfying
and convincing than any other. . . . It is with their muscles
that they most easily obtain knowledge of the divine.“ The
best known examples are the Mohammedan dervishes, the
American Shakers, the Jewish Hasidirn, and the Siberian
‘ Paus. 10. 32. 5; Plut. de prime frigido, I8, 953 D.
2 mul. oirt. I3.
3 Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, 232, 235.
 INTRODUCTION xv

shamans. Often the dance induces a sense of being pos-

sessed by an alien personality. Such dancing is highly
infectious; it ‘spreads like wildfire’ (Ba. 778), and easily
becomes a compulsive obsession, taking possession even of
sceptics (like Agaue) without the consent of the conscious
mind. This happened in the extraordinary dancing madness
which periodically invaded Europe from the fourteenth to
the seventeenth century,‘ when people danced until they
dropped and lay unconscious (cf. Ba. 136 and n.): e.g. at
Liege in 1374 ‘many persons seemingly sound in mind and
body were suddenly possessed by -the devils’ and left house
and home to wander away with the dancers; Cadmus and
Teiresias had their counterparts in seventeenth-century
Italy, where ‘even old men of ninety threw aside their crutches
at the sound of the tarantella, and as if some magic potion,
restorative of youth and vigour, flowed through their veins,
they joined the most extravagant dancers’. Many held that
the dancing madness could be imposed on people by cursing
them with it, as Dionysus cursed the daughters of Cadmus.
In some cases the obsession reappeared at regular intervals,
‘ See I. F. K. Hecker, Die Tanzwuth (1832; Eng. trans., Babington,
1888), A. Martin, ‘Geschichte der Tanzkrankheit in Deutschland’ in
Ztschr. d. Vereins Volkskunde, xxiv (1914). Such happenings are not
unknown even today. In 1921 there was an outbreak of dancing mania
in Thuringia, inspired by one Muck Lamberty. ‘Policemen and public
servants were seen joining the dance and singing in open streets, and
there was a new kind of riot, against which the authorities seemed to be
helpless. . . . Dignity, profession, creed and political opinion lost their
meaning. . . . The new prophet became a power, esteemed even in high
quarters. Not only was it doubtful whether anybody could have been
found to call him to account, but this might even have resulted in a
general rising’ (G. R. Halkett, The Dear Monster, 204 fI.). As Dionysus
was received at Delphi, so Muck preached in the Cathedral at Erfurt,
and succeeded for a time in establishing new forms of religious festival.
But Pentheus won in the end: Muck was discredited owing to moral
scandals. Similar outbreaks of mass hysteria occurred periodically in
japan during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see E. H.
Norman, For Eastern Survey, xiv (I945), 65 fI.). Disturbed social
conditions seem to have been a predisposing cause both in Germany
and in Japan.
xvi INTRODUCTION
growing in intensity until St. _]ohn’s or St. Vitus’s day,
when an outbreak occurred and was followed by a return
to normality; hence there developed periodic ‘cures’ of
afflicted patients by music and ecstatic dancing, which in
some places crystallized into annual festivals.‘
This last fact suggests the way in which in Greece the
ritual dpeifiaata at a fixed date may originally have developed
out of spontaneous attacks of mass hysteria.’ By canalizing
such hysteria in an organized rite once in two years, the
Dionysiac cult kept it within bounds and gave it a relatively
harmless outlet. What the -.-r<£p08os of the Bacchae depicts
is hysteria subdued to the service of religion; the deeds
done on Cithaeron were manifestations of hysteria in the
raw, the compulsive mania which attacks the unbeliever.
Dionysus is at work in both: like St. John or St. Vitus, he
is the cause of madness and the liberator from madness,
Bcircxog and /l1io1.o5‘,3 (iecig Seivdraros, civtipobrrotat 5' wjrrtobrarog
(Ba. 860). We must keep this ambivalence in mind if we
are rightly to understand the play. To resist Dionysus is to
repress the elemental in one’s own nature; the punishment
is the sudden complete collapse of the inward dykes when the
elemental breaks through perforce and civilization vanishes.
The culminating act of the Dionysiac winter dance was
the tearing to pieces, and eating raw, of an animal body,
0"rra.po'.')/p.65‘ and tbuoqbayta. It is referred to in the regulations
of the Dionysiac cult at Miletus (276 B.c.)," and attested
‘ Cf. the annual dancing procession at Esternach in the Rhineland,
which is still believed to be a cure for psychopathic complaints (Martin,
l.c., 129 ff.) ; also Ieanmaire, Dionysos, 167 if.
1 For other parallels which suggest that the ‘maenad’ is a real and
not merely a mythological figure see notes on 748-64, and ‘Maenadism
in the Bacchae’, 159 ff.
3 Rohde, Psyche, chap. 9, n. 21, Farnell, Cults, v. 120. Cf.~the story
of the daughters of Proetus, who were driven mad by Dionysus and
subsequently cured per’ ti./\a.l\a.-y,u.of:’ Kai -rwog eivfiéov xopcias [Ap0.llOd.]
2. 2. 2; and SChOl. Pindar, Pj/ill. 3. I39 Kai. -rdv Altdvvoov 8% Ko.9o.p'rucdv
navias paoi.
4 Milet Vi. 22 psi] eigeivar. cbpogbdyrov eiptflaheiv ;.rr)9evi. rrpdrepov -ij 1) ie‘pcm
Iirreip Ti}; 11-6/\cr.us énfldhg. ei,u.BalleE'v means, I think, ‘throw to the crowd of
 INTRODUCTION xvii
by Plutarch and others. In the Bacchae the O'1'l'(I.pCI.')/].LClS‘, first
of the Theban cattle (734 ff.) and then of Pentheus (1125 ff.),
is described with a gusto which the modern reader has
difliculty in sharing. A detailed description of the 03710-
qbayia would perhaps have been too much for the stomachs
even of an Athenian audience; Eur. speaks of it twice,
Ba. 138 and Cretans fr. 472, but in each place he passes over
it swiftly and discreetly. It is hard to guess at the psycho-
logical state that he describes in the two words objuoqbd-yov
xcipw. But it is noteworthy that the days appointed for
o5)u.0qSa-yla were ‘unlucky and black days’ ;‘ and it appears
that those who practise a comparable rite in our time
experience in it a mixture of supreme exaltation and
supreme repulsion: it is at once holy and horrible, fulfil-
ment and uncleanness, a sacrament and a pollution--the
same violent conflict of emotional attitudes that runs all
through the Bacchae and lies at the root of all religion of
the Dionysiac type.‘
Late writers explained the ofinopayla as they did the
dancing: they supposed it to commemorate the day when
the infant Dionysus was himself torn to pieces and devoured.‘
But (a) we can hardly dissociate the rite from the wide-
spread belief in what Frazer called ‘the homoeopathic
effects of a flesh diet’ :4 if you tear something to pieces and
eat it warm and bleeding, you add its vital powers to your
celebrants’ (‘Maenadism in the Bacchae’, 164); cf. the modern Arab
cbuogbayia, where the priest on a terrace throws the victim to the mob
of ecstatics below (R. Brunel, Essai sur la con_fre'rie religieuse des
Aissdoua au Maroc, 177). For other evidence see Farnell, Cults, v.
302 f.
‘ Plut. Jeff. 0106. I4, 41'] C, 1)p.e'pu.s‘ dnoqipdbas Kai cncvdpurrrdg, e’v aig
cbpogbayiat Kai. Baaonaopoi.
3 Cf. Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 179: ‘the very repugnance which
the Kwakiutl [Indians of Vancouver Island] felt towards the act of
eating human flesh made it for them a fitting expression of the Diony-
sian virtue that lies in the terrible and the forbidden’.
3 Schol. Clem. Alex. 92 P. (i. 318 Stahlin), Firm. Mat. err. prof. rel.
6. 5, Photius, S.V. veflpi§e:.v.
4 See Golden Bough, v. ii, chap. 12.
4003 .9 b
xviii INTRODUCTION
own, for ‘the blood is the life’; (b) it seems likely that the
victim was felt to embody the vital powers of the god him-
self, which by the act of <.3,u.o<;$a.yta were transferred to the
worshippers. The most usual victim was a bull--that is
why Aristophanes speaks of ‘the Bacchic rites of bull-eating
Cratinus’.‘ We hear also of oluoqfiayiat of wild goats or
fawns, and the tearing of vipers? while the women who
rent Pentheus believed him to be a lion.‘ In several of
these creatures we may recognize bestial incarnations of
the god: cf. Ba; 1017-19, where the faithful cry to him to
appear as bull, snake, or lion. For a cattle-herding people
like those of Boeotia or Elis there is no more splendid
symbol of nature's potency than the bull. It is in bull-
shape, ‘raging with bestial hoof’, that Dionysus is invoked
in the ancient hymn of the women of Elis,‘ as it is in bull-
shape that he mocks his persecutor in the Bacchae (618);
and the sculptors sometimes show him, as Pentheus saw
him in a vision (Ba. 922), as a horned man.‘ In the Homeric
hymn (7. 44) he manifests himself as a lion, and this may
well be the oldest of his bestial -shapes.“
We may regard the cbnoqiayia, then, as a rite in which the
god was in some sense present in his beast-vehicle and was
in that shape torn and eaten by his people.’ Did the cult
once admit-—as the Pentheus story suggests—a still more
potent, because more dreadful, form of communion--the
rending, even the rending and eating, of God in the shape
‘ Ran. 357 and schol. Cf. Ba. 743 ff., 1185; Oppian, Cyn. 4. 304 ff.
1' Goat, Ba. 138, Arnobius, adv. nat. 5. 19; fawn, Phot., s.v. vq8,ot’§e:.v ;
viper, Galen, de antid. I. 6. 14.
3 Cf. Or. 1492, where the Bdxxat. hunt a O’KIip.v05‘ dpeio. (i.e. a. lion-cub P).
4 Plut. Q.G1'. 36, 299 B, Boétp rrodi driwv, dfzc rafipe. .
-" Cf. his cult epithets Bixepcus, -ravpwrrcig, 1-avpo,u.e'-rwrros, K€p(10'<,bdp0$‘.
Occasionally his statues gave him a bul1’s body also (Athen. 476 A). Cer-
tain of his worshippers were called ,8ow.-6.\o:., and at Argos he was wor-
shipped as ,8ov-yewfig (Plut. Is. et Os. 35, 364 F).
6 There were no lions in Greece in historical times; but the lion
survived in the god’s earlier homes, in Asia Minor, Thrace, and
Macedonia (Hdt. 7. 125, Xen. Cyrr. I1, Paus. 6. 5. 4, Ar. ‘Hist. An.
579"7). 7 Cf. Gruppe, Gr. Mythologie u. Relzgionsgeschzehte, 732.
 INTRODUCTION xix
of man? We cannot be sure, and some scholars deny it.
There are, however, scattered indications which point that
way.‘ Theophrastus, apud Porph. abst. 2. 8, speaks of -5 1-o’3v
dvfipwn-o6vo:.o'3v Baxxeia, and adds that the Bassares practise
cannibalism as well. Pausanias (9. 8. 2) has heard that at
Potniae, near Thebes, a boy was at one time sacrificed to
Dionysus, until Delphi authorized a goat as a surrogate. He
explains the rite as expiatory; but there is other evidence"
which may lead us to doubt this. Euelpis of Carystos (ap.
Porph. Abst. 2. 55) knows that on two Aegean islands, Chios
and Tenedos, o'11'a.pa.'y;.:.d5‘ of a human victim was once prac-
tised in honour of Dionysus Omadios, the god of the dino-
payia; and Clement (Protr. 3. 42) has culled from a Hellenistic
history of Crete a similar tradition about Lesbos. It seems
that on Tenedos, as at Potniae, an animal victim was later
substituted, but the ritual retained curious and significant
features : Aelian (N.A. 12. 34) tells us that they choose a cow
in calf and treat her as if she were a human mother; when
the calf is born, they put buskins on it and then sacrifice it
to Dionysus Zlvfipwwoppalo-n79, ‘the Mansmasher’; ‘but he
who struck the calf with his axe is stoned by the people until
he escapes to the sea-shore’ (i.e. he is polluted, and must
make as if to leave the country, like Agaue at the end of the
Bacchae). To this evidence we may add the repeated occur-
rence of child-murder and human orrapayndg in Dionysiac
myths (see below) ; the fact that the human sacrifice alleged
to have been performed before the battle of Salamis is said to
have been offered to Dionysus Omestes ;1 and the allegation
of ritual murder in connexion with the Italian Dionysiac
movement which was suppressed in 186 B.C.3
‘ Collected by F. Schwenn, Die Menschenopfer bei den Griechen u.
Romern. See also Farnell, Cults, v. 164 ff.
1 Plut. Them. 13, on the authority of Aristotle’s pupil Phanias. Even
if the story be false, it shows what fourth-century Greeks thought of
Dionysus Omestes.
1 Livy, 39. 13, cf. Plaut. Bacchides, 371 f. Kern believed that the
/I'Fjva.l. (Theocr. xxvi) was written to defend ritual child-murder
(Arch.f. Rel. xxvi. 14 f.).
xx INTRODUCTION
However this may be, the J.-poqflayia and the bestial
incarnations reveal Dionysus as something much more
significant and much more dangerous than a wine-god. He
is the principle of animal life, 1-aiipos and 1-avpoqfiei-yog,‘ the
hunted and the hunter—the unrestrained potency which
man envies in the beasts and seeks to assimilate. His cult
was originally an attempt on the part of human beings to
achieve communion with this potency. The psychological
effect was to libe.rate the instinctive life in man from the
bondage imposed on it by reason and social custom: the
worshipper became conscious of a strange new vitality,
which he attributed to the god's presence within him (cf.
Ba. 187 ff., r94, 945-6, and notes). Euripides seems to hint
likewise at a further effect, a merging ‘of the individual
consciousness in a group consciousness: the worshipper
Qaaaetieraz glrvxciv (Ba. 75), he iS 3.12 one not only with the
Master of Life but with his fellow-worshippers; and he is
at one also with the life of earth (Ba. 726-7, and note).

ii. Dionysiac Religion at Athens

The Greeks held, no doubt correctly, that these singular
rites were not native to Hellas: Herodotus calls them
vewmri. ém;-y)u.é'va (2. 49, where vewo~ri. seems to refer to the
time of Melampus, before the Trojan War) ; and Euripides
represents the Dionysiac cult as a sort of ‘world religion’,
carried by missionaries (as no native Greek cult ever was)
from one land to another. According to him, its original seat
is the mountains of Lydia and Phrygia (Ba. 13, 55, 86, 8cc.),
a view supported by the modern discovery that Béxxos is
the Lydian equivalent of Dionysus.’ Elsewhere Dionysus
is most often represented as a Thracian: Homer connects
him with the Thracian Lycurgus (IZ. 6. r3o ff., cf. Soph. Ami.
955), and in the fifth century Greek travellers knew of the
‘ Soph. fr. 668.
2 Sardis, vi. i. 39, Lyd. Ba.m;-'ar\:.5‘ = Greek Aabvuauckfis.
 INTRODUCTION xxi

Dionysiac cult on Mounts Pangaeum and Rhodope.‘ This

also we may accept: the highlands of Thrace and those of
Asia Minor held peoples of kindred blood and culture (Hdt.
7. 7 3). The myths suggest that the new god may in fact have
reached mainland Greece by two independent routes—-
overseas from the Asiatic coast by way of Cos, Naxos, Delos,
and Euboea to Attica, and by land from Thrace to Mace-
donia, Boeotia, and Delphi.‘ His coming cannot be exactly
dated, but must I think be a good deal earlier than was
supposed, e.g., by Wilamowitz (who was prepared to put
it as late as 700 B.c.) : not only is Semele already a Theban
princess for the author of the ALOQ d-.-r<£1-17 (Il. 14. 323 ff.), but
the introduction myths are associated with very early
conditions—the monarchy at Athens, the rule of the
Minyae at Orchomenus and of the Proetids and Perseids
at Argos, the Cadmean period at Thebes.‘
In the course of the centuries which separate the first
appearance of Dionysiac cult in Greece from the age of
‘ Cf. Hec. 1267, Rhes. 972, Hdt. 5. 7 and 7. 111. Hdt. also knows of
drgiastic 'rpl.e1"qpi8€$‘ among the Scythian Geloni (4. 108). And the god’s
northern associations are recognized even in the Bacchae (lines 560-75).
1 Cf. Kern, Rel. der Griech. i. 226 ff. ; Nilsson, Minoan-lllycenaean
Religion‘, 567 if. » '
3 Cf. Farnell, Cults, v. 109 ff., Foucart, Culte de Dion. en Attique,
chap. 3, Deubner, Arch. jhb. xlii (1927), 189. Since the above was
written, the case for a very early dating of the introduction myths
has been strengthened by Miss Lorimer, Homer and the Monuments,
471 f., and has received apparent confirmation from the decipherment
on a fragmentary Pylos tablet, Xao6, of the name di-wo-nu-so-jo
(ventris and Chadwick, DQ.§.t4m,e.u.t.i .in..._M1gg31dean Greek, 127). Ven-
tris and Chadwick point out that the name onlthewfzitilet 1s not neces-
sarily that of a god ; it seems, however, to presuppose knowledge of
the divine name, and thus to date back Greek acquaintance with
Dionysus to the thirteenth century B.C. at latest. If the decipherment
is confirmed, it does not follow that the introduction myths are entirely
without historical foundation; but the historical element will refer to
a very remote period (the time of Herodotus’ Mela.mpus?), unless
with Nilsson (Minoan-Mycenaean Religion1, 575 ff.) we postulate a
missionary movement in the Archaic Age which was in fact a reintro-
duction from abroad of ideas and rites that had been familiar to the
Minoan world.
xxii INTRODUCTION
Euripides, it was brought under State control and lost
much of its original character, at any rate in Attica. The
Athenians of Euripides’ time had no biennial winter rite,
no mountain dancing, no obp.oq5c1.yio.;‘ they were content to
send a delegation of women to represent them at the
Delphic rpte-njpis. So far as we know, their own Dionysiac
festivals were very different: they were occasions for old-
fashioned country gaiety and a little old-fashioned country
magic, as at the rural Dionysia; or for pious and cheerful
drunkenness, as at the Feast of Cups; or for a display of the
civic and cultural greatness of Athens, as at the City Dio-
nysia. Only the Lenaea may perhaps have kept something
of the original fervour which its name betokens and which
we may recognize on some of the so-called ‘Lenaea-vases’?
The function of these genial Attic festivals was, in the words
of Pericles,‘ to provide dvdnavhat 'r<I:v vrdvwvi their value was
more social than religious. This aspect of Dionysiac worship
is not ignored in the Bacchae: Euripides has expressed it
beautifully in the first stasimon, 370 ff. (see Commentary).
But there was little or nothing in the ofiicial Athenian cult
which could inspire the descriptions in the -mip08os: and the
messenger-speeches, or had any real relevance to the savage
and primitive story of Pentheus’ punishment. j
Much of the play’s primitive religiouscolouring is doubt-
less traditional, like the theme itself (see below). Its extra-
ordinary vividness is possibly due in some measure to things
that the poet saw or heard in Macedonia, where the play
was written--—for in Macedonia, if we are to believe Plutarch,
‘ It has been held that the ‘orgiastic’ rites never had a footing in
Attica; but the name Lenaea——a_pparently from Mivm, the wild women
-—suggests the contrary.
1 Farnell, Cults, v. 208_f.; Frickenhaus, Lenaenoasen ; Deubner, Att.
Feste, 126 ff. The vases show a wine-offering made by women before a
mask-idol of Dionysus, accompanied by a sacral dance with thyrsi and
torches, to the music of flutes and castanets. This looks like a con-
trolled and limited survival of the orgiastic female cult. But its con-
nexion with the Lenaea is disputed (Nilsson, Arch. jahrb. xxxi (1916),
331 f.). 1 Thuc. 2. 38.
 INTRODUCTION xxiii

the Dionysiac cult was still in the fourth century sufficiently

primitive to include such rites as snake-handling.‘ But I
have suggested elsewhere‘ that Euripides’ interest in the
subject may also have been aroused by things that were
happening nearer home. At Athens Dionysus had been
tamed; but it does not follow that the Dionysiac temper had
vanished, and there is in fact plenty of evidence that during
the Peloponnesian War—probably as a result of the social
stresses which it generated-—-religion of the orgiastic type
began to emerge again under other names. Athens was
invaded by a multitude of 6602 ficvmolz it is at this time that
Attic literature begins to be full of references to the eastern
and northern mystery gods, Cybele and Bendis, Attis,
Adonis, and Sabazius? In relation to the Bacchae the last-
named is of especial interest. He is an oriental counterpart
of Dionysus—an unhellenized Dionysus whose cult retained
the primitive appeal and much of the primitive ritual which
the Attic Dionysus had long since lost. Sabazius still
promised his initiates what Dionysus had once promised—-
identification with deity.‘ And to this end he offered them
the old means—an ecstatic nocturnal rite performed to the
music of flute and kettledrum.5 Several of the old ritual
elements mentioned in the vrdpobos of the Bacchae-—the
Kafiapjioi, the "r1iju.1ro.va., the snake-handling, the fawnskins,
the cult-title é’{,‘apX0g—are attested by Demosthenes for the
Sabazius-cult as practised at Athens in the fourth century.‘
‘ Plut. Alex. 2.
1 ‘Maenadism in the Bacchae’, 171 ff.
1 Cybele, Cratinus, fr. 82, Ar. Av. 876 f., Soph. Phil. 391 ff.; Bendis,
Cratin. fr. 80, cf. I.G. i1. 310. 208 (429/8 B.C.); Attis, Theopompus com.
fr. 27; Adonis, Cratin. fr. 15, Ar. Pax, 420; Sabazius, Ar. Vesp. 9 f.,
Av. 875, Lys. 387-97. On the growth of superstition during the Pelopon-
nesian War see Kern, Rel. d. Griech. ii. 287 ff., Nilsson, Greek Popular
Religion, 130 ff.
4 They became aéfiot, as the initiates of Bacchus became Bdxxol.
(Harpocrat. s.v. Z.'dEBo¢, schol. Ar. Av. 874, Plut. Q. Conv. 4. 6. 2).
1 Ar. Lys. 388, fr. 566, Dem. de cor. 259, Iamb. de myst. 3. 9.
6 de cor. 259 f., 284. We may add the ivy if the MS. reading m.'r1'o¢dpo5'
is right in de cor. 260.
xxiv INTRODUCTION
The past had in fact returned, or was trying to return.
And it brought in its train a controversy of similar sub-
stance to the debate between Pentheus and Teiresias in the
Bacchae. Echoes of that controversy survive in the frag-
ments of Old Comedy, in the orators, and in Plato. Or
rather, echoes from one side of it; for it happens that all
our witnesses are hostile to the new religious movement.
Aristophanes wrote a play, the Horae, in which ‘Sabazius
and certain other foreign gods’ were put on trial and sen-
tenced to banishment from Athens; the complaint seems
to have been chiefly directed, like Pentheus’ complaint
against Dionysus, to the celebration of women's rites under
cover of darkness, ‘nocturnae pervigilationes’.‘ Nor was
this an isolated attack on the new cults: the Hem‘. fevmot
were satirized by Apollophanes in his Cretans, by Eupolis
in his Baptae, by Plato comicus in his Adonis. In the fourth
century, Demosthenes seeks to blacken his rival’s character
by repeated allusions to his association with the disrepu-
table rites of Sabazius; Phryne is accused of introducing a
‘new god’ of Dionysiac type, Isodaites, and of forming
unlicensed Bic-.o0t ;1 while Plato takes so seriously the moral
dangers of the movement ‘that he would impose severe
penalties on anyone who should be found ‘practising private
orgiastic rites’.1
Athenian public opinion is thus, so far as we happen to
know -it, on the side of law and order. What sort of emo-
tional forces were engaged on the other side we may partly
guess from the choruses of the Bacchae,‘ and the discourse
of Teiresias may perhaps help us to reconstruct the intellec-
tual case for the defence that was made in certain quarters.
Conversely, we may understand better some parts of the
‘ Cic. Leg. 2. 37.
1 Euthias, fr. 2 Baiter-Sauppe. Moral prejudice against foreign cults
probably had something to do also with the condemnation of the two
priestesses, Ninus and Theo ris (cf. Foucart, Associations, 80 ff., 132 ff.).
3 dpyui§mv -rr/\1)v rd 31771. data, Leg. I0, 910 BC.
1 Partly also from certain vase-paintings: see below, p. xxxv f.,
and Webster, Greek Art and Literature, 530-400 B.C., 174. '
 INTRODUCTION xxv

play if we relate them to this contemporary background.

I do not suggest that the poet treated the coming of
Dionysus to Thebes as an allegory of the coming to Athens
of Sabazius and his like: even had he wished to do so, the
outline of the story was too firmly fixed by tradition to
lend itself to such treatment. But it seems probable that
the contemporary situation helped to stimulate Euripides’
interest in the mythical one; and that in writing certain
passages of the Bacchae—notably the Pentheus—Teiresias
scene‘--he had in mind, and expected his audience to have
in mind, the parallelism between the two.

II. TRADITIONAL ELEMENTS IN THE

BACCHAE
i. History and Ritual
The story of Pentheus and Agaue is one of a series of
cult-legends which describe the punishment of those rash
mortals who refused to accept the religion of Dionysus.
The first of them to appear in literature is the tale of
Lycurgus the Thra_c__:ian, of whom Homer relates (Il. 6.
130 ff.) that on the sacred mountain Nysa he hunted
Dionysus and his -‘nurses’, drove them into the sea, and
was blinded as a punishment. Later writers (and vase-
paintings1) tell that he was punished with madness, and
in his madness killed his own son ([Apollod.] 3. 5. 7, Hyg.
Fab. 132). His end is variously described: he was entombed
in a cave (Soph. Ant. 955 ff.), suffered 0'7rc1.po.'yp.d5‘ by horses
([Apollod.]) or panthers (Hyg.), or cut off his own legs
(Serv. on Aen. 3. 14). A closely similar figure is the Thracian
‘ See introductory note on this scene, and 201-3 n., 222-3 n., 234 n.,
274-85 n.
1 The oldest evidence is a hydria painted about 4.40 (C .V.A. Cracovie,
pl. 12 ; Beazley, Greek Vases in Poland, 44 ff.), which shows that this
version is not a late borrowing from the Agaue story.
xxvi INTRODUCTION
Boutes, who chased the maenads of Phthiotis into the sea,
went mad, and drowned himself in a well (Diod. 5. 50).
Another group of stories tells of women who were maddened
by the god--the three daughters of Minyas at Orchomenos,
who killed and devoured the child Hippasos (Plut. Q. Gr.
38) ; the three daughters of Proetus, who induced the women
of Argos to kill their children and take to the mountains
([Apollod.] 2. 2. 2, from Hesiod, &c.) ; the daughters of
Eleuther at Eleutherae, whose madness was a punishment
for scorning a vision of the god (Suidas szv. MéAav).
These legends are evidently related to the Theban myth
of the madness of Cadmus’ three daughters and the death
of Pentheus at their hands. Many writers‘ find in them
simply a reflection of historical events—a tradition of suc-
cessive local conflicts between the fanatical adherents of
the new religion and the representatives of law and order,
the heads of the great families. That such conflicts occurred
is probable in itself ; that the infection of mountain-dancing
should lay sudden hold of unbelievers is psychologically
intelligible and has, as we have seen, its parallels in other
cultures; that the god should make his first converts among
the women is natural in view of the narrow and repressed
lives which Greek women commonly led. But while we need
not reject this view, it does not, I think, provide by itself
a complete explanation of the myths. (a) It does not suit
the Lycurgus story, which is located in the god’s Thracian
homeland. (b) It does not account for the odd fixity of
outline displayed by the other group: always it is the king’s
daughters who go mad; always there are three of them
(corresponding to the three 9ia.o'o:. of maenads which existed
at Thebes and elsewhere in historical times, cf. Ba. 680 n.) ;
regularly they murder their children, or the child of one of
them, as Lycurgus did his son, and as Procne murdered
Itys at the 1-piewjpis on Mount Rhodope (Ov. Met. 6. 587 ff.).
‘ e.g. Wilamowitz, Glaube d. Hell. 2. 66, Nilsson, Hist. of Greek
Religion, 206 ff. Against this view, see now Guthrie, The Greeks and
their Gods, 172 f., and Ieanmaire, Dionysos, 86 ff.
 INTRODUCTION xxvii

History no doubt repeats itself: but it is only ritual that

repeats itself exactly. (c) The Minyad story is connected
by Plutarch with a ritual pursuit of the ‘maenads’_by the
priest of Dionysus which was still performed at Orcho-
menos in his own day-a pursuit which could end (and
had on occasion ended) in a ritual murder. If we accept
Plutarch’s evidence, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that
the pursuit of the Argive maenads by the priest Melampus,
and that of the god’s ‘nurses’ by Lycurgus and Boutes,
reflect a similar ritual.‘
These considerations suggest that Pentheus may be a
figure compounded (like Guy Fawkes) of historical and
ritual elements—at once the god’s historical adversary and
his ritual victim. Euripides has given him a character that
suits the former role: he is the conservative Greek aristo-
crat, who despises the new religion as Bdpfiapov, hates it for
its obliteration of sex and class distinctions, and fears it as
a threat to social order and public morals. But there are
features in his story as the play presents it which look like
traditional elements derived from ritual, and are not easily
accounted for on any other hypothesis.‘ Such are Pentheus’
perch on the sacred fir-tree (1058-75 n.), his pelting with fir
and oak branches (1096-8 n.), and Agaue’s delusion that
she carries the-severed head of one of the god’s bestial
incarnations, a bull-calf or a lion, on which she invites the
Chorus to feast (1184-7 nn.). And if we accept these as
reflecting a primitive sacrificial ritual, we may reasonably
connect with the same ritual-—and therefore recognize as
in substance traditional-two major incidents of the story,
the enchanting or bedevilling of Pentheus and his dressing
‘ Lycurgus’ 50»-.-M155 (Il. 6. 135) looks like a ritual weapon. Does his
imprisonment in the cave also reflect ritual? Cf. Livy, 39. 13. 13, in
Italian Dionysiac cult ‘raptos a diis homines dici, quos machinae illi-
gatos ex conspectu in abditos specus abripiant’: I am tempted to
connect this with the cave-dwelling god or 1Tp0¢‘|';1'17S of Rhes. 972 f. and
Strabo, 7. 3. 5. (So now Festugiere, Mélanges d’Arch. et d'Hist. 1954,
94 ff»)
1 Cf. A. G. Bather, ].H.S. xiv (1894), 244 ff., Farnell, Cults, v. 171 f.
xxviii INTRODUCTION
in ritual garb. If Pentheus is to be the god’s victim, he
must become the god’s vehicle (that is the Dionysiac theory
of sacrifice): Dionysus must enter into him and madden
him, not by drink or drugs or hypnotism, as modern rational-
ism too glibly suggests, but by a supernatural invasion of
the man’s personality (cf. introductory note to scene 3 c).
Also, before the victim is torn, it must be consecrated by
a rite of investiture: as the calf on Tenedos wore the god’s
buskin, so Pentheus must wear the god’s pirpa (831-3 n.,
854-5 n.). We may say with some confidence that neither
the bedevilling scene nor the ‘toilet’ scene is, in its main
content, the poet’s (or any poet’s) invention as has been
alleged, although from these traditional elements he has
created something which is unique in its strangeness and
compelling power. The same seems to be true of much of the
content of the first messenger-speech (see Commentary).

ii. Evidence from Earlier Dionysiac Plays

The 1rd9'r] of Dionysus, the patron god of drama, may well
be the oldest of all dramatic subjects. For us the Bacchae
is a unique specimen of a Dionysiac passion-play ; but for
its first audience it was a rehandling of a theme already
familiar to generations of Athenian play-goers. The
ascription of a 116.066; to Thespis is probably a_fiction;
but in addition to the two Dionysiac tetralogies of Aeschylus
we hear of a Lycurgus-tetralogy by Polyphrasmon, exhibited
467; a .BCi.KXCI.t. by Xenocles, one of a set of plays which
gained the first prize in 415 ; a Bdxxar. 1') Harare, by Sophocles’
son Iophon; a Z.’cp.é)l~/7 Kepavvovuévq by Spintharos (late fifth
century); a Bcixxcu. by Cleophon (period uncertain). No
Dionysiac tragedies are attributed to Sophocles, unless his
'Y3poqb6pot. dealt, like the Zeuéhrj ij 'Y3poq5dpot Oi Aeschylus,
with the birth of Dionysus (whom we know to have been
mentioned in the play, fr. 674). The Atévvoos of Chaeremon
(in which Pentheus seems to have figured), the Eqlél-q of
Carcinus, and the Zeuékq of Diogenes probably belong to
 INTRODUCTION xxix

the fourth century; a longish extant passage from the last-

named testifies to the continued interest of Athenian
audiences in exotic orgiastic cults.
Of none of these do we know much beyond the title—-—the
great popularity of the Bacchae‘ in later antiquity doubtless
killed them. And even of Aeschylus’: Dionysiac plays our
knowledge is lamentably small-.1 His Lycurgeia consisted
Of the ’H3wvoi, Baoocipat (or Baooapides), Neavioxot, and
the satyr-play Avmfipyos (schol. Ar. Thesm. 134). As to the
plays which made up his (presumed) Theban tetralogy
there is much dispute. The Medicean catalogue offers us
Bcixxat, Ecivrptai, Hcvdedg, Ecpéhrj ij ’Y5poq.‘>o‘po:., Tpoqboi
(= Atovooov Tpoqfioi, hyp. Eur. Med.). This is one too many:
the likeliest guess is perhaps that the Bcixxat. is an alterna-
tive title for the Ba.ooc£pa.t.1 The Z'ep.é'l\17 must have been the
first play: it dealt with Semele’s mysterious pregnancy and
the beginning of the Dionysiac possession at Thebes (schol.
Ap. Rh. 1. 636), and presumably ended with her death and
the supposed death of her child ;“ the Chorus are women
who have brought water for the ceremonial washing of the
‘ It was well known as a schoolbook (Call. epigr. 48 Wilam. = Anth.
Pal. 6. 310); popular recitations were given from it (Lucian, Ind. 19);
it was widely quoted and excerpted in the Roman period, as may be
seen from the ‘testimonia’ cited in Kirchhoff’s apparatus, and was
imitated by Nonnus at a time when almost all memory of Greek
tragedy was fading.
1 To the fragments in Nauck’s T.G.F. must be added P. Oxy. 2164,
now conveniently accessible in Mr. Lloyd-_lones’s appendix to the
Loeb Aeschylus, and a few scraps collected by Mette in his Frag-
mente der Tragfidien des Aischylos (Berlin, I9 59). Discussion: Welcker,
Aisch. Trilogie, 320 ff., Hermann, Opusc. v. 3 ff., Bruhn, Introd. to Ba.,
Zielinski, Tragodoumena, 67 ff., Murray, Aeschylus, 153 ff., Deichgraber,
Gott. Nachr. 1939, no. 8, Latte, Philol. xcvii (1948), 47 ff.
1 Or for the Hevflcfis (as the Bolxxal. of Eur. and Iophon bore the
alternative title zraearg). In that case the Alexandrine scholar who
made the catalogue has blundered surprisingly. On the view suggested
in the text, the blunder may be that of a copyist, who wrote Bdxxcu.
Baaacipcu. 1“/\a.6:cos Hdvrtog instead Of Bcixxar. ij Baaacipcu. F/\a.i3ocog
Howard; Fllafixos II¢iv-nos.
4 Cf. fr. 221 Zea»; 6; KGTéKTfl -rofi-rov (i.e. Dionysus, cf. Ba. 244 f.?).
xxx INTRODUCTION
new-born infant.‘ Hera may have intervened to tempt
Semele to her destruction (cf. Ba. 9), as she does in some
later versions of the story. The Oxyrhynchus fragments,
however, in which Hera figures, belong, if Asclepiadesz can
be trusted, not to this play but to the Xantriae. In the main
fragment a chorus-presumably the ‘wool-carding women’
of the title-—defend Semele’s reputation against jealousy
and slander concerning her union with Zeus (cf. Ba. 26 ff.).1
To them enter Hera disguised as a begging priestess: her
purpose is doubtless to stir up opposition against Semele’s
son (cf. Ba. 98, 294) ; I take her to be the person referred to
elsewhere -in the play as 'rc‘:3v3e Boiiltevrts rrdvouv (fr. 172). (It
is interesting that Euripides discards this supernatural
intervention, making the opposition purely human and
basing it on very human motives.) Dionysus’ reply to
Hera’s plot is to send Lyssa to madden the unbelievers (fr.
169). (Observe, again, that whereas Aeschylus brought
Lyssa in person on the stage, Euripides is content with a

‘ Others say, to put out the fire started by the lightning. But this
unforeseen event seems to have occurred at or near the end of the play,
and the entry of the Chorus could hardly be so long deferred. Descrip-
tive titles elsewhere describe the initial situation, e.g. Choephoroe,
Ichneutae, Plyntriae, Hippolytus Stephanias.
1 Apud schol. Ar. Frogs 1344. Latte has argued forcibly that we
should throw Asclepiades’ testimony overboard and assign the frag-
ments to the Semele, thus giving Hera the function which she has in
some later versions of the story. His argument rests, however, on two
assumptions: that the Xantriae dealt with the death of Pentheus, and
that in the fragments Semele is implied to be still alive. Neither
assumption seems to me secure. As to Pentheus’ death see p. xxxi
n. 1. Semele’s life hangs on a supplement to an incomplete sentence,
[Z’]e,u.e‘)\a5 5’ e[1i]x6,uc6’ civae Sui 4-at €‘I.l6'l.l’l'l'OpOII )\a[, which Latte com-
pletes with )kci[xo$ aiofig, Lloyd-Jones With lkd[xos cilkflov. But other
supplements are possible, e.g. Au-rpetav (for the rhythm cf. Agam. 204):
the sentence would then refer to the continuing cult at Semele’s grave
(cf. note on Ba. 6-12).
1 They are therefore not the women who were punished with madness
for their lack of faith. Hence Elmsley’s view that Edvrptat = ‘The
Dismemberers’ (of Pentheus) seems to be mistaken (it is also open to
objection on the ground stated in n. 1 above).
 INTRODUCTION xxxi

passing allusion (977) ; he had used her in the Heracles, but

here there is no room for such a purely symbolic figure.)
In the E:(i.vTpt.G.I. I suspect that Dionysus did not appear in
person but worked through his agent Lyssa; the god him-
self was reserved for the third piece. The Edv-rpiai may
have ended where Euripides’ Bacchae begins, with the
retreat of the Theban women to Cithaeron, which we know
was mentioned in it,‘ and Pentheus’ threat to pursue them.
The third piece, the Hevfiefig, will then have covered the
same ground as Euripides’ play, which agrees with the state-
ment of Aristophanes of Byzantium in the 15w66em.s to the
latter.‘ Enragingly, only one line of it survives, fr. 183
p.178’ ai.‘y.a'ro5' 11'e‘)u.<,f>¢.'ya rrpd$‘_1re"5qo Bd¢\'gs‘—E|.n iI1j11I1Cti0n which
recalls Ba. 837 and was perhaps uttered in similar circum-
stances. Of the Aiovfioov Tpoqbot we know only that it dealt
with, or mentioned, the rejuvenation of the Tpoqlmi and their
husbands by Medea (fr. 50). This reward of the faithful
would suit a satyr-play, having obvious humorous possi-
bilities.
The fragments of Aeschylus’ Lycurgeia offer some inter-
esting parallels to the Bacchae. (a) In the ’H8wvot, as in our
play, Dionysus was taken prisoner‘ (schol. Ar. Thesm. 135),
questioned about his birthplace, evidently in ignorance of
his identity (fr. 61, cf. Ba. 460 ff.), and taunted with his
effeminate appearance and costume (fr. 61 and probably
59, 60, 62, cf. Ba. 453-9 n., 831-3 n.). It looks as if the first
scene between Pentheus and Dionysus in the Bacchae

I SChOl. Eum. 26 vfiv qb-qocv e’v Hapvaaqb elvat. 1-ti. xa-rd. Hcvdda, Ev 3e rais
Eav-rpiats év Ktfimpofivt. It is usually inferred from this that the death of
Pentheus occurred in the .E.'dv-.-pun, which was therefore the third play
of the trilogy. But if so, (a) what was the second play about? (b) why
does Aristophanes say that Aesch. treated the subject-matter of Eur.’s
Bacchae év Hevfiet‘? Cithaeron may well have figured both in the
Edvrptat and in the Hcvfietis, and Pentheus’ death may have been pre-
dicted in the former play.
1 Haste; here has sometimes been taken for the name of the whole
trilogy. But A1. parallels the Phoenissae with the Septem, not with the
Oedipodea.
xxxii INTRODUCTION
followed the older poet’s model pretty closely. (b) Some-
where in the tetralogy there was an epiphany of the god
in his true nature, whose effect on Lycurgus’ palace was
described in the line eivdovowd 81) 363p.a- Barcxezier. ore‘)/17
(fr. 58). We may probably infer that in the ‘palace miracles’
of the Bacchae Euripides was following tradition, although
the words preserved need not imply an actual earthquake.
Cf. Naevius, Luc. frs. 20, 23, quoted below, p. xxxiii, n. 1.
(c) From two fragments of the Baoodpat we may infer that
Aeschylus—like Euripides-spoke of the god’s dangerous
bull-shape (fr. 23, cf. Ba. 618, 920, 1017) and represented
him (if 6.0-.-pa.m’7‘g is sound) as Master of the Lightning
(Mette, Suppl. Aesch. fr. 31 = fr. 12 Weir-Smyth [Loeb]
dorparrfis rrevxdev oélas on Mount Pangaeum, cf. Ba. 594-
5 n., 1082-3 n.). '
Three further" conjectures may be added. (i) Some
character in Aeschylus (?Lycurgus or Pentheus) applied
the abusive term X(1.Al.,lLt:fl.L or X0./\tpé3eg to the bacchanal
women (fr. 448), which suggests that the allegations of
immorality put by Euripides into Pentheus’ mouth are
traditional charges. (ii) The imprisonment and miraculous
escape of the bacchanals, briefly described in our play
(443—8), figures in ‘Apollodorus’ ’ summary of the Lycurgus
story (Bibl. 3. 5'. I Bcircxar. 3% eiyévovro aixpdhwrot . . . arldts: 8d
0.2 Bdtcxar. é)uJ61;aa.v éfiatpvrjs.-), and perhaps appeared also
in the Lucurgus of Naevius (fr. 6, cf. Ribbeck, Romische
Tragodie, 59 f.). ‘Apollodorus’ is not following Euripides,
for he makes Lycurgus jail the satyrs too. We must
suppose that he and Euripides (and Naevius?) are drawing
here on a common source, in all likelihood the Lycurgeia
of Aeschylus.‘ (iii) Naevius reproduces also the interroga-
tion of the captive god (frs. 11-14) and the description of his
effeminate dress,‘ which certainly go back to Aeschylus;
‘ Cf. Zielinski, Tragodoumena, 66.
1 Naevius, fr. incerti nominis 4 ‘diabathra in pedibus habebat, erat
amictus epicroco’. It seems fairly certain that Dionysus is the person
described.
 INTRODUCTION xxxiii
and the burning of the palace,‘ which probably does. Hence
it may well be from the same source that he and Euripides
derived the comparison of the maenads to birds and the
account of their raid on the valley farms (frs. 7 and 3, quoted
on Ba. 748-50). The impression left by the Lucurgus frag-
ments as a whole is that Naevius did not borrow from the
Bacchae, but used an original very similar to it both in
general colouring and in the pattern of its plot. And the
probabilities are that this original was the ’H8<ov0t of
Aeschylus.‘
Of the Roman tragedies on the Pentheus story, the
Pentheus of Pacuvius was based on Euripides, if we are to
believe Servius on Aen. 4. 469; but some other source was
apparently used as well, for Pentheus’ prisoner was called
Acoetes, as he is in Ovid. Met. 3. 574 ff. (where the nar-
rative diverges widely from Euripides in other respects).
The Bacchae of Accius appears from the fragments to have
been a fairly close adaptation of Euripides’ play.

iii. Evidence from Vase Paintingsi‘

The death of Pentheus was, like other Dionysiac subjects,
a great favourite with the vase painters; and from their
treatment of it attempts have been made to draw inferences
as to Aeschylus’ handling of it and the innovations attribut-
able to him or to Euripides.
1. The earliest extant representation of the scene ap-
pears on a psykter in Boston (and Freiburg), painted about
520 B.C. in the manner of Euphronios (Arch. jhb. vii (1892),
pl. 5, Philippart, pl. 12, No. 150, Beazley, A.R.V. p. 19. 5).
The largest fragment shows Pentheus (identified by name)
‘ fr. 20 ‘ut uideam Volcani opera haec fiammis flora fieri’; fr. 23 ‘late
longeque transtros feruere’.
1 Cf. Deichgraber, loc. cit., pp. 260 ff.
1 Most fully collected and illustrated by H. Philippart, ‘Iconogra-
phie des Bacchantes d’Eur.’, Rev. belge de phil. et d’hist. ix (1930). Cf.
also Sandys‘, Introd., pp. cvii ff., and L. Curtius, Pentheus (Berliner
Winckelmannsprogramm 88, 1929).
4003 .9 C -
xxxiv INTRODUCTION
being torn by two maenads, one of whom is named Galene ;‘
the name of the other is missing. It has been inferred that
in the oldest form of the myth the killers were not Agaue
and her sisters but the followers of Dionysus; and that
either Aeschylus or Euripides was the first to make Agaue
the murderess.‘ This is not impossible, but the parallel
myths of the Minyads and Proetids seem to me to tell
against it ; and the Villa Giulia cup (infra) is against making
Euripides the innovator.
2. Other pre-Euripidean vases present nothing that con-
flicts with Euripides’ account. That the ghastly play with
the mangled limbs (Ba. 1133 ff.) is an invention neither of
Euripides nor of Aeschylus appears from two early works:
the Louvre cup G 69 (Arch. ]hb., l.c,, p. 162, Philippart,
pl. 13 a, No. 151), which belongs to the last decade of the
sixth century;1 and the stamnos by the Berlin painter in
Oxford (Beazley, A.R.V. 138. 112, ].H.S. xxxi (1911), 282,
pl. 17), painted in the first decade of the fifth. The triumph-
dance led by a maenad who carries Pentheus’ head is shown
on fragments of a cup in the Villa Giulia at Rome (C .V.A.
Villa Giulia, fasc. 2, III. i. c, pl. 37) painted early in the
last quarter of the fifth century B.C. Here the leading figure
stands out from the others, and it is a reasonable guess to
call her Agaue, though we cannot be absolutely certain.
3. About contemporary (at earliest) with Euripides’ play
is the Heidelberg pyxis (Curtius, Abb. 2-6, Philippart,
No. 132, pl. VII b), which shows Pentheus setting out from
his palace with net and hunting-spears, presumably to hunt
the maenads (cf. the figurative hunting of the fawn, Ba.
868 ff.). Neither here nor elsewhere in Greek art is there
1 A figure so named appears also in a Dionysiac 064009 on a red-fig.
bell-krater, c. 430 B.C. (Reinach, Repertoire des Vases, ii. 6. 3, C. Frankel,
.S'atyr- u. Bakchennamen auf Vasenbildern, No. 17). Elsewhere Galene is
a Nereid or a local nymph.
1 Aesch., P. Girard, R.E.G. xvii (I904), 190; Eur., Hartwig, Arch.
_]hb. vii (1892), 157 ff., Wilamowitz, Ba. zlbersetzt, Einleitung 34.
1 The dates assigned by Curtius (‘c. 470’) and Philippart (‘early fifth
century’) are mistaken.
 INTRODUCTION xxxv

any indication that Pentheus is disguised. This may be

due merely to the difficulty of making a disguised Pentheus
easily recognizable (Huddilston, Greek Tragedy in the Light
of Vase-paintings, 16). And it is in any case rash to conclude,
as some do, that Euripides. invented the disguising (cf.
supra, p. xxviii): more than one version of Pentheus’ end
may well have been current before he wrote.
4. An Italiote kalpis (Miinchen 3267, Sandys, No. 1,
Curtius, Abb. 14, Philippart, No. 137, pl. VII a), roughly con-
temporary with the first performance of the Bacchae, shows
an armed Pentheus discovered in hiding between two trees;
and a series of other vases of similar date and origin‘ show
him in armed conflict with the maenads. This conception
has been thought to go back to Aeschylus,‘ on the strength
Q

Of 25 f. Bdxxatg e’o"rpa.'r1j'y'qo'ev Beds, I ha}/cl: dixnv .lTev9e|.

navappdpas {J-dpov, which is understood as implying that
Dionysus led his women into pitched battle with Pentheus
and routed him (cf. Ba. 52, 798 f., which might carry a
reference to this version). The combination would be more
convincing if Aeschylus’ words were more explicit and the
art tradition were traceable to a date nearer to Aeschylus’
time.
Speculations of this type are necessarily hazardous. What
does, however, emerge from a study of fifth-century paint-
ings of Dionysiac subjects is that some at least of the
painters had seen women in religious ecstasy (possibly at
the Lenaea).1 And what they could see Euripides might
see also, without going to Macedonia for the purpose. But
the painters’ conception of a maenad changed as the fifth
century advanced. Those by the great artists of the age
of the Persian wars‘ breathe the fiercest fire. In the last
I Philippart, Nos. 133, 134, 138, 139 =- Sandys, Nos. 2, 6, 3, 4.
1 G. Haupt, Commentationes archaeol. in Aesch. (Diss. phi]. Hal.,
1897), I14 ff., Bruhn, Einl. 25 f.; contra, Séchan, Etudes sur la Tragédie
grecque dans ses rapports avec la Céramique, 102 ff., 308 ff.
1 See above, p. xxii.
4 e.g. the amphora by the Kleophrades painter, Pfuhl, figs. 379-80
(Beazley, A.R.V. 121. 5); white-ground cup by the Brygos painter
xxxvi INTRODUCTION
quarter of the fifth century noble maenads were still
created, e.g. in the reliefs reflected by a Greek bronze
krater‘ and by neo-Attic marble copies,‘ or on the Lenaea-
stamnos in Naples.‘ These do not lack o'ep.vd1"qS‘, but the
animality and savage ecstasy of the older period is toned
down-—the dxdllwov and Bdpos have given way to an ideal
of tamed melodious beauty. It is the older pictures which
best illustrate the spirit of Euripides’ poem.

iv. Formal Elements

We have thus far considered only the content of the
Bacchae. When we examine the form, we are at once struck
by the archaic aspect which this very late play presents.
In this it is not unique: a certain archaizing tendency shows
itself here and there in all Euripides’ later work.‘ But the
Bacchae carries archaism further than any other of his
plays; Murray even calls it ‘the most formal Greek play
known to us’.5 i
In a measure this is dictated by the plot. Here for once
Euripides had a Chorus whose presence needed no apology
and whose personal fortunes were intimately bound up
with the action: they can thus avva-ywvtficafiat in the manner
approved by Aristotle (Poet. 1456=25), and to an extent
which is unusual both in Euripides and in the surviving
plays of Sophocles. Hence there was no need to curtail
their part or to replace any of their songs by actor's solos
Furtwangler-Reichhold, pl. 49 (A.R.V. 247. 14); cup by Makron,
Pfuhl, fig. 438 (A.R.V. 304. 37). _
‘ W. Zuechner, Der Berliner Mdnadenkrater (Berliner Winckel-
mannsprogramm 98). _
1 Gisela Richter, A.].A. xl (1936), 11 ff.
1 Pfuhl fig. 582 (A .R.V. 789. 2).
4 Wilamowitz, Eur. Herakles, i1, p. 145, cf. H. Burkhardt, Die
Archaismen des Eur. (Diss. Erlangen, 1906), 95 ff., W. Kranz, Stasimon,
232. A striking example is Euripides’ revival of the original metre of
tragic dialogue, the trochaic tetrameter, which after a long interval of
neglect reappears in the Heracles and is used in most of his subsequent
plays. 5 Euripides and His Age, 184.
 INTRODUCTION xxxvii

(p.ovq.>8to.:.),.‘ Further, the presentation of a miracle play,

unless the producer commands the technical resources of
Drury Lane, imposes an extensive use of narrative. The
poet has put a. psychological miracle at the centre of his
stage action ;‘ but the physical miracles have to be reported.
And so" the Bacchae reverts to the oldest dramatic model:
not only are there two formal messenger-speeches, each
over 100 lines‘ long, but we have in addition the soldier's
narrative (434-50) and that of the Stranger (616-3'7); all
four describe miraculous events which could not be shown
on the stage.
But it is significant that in diction and st’yle also the play
reverts to an older manner. A recent continental investi-
gator finds more archaic forms in the Bacchae than in any
other play of Euripides, and fewer colloquial or prose forms
than in anything he had written since the Troades.1 There
is, it is true, an unusually high proportion of ‘new’ words,
i.e. words not found in any earlier writer.‘ But few of these
seem to be taken from contemporary speech: some of them
belong to the language of Dionysiac religion, like 61.0003-r-qs
or Ra-ra,8aRX:.o6a9a|.: others are refinements of poetic dic-
tion, like XpU0’0pdT)S 01' omapdxo/.Los. There is a considerable
Aeschylean element in the vocabulary,‘ and some uncon-
scious echoes of Aeschylean phrases have been noticed‘
(probably we should find more if Aeschylus’ Dionysiac
plays were extant). The grave semi-liturgical style which
1 It seems likely that the long solo, overdone in plays like the Orestes
and no longer a novelty, had begun to bore audiences (cf. Ar. Ran. 849,
1329 ff.) ; for the contemporary Oedipus Coloneus shows a. similar rever-
sion to the older practice as compared with the Philoctetes.
1 See note on Scene 3 (c), p. 172.
1 ]. Smereka, Studio Euripidea (Lwow, 1936), 117.
4 Ibid. 241.
5 Cf. Burkhardt, op. cit., 62 ff.
'1 O. Krausse, de Euripide Aeschyli instauratore (diss. jena, 1905),
158-62. See esp. 850-3 n. and 1101-2 n. It is unsafe to attach much
significance to stock tags like 764 otix dvev Bedbv -rwos = Pers. 163, or
753 miv-r’ d'vco -re Kai. mi-rw = Eum. 650, or to proverbial phrases like
795 rrpds Kdvrpa ¢\a1c'ri§o:.;.u. (Cf. Ag. I624).
xxxviii INTRODUCTION
predominates in the choral odes often recalls Aeschylus;
there is little of the baroque preciosity and preoccupation
with the decorative which characterizes most of Euripides’
later lyrics. In keeping with this tone is the choice of
rhythms associated with actual hymns of worship (Com-
mentary, p. I83), and especially the extensive use of ionics
(p. 72). So too is the’ introduction of refrains (876 ff.,
991 ff.), which belong to the tradition of the cult hymn:
it is noteworthy that Aeschylus uses them freely, Sophocles
not at all, Euripides elsewhere only in Ion’s hymn to Apollo
and Electra’s water-carrying song. The iambic trimeters
give away the date of the play by the high proportion of
resolved feet (one to every 2-3 trimeters, a frequency ex-
ceeded only in the Orestes); but the dialogue has never-
theless a certain archaic stiffness as compared, e.g., with the
contemporary Iphigeneia at Aulis. One mark of this is the
rarity in the spoken passages of civa-|.AaB1§ (division of a line
between two speakers). In other late plays this is a favourite‘
device for conveying the swift cut-and-thrust of excited
discussion, especially in the trochaic scenes; in the Bacchae
iambic lines are divided in two places only (189, 966-70),
trochaics never.
This severity of form seems to be deliberate: it goes
beyond what the conditions of the theatre enforced. And
in fact the play’s tremendous power arises in part from the
tension between the classical formality of its style and
structure and the strange religious experiences which it
depicts. As Coleridge said, the creative imagination shows
itself most intensely in ‘the balance or reconciliation of
opposite or discordant qualities’, and especially in combining
‘a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual
order’. Such a combination is achieved in the Bacchae.
1 52 spoken lines are so divided in the Orestes, 36 in the IA., 53 in
the OC.
 INTRODUCTION xxxix

III. THE PLACE OF THE BACCHAE IN

EURIPIDES' WORK
After the production of the Orestes in the spring of 408
Euripides left Athens, never to return: he had accepted
the invitation of Archelaus, the Hellenizing king of the
semi-barbarous Macedonians, who was anxious to make his
court a centre of Greek culture. The poet was over 70 and,
as we have some reason to think, a disappointed man. If
the prize-lists were any test, he had been relatively un-
successful as a dramatist; he had become the butt of the
comic poets; and in an Athens crazed by twenty years
of increasingly disastrous war his outspoken criticisms of
demagogy and of power-politics must have made him many
enemies. There may well be truth in the tradition preserved
in 3. fragment Of Pl'1i10d6II1l1S———q5a.o'iv cixficipevov afirdv e'1'ri.
‘TC?! crxefidv -rrziv-1-0.5‘ éraxafpeav rrpog Zlpxéhaov cirre/\66Fv.I In
Macedonia hecontinued to write, producing the Archelaus,
a play about his host’s eponymous ancestor, which may
have been acted in the new theatre built by Archelaus at
Dion. And when he died, in the winter of 407-406, three
further pieces were found among his papers, the Bacchae,
the Alcmaeon at Corinth (now lost), and the Iphelgeneia at
Aulis-—the last-named probably unfinished. These were
subsequently staged at Athens by the poet’s son (or
nephew), Euripides the younger,‘ and won the first prize.“
The presumption thus created that the Bacchae was com-
pleted, if not conceived, in Macedonia derives support from
the complimentary references to Pieria (4o9—rr n.) and to
the valley of the Ludias (568-7 5 n.)--both of them districts
1 De vitiis, col. 13. 4. It is not certain that the words refer to
Euripides, but it is highly probable. Cf. wit. Eur. 1. II5 Nauck -rrikéov -n.
cfipovrfaas eixdrws rrepufa-ra.-ro 'r'<.'6v 'rroAPlc13v, o133e;.ufav q6u\o-nplav rrepi. rd.
9e'a.'rpa. rronofipevos. . . . §1rre'rccw1'o 5% Kai. of xwpaxoi qbfidvqu alirciv Scaafipovres.
fi1rrep¢3cIJv 8% rrzivra sis Maxe3ov[av drrfipe.
1 Schol. Ar. Ran. 67 (from the 3c3aaKa)u'cu.); cf. wit. Eur., 1. 29.
3 Suidas, s.v. E6pmi’8'qs.
xl INTRODUCTION
which Euripides is likely to have visited, since Dion was
situated in the former and Aegae, the Macedonian capital,
in the latter. I do not, however, think it probable that the
play was designed primarily for a Macedonian audience:
the allusions to contemporary theories and controversies
at 201-3, 270-1, 274 ff., 890 ff., and elsewhere (see Com-
mentary) are surely meant for Athenian ears ;‘ and we have
seen that at this period the social problem of orgiastic
religion had at least as much topical interest at Athens as
in Macedonia.
Why did Euripides, tireless innovator and experimen-
ter as he had always been, leave as his final legacy to
his fellow—countrymen this topical yet deeply traditional
miracle-play, ‘old-fashioned’ in style and structure as in
the incidents it depicted, yet charged with disturbing emo-
tion? Had he some lesson which he wished to teach
them? Most of his would-be interpreters have thought
so, though they have failed to agree about the nature of
the lesson. Since the play exhibits the power of Dionysus
and the dreadful fate of those who resist him, the first
explanation which occurred to scholars was that the poet
had experienced (or thought it expedient to feign) a death-
bed conversion: the Bacchae was a ‘palinode’, a recanta—
tion of the ‘atheism’ of which Aristophanes had accused its
author (Thesm. 450 f.) ; it was written to defend Euripides
against the charge of impiety which was soon to overwhelm
his friend Socrates (Tyrwhitt, Schoene), or ‘to put him
right with the public on matters on which he had been
misunderstood’ (Sandys), or from a genuine conviction
‘that religion should not be exposed to the subtleties of
reasoning’ (K. O. Miiller) since ‘he had found no satis-
faction in his unbelief’ (Paley). Oddly enough, good
Christian editors seem to have been gratified by this notion
of their poet’s eleventh-hour conversion to pagan ortho-
doxy; and this or something like it remained the prevailing
' Cf. R. Nihard, Le Problémc des Bacchcmtes d’Euripide (Publications
du Musée Belge, No. 38, 1912), 33 ff., and 62, n.-"2.
 INTRODUCTION xli
opinion till far on in the nineteenth century. At this period
a generation arose which,. having a different set of pre-
judices, admired Euripides for quite other reasons, and
proceeded to make the Bacchae conform with its own views
by radically reinterpreting it. Pointing out (correctly) that
Cadmus and Teiresias are poor representatives of ortho-
doxy, and that Dionysus behaves with pitiless cruelty not
only to his opponents Pentheus and Agaue but to his
supporter Cadmus, they concluded that the real moral of
the play was ‘tantum religio potuit suadere malorum’. This
interpretation, the germ of which appears already in Patin,
was developed in the last decade of the century by Wila-
mowitz and Bruhn in Germany, Decharme and Weil in
France; and later (with fantastic elaborations peculiar to
themselves) by‘ Norwood and Verrall in England. The
devotional earnestness of the choral odes, to these critics
an offence and a stumbling-block, was variously explained
as a concession to a superstitious Macedonian audience
(Weil) or as a successful characterization of fanaticism
(Wilamowitz) .
The more thoughtful among recent critics‘ have recog-
nized the inadequacy both of the ‘palinode’ theory and of
its rival. Each thesis fits some of the facts, but mani-
festly does not fit others: i.e. both are too crude.
(a) Closer study of the poet’s work as a whole reveals no
such abrupt volte-face as the ‘palinode’ thesis postulated.‘
I Cf. Murray, ‘The Bacchae of Euripides in relation to certain Cur-
rents of Thought in the Fifth Century’, Essays and Addresses, 56 ff.,
Nihard, op. cit.,~ F. M. Wassermann, ‘Die Bakchantinnen des Eur.’,
N. jhb. f. W:'ss. u. jugendbildung, v (1929), 272 ff., W. B. Sedgwick,
C.R. xliv (I930), 6 ff., G. M. A. Grube, Trans. Amer. Phil. Ass. lxvi
(I935), 37 ff., and The Drama of Euripides, 398 ff., H. D. F. Kitto, Greek
Tragedy, 382 f. To these can now be added W. Schmid, Geschichte der
griech. Lit. I. iii, 683 ff., A. Lesky, Die griech. Tragddiel, 250 ff.,
F. Martinazzoli, Euripide, 387 ff., and E. M. Blaiklock, The Male
Characters of Euripides, 209 ff.
1 Hartung pointed this out a century ago : ‘hi si magis quid carmina
Euripidis docerent scrutari quam quid ipsi opinarentur effutire voluis-
sent, eandem sententiam iuvenem atque senem profiteri intellexissent'.
xlii INTRODUCTION
On the one hand, his interest in, and sympathetic under-
standing of, orgiastic religion does not date from his Mace-
donian period: it appears already in the chant of the
initiates in the Cretans (fr. 472), the ode on the mysteries
of the Mountain Mother in the Helem: (1301 ff.), and the
remains of an ode in the Hypsipyle (frs. 57, 58 Arnim = 31,
32 Hunt). The Helena was played in 412, the Hypsipyle
somewhat later; but the Cretarts seems to be early work.‘
The Choruses of the Bacchae are thus the last and fullest
utterance of feelings which had haunted‘ Euripides for
at least six years before his death, and probably for much
longer. So too the attacks on ‘cleverness’, and praise of
the instinctive wisdom of simple people, which have sur-
prised critics of the“ Bacchae, are in reality nothing new:
see notes on 399-401, 43o-3, 890-2, 910-I I. On the other hand,
the discrepancy between the moral standards implied in
the myths and those of civilized humanity, to which many
of Euripides’ characters call attention, is not ignored in
the Bacchae. The vengeance of Dionysus is as cruel and
undiscriminating as the vengeance of Aphrodite in the
Hippolytus. In each play one of the god’s humble wor-
shippers pleads against this unmorality, and pleads in vain
(Ba. 1348-9 n.). And each play ends with the sympathies
of the audience concentrated solely upon the god’s victims.
It is not thus that Euripides, or anyone else, would have
composed a palinodefi _

For further evidence see my paper ‘Euripides the Irrationalist’, C .R.

xliii (1929), 97 ff.
1 Wilamowitz, Berl. Kl. Texte, v. 2, p. 79, Zielinski, Tragodoumemz,
226.(no resolutions in the 40 surviving trimeters).
1 Significant in this connexion is his especial fondness for the meta-
phorical use of Bdxxfl, flaxxefictv, and related terms. I have counted over
20 examples, against 2 in Aeschylus and 1 in Sophocles.
3 One may add that the supposed ‘conversion’ to ‘orthodoxy’ must
have been followed by an immediate backsliding. For one of the
implications of the I A.-presumably the poet’s last work, since he seems
to have left it unfinished-is certainly ‘tantum religio . . .’ (cf. the
judgement of the Chorus—leader, 1403 -rd -rfis 6506 voaet).
 INTRODUCTION xliii
(b) But we must not leap to the conclusion that Euripides
regarded Aphrodite and Dionysus either as fiends or as
fictions. To such an interpretation of the Bacchae one fatal
obstacle is the characterization of Pentheus. If Dionysiac
worship is an immoral superstition and nothing more, it
follows that Pentheus is one of the martyrs of enlighten-
ment. But it is much easier to blacken Dionysus than to
whitewash Pentheus. Some rationalist critics have essayed
the latter task; but it takes a resolutely blinkered vision
to discover in him ‘the defender of conjugal faith’, ‘a con-
sistently lovable character’.‘ Euripides could conceivably
have represented him thus ; he could certainly have made him
a second Hippolytus, fanatical, but with a touching and
heroic fanaticism. He has not chosen to do so. Instead, he
has invested him with the traits of a typical tragedy-tyrant :1
absence of self-control (214, 343 ff., 620 f., 670 f.); willing-
ness to believe the worst on hearsay evidence (221 ff.), or
on none (255 ff.); brutality towards the helpless (231, 241,
511 ff., 796 f.); and a stupid reliance on physical force as
a means of settling spiritual problems (781-6 n.). In addi-
tion, he has given him the foolish racial pride of a Hermione
(483-4 n.), and the sexual curiosity of a Peeping Tom
(222-3 n., 957-60 n.).3 It is not thus that martyrs of enlighten-
ment are represented.‘ Nor do such martyrs at the moment
of death recant their faith as Pentheus does (1120 f.).
I Masqueray, Euripide et ses z'de'es, 147; Pohlenz, Die griech.
Tra_go'dz'e=, i. 455.
1 Cf. Murray’s translation, note on 215-62, M. Croiset, journal des
Savants, 1909, 250, and now especially H. Diller, Abh. Maine 1955,
Nr- 5. 458-63-
3 Pentheus’ ‘libidinosa spectandorum secretorum cupido’ was already
noticed by Hartung. It is this curiosity which delivers him into his
enemy's hands (see Commentary on the temptation scene). As Zielinski
has well said (N. ]hb., 1902, 646), primitive things rise against him not
only in Thebes but in his own breast.
4 Nihard, op. cit. 103 f., instructively contrasts the character of
Zopire in Voltaire’s Mahomet. (We must, of course, avoid the opposite
error of seeing in Pentheus a mere stage villain: if he were that, the
poet could not invite our pity for him as he plainly does in the later
xliv INTRODUCTION
What of the divine Stranger? He displays throughout
qualities antithetic to those of his human antagonist:
therein lies the peculiar effectiveness of the conflict scenes.
Pentheus is flurried, irascible, full of an unhealthy excite-
ment; the Stranger preserves from first to last an unruffled
smiling calm (ajavxla, 621-2 n.)—a calm which we find at
first touching, then vaguely disquieting, in the end inde-
scribably sinister (439 n., 1020-23 n.). Pentheus relies on
a parade of military force; the Stranger’s only weapon is
the invisible power which dwells within him. And to the
00<;5ia of the King, the ‘cleverness’ or ‘realism’ which would
measure everything by the vulgar yardstick of average
experience, he opposes another kind of 00<;l>la, the wisdom
which, being its-elf a part of the order of things, knows
that order and man’s place in it. In all these ways the
Stranger is characterized as a supernatural personage, in
contrast with his all-too-human adversary: vjovxla, o'ep.vci—
1-17s-, and wisdom are the qualities which above all others
the Greek artists of the classical age sought to embody
in the divine figures of their imagination. The Stranger
behaves 03¢.-. 81‘; 9665‘, as a Greek god should behave: he is
the counterpart of the serene and dignified being whom we
see on certain red-figure vases, or in sculptured works of
Attic inspiration.
But the Stranger is not simply an idealized being from
outside man’s world; he is Dionysus, the embodiment of
those tragic contradictions—joy and horror, insight and
madness, innocent gaiety and dark cruelty—which, as we
have seen, are implicit in all religion of the Dionysiac type.
From the standpoint, therefore, of human morality he is and
must be an ambiguous figure. Viewing_him from that stand-
point, Cadmus at the end of the play explicitly condemns
scenes. As lines 45-46_ show, he is a man of conventional conservative
piety, not a eontemptor deum like Virgil’s Mezentius, and he believes
himself to be acting in the interest of the State. But neither in Greek
tragedy nor in real life do good intentions save men from the con-
sequences of false judgement.)
 INTRODUCTION xlv
his heartlessness. But the condemnation is as futile as
is the similar condemnation of Aphrodite in the Hippo-
lytus. For, like Aphrodite, Dionysus is a ‘person’, or moral
agent, only by stage necessity. What Aphrodite really is,
the poet has told us plainly: <7'>oz.1'<§. 8’ dv’ aZ6ép’, Eon 8’ év
Qahacrolqa | xhfidwvz Ktiwpts, 'rra'.v-ra 5’ drc 'ra1.i'r175- é'q5v' I 17j5'
e'o'1-iv -F) arrelpovaa Kai. 32.50130’ Epov, I 0'5 '2-ra'.v1-es‘ e'o'p.€v oi xard
x66v’ é’-yyovot (Hipp. 447 ff.). To ask whether Euripides
‘believed in’ this Aphrodite is as meaningless as to ask
whether he ‘believed in’ sex. It is not otherwise with
Dionysus. As the ‘moral’ of the Hippolytus is that sex is
a thing about which you cannot afford to make mistakes,‘
so the ‘moral’ of the Bacchae is that we ignore at our peril
the demand of the human spirit for Dionysiac experience.
For those who do not close their minds against it such
experience can be a deep source of spiritual power and
ea}-Saqaovla. But those who repress the demand in themselves
or refuse its satisfaction to others transform it by their act
into a power of disintegration and destruction, a blind
natural force that sweeps away the innocent with the guilty.
When that has happened, it is too late to reason or to plead:
in man’s justice there is room for pity, but there is none in
the justice of Nature; to our ‘Ought’ its sufficient reply is
the simple ‘Must’; we have no choice but to accept that
reply and to endure as we may.
If this or something like it is the thought underlying the
play, it follows that the flat-footed question posed by
nineteenth-century critics—-was Euripides ‘for’ Dionysus
or ‘against’ him?—admits of no answer in those terms.
In himself, Dionysus is beyond good and evil; for us, as
Teiresias says (314-18), he is what we make of him. The
nineteenth-century question rested in fact on the assump-
tion, common to the rationalist school and their opponents,‘
I R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, 210.
1 As Grube expresses it (Drama of Eur. 399), ‘both schools are guilty
of the same fundamental error: they put the poet himself in front of his
play instead of behind it’. Cf. Zielinski, N. _/hb., 1902, 649, ‘War er
xlvi INTRODUCTION
and still too often made, that Euripides was, like some of his
critics, more interested in propaganda than in the drama-
tist's proper business. This assumption I believe to be false.
What is true is that in many of his plays he sought to inject
new life into traditional myths by filling them with a new
contemporary content—recognizing in the heroes of old
stories the counterparts of fifth-century types, and restating
mythical situations in terms of fifth-century conflicts. As
we have seen, something of the kind may have been
intended in the Bacchae. But in his best plays Euripides
used these conflicts not to make propaganda but as a
dramatist should,‘ to make tragedy out of their tension.
There was never a writer who more conspicuously lacked
the propagandist’s faith in easy and complete solutions.
His favourite method is to take a one-sided point of view,
a noble half-truth, to exhibit its nobility, and then to
exhibit the disaster to which it leads its blind adherents-—
because it is after all only part of the truth.’ It is thus that
he shows us in the Hippolyt-us the beauty and the narrow
insufficiency of the ascetic ideal, in the Heracles the
splendour of bodily strength and courage and its toppling
over into megalomania and ruin; it is thus that in his
revenge plays-—Medea, Hecuba, Electra—the spectator’s
sympathy is first enlisted for the avenger and then made to
extend to the avenger‘s victims. The Bacchae is constructed
on the same principle: the poet has neither belittled the
Pentheus, war er Dionysus, Teiresias? Alles das, und noch vieles dazu’.
Blaiklock quotes the judgement of Andre Gide (journal, 21 August
1940): ‘Euripides takes sides no more than does Ibsen, it seems to me.
He is content to illuminate and develop the conflict between natural
forces and the soul that claims to escape their domination.’
‘ Cf. Virginia Woolf on the Antigone: ‘When the curtain falls we
sympathise even with Creon himself. This result, to the propagandist
undesirable . . . suggests that if we use art to propagate political
opinions, we must force the artist to clip and‘ cabin his gift to do us a
cheap and passing service. Literature will suffer the same mutilation
that the mule has suffered; and there will be no more horses’ (Three
Guineas, 302).
1 Cf. Murray, Euripides and His Age, 187.
 INTRODUCTION xlvii
joyful release of vitality which Dionysiac experience brings
nor softened the animal horror of ‘black’ maenadism ;
deliberately he leads his audience through the whole gamut
of emotions, from sympathy with the persecuted god,
through the excitement of the palace miracles and the
gruesome tragi-comedy of the toilet scene, to share in the
end the revulsion of Cadmus against that inhuman justice.
It is a mistake to ask what he is trying to ‘prove’ : his con-
cern in this as in all his major plays is not to prove anything
but to enlarge our sen.sibility--which is, as Dr. Johnson
said, the proper concern of a poet.
What makes the Bacchae different from the rest of
Euripides‘ work is not anything new in its technique‘ or in
its author's intellectual attitude. It is rather what James
Adam felt when he said that the play expressed ‘an added
dimension of emotion’, and that it was ‘pervaded by
the kind of joyous exaltation which accompanies a new
discovery or illumination’.‘ It is as if the renewed contact
with nature in the wild country of Macedonia, and his re-
imagining there of the old miracle story, had released some
spring in the aged poet’s mind, re-establishing a contact
with hidden sources of power which he had lost in the self-
conscious, over-intellectualized environment of late-fifth-
century Athens, and enabling him to find an outlet for
feelings which for years had been pressing on his conscious-
ness without attaining to completeexpression. We may
guess that Euripides said to himself in Macedonia very

1 The Religious Teachers of Greece, 316 f. Cf. Andre Rivier, Essai sur
le tragique d'Euripide, 96: ‘La revelation d’un au dela libere de nos
categories morales et de notre raison, tel est le fait religieux fonda-
mental sur quoi repose la tragedie des Baccharttes.’ The depth and sin-
cerity of the religious feelings expressed in the choral odes has recently
been emphasized by Festugiere, Eranos, lv (1957), 127 ff. This seems to
me right, so long as we are talking of feelings and not of convictions.
But it remains perfectly possible that, as jaeger puts it, ‘Euripides
learnt how to praise the joy of humble faith in one of the religious
truths which pass all understanding, simply because he himself had no
such happy faith’ (Paideia, i. 352, Eng. trans.).
xlviii INTRODUCTION
much what Rilke said to himself at the beginning of his
last period:
‘Werk des Gesichts ist gethan:
tue nun Herzwerk
an den Bildern in dir, jenen gefangenen. Denn du
iiberwaltigtest sie ; aber nun kennst du sie nicht.’
The ‘added dimension of emotion’ proceeds from no in-
tellectual conversion, but from the work of the heart—from
vision directed inward upon images long imprisoned in the
mind.
Note. In the above discussion I have not dealt, save by
implication, with the ingenious fancies of Verrall and (in his
youth) Norwood,‘ which had a vogue in this country‘ fifty
years ago but lie outside the main current of thought about
the play. So far as scholars are concerned, it might be sulfi-
cient to say that time has dealt with them ;3 but since Verrall
at least is still, I believe, read in English schools, it may be
useful to state briefly here some of the grounds which make
it impossible to accept their two main theses,‘ viz. that the
miracles in which the play abounds are meant to be under-
stood by the audience as bogus miracles, and that Pentheus’
I Gilbert Norwood, The Riddle of the Bacchae (1908); A. W. Verrall
The Bacchants qf Euripides and Other Essays (1910). Verrall had already
interpreted other plays of Euripides on similar lines.
1 It is interesting that no continental scholar of standing has ever
(so far as I know) taken Verrall’s interpretation of Euripides really
seriously.
3 Since this was written, the late Professor Norwood has dealt with
them himself, in a characteristically honest and forthright manner. In
his Essays on Euripidean Drama (1954) he recanted both the theses
I have criticized, and gave his reasons. He still held that the destruc-
tion of the palace can only be an illusion in the mind of the Chorus,
but he had come to believe that the illusion, and also the many
physical miracles reported in the play, are to be accepted as divinely
occasioned, and that the Stranger is none other than the god.
4 Some of their interpretations of individual passages are considered
in the Commentary. Most of them I am unable to accept, but it is only
fair to say that both writers have helped me in places to a better under-
standing.
 INTRODUCTION xlix
prisoner is not the god Dionysus but a human priest or
adept.
(a) These contentions ignore the conditions of the Greek
theatre‘ (and of all theatres), under which an audience must
inevitably accept stage personages and stage happenings
as being—for the purposes of the play—-what they profess
to be, unless someone on the stage knows better and says
so. Nothing would have been easier than to have Pentheus
expose the false miracles—denying the reality of the earth-
quake,‘ impugning the good sense or the good faith of
the Herdsman—had the poet so chosen. But the King,
so quick to scent licence and venality, is allowed on these
points no single word of doubt. Again, the prologue, whose
speaker is at pains to make it clear to the meanest intelli-
gence that he is a god preparing to masquerade as a man,
becomes either on Norwood’s early view or on Verrall’s a
gratuitous mystification. According to the former, he is in
fact a man masquerading as a god masquerading as a man.
Verrall, perceiving that this monstrous formula was too
complicated for any audience to grasp (even were it ex-
plained to them, as it is not), and that Dionysus prologizes
in virtue of the same convention as other gods in other
plays, admitted the Dionysus of prologue and epilogue as
a ‘theatrical deity’, distinct from the ‘adept’ who represents
him in the body of the play. But how should the cleverest
audience distinguish the man on the stage, who continually
hints that he is a god, and is seen by them to exercise divine
power, from the god-made-flesh who has been promised
them? That promise is on Verrall’s theory a plain lie,
whose only discernible effect is to befog the spectator. Was
Euripides really such a bungler?
I Verrall was in fact driven to maintain that Euripides’ plays were,
like the poetic dramas of his own time, written with an eye to the study
rather than the theatre: ‘to the ultimate purpose the stage-exhibition
at the Dionysia was indifferent’ (Introduction to the Ion, p. xlv). Yet
Aristotle a century later still thought exclusively in terms of the stage-
exhibition. _
1 On the supposed difiiculties of the earthquake scene see pp. 147 ff.
4002.0 d
l INTRODUCTION
(b) The supposition that Euripides thought it worth while
to write a play about the sham miracles of a sham god,
having already represented similar sham miracles in a whole
series of other plays, is intelligible only if we assume that
fifth-century Athens shared the burning interest in the
historicity of mythical miracles characteristic of late-
Victorian England. Such an assumption is highly improb-
able: myths were myths, not scripture, and no man was
required to profess belief in them--e.g. the devout Pindar
could write fimip 1-dv dhadij Plciyov | 3e5o.:.5o.r\p.e‘vo|. l,be1.i5eo':.
rroucihotg e’Ea-naréjvn jafifiot.‘ Verrall’s theories are in fact
a classic instance of that insularity in time which, blinding
men to the uniqueness both of their own and of past ages,
drives them to impose upon the past the fleeting image
of their own preoccupations.
(e) The final condemnation of these bleak ingenuities is,
for me at least, that they transform one of the greatest of
all tragedies into a species of esoteric and donnish witticism
(a witticism so ill contrived that it was twenty-three
centuries before anyone saw the point)? Did Earth, for
example, acknowledge her Master by yielding at the touch
of his holy wand ‘milk and wine and nectar of the bee‘
(704 ff.)? Doubtless, replied Norwood; but the clever
spectator will realize that they came there in the picnic
basket and were ‘planted’, as the police say, to give the
messenger a little surprise.’ The oixeia 1j80v1j of tragedy
can be enjoyed in more forms than Aristotle knew; but (as
Grube observes) it cannot be enjoyed by those who are
continuously occupied in sniggering up their sleeve.
I Ol. 1. 29. Cf. ]. Burnet, ‘The Religious and Moral Ideas of Euri-
pides’, reprinted in his Essays and Addresses, 46 ff.
2 Verrall claimed (Euripides the Ratiemalist, I06, 212) that his general
view of Euripidean gods was anticipated by Aristophanes (Thesm.
450 f.) and by Lucian (Iup. Tr. 41). But the claim rests on a wilful
mistranslation of the former passage and a wilful misunderstanding of
the latter.
3 Op. cit. 73, n. 1.
 INTRODUCTION li

IV. SOURCES OF THE TEXT

i. The Transmission‘
We possess two distinct groups of plays by Euripides,
which derive from two different ancient sources. One
group, the plays to which ancient commentaries (scholia)
are attached, appears to be descended from a school edition
of select plays of Euripides with notes, produced under the
Roman Empire.‘ It resembled the school editions from
which the extant plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles descend,
and was perhaps made by the same man. The majority of
our MSS., including the oldest and best (M A V B and the
Jerusalem palimpsest H), contain only plays of this group.
The other group, which has no scholia, evidently represents
a fragment of a comprehensive library edition of Euripides
in which the plays were arranged in alphabetic order; for
all the plays of this group have titles beginning with
E, H, I, or K. From this comprehensive edition two nests
(refixn) of papyrus rolls‘ survived by some accident longer
than the rest, and came into the hands of an unknown
scholar of early‘ Byzantine times, who copied the select
plays (without their scholia) and the additional plays from
his new find into a single codex, thus producing a combined
edition of the nineteen plays which we possess to-day.
This combined edition is represented for us by two rather
late MSS., L and P.
I For a general account of the transmission of the text of Euripides
see Mr. W. S. Barrett’s introduction to his forthcoming edition of the
Hippolytus, which corrects and replaces Wilamowitz’s description in
Einleitung in die griech. Tragiidie, Kap. iii.
2 The edition cannot be dated with any certainty, but such slender
indications as we have suggest the second century A.D.
3 See B. Snell, Hermes, lxx (1935), 119 f. -His ingenious theory is not,
however, free from difficulties.
4 We may infer this from the considerable divergence between
M A V B and L P in the tradition of the select plays which are common
to both. And I learn from Dr. Maas that Eustathius (1850. 35 ff.) speaks
of the Cyclops as extant in the twelfth century.
lii INTRODUCTION
The position of the Bacchae is peculiar. Like the ‘alpha-
betic’ plays, it survives only in the MSS. of the combined
edition—in P, and down to l. 755 in L. But it cannot be
part of the unknown Byzantine scholar’s papyrus find.
For (a) a roll with title-initial B (or H if the alternative
title Pentheus was used) would not be found in the same
nest with rolls having title-initials E to K, unless it had
strayed into the wrong pigeon-hole. (b) Like most of the
‘select’ plays, but unlike any of -the ‘alphabetic’ plays, it
has two omeeeetg, one of which is attributed by name (like
the second hypotheses of Med., Phoen., Or., which are ‘select’
plays) to Aristophanes of Byzantium. (0) It was known to
the author of the Christus Patiens (see below), who otherwise
shows acquaintance only with ‘select’ plays. (d) Although
it has been transmitted to us, like the ‘alphabetic’ plays,
without scholia,‘ it is quoted by the Euripidean scholiasts
far oftener than any ‘non-select’ play. '-
We must conclude that it formed part of the Roman
edition of select plays? If we accept the numerals attached
to the plays in L as representing the original order, it was
the last play in the select edition.‘ And if so, we can better
understand its absence from M A V B, its incomplete pre-
servation in L, and the mutilated state of its ending in P:
bored copyists are tempted to omit the last piece in their
I Apart from three glosses in L (on 151, 451, 611) and a few metrical
notes in the same MS.
1 This conclusion is now (1959) confirmed by the second Antinoe
papyrus (see below, p. lix), which shows that as early as the sixth
century the Bacchae was being copied along with annotated ‘select’
plays.
1 As L lacks the Troades, the Bacchae is numbered 9 (6'). These
marginal numerals in L have generally been attributed to the scribe,
but according to P. G. Mason (C .Q. xlviii (1954), 56) and Turyn (The
Byzantine Manuscript Tradition of the Tragedies of Euripides, 240)
they are in the hand of l. We n'eed not, however, assume with Turyn
(242-) that they represent merely Z’s private fancy; he may have
found them in an independent source, or even in the margins of L’s
exemplar--to which, according to Turyn himself (246), he must have
had access.
 INTRODUCTION liii
exemplar,‘ especially if it be defective or blurred; and the
last pages of a book are especially liable to injury.

ii. The Medieval Sources

Laurentianus xxxii. 2 (Murray‘s L, also known as C) is
a MS. of the early fourteenth century which was brought
to Italy by its owner, Simon Atumanus, Bishop of Gerace
in Calabria, in or before 1348; subsequently it passed into
the Laurentian collection at Florence, where it now is. It
contains all the extant plays of Euripides except the Troades
and the latter part of the Bacchae, together with 6 of
Sophocles, 3 of Aeschylus, and Hesiod’s Works and Days.
Of the Bacchae it never contained more than ll. 1-7 55, which
are followed by some pages left blank.’ The whole of the
work was checked with the exemplar by a contemporary
8:.0p6w-mjs, or, as Turyn thinks, by the scribe himself; he
corrected occasional errors and omissions in the copy and
added here and there variants or glosses (probably from the
margins of the exemplar) : e.g. it seems to have been he who
added ye in 401, the glOSS c-‘;.1.oi3 O11 4 51, and the note 1j;.u.x(dp:.ov)
at 590. Unfortunately correction did not rest there: an-
other hand, identified by Turyn as that of the well-known
Byzantine scholar Demetrius Triclinius, has introduced
numerous conjectural emendations, in some cases obliterat-
ing all trace of the original text. His readings (marked Z
in Murray‘s apparatus) have no more authority than the
conjectures of modern scholars, whereas those of the 8L0p—
Bw-njg (L2 in Murray) represent the tradition; but unluckily
I Most of these copyists omitted more: B lacks Rhes. and Tro.; A
lacks Alc., Rhes., Tro. ; M lacks Med., Alc., Rhes., Tro. V contains all
the plays which have scholia, and may once have contained Bacch.,
since it is mutilated at the end.
1 Wilamowitz thought the Bacchae was written in a different hand
from the rest, and concluded that it was copied from a different
exemplar (Analecta Euripidea, 4 f.). But it is now generally agreed
that although the ink is different the hand is the same which wrote
most of the other plays (Spranger, Studi Italiani, x (1932), 315 ff.;
Mason, loc. c'it.; Turyn, op. cit. 235 f.).
liv INTRODUCTION
there is often difficulty in deciding to which hand a parti-
cular correction is due. In the Bacchae l has been successful
in removing a number of small corruptions, e.g. in mending
lame syntax at 55 and lame trimeters at 227 and 503, and
in correcting the meaningless xhtieiv at 653. He knew that
strophe and antistrophe should correspond,‘ and tried to
restore responsion at 392-3 and 421-and I strongly suspect
at 115 also, though there Murray thinks 50'-ris may be a
genuine old reading preserved by L‘. An example of l’s
recklessness in emendation, and the harm caused by it,
may be seen at 102, where his feeble and unnecessary con-
jecture 6vpo0qS6p0i survives even in some twentieth-century
texts because it is ‘a manuscript reading’.
The Palatinus (P) was written at some time in the
fourteenth century; by about 1420 it was split into two
parts, one of which is preserved in the Vatican as Palatinus
287, the other at Florence as Laurentianus Conv. Suppr.
172.1 It contains all the extant plays of Euripides together
with 3 of Aeschylus, 6 of Sophocles, and 2 homilies of John
Chrysostom. Like L, it was checked by a contemporary
8t0p6arr1js- (P2). The Palatine part, which includes the
Bacchae and 12 other plays of Euripides, came into the
possession of Marcus Musurus (c. 1470-1517), who used it,
together with a copy of L, as the basis of the Aldine edition
(1503, the first printed edition which contains the Bacchae).
It may have been Musurus who introduced some or all of
the numerous later corrections (p) which appear in the
Palatine part. p was a rather better scholar than l, and
found the right correction for a good many small slips in
the B6lCCh6l6‘, e.g. at 737 wdpiv for rrdhtv, 929 mJ.91jpp.oo'o. fOI‘
Kafichpptoa, I277 rivos‘ for ‘Ti p.ov. There are other places
where he is less happy, e.g. 477, 747, 1227. At 314 he quotes
a (false) variant from Stobaeus, whose readings he has
‘ On Z as a metrician see Denniston’s introduction to the Electra,
pp. xli f.
1' That these are parts of the same MS. was first recognized by
C. Robert, Hermes, xiii (1878), 133.
 INTRODUCTION lv
introduced in other plays also; but apart from this instance
there is no evidence that he had MS. authority for any of
his readings in the Bacchae (he seems in this play not even
to have used L or a copy of L).
The relationship of P to L--which was long completely
obscured, and is still to some extent obscured, by the
ravages of p and l—appears to be different in different
plays. (a) In the 9 ‘alphabetic’ plays it now seems pretty
certain that P is a derivative of L, whose only value lies in
preserving readings of L which l erased.‘ (b) In some at least
of the ‘select’ plays P is at least partially independent of L,
since it not infrequently agrees with M A V against L. (c) In
the Troades, and in Bacch. 756-1392, both of which L lacks,
P is an independent witness. His source, which I will call [Q],
is probably the same for both ;2 and to judge by P's wide
divergence from V in Tro., [Q] is more likely to have been a
MS. of the combined edition than a MS. of the select plays.
In Bacch. 1-755 P may depend in part on L : in one place (568)
his text looks like the result of misreading L’s handwriting.
But he must have drawn also on [Q], since he preserves 1. 14
and the word rrapeirai in 635, both of which L omits. 1
Had the scribe of P taken his text of the Bacchae from
a MS. of the select plays, we should be much better off:
we should have a valuable dual tradition for ll. 1-755, and
probably also a more complete text of the last 100 lines.
We know from the adaptations in the Christus Patiens that
a more complete text existed in the twelfth century ;3 and

I See esp. Wecklein, Sits.-Ber. Bayer. Akad., 1899, ii. 297 ff., and
1922, Abh. 5. 61; P. Maas, Gnomon, 1926, 156 f. Turyn, who maintains
that P is throughout a twin of L, derived from the same exemplar
(op. cit. 264 ff.), does not seem to me to have disposed of their very
strong arguments for the dependence of P on L in the alphabetic
plays: cf. H. Lloyd-Jones, Gnomon, xxx (1958), 505 ff.
1 It can be plausibly argued from the distribution of lacunas that
both descend in P from an archetype which had on each page two
columns of 35 to 38 verses: see 755-7 n.
3 See Murray‘s note at end of text, and my Appendix. On the date
of the Chr. Pat., see Brambs’s preface to the Teubner edition, 18 ff.
lvi INTRODUCTION
we can be fairly certain that the MS. from which its author‘
quarried the material for his curious mosaic contained
select plays only, since he shows knowledge of no others.
It provided him with a text of the Bacchae which was not
only fuller but in some places at least more accurate than
P‘s: cf. 694, 1161, 1213, and especially 1084 and 1087, where
the text deducible from Chr. Pat. is now confirmed by a
papyrus.‘ The indirect evidence furnished by the Chr. Pat.
for several hundred lines of our play must, however, be
used with great caution ; for the author altered his originals
freely, not only adapting them to a new purpose but often
modernizing them in language and metre.

iii. Papyri
The text of the Bacchae thus rests on a more slender
foundation than the text of any other ‘select’ play of
Euripides. And apart from the Chr. Pat. and a few ancient
citations we have hitherto had no means of testing the
strength of this foundation. Line 1, it is true, occurs in
a schoolboy’s exercise book, P. Teb. iii. 901; line 642 in
a grammatical fragment, P. Lit. Lond. 183; and the tail-
piece (1388-92) in P. Hibeh i. 25. But none of these tells us
anything. Thanks, however, to the kindness ofthe Egypt
Exploration Society, the Delegates of the Oxford University
Press, and Mr. C. H. Roberts, I have been allowed to make
use of two unpublished papyri.‘ The more interesting of
their readings are quoted and discussed -individually in the
1 Possibly Constantine Manasses (K. Horna, Hermes, lxiv (1929)‘
429) ; anyhow not Gregory of Nazianzus.
1 As it is also at Rhes. 52. The opinion of Kirchhoff, that the author
of Chr. Pat. used a MS. similar to L P and no better, was refuted by
Doering, Philol. xxiii. 517 ff., xxv. 221 ff. In the plays with a dual tradi-
tion the Chr. Pat. supports now the one, now the other group of MSS.,
but is usually free from errors peculiar to one group: i.e. it seems to
represent a stage in the tradition prior to the bifurcation.
3 Since published as P. Oxy. 2223 and P. Ant. 24 respectively. To
these two I am now (1959) able to add another fragment from Antinoe :
see below, p. lix.
 INTRODUCTION lvii
commentary ; but a word may be said here about the general
bearing of the new evidence on the reliability of the text.
(a) An Oxyrhynchos fragment, written in a handsome
professional book-hand assigned by Mr. Roberts to the
second century A.D., contains ll. 1070-1136, but with begin-
nings of lines missing in the first column (1070-1104) and
ends of lines in the second (1105-36). It looks like a careless
copy made from an excellent text—a much better text
than P. Its faults are numerous but superficial: with one
possible exception (1131) its visibly false readings are such
as could be corrected at a glance even without the help
of P. Nowhere (apart from spellings like iepew.) does it
agree with P in a manifestly false reading; in the three
places where .it supports a text that has been seriously
doubted (1098, 1103, 1125) the grounds for doubt are,-I
think, inconclusive. On the other hand, it confirms no
fewer than thirteen modern corrections, most of them old‘
and extremely obvious. What is disturbing, however, is
that besides omitting (I suspect rightly) a line which has
never been doubted (1092), and adding a new line (after 1104)
whose absence has never been felt, it presents defensible
new readings in seven other places where the tradition of
P has not been questioned. One of these (Kdpa 1087) hap-
pens to be confirmed by the Chr. Pat. ; two others seem to
me definite improvements (Bp0',a0v 1085, 8’ dip’ 1113); the
remainder ('r(e)¢.ju.wpei'r’ e‘ju.oi I081, Uejuvdv I033, ti [069] III8,
rrhevpoicnv 1126) are more or less indifferent variants, such
as we encounter fairly often in the medieval tradition of
Euripides.
The general effect is not to strengthen one’s belief either
in the reliability of P or in the possibility of correcting it
outside rather narrow limits. It looks on this evidence as if
the text of the Bacchae had suffered considerable alteration
since Roman times, including the introduction not only of
1 The most recent critic of whose labours it takes any account is
Paley-—a distressing illustration of the law of diminishing retums to
which conjectural emendation is subject.
lviii INTRODUCTION
many superficial errors which the critics have been able
to put right but probably of a good many others which
remain unsuspected. This appearance conflicts with the
conclusion usually, and rightly, drawn from the study of
papyri in general and of Euripidean papyri in particular.‘
The difference is probably due to the exceptional manner
in which the Bacchae has been transmitted; if we could
read it as it stood in the edition with scholia, the relation
between the medieval and the Roman tradition might well
appear in a different light.
In the same hand as the Oxyrhynchos fragment are four
beginnings of unrecognized lines on a detached piece of
papyrus, which will be found in the Appendix ; they may or
may not be lost lines of the Bacchae.
(b) Mr. Roberts’s other contribution consists of three
scraps from a papyrus codex found at Antinoé and assigned
by him to the fifth century A.D. The largest scrap has on
the verso fragments of ll. 459-71, on the recto fragments of
ll. 496-508. The other two have on both sides fragments
of unrecognized lines; these are printed in the Appendix,
where I have given reasons for attributing the two longer
of them to the Bacchae and situating them in the lacuna
after 1329. The fragments of extant lines are too meagre
to justify any confident generalization about the character
of the text they represent. So far as they go, however,
they tend to support the conclusion that the L P tradition
of the Bacchae is decidedly inferior to that current in
Roman times. This papyrus, like the other, nowhere agrees
with the medieval tradition in manifest error. The scribe
has made one slip (omission of Sé in 465) ; on the other hand,
he avoids four blunders common to L and P, confirming in
one case (503) an ancient citation, in the other three the
conjectures of early editors. In the two remaining places
‘ e.g. Schubart, Einfiihrung i. d. Papyruskunde, 88, says that ‘in
general, papyri of the Roman period have the text which we read to-
day’ ; D. L. Page, Introd. to Medea, xl, that Euripidean papyri of post-
Alexandrian date ‘differ very little from our own manuscripts’.
 I INTRODUCTION lix
where the papyrus differs from L P, either text is possible,
with the balance of probability perhaps slightly in favour
Of the new reading (lluivvoog afirdg 7.1.’ 466, 0133’ eio'op¢:E5' 502).
At 469, where L and P differ from each other, the papyrus
confirms L.
(c) In the present (second) edition I have been enabled by
the kindness of Mr. J. W. B. Barns and the Delegates of
the Press to cite the readings of a further papyrus scrap, as
yet unpublished. It comes from Antinoe, but not from the
same text as .P. Ant. 24, described above. Mr. Barns tells
me that it is in the same fifth- or sixth-century hand as
P. Ant. 23 (Medea, with scholia), and almost certainly from
the same codex (or set of codices ).‘ It contains only frag-
ments of (recto) lines 1154-9 and (verso) lines 1183-6. But
scanty as it is, it confirms two modern corrections, .7‘lr.8c|.
for I4i8av at 1157, and -rA&p.0v for rhdpwv at 1184. Its evi-
dence thus points in the same direction as that of the other
Bacchae papyri.
1 The surviving scrap of the Bacchae includes no scholia ; but what
looks like an interlinear letter ‘p.’ added (perhaps by a second hand)
above 6 p.ciaxos' at 1185 is possibly a reference numeral applying to a
scholion which has not been preserved.