Greek Studies: a Series of Essays

by Walter Pater

The circumstances of the place thus combining with his peculiar motive, Euripides writes the Bacchanals. It is this extravagant phase of religion, and the latest-born of the gods, which as an amende honorable to the once slighted traditions of Greek belief, he undertakes to interpret to an audience composed of people who, like Scyles, the Hellenising king of Scythia, feel the attraction of Greek religion and Greek usage, but on their quainter side, and partly relish that extravagance. Subject and audience alike stimulate the romantic temper, and the tragedy of the Bacchanals, with its innovations in metre and diction, expressly noted as foreign or barbarous—all the charm and grace of the clear-pitched singing of the chorus, notwithstanding—with its subtleties and sophistications, its grotesques, mingled with and heightening a real shudder at the horror of the theme, and a peculiarly fine and human pathos, is almost wholly without the reassuring calm, generally characteristic of the endings of Greek tragedy: is itself excited, troubled, disturbing—a spotted or dappled thing, like the oddly dappled fawn- skins of its own masquerade, so aptly expressive of the shifty, twofold, rapidly-doubling genius of the divine, wild creature himself. Let us listen and watch the strange masks coming and going, for a while, [60] as far as may be as we should do with a modern play. What are its charms? What is still alive, impressive, and really poetical for us, in the dim old Greek play?

The scene is laid at Thebes, where the memory of Semele, the mother of Dionysus, is still under a cloud. Her own sisters, sinning against natural affection, pitiless over her pathetic death and finding in it only a judgment upon the impiety with which, having shamed herself with some mortal lover, she had thrown the blame of her sin upon Zeus, have, so far, triumphed over her. The true and glorious version of her story lives only in the subdued memory of the two aged men, Teiresias the prophet, and her father Cadmus, apt now to let things go loosely by, who has delegated his royal power to Pentheus, the son of one of those sisters—a hot-headed and impious youth. So things had passed at Thebes; and now a strange circumstance has happened. An odd sickness has fallen upon the women: Dionysus has sent the sting of his enthusiasm upon them, and has pushed it to a sort of madness, a madness which imitates the true Thiasus. Forced to have the form without the profit of his worship, the whole female population, leaving distaff and spindle, and headed by the three princesses, have deserted the town, and are lying encamped on the bare rocks, or under the pines, among the solitudes of Cithaeron. And it is just at this point that the divine child, [61] supposed to have perished at his mother's side in the flames, returns to his birthplace, grown to manhood.

Dionysus himself speaks the prologue. He is on a journey through the world to found a new religion; and the first motive of this new religion is the vindication of the memory of his mother. In explaining this design, Euripides, who seeks always for pathetic effect, tells in few words, touching because simple, the story of Semele—here, and again still more intensely in the chorus which follows—the merely human sentiment of maternity being not forgotten, even amid the thought of the divine embraces of her fiery bed-fellow. It is out of tenderness for her that the son's divinity is to be revealed. A yearning affection, the affection with which we see him lifting up his arms about her, satisfied at last, on an old Etruscan metal mirror, has led him from place to place: everywhere he has had his dances and established his worship; and everywhere his presence has been her justification. First of all the towns in Greece he comes to Thebes, the scene of her sorrows: he is standing beside the sacred waters of Dirce and Ismenus: the holy place is in sight: he hears the Greek speech, and sees at last the ruins of the place of her lying-in, at once his own birth-chamber and his mother's tomb. His image, as it detaches itself little by little from the episodes of the play, and is further characterised by the [62] songs of the chorus, has a singular completeness of symbolical effect. The incidents of a fully developed human personality are superinduced on the mystical and abstract essence of that fiery spirit in the flowing veins of the earth—the aroma of the green world is retained in the fair human body, set forth in all sorts of finer ethical lights and shades—with a wonderful kind of subtlety. In the course of his long progress from land to land, the gold, the flowers, the incense of the East, have attached themselves deeply to him: their effect and expression rest now upon his flesh like the gleaming of that old ambrosial ointment of which Homer speaks as resting ever on the persons of the gods, and cling to his clothing—the mitre binding his perfumed yellow hair—the long tunic down to the white feet, somewhat womanly, and the fawn-skin, with its rich spots, wrapped about the shoulders. As the door opens to admit him, the scented air of the vineyards (for the vine-blossom has an exquisite perfume) blows through; while the convolvulus on his mystic rod represents all wreathing flowery things whatever, with or without fruit, as in America all such plants are still called vines. "Sweet upon the mountains," the excitement of which he loves so deeply and to which he constantly invites his followers—"sweet upon the mountains," and profoundly amorous, his presence embodies all the voluptuous abundance of Asia, its beating [63] sun, its "fair-towered cities, full of inhabitants," which the chorus describe in their luscious vocabulary, with the rich Eastern names—Lydia, Persia, Arabia Felix: he is a sorcerer or an enchanter, the tyrant Pentheus thinks: the springs of water, the flowing of honey and milk and wine, are his miracles, wrought in person.

We shall see presently how, writing for that northern audience, Euripides crosses the Theban with the gloomier Thracian legend, and lets the darker stain show through. Yet, from the first, amid all this floweriness, a touch or trace of that gloom is discernible. The fawn-skin, composed now so daintily over the shoulders, may be worn with the whole coat of the animal made up, the hoofs gilded and tied together over the right shoulder, to leave the right arm disengaged to strike, its head clothing the human head within, as Alexander, on some of his coins, looks out from the elephant's scalp, and Hercules out of the jaws of a lion, on the coins of Camarina. Those diminutive golden horns attached to the forehead, represent not fecundity merely, nor merely the crisp tossing of the waves of streams, but horns of offence. And our fingers must beware of the thyrsus, tossed about so wantonly by himself and his chorus. The pine-cone at its top does but cover a spear-point; and the thing is a weapon—the sharp spear of the hunter Zagreus—though hidden now by the fresh leaves, and that button of pine-cone (useful also to dip in [64] wine, to check the sweetness) which he has plucked down, coming through the forest, at peace for a while this spring morning.

And the chorus emphasise this character, their songs weaving for the whole piece, in words more effective than any painted scenery, a certain congruous background which heightens all; the intimate sense of mountains and mountain things being in this way maintained throughout, and concentrated on the central figure. "He is sweet among the mountains," they say, "when he drops down upon the plain, out of his mystic musings"—and we may think we see the green festoons of the vine dropping quickly, from foot-place to foot-place, down the broken hill-side in spring, when like the Bacchanals, all who can, wander out of the town to enjoy the earliest heats. "Let us go out into the fields," we say; a strange madness seems to lurk among the flowers, ready to lay hold on us also; autika ga pasa choreusei+—soon the whole earth will dance and sing.

Dionysus is especially a woman's deity, and he comes from the east conducted by a chorus of gracious Lydian women, his true sisters— Bassarids, clad like himself in the long tunic, or bassara. They move and speak to the music of clangorous metallic instruments, cymbals and tambourines, relieved by the clearer notes of the pipe; and there is a strange variety of almost imitative sounds for such music, in their very [65] words. The Homeric hymn to Demeter precedes the art of sculpture, but is rich in suggestions for it; here, on the contrary, in the first chorus of the Bacchanals, as elsewhere in the play, we feel that the poetry of Euripides is probably borrowing something from art; that in these choruses, with their repetitions and refrains, he is reproducing perhaps the spirit of some sculptured relief which, like Luca della Robbia's celebrated work for the organ-loft of the cathedral of Florence, worked by various subtleties of line, not in the lips and eyes only, but in the drapery and hands also, to a strange reality of impression of musical effect on visible things.

They beat their drums before the palace; and then a humourous little scene, a reflex of the old Dionysiac comedy—of that laughter which was an essential element of the earliest worship of Dionysus—follows the first chorus. The old blind prophet Teiresias, and the aged king Cadmus, always secretly true to him, have agreed to celebrate the Thiasus, and accept his divinity openly. The youthful god has nowhere said decisively that he will have none but young men in his sacred dance. But for that purpose they must put on the long tunic, and that spotted skin which only rustics wear, and assume the thyrsus and ivy-crown. Teiresias arrives and is seen knocking at the doors. And then, just as in the medieval mystery, comes the [66] inevitable grotesque, not unwelcome to our poet, who is wont in his plays, perhaps not altogether consciously, to intensify by its relief both the pity and the terror of his conceptions. At the summons of Teiresias, Cadmus appears, already arrayed like him in the appointed ornaments, in all their odd contrast with the infirmity and staidness of old age. Even in old men's veins the spring leaps again, and they are more than ready to begin dancing. But they are shy of the untried dress, and one of them is blind—poi dei choreuein; poi kathistanai poda; kai krata seisai polion;+ and then the difficulty of the way! the long, steep journey to the glens! may pilgrims boil their peas? might they proceed to the place in carriages? At last, while the audience laugh more or less delicately at their aged fumblings, in some co-operative manner, the eyes of the one combining with the hands of the other, the pair are about to set forth.

Here Pentheus is seen approaching the palace in extreme haste. He has been absent from home, and returning, has just heard of the state of things at Thebes—the strange malady of the women, the dancings, the arrival of the mysterious stranger: he finds all the women departed from the town, and sees Cadmus and Teiresias in masque. Like the exaggerated diabolical figures in some of the religious plays and imageries of the Middle Age, he is an impersonation of stupid impiety, one of those whom the gods willing to [67] destroy first infatuate. Alternating between glib unwisdom and coarse mockery, between violence and a pretence of moral austerity, he understands only the sorriest motives; thinks the whole thing feigned, and fancies the stranger, so effeminate, so attractive of women with whom he remains day and night, but a poor sensual creature, and the real motive of the Bacchic women the indulgence of their lust; his ridiculous old grandfather he is ready to renounce, and accuses Teiresias of having in view only some fresh source of professional profit to himself in connexion with some new-fangled oracle; his petty spite avenges itself on the prophet by an order to root up the sacred chair, where he sits to watch the birds for divination, and disturb the order of his sacred place; and even from the moment of his entrance the mark of his doom seems already set upon him, in an impotent trembling which others notice in him. Those of the women who still loitered, he has already caused to be shut up in the common prison; the others, with Ino, Autonoe, and his own mother, Agave, he will hunt out of the glens; while the stranger is threatened with various cruel forms of death. But Teiresias and Cadmus stay to reason with him, and induce him to abide wisely with them; the prophet fittingly becomes the interpreter of Dionysus, and explains the true nature of the visitor; his divinity, the completion or counterpart of that of Demeter; his gift of prophecy; [68] all the soothing influences he brings with him; above all, his gift of the medicine of sleep to weary mortals. But the reason of Pentheus is already sickening, and the judicial madness gathering over it. Teiresias and Cadmus can but "go pray." So again, not without the laughter of the audience, supporting each other a little grotesquely against a fall, they get away at last.

And then, again, as in those quaintly carved and coloured imageries of the Middle Age—the martyrdom of the youthful Saint Firmin, for instance, round the choir at Amiens—comes the full contrast, with a quite medieval simplicity and directness, between the insolence of the tyrant, now at last in sight of his prey, and the outraged beauty of the youthful god, meek, surrounded by his enemies, like some fair wild creature in the snare of the hunter. Dionysus has been taken prisoner; he is led on to the stage, with his hands bound, but still holding the thyrsus. Unresisting he had submitted himself to his captors; his colour had not changed; with a smile he had bidden them do their will, so that even they are touched with awe, and are almost ready to admit his divinity. Marvellously white and red, he stands there; and now, unwilling to be revealed to the unworthy, and requiring a fitness in the receiver, he represents himself, in answer to the inquiries of Pentheus, not as Dionysus, but simply as the god's prophet, [69] in full trust in whom he desires to hear his sentence. Then the long hair falls to the ground under the shears; the mystic wand is torn from his hand, and he is led away to be tied up, like some dangerous wild animal, in a dark place near the king's stables.

Up to this point in the play, there has been a noticeable ambiguity as to the person of Dionysus, the main figure of the piece; he is in part Dionysus, indeed; but in part, only his messenger, or minister preparing his way; a certain harshness of effect in the actual appearance of a god upon the stage being in this way relieved, or made easy, as by a gradual revelation in two steps. To Pentheus, in his invincible ignorance, his essence remains to the last unrevealed, and even the women of the chorus seem to understand in him, so far, only the forerunner of their real leader. As he goes away bound, therefore, they too, threatened also in their turn with slavery, invoke his greater original to appear and deliver them. In pathetic cries they reproach Thebes for rejecting them—ti m' anainei, ti me pheugeis;+ yet they foretell his future greatness; a new Orpheus, he will more than renew that old miraculous reign over animals and plants. Their song is full of suggestions of wood and river. It is as if, for a moment, Dionysus became the suffering vine again; and the rustle of the leaves and water come through their words to refresh it. The [70] fountain of Dirce still haunted by the virgins of Thebes, where the infant god was cooled and washed from the flecks of his fiery birth, becomes typical of the coolness of all springs, and is made, by a really poetic licence, the daughter of the distant Achelous—the earliest born, the father in myth, of all Greek rivers.