Hopefully everybody is enjoying the summer. Part of this for me is rereading Euripides’ Bacchae, after 35 years.
As I was gathering some backup material, i.e. my 1960 Dodds, I was more than a little intrigued that this still is the go-to commentary, even though it’s essentially a product of the 1940s. It’s not just that college students do not nearly have the same Greek chops as were taken for granted when Dodds wrote the commentary; it’s also that our understanding of Dionysian rites have been vastly augmented since 1960, and folks should at least read some Henrichs articles alongside Dodds.
However, there is one simple grammatical thing that keeps bugging me as I move along and that’s in line 515, when Pentheus has uttered his threat to lock the Stranger / Dionysus up in the stable, and Dionysus says στείχοιμ᾽ ἄν, as he’s leaving.
I don’t get the optative + ἄν. It’s as if it stands in for a futurum, but I’m not satisfied with this. So I’m curious how you guys look at this.
(Menelaus:) Speak … :: (Orestes:) I will go ahead and speak, then.
Note imperative λέγ’, to which λέγοιμ άν is a reaction."
Is the optative “στείχοιμ᾽ ἄν” not a similar reply to Pentheus" “χώρει·” in line 509? Clearly here it is ironic as Dionysus doesn’t need to comply with anything Pentheus says.
Having finished reading the Bacchae by now, I should note that στείχοιμ᾽ ἄν occurs twice in Bacchae.
Line 845, when Pentheus is about to enter the palace to change into a woman στείχοιμ᾽ ἄν occurs, in the exact same spot as in 515 and in Orestes 640 λέγοιμ’ άν, at the start of the verse.
I’m far from ready to read Bacchae at this point, but I’m be curious to read a Henrichs article which provides a more up-to-date view of Dionysian rites. Could anyone recommend one?
Many of those articles are unfortunately behind paywalls, however here’s one free pdf from 1990, ‘Between Country and City, Cultic Dimensions of Dionysus in Athens and Attica.’:
After reading the Henrichs paper, I had to look at Dodds’ introduction to see where his interpretation needed a corrective. Dodds claimed that “the ‘jolly Bacchus’ the wine god with his riotous crew of nymphs and satyrs” is more characteristic of Alexandrines and the Romans. Henrichs claims that in the Attic country cults, Dionysus was associated with agriculture, wine and the good life, rather than the savage destruction of the myth. The corrective seems to be that Dionysus has a dual nature and that Euripides play stages the myth, but the Athenians knew that their Attic cults were quite benign.
I seem to recall that Henrichs in this or another paper says that Dodds mixes up ‘cult’ and ‘rite’, and that Dodds seems to view the Bacchae a little too much as a documentary on Dionysiac cult life, rather than, ultimately, a work of fiction.
For instance, in many ways the chorus of Maenad women and Theseus’ sex change (and in particular, D’s chilling comment that Theseus would be meeting his maker as a woman) fits in with the way Euripides was scratching the gender wound in Athenian / Greek society. That’s a feat of the literary imagination, rather than a way to tell people what things looked like up in the hills.
I couldn’t help but notice some spots in Dodds commentary where he notes that he had visited this or that mountain in the 1940s and it was exactly like Euripides says, which strikes me as really old-school and indicative of a way of looking at a high-literary text we don’t do anymore. But of course, Dodds basically wrote the book in the forties, so what do I expect?
In his Aris & Phillips edition of the play, Richard Seaford focuses on advances in knowledge about Dionysian cults since Dodds. He refers to articles by Henrichs as well as to a number that he himself wrote.
When I’m ready to read “Bacchae” both commentaries will complement each other.