“Once on a time,” Oliver said, “not lately. Tell us about it.”
“A great work—his Bacchae. Everybody ought to read it. You see, there’s a reformer in Athens, called Pentheus, a straitlaced, stiff-necked Puritan, an out-and-out prohibitionist, a—a regular Mid-Western professor. Well, the young god—Dionysus, you know—comes over into Greece from Asia with his choruses, singing and dancing and swinging the ivy-wreathed thyrsus—and all that beautiful joyous stuff, you know. But this Pentheus makes up his mind that Dionysus is a bad lot, and he locks the god up in the stable—passes a sort of Volstead Act on him, you understand. But he gets out—the god gets out. Of course, he gets out; on the q.t. He escapes into the hills—classical moonshine, classical bootlegging, you see. The women get hold of the stuff and, up there in the hills, begin celebrating ‘mysteries’—all on the q.t. Attorney-General Pentheus says this must be stopped—law must be enforced. He sleuths up into the hills to spy them out. But the women, his own mother among them, catch him, and literally pull him to pieces, tear him limb from limb and strew the bloody fragments all over the place. That’s the vengeance of Dionysus.”
“How perfectly horrid!” exclaimed Cornelia.
“You know the play, Professor,” said Willys, of course.
“Oh yes,” I replied, as if I had been intimate with it from infancy. As a matter of fact, Oliver’s telegraphic reference to Bacchus had prompted me to chuck Gilbert Murray’s little book on Euripides into my traveling bag for train reading. That accident enabled me to sustain my bluff by a bit of critical wisdom. “The play is curious,” I said, “coming from Euripides. He passes for a progressive, an intellectual radical. You would have expected him to sympathize with Pentheus, of course. But I notice that Gilbert Murray doesn’t accept the old theory that Euripides recanted and went back to the ancestral gods.”
“Well,” replied Willys, “in that case, I think Gilbert Murray is wrong—who is this Gilbert Murray? I’ve got the play here—in my overcoat pocket—somebody or other’s translation, of course. You take it with you, Professor, when you go. Read it again and tell me if you don’t think I’m right.”
I had to laugh; and then we both explained how we happened to be reading, or reading about, the Bacchae. Then Willys returned to his argument.
“When I read this play, you know, it hit me in the eye that this thing is as old as history. This prohibition idiocy is as old as the race. If drinking could be rooted out, it would have been rooted out long ago. All the arguments against it were cheesy in the days of Noah. It sticks because, as His Excellency and I are pointing out, it is rooted in necessity. You reformers, as you call yourselves, don’t know what you are about. You’ve bit off what can’t be chewed. You are attacking religion; and it’s dangerous business. You are trying to kill a god, and it can’t be done.”
“But my dear Mr. Willys,” cried Cornelia, “it isn’t our God. The Church hasn’t really defined its position, and of course some of the bishops are very liberal. But don’t the dissenters in this country take a very firm stand in favor of prohibition? Most Americans are dissenters, aren’t they? If so, then I should think you would call prohibition itself a religious movement.”
“It has long been identified with the popular evangelical churches,” I said.