I listened to Bacchae on audio book last Spring, Arthur Grey’s narration. He did quite the job of it, from the old Loeb Murray translation, I think. I had never heard anything quite like it. It made me excited to read it in the original, but Euripides was still taking me lots of dictionary work to read last year, and I wanted to put off more Euripides until that was no longer the case. So the Bacchae are really the explanation for my current read through.
I’m a man of my word, though I can’t promise my thoughts will be interesting, and apologies in advance if they betray my lack of study of Greek drama. Thanks to mwh and Lukas for directing my attention back to these phenomenally rich works of art - I’ve still only read them in English but at least now I’ve had a look at the Greek in a few important places.
The first thing that strikes me looking at the plays again is how many times they explore, explicitly and implicitly, the very question Michael posed above of why anyone might call such plays enjoyable. As the disguised Dionysus manipulates Pentheus into going unarmed to see the Maenads on the mountain, rather than slaughtering them for what he thinks are violations of Theban (or his?) morals, he [Dionysus] asks:
ὅμως δ᾽ ἴδοις ἂν ἡδέως ἅ σοι πικρά; (815)
Would you willingly look at things which are painful to you? Pentheus was a moment away from taking his men to go and kill the Bacchae (including his mother?), but decides instead to sit ‘under the pines’ and watch them, as we watch him. As Michael points out for Medea, the audience doesn’t actually get to witness Pentheus’ gruesome death, but as readers of the play there’s no distinction. In many ways, the reader of the play experiences these moments, which are described in all their schlocky horror glory by messengers, more vividly than the dialogue and chorus making up the rest of the play. The same is true for Creon and his daughter’s death in the Medea. Both the reader and the audience can be ear-witnesses as well as eye-witnesses and often radio is more powerful than TV.
I also thought it was interesting how Euripides continues to explore our observation of horrible events in his choice of recipients of these gruesome stories. In the Bacchae, the chorus leader (please correct me if this is wrong) receives the story of Pentheus being pulled limb from limb by his own mother and declares it a victory of the god over an impious man (τὰν τοῦ δράκοντος Πενθέος). The messenger doesn’t respond. Are we to share this sentiment, that Pentheus got what was coming to him? Compare with Medea receiving the news of Creon and his daughter’s face-melting demise - she is delighted, the messenger asks her if she’s in her right mind (φρονεῖς μὲν ὀρθὰ κοὐ μαίνῃ, γύναι[;]). Where do our sympathies lie? Are we going to enjoy the gory bits too?
Other things - As Seneca points out, the gender politics in these plays is exceptionally rich and also, from a position of no knowledge, I would be very interested to explore (in the Medea in particular) the questions posed to Athenians by the characters of these plays. ‘How will Erechtheus’ Athens host a child murderer?', the chorus asks. How could they even have her on their stage? It’s a shame these plays haven’t had more of an impact on modern society.
Thank you Sean. The question was not mine but Aristotle’s (triggered by Dionysus’ question perhaps?—note that ἡδέως is not just “willingly”)), as you well know. I don’t want to tread on your toes, but I wrote the following while continuing to watch the reading, and post it as is. By no means does it displace yours.
What a fine thing the CHS-sponsored "Reading Greek Tragedy Online” is! Many thanks for tipping us off to the Bacchae reading, seneca, which is obviously worth very much more than any words from me. I haven’t yet had a chance to listen to all of it, but a couple of thoughts did occur, so I’ll pass them on without more ado. The first is very predictable I’m afraid. I don’t think the translation is at all good.
The second is that I think that the readers, accomplished actors though they are, muff the most momentous moment in the play, which comes when Dionysus, unrecognized by Pentheus, asks him if he wants to see the women sitting together on the mountains, and he replies that he’d give a load of gold for that—marking the psychological collapse that renders him putty in the god’s hands. It’s the play’s crucial turning-point. In a way this is a matter of translation too, for the formal stichomythia of the Greek, whereby the characters deliver single lines in alternation with one another, is uniquely broken by Dionysus’ awful monosyllabic ᾶ, breaking the meter altogether, prefacing the question that triggers Pentheus’ shockingly voyeuristic response and converts god’s oppressor to god’s victim. (It comes at verse 810:
ἆ.
βούλῃ σφ᾽ ἐν ὄρεσι συγκαθημένας ἰδεῖν;) The reading in the video flubs Pentheus’ previous line and renders Dionysus’ ἆ by “Wait”, which inevitably has infinitely less impact.
Up to this point the play has seemed inexorably headed to a pitched battle on Cithaeron between Pentheus’ armed forces and Dionysus’ bacchants (which is apparently what happened in Aeschylus’ Pentheus play), but Euripides has pulled fast one on us, pulling the rug out from under our feet. (Ouch, shouldn’t mix my metaphors.) It was all a superb piece of misdirection. Pentheus will still go to the mountain, but in thrall to Dionysus, not armed but in bacchic garb, and only the final outcome will be the same. In retrospect we can see his breakdown coming, but only (I would maintain) in retrospect.
I’ll stop there (though I find it very hard to). I’d be interested to know if I’m making too much of this.
Michael
The problem is that you and Aristotle have started a very interesting discussion that makes one want to write reams. I think you’re spot on about this passage - the dramatic potential of the scene is immense and that little ἆ is a pivot that makes you (reading it) want to go back and check you haven’t missed a line. In performance the line could bear a moment of ‘pixie dust’ over Pentheus’ head or a straight psychological reading of a breakdown, as you say. Makes hundreds of years of copying out manuscripts almost worth it.
ἡδέως - I considered eagerly, but thought it was too much. Gladly too weak. ‘With pleasure’ mucked up the word order. Traduttori, traditori, or so I’ve heard (maybe traduttori, torturati is more appropriate in this case).
No pixie dust please. It works on a purely human level, It’s not magic. It’s psychologically realistic, and psychological manipulation was all the rage. I recommend Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen on the logos of persuasion (I wish the Bacchae translation didn’t use “obey” for being persuaded) and an old article on it by Segal (Charles, not his brother).
What surprised me in listening, with so many proto-Christian themes (at least in Murray), and Dionysus’ professed attempt to save Pentheus, was not the breakdown, but the conclusion in destruction and massacre. I was lulled into anachronistically expecting a repentance followed by a divine resolution. Dionysus’ failure to save Pentheus from himself made Dionysus seem more anthropomorphic to me, and betrayed some of the early (pre-810; Murray telegraphed the line with a stage direction) promise. But that may only be a Christian judgement.
Your wish is my command. I just meant to suggest that there’s sufficient ambiguity in the text to bear such a reading from a dramaturgy perspective (in a world where we can set Medea in WW2). Perhaps you disagree - anyway, it’s irrelevant because we agree about a psychologically realistic reading being better. Thanks for the Segal recommendation, I really enjoyed Singers, Heroes and Gods last year so I’ll check that out. Who’s his brother?
Joel, Yes Christianity really messes up Greek tragedy. Perhaps you’ll say that’s why Greek tragedy no longer grabs people. But I think it does, given the chance.
Sean, I’ll play true to type and opine that the most relevant dramaturgy perspective on this is a historical one. That’s not to deny validity to others, which can offer more pleasure as well as more irritation to me and to other moderns and postmoderns.
Charles Segal was a lovable and humane man. His brother was Erich, himself a classicist before he hit pay dirt with Love Story.
All, I’m going to take break for a while. I must cultivate my garden. Thanks for the company. I hope to be back.
Are you sure? I had Googled a bit before while I was trying to guess (and make sure it wasn’t Steven). One was born in and went to high school in Boston and the other in was born in Brooklyn about 15 months later, and went to high school there. Charles Segal’s obituary mentions a brother Richard, which could be Erich? Erich though is the son of a Rabbi, but The New York Times fails to mention this of Charles.
They seem to have been at Harvard at they same time? This reminds me of a friend whose roommate at Harvard had the same first and last name, and the two of them pretended to be brothers, though they had strikingly different physical appearances and ethnic backgrounds.
Many thanks to you, Michael. I’ve really enjoyed reading your posts in this thread. Enjoy your well-earned break.
Maybe I’m getting this discussion wrong, but I don’t think there is any way Euripides or any of the dramatists is 'prefiguring Christianity. Of course this may look different when you’re reading Murray, but that is Murray, not Euripides.
What I do see is that the tragedians were adjusting the Iron Age code of ethics displayed in heroic epic poetry, and in that way they can be seen (retrospectively) as a step towards a Christian ethic. But that’s not the same as prefiguring. They were adjusting the code of conduct for an age of living in cities without dynasties calling the shots.
So, in ‘Orestes’ Euripides may or may not be presenting Orestes as a complete nutcase, with his need for vengeance. The way Orestes and Pylades are plotting killing Helen as a couple of weird teenagers in a way harks back to all the “kill the girl” (Od bk 22) stuff in preceding literature.
We can read this as Euripides’ critique of the epic code, but who are we to say what Eu was thinking? Orestes was one of the more popular tragedies in the fourth century and later (which is why we still have the text), and maybe that’s because the audiences loved this O and Pylades scene, taking it seriously, eager to see Helen killed.
Herman
Perhaps how this was expressed was not so clear. It is certainly possible to read the play through the lens of Christianity and find what you are looking for. It’s also an example of the way in which it is not possible to free ourselves from the age and culture in which we live. Just look at my posts which mention Gadamer.
More interestingly rather than “prefiguring Christianity” it may have have had a direct influence. Below are some extracts from Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Euripides, Edited by Rosanna Lauriola and Kyriakos N. Demetriou, 2015, Leiden
"Judaeo-Christian writers likewise sought inspiration in this most pagan of Athenian dramas. 3 Maccabees, for example, “demonstrates some suggestive affinities” with Bacchant Women.10 It may have influenced the New Testament books of Luke and Acts, and later Christian writers, most famously the Christian philosopher Clement of Alexandria (2nd–3rd century AD), paid it serious attention.11 …In short, Bacchant Women was one of the great master-texts of the ancient world.
10 Cousland (2001) 539.
11 MacDonald (2015) 11–66; Friesen (forthcoming)." p509
On Muarry’s translation:
"Murray’s Bacchant Women was integral to the first recorded modern professional production of the play in 1908, and it also influenced later adaptations such as Major Barbara, by the Irish playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950).25 Perhaps surprisingly, Murray translates Euripides’ thoroughly religious, thoroughly pagan text into a secular passion play about the “Kingdom of Heaven within us”—about finding happiness, peace, and justice right here on earth:
But whoe’er can know,
As the long days go,
That to Live is happy, hath found his Heaven!26
Murray describes Greek religion using Christian phraseology: “Son of God”, “Spirit of God”, “Heaven”, “Glorying to God in the height”, “true God”, and so on. He introduces Scriptural imagery such as the sower and the seed. Finally, Murray interprets Dionysus with Christian theological concepts, including the trinity, the passion, salvation, and even the Eucharist:
Yea, being God, the blood of him is set
Before the Gods in sacrifice, that we
For his sake may be blest.27
Literati such as Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) roundly criticized Murray’s archaizing style, but his reinterpretation of Bacchant Women, not to mention his willingness to take the much-maligned Euripides seriously as a playwright, poet, and thinker, was thoroughly modern.
25 See below, pp. 533–4.
26 Murray (1904) 53.
27 Murray (1904) 19. " p 513
Even though I am not a christian I can appreciate the importance of this interpretation. I prefer discussing the gender performance and metatheacricality in the play but anyone who has read my posts will know that I applaud attempts to find different interpretations of classical texts although I deprecate attempts to privilege them. The latter is quite difficult to avoid.
“Literati such as Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) [why don’t they just call him Nobelprize winning poet T.S. Eliot? Literati is a little condescending] roundly criticized Murray’s archaizing style, but his reinterpretation of Bacchant Women, not to mention his willingness to take the much-maligned Euripides seriously as a playwright, poet, and thinker, was thoroughly modern.”
I know, and there was Wilamowitz’ championing Euripides, too, in more or less the same era. Before it was kind of a given that Euripides represented a levelling-off of Greek tragedy.
Well, I was interested in how much of the Christian philosophy in the Bacchae was Murray’s and how much Euripides’. Christianity as we have it today is in some part, to my naive view, a Greek re-interpretation of a Semitic cult, and it would of course upset a Catholic convert like T.S. Eliot very much to come across a translation that tried to present a tight connection.
However, I’m surprised at the examples presented from the BCRE (?) quoted by Seneca, because they were not the lines that I would have thought of.
But whoe’er can know,
As the long days go,
That to Live is happy, hath found his Heaven!"
Although Murray does insert the word “Heaven”, it remains an entirely pagan and anti-Christian thought, and well expresses what Euripides was saying.
But look at the following, the expression that stuck out to me, just a little earlier than the line 810 which Michael mentioned.
Murray:
Pe: How now ? - This is some plot against me!
Di: What / Dost fear? Only to save thee do I plot.
ΕΥΡ:
Πε. οἴμοι· τόδ᾽ ἤδη δόλιον ἔς με μηχανᾷ.
Δι. ποῖόν τι, σῷσαί σ᾽ εἰ θέλω τέχναις ἐμαῖς;
If anything, Euripides’ expression is more ‘Christian’ than Murray’s, in its fundamental conception of God’s relationship to man.
Another example from BCRE
“Yea, being God, the blood of him is set
Before the Gods in sacrifice, that we
For his sake may be blest.”
But Euripides’ original is startling:
οὖτος θεοῖσι σπένδεται θεὸς γεγώς,
ὥστε διὰ τοῦτον τἀγάθ᾽ ἀνθρώπους ἔχειν.
Murray has intruded “blood” (but for obvious poetic reasons, I’d think) and “for his sake” for διὰ τοῦτον. But the original lines should still wake people right up.
To me the question is hardly whether creative people (crackpots) have intruded a peculiar conception into Euripides at different times. While that may be an enjoyable hunt for some, the question that strikes me as worthy of serious investigation is whether Euripides represents a recognizable step on a cultural/religious evolution that connected pagan and Christian Greece.
Unless Eliot (Mr Thomas Stearns, of St. Louis, Missouri) published more than one essay on Murray’s translations, he doesn’t criticise him on grounds of Christianising, but for being a bad poet - “merely a very insignificant follower of the pre-Raphaelite movement”. Euripides and Professor Murray only takes about 5 minutes to read, and it’s good reading (it starts with a review of a performance of Murray’s Medea), but here’s the conclusion:
“We need a digestion which can assimilate both Homer and Flaubert. We need a careful study of Renaissance Humanists and Translators, such as Mr. Pound has begun. We need an eye which can see the past in its place with its definite differences from the present, and yet so lively that it shall be as present to us as the present. This is the creative eye; and it is because Professor Murray has no creative instinct that he leaves Euripides quite dead.” - Interesting though that Eliot never had the stomach for it himself.
Joel you might enjoy Sir James George Frazer’s (OM FRS FRSE FBA) Golden Bough, which had a profound influence on Eliot and many other poets of the period.
No no, I hadn’t read the essay before, and missassumed from the BCRE article above that it was following his critique. I appreciate the link, and enjoyed the Eliot essay, though I disagree with it. Eliot’s language objections are really quibbles, and the overall judgement is more based on his personal taste than steady criticism. Murray didn’t produce such a dead Bacchae, at least. A travesty, perhaps. I won’t know until I’ve gotten to Fabulae vol. III, unfortunately.
I read chunks of The Golden Bough when I was much younger, and enjoyed it immensely. I have actually planned to read through it all at some point, once I head read more of the source material.
Speaking of poetic influences during the Eliot period, there was a very good In Our Time on WH Auden recently. I recalled it because it mentioned TS Eliot in passing, as a sort of anti-influence, during his college years.
Eliot is concise, but I think he gets all his main points in there - too many words, too much importing of Middle/Early Modern English verb endings (-st, -th, after Swinburne), unnecessary use of rhyming couplets, lack of sensitivity to what he is trying to achieve by re-presenting (cf. David Jones) Euripides to a 20th century audience. I think what he’s getting at is pretty clear if you compare Murray’s translation of Agamemnon with the translation by Louis Macneice (who might have made an appearance in that episode of In Our Time), which Eliot described as “an accurate, almost literal translation, and at the same time as English poetry for the twentieth century.”
Here’s Clytemnestra’s first appearance (264-7)
Murray:
Glad-voiced, the old saw telleth, comes this morn,
The Star-child of a dancing midnight born,
And beareth to thine ear a word of joy
Beyond all hope: the Greek hath taken Troy.
Macneice:
Bearing good news, as the proverb says, may Dawn
Spring from her mother Night.
You will hear something now that was beyond your hopes.
The men of Argos have taken Priam’s city.
Aeschylus:
εὐάγγελος μέν, ὥσπερ ἡ παροιμία,
ἕως γένοιτο μητρὸς εὐφρόνης πάρα.
πεύσῃ δὲ χάρμα μεῖζον ἐλπίδος κλύειν:
Πριάμου γὰρ ᾑρήκασιν Ἀργεῖοι πόλιν.
Macneice produces the same effect as, say, Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho, being true to natural English speech patterns of the 20th century while also being balanced so elegantly it becomes poetry. Good English and good Fries. Of course it’s all a question of taste really and I’m glad both translations exist. The more the better.
On the desire to find parallels between, or even amalgamate, Greek religion and Christianity, Walter Pater’s short chapter on Pico della Mirandola in Studies in the History of the Renaissance is very stimulating regardless of whether you agree with him:
“The religions of the world were to be reconciled, not as successive stages, in a gradual development of the religious sense, but as subsisting side by side, and substantially in agreement with each other. And here the first necessity was to misrepresent the language, the conceptions, the sentiments, it was proposed to compare and reconcile. Plato and Homer must be made to speak agreeably to Moses. Set side by side, the mere surfaces could never unite in any harmony of design. Therefore one must go below the surface, and bring up the supposed secondary, or still more remote meaning, that diviner signification held in reserve, in recessu divinius aliquid, latent in some stray touch of Homer, or figure of speech in the books of Moses.”