Mystery Cults, Theatre and Athenian Politics

A Reading of Euripides' Bacchae and Aristophanes' Frogs

Luigi Barzini

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350187344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This new comparative reading of Euripides' Bacchae and Aristophanes' Frogs sets the two plays squarely in their contemporary social and political context and explores their impact on the audiences of the time. Both were composed during a crucial period of Athenian political life following the oligarchic seizure of power in 411 BC and the restoration of democracy in 410 BC, and were in all likelihood produced nearly simultaneously a few months before the rise of the Thirty Tyrants and the ensuing civil war. They also demonstrate significant similarities that are particularly notable among extant Attic theatre productions, including the role of the god Dionysos as protagonist and architect of religious and political action, and the presence of Demetrian and Dionysiac mystic choruses as proponents of the appeasement of civil discord as the cure for Athens' ills. Focusing on the mystic, civic and political content of both Bacchae and Frogs, this volume offers not only a new reading of the plays, but also an interdisciplinary perspective on the special characteristics of mystery cults in Athens in their political context and the nature of theatrical audiences and their reaction to mystic themes. Its illumination of the function of each play at a pivotal moment in fifth-century Athenian politics will be of value to scholars and students of ancient Greek drama, religion and history.

Part One

Summary and Context

1

The Plays, the Eleusinian and Great Dionysia Festival

1.1 The plays

Euripides’ Bacchae recounts the arrival at Thebes of Dionysus and his thiasos, a sacred band of Asian Bacchic women revellers, the maenads. Upon his entry on stage, Dionysus declares he has come in human disguise to Thebes, the polis where his mother Semele, daughter of Cadmus founder of the city, had been killed by her lover Zeus’ lightning after giving birth to him. Having made the cities in Asia recognize his divinity and establish the rituals of his ecstatic cult, that is music making, singing and dancing in his honour, Thebes is the first Greek polis which he visits for the same purpose.

As the women of the royal family, the god’s aunts, claim that a man and not Zeus was Dionysus’ father, Dionysus had driven them and all the women of Thebes to perform his rituals on Mount Cithaeron. The tyrant of Thebes, young Pentheus, rejects the cult of Dionysus, and does not listen to the words of caution of his grandfather, Cadmus, and of Cadmus’ old friend, Tiresias, both of whom join the revellers on Mount Cithaeron. He instead threatens to incarcerate Tiresias and has Dionysus imprisoned, who allows himself to be put in chains with a laugh. Despite a dialogue with the god, Pentheus pursues a war against the cult and chains the god up in the royal stables. Dionysus frees himself, makes the royal palace collapse, defeats Pentheus and joins his thiasos in front of the ruins of the palace. There he is joined by Pentheus and by a messenger who reports on the supernatural activities of the maenads on Mount Cithaeron. Pentheus is enraged and assembles his army to move against the maenads. Pushed by his prurient curiosity to watch the maenads’ rituals, he is however convinced by Dionysus to disguise himself as a maenad and to follow the god to Mount Cithaeron. On the mountain, the tyrant is torn apart by the maenads led by his mother Agave, who returns to the royal palace holding Pentheus’ head thinking it is the head of a wild beast, until her father, Cadmus, makes her see sense. Dionysus then appears in his divine nature, announces the establishment of his rituals in Thebes and sends Cadmus, his wife and daughters into exile.

Aristophanes’ Frogs tells the tale of the god Dionysus who wishes to go to Hades together with his slave Xanthias to make Euripides come back to Athens to revive the art of tragedy. After receiving instructions from Heracles, Dionysus crosses the Acherusian lake and encounters a chorus of frogs that sings a comical hymn to Dionysus and Apollo. In Hades, the pair meets a chorus of mystery initiates who invoke Iacchus (the Eleusinian version of Dionysus) to join their dancing procession to the meadows of Demeter. In the parodos, the chorus then proceeds to pronounce a condemnation and exclusion of the impure Athenians who have not been initiated into the Bacchic mysteries, who kindle civic strife, are guilty of treason or do not finance theatre productions from its sacred dances and from the Dionysiac festival. The exclusion on religious and political grounds is transparently aimed at the new class of Athenian rulers, unpatriotic, irreligious and unartistic traitors. The parabasis follows some comical episodes and is a direct political appeal to the audience and to the polis of Athens. It is a curiously pro-oligarchic and at the same time a radically egalitarian manifesto, opposed to the democratic leaders of the demos, but also a defence of the well-born and well-educated class of citizens. The second part of the play contains a competition, an agon, between Aeschylus and Euripides, about poetry and literary critique; the winner will return to the world of the living and help save Athens from its distressed state by producing patriotic and ethical theatre performances. Dionysus is the judge, and decides in favour of Aeschylus, who is then accompanied by a torchlit choral procession to the polis.

We have no direct evidence of the date of the production of the trilogy to which Bacchae is a part, other than a note on Aristotle’s Didascaliae that the play was produced by Euripides’ son in Athens together with Iphigeneia in Aulis and Alcmaeon, after the playwright’s death in 407/6. Some scholars, such as Webster, Cantarella and Kovacs, believe Bacchae was staged at the Great Dionysia of 405, about two months later than Frogs.¹ The political content analysis of the plays supports this hypothesis. The trilogy that included Bacchae won the first prize. Aristophanes’ Frogs was produced by Philonides at the Dionysiac Lenaea festival, which took place around the twelfth day of Gamelion of the year when ‘the old temple of Athena at Athens was burned, Pythias being ephor at Sparta and Callias archon at Athens’ as Xenophon notes,² which in our calendar was around the end of January to the beginning of February 405; the plays were awarded first prize.

Most academics have neglected the significance of the probable synchronous performance of the plays, misapprehended the similarities between the plays, largely ignored the extra-textual context of them and treated them as unconnected works in the separate fields of Old Comedy and Tragedy. While the two plays are, in Lada-Richards’ words, ‘the two most important extant dramatizations of Dionysus in the theatre of the Athenian polis’,³ their parallel religious and political content has not been the focus of research. Despite the vast number of scholarly works separately dedicated to the two plays,⁴ mystery cults,⁵ Dionysus and Tragedy,⁶ the development of moral and political thought in Athens during the sixth and fifth centuries⁷ and the role of theatrical representations in the democratic polis,⁸ no scholar has attempted a comparative reading of these two plays in their common political and religious context. Only by considering both plays in their historical, religious and political context can we hope to discard some of our ‘modern conceptual hierarchies’, and instead try to ‘reconstruct the perceptual filters of the fifth-century Athenian audience’⁹ and to properly evaluate their significance.

A common theme in the plays is their powerful religious and civic content, unique in extant Greek theatre.¹⁰ In Bacchae, the choruses/thiasoi of Asian maenads and of Theban women are given a fundamental role as followers of the deity Dionysus and supporters of his effort to establish his cult in the polis. In the first part of Frogs, the chorus/thiasos of Eleusinian initiates establishes its authority as the polis’ civic and religious sacred chorus and expresses its religious and political credo in the parodos and parabasis. The second theme of the plays is their political content. For the interpretation of the plays and of their intended impact it is essential to place them in their socio-political context that I shall briefly summarize here.

Far from addressing the military position Athens was in, as most commentators would have it, the focus of the political content of the plays is the polis’ internal political situation. The plays were composed during the period of sharp and violent political division, stasis, in the polis of Athens that followed the regime of the Four Hundred in summer 411 and the restoration of democracy in 410. They were produced in the winter/spring of 405, a year before the seizure of power by the Thirty. During this period, despite the efforts made by the demos to strengthen its democratic rule against oligarchic conspirators and would-be tyrants, political and religious issues were still the basis of rising tensions in the polis, as evidenced for instance by the controversial trial of the Arginusae generals in the fall of 405, a few months before the production of the plays. In an atmosphere of fear and reciprocal suspicion, of extreme political and religious tension, the plays advocate collective adhesion to the ethical and civic values and rituals of the mystery cults as the way to facilitate a civic and religious reconciliation betw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Map of Attica
• Preface
• Definitions
• Part One Summary and Context
• 1 The Plays, the Eleusinian and Great Dionysia Festival
• 2 Mysteries and Mystery Initiation in Athens
• 3 Initiates and Theatre Audiences in Athens
• 4 Mystery Rituals and Theatre Performances
• 5 The Polis, Mystery Cults and Civic Ideology
• 6 Historical Context and Episodes
• Part Two The Plays
• 7 Audiences, Similarities and Scholars’ Misapprehension of Pentheus
• 8 Politics in the Plays
• 9 Mystery Cults and the Choruses
• 10 Political Implications
• Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright