Dionysus’ Inversion of Philia in the Bacchae

Robert H. Simmons (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)

Aristotle considered challenges to philia to be at the heart of good tragedy (Po. 1453b19-22), and several authors have studied the pervasiveness and significance of this value in the tragic theater (e.g., Belfiore 2000; Blundell 1989; Vickers 1973). The breadth of philia’s consequence in the Bacchae, though, has not been adequately addressed in these inquiries, nor in those dedicated to philia in the Bacchae alone (McDonald 1989) or in Euripides more broadly (Schmidt-Berger 1973; Scully 1973; Tyler 1969). In particular, Dionysus’ actions in the play are driven as much by his sensitivity to others’ violations of philia against him as they are by his desire to convert or punish non-worshipers.

As in most tragedies, attention to the proper and improper treatment of family members is common in the Bacchae. Dionysus has chosen Thebes as the first Greek city to enchant so that he can also punish his mother’s sisters, who denied that Zeus was Dionysus’ father (Bacch. 23-31). Cadmus encourages Pentheus to join him in aggrandizing Dionysus’ divinity so that they both can benefit from their familial connection to the new god (Bacch. 181-83, 333-36). Agave deplores her murder of her son while possessed by the god (Bacch. 1114-52). And Cadmus laments that Dionysus has punished the Theban ruling family “even though he is born of our house” (Bacch. 1249-50).

While Seaford (1996 ad 1248-49) reads Cadmus’ complaint as an ironic encapsulation of the difference between Cadmus’ narrow, worldly point of view and Dionysus’ divine imperative, details of the gods’ punishments show that he is just as attentive to philia as Cadmus is. Dionysus’ retribution against members of his mortal family inverts philia, reciprocating malice rather than favors, in line with the Greek taste for repayment of injuries and insults to philoi in kind, but with interest (Blundell 28-31). The offense his aunts committed against him was to undermine the perceived exclusivity of his oikos: in disputing Semele’s claims of Zeus’ paternity of Dionysus, they imply that the boundaries of his household are open. In response, he drives his aunts out of their own homes to the mountains (Bacch. 32-36), where all the women, noble and not, are mixed together (37). In part, this can be taken as the action of a god who breaks down individual oikoi in favor of the greater polis (e.g., Seaford 1993; Arthur 1972). But this forced breakdown of the discrete walls of individual oikoi is also a literal manifestation of the figurative situation implied by his aunts’ insults against his mother. They questioned the identity of the members of Dionysus’ oikos, and he in turn casts them out of their households into an indiscriminate mix in the wild. Agave’s suffering for murdering her son is also fitting retribution. While her rumors symbolically eliminated one-third of Dionysus’ sacred mother-father-child trinity and illegitimated his birth, he in turn not only forces her to live without one third of her trinity, but also makes her a literal murderer of her child, just as she was a figurative murderer of his father. These narrowly directed punishments differ from those that Dionysus doled out to persecutors or non-worshipers in every prior record (for catalogs, see Dodds 1960, xxv-xxvi; Oranje 1984, 114-30).

The character of Dionysus in this play is not merely an embodiment of the god for whom ritual was celebrated (Seaford 1994, e.g.) or of the god of the theater (Segal 1997, e.g.), but also a participant in a social scene. His retribution is not just that of a wronged god, but of a wronged philos who wants his tormentors to suffer as his family’s reputation has. Recognizing his character as such lends additional credence to readings of the character and this play as reflective of their social and political contexts (such as Hose 1995), removing interpretation of the Bacchae from the sacred space in which it is often detained.

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