[744] vv. 824-45.
[745] vv. 732-51.
[746] Professor Murray’s beautiful translation of these lyrics will be familiar to most readers.
[747] Murray, Euripides and his Age, p. 196. My quotation, of course, does not imply that Professor Murray is guilty of the confusion of thought in question.
[748] The view mentioned in this paragraph will be found worked out in the present writer’s Riddle of the Bacchæ. This theory has met with much scepticism, but received the honour of almost entire acceptance by the late Dr. Verrall in The Bacchantes of Euripides. Dr. Verrall improved the statement of the theory, in particular by rejecting the supposition of a plot between Tiresias and the Stranger. Mr. W. H. Salter, in his delightful Essays on Two Moderns, also accepts this view of the play in the main (pp. 50-68). Dr. R. Nihard, in Le Problème des Bacchantes d’Euripide (Louvain, 1912), a useful study, rejects it.
[749] vv. 632 sq.:—
πρὸς δὲ τοῖσδ’ αὐτῷ τάδ’ ἄλλα Βάκχιος λυμαίνεται·
δώματ’ ἔρρηξεν χαμᾶζε. συντεθράνωται δ’ ἅπαν ...
συντεθράνωται, however, is elsewhere only known to us by the explanation of Hesychius, συμπέπτωκε, and Verrall points out that it ought to mean “it has all been put together again”.
[750] To this view no complete answer has yet been made. All that can possibly be said is what Professor Gilbert Murray (Euripides and his Age, pp. 186 sq.) and (in a letter to the present writer) Professor U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff suggest, that the palace is in the main destroyed, but the façade is more or less undamaged. This does away with the testimony to Dionysus’ imposture which the audience receive from their own eyes, but it leaves untouched the incredible silence of Pentheus. Moreover, Dionysus’ words as they stand mean that the building is utterly destroyed. That they do not mean this is only suggested in despair, because, if they do mean this, they are absurdly and patently false.