Bacchae was produced posthumously at the City Dionysia in ca. 405 BCE, and its group of plays won first prize in that year’s tragic competition. It became, in due course, one of the ten “select plays” of later antiquity and, despite its precarious survival (its ending is lacunose and lines 1-755 are found in only one of the two chief medieval mss., L), secured a firm place in European literature. Interpretations and reimaginings of this drama have been many and wide ranging.
It is by any measure a most remarkable drama. Within the broad scope of presenting a tale of divine vengeance, it deals with issues of religious euphoria, madness, boundaries of identities, human psychology, and moral limitations. The drama is also suffused with dichotomies: god/mortal, male/female, madness/sanity, acceptance/rejection of divinity, cleverness/wisdom (τὸ σοφόν/σοφία), old/young, Greek/barbarian, city/country, ruler/ruled, all of which, and others, are (inter)woven throughout the play. Especially challenging are the issues surrounding the intersection of (perverted) ritual, religion, mythology, and dramatic presentation. To what extent did the depiction of bacchant behavior reflect, echo, or comment on contemporary cultic practice? At the same time, the poetry, both speech and song, especially with the repeated images and leitmotifs, is exceedingly vibrant, evocative, and chilling. Commentators have a formidable challenge.
E. R. Dodds published his highly influential edition in 1944 (second edition 1960), reflecting his strong interest in psychology, anthropology, ritual, and religion, and it has been the mainstay commentary since then. Jeanne Roux’s text, translation, and commentary (1970-2) are full and useful, and Richard Seaford’s edition in the Aris & Philips series (1996; BMCR 1996.11.01) reaches a broader audience (lemmata are keyed to the translation), although he pushes too hard for an interpretation of the play as a reflection of initiation ritual. I heard a rumor twenty-plus years ago that Dodds’s edition was being “updated” by a distinguished scholar, but nothing, apparently, came of that effort. A new commentary was called for. Now, William Allan and Laura Swift have produced a modern commentary on the play in the Cambridge “yellow and green” series. Over the past two decades, these two scholars have shown their numerous strengths both in interpreting ancient Greek literature and culture and in producing first-rate commentaries (Allan on Children of Heracles, and in this same series, Helen, and Greek Elegy and Iambus; Swift on Archilochus). This new work offers a thorough introduction, new text, and full commentary, covering the wide swath of issues that one must address in such a work, and, while taking advantage of the notable achievements of Dodds and others, reflects the deeper knowledge and changed perspective on many of the play’s issues and topics. Without qualification, I recommend it strongly for students and scholars alike. I had the good fortune of being able to teach an advanced undergraduate course this spring semester using this commentary (it appeared just in time!), and I can report that in that important crucible of the classroom, the commentary was invaluable to my students and very well received by them.
The Introduction includes the necessary preliminaries (see the sections at the end of this review), often with valuable perspectives. On matters of production A&S are circumspect about two of the vexing issues of the fifth-century physical theater, concluding it “unlikely” that there was a raised stage (6) and that there is no “irrefutable evidence” for a circular orchestra in this period (6, n.23). Similarly, they can see no evidence for a permanent altar in the orchestra and suggest that Semele’s tomb may have been indicated by a painted panel on the skene. In general, on several matters in the current interpretative orthodoxy the editors adopt a more cautious view (here and in the individual notes). They are skeptical of Freudian interpretations of Pentheus’s desires (32) and guarded about over-reading the metatheatrical nature of the “dressing scene” (23). Similarly, they maintain that the play “takes the more extreme variant of historical maenadism and exaggerates it for dramatic ends (20; see also 19, n.68). They also state baldly that Greek drama, while evolving from and engaging with many aspects of ritual is not, even in the case of Bacchae, “itself ‘ritual’” (22, n.79). This final point is important, and I would like to see them argue it more fully elsewhere.
In discussing the play’s structure, A&S identify its fundamental narrative patterns as disguise (although here uniquely of a god), (divine) vengeance, and the “someone digs their heels in” plot, which also includes a secondary element of “late learning.” They do not, however, pay attention here to the Bacchae as a nostos drama, with the native god returning home. Unlike in Agamemnon or Trachiniae, e.g., the return is not prepared for earlier in the play and then realized later, but rather begins the play, with the additional element of a later appearance in a new form. (See below on lines 1-2 of the commentary.)
The longest section of the Introduction (15-38) discusses the play and its more salient thematic elements. While I always encourage students to read such sections after they have read the text, whenever one reads it, they will be rewarded with a rich, thoughtful, and judicious treatment of the play’s many subtleties, dichotomies, and explorations. I found particularly valuable the section on “characters and belief,” as well as its more-than-usually-sympathetic view of Pentheus, which position they strongly argue for in the commentary as well.
In the commentary, each choral song is treated fully, with expert metrical analysis along with scansion of each stanza. The Introduction has a rich section on “Immediately the whole land shall dance and sing,” which encompasses both formal elements of genre and the musical associations and distinctiveness of the songs and also describes the poet’s language and style. While focused on the Bacchae, this latter section can be profitably read by anyone interested in Euripidean style. The play’s very extensive reception merits its own full discussion, and so it is understandable that the editors provide only a footnote (52, n. 189) steering the reader to treatments of this topic, it being “beyond the scope of this volume,” even if one might have hoped for at least a modest account.
The text does not differ greatly from Diggle’s “magisterial edition” (52); A&S list about 50 places where it differs from Diggle’s. Their arguments for preferring one reading over another or for favoring an emendation are consistently clear and reasonable. The apparatus is, as expected in this series, abbreviated.
In the commentary proper, each section (parodos, episode, etc.) receives a general, and valuable, overview, followed by a discussion of stagecraft, before individual lines and words are taken up. The notes are clear in presentation and concise in argument, display good judgment, and are fair in the discussion of opposing views. The overall quality is consistently very high. The explication of syntax, morphology, semantics, idioms, imagery, and the many subtleties of the Greek is laudable. My only general reservation is that some items are too often repeated, unnecessarily to my mind, (there are at least three notes explaining the idiom ἔχω + adverb), and some glosses are too basic for the imagined level of reader (e.g., ὤιστρησ’, 32-3; μετῆλθες of 712-3; and ἀποστέλλῃ, 957-8). A&S also handle the play’s rich tapestry of imagistic motifs with care and nuance.
The notes on stagecraft are welcome and informative. They rightly (to my mind) have Dionysus appear initially at ground level (p. 102), and they maintain (on 576-603) that no actual physical changes occurred to demonstrate the palace’s collapse, although the βροτεῖον might have been used. They comment appropriately on Pentheus’s “delayed contact” with Cadmus and Teiresias when first coming on stage (n. 215-62). I would like, however, to have seen further comment on Pentheus’s departure while the god/stranger explains his plans to the chorus of Asian bacchants (847-61), where a reference to Oliver Taplin’s The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, 221-2, would enrich the discussion. They recognize in the staging note on 170-369 that all characters at the start of an episode, that is, after a song, are generally unannounced (although on 1024-1152, they unnecessarily limit this practice to messengers); I missed here a note to Richard Hamilton, “Announced Entrances in Greek Tragedy,” HSCP 1978). That Agave’s entrance with her son’s head does receive an announcement after a song (1165-7) is not commented on.
The bibliography is appropriately long (314-43) and varied, citing works on ritual, religion, meter, literary analysis, gender studies, grammar, narratology, stagecraft, anthropology, intellectual history, and more. Unsurprisingly the most numerous items, by my casual counting, are papers by Albert Henrichs, whose long devotion to all things Dionysus deeply informs our understanding of the play. Works cited comprise standard pieces as well as less-well-known ones and include items with a 2022 publication date.
In what follows I comment on only a very few individual lemmata.
1-2: I think the editors could have made more of the play’s opening word, ἥκω. While they note that it has a “more marked resonance” here because the god is returning home, in fact this verb often means just this, “return” (LSJ I.3), and as the very first word in the play it announces that the drama is in fact a kind of nostos. Later (n. 83-8), they do observe that the verb κατάγουσαι refers to bringing the god back, i.e., home. The most apt parallel for this use of ἥκω at the start of a nostos drama is Aeschylus, LB 3, where the verb is paired with κατέρχομαι.
170-369: This introductory note (on the episode beginning with Teiresias’s arrival) can stand as an example of the fullness and strength of the preliminary notes. It concisely deals with Teiresias’s peculiar appearance, the unusual (slightly comic) tone of the first part of the scene, the way Pentheus’s character is introduced, the ironic nature of the different arguments posed by the old men, and the king’s stubborn rejection that will be displayed throughout the first half of the drama. These items are then, in turn, taken up in the lemmata.
246-7: κἀγχόνης . . . ἄξια is interpreted, as by most editors, as referring to another form of punishment to inflict on the stranger (a few lines earlier he had promised to behead him), whereas its more common and, I think, more likely meaning here is something akin to “worth hanging oneself over,” expressing Pentheus’s exasperation over these acts of insolence.
402-16: This note effectively both connects this stanza to other “escape odes” in Euripides and also explains how the two imagined places of escape are described “in terms that evoke the sexually disruptive nature of Dionysiac rites.”
657-786. As do several other of Euripides’ later plays, Bacchae has more than one messenger scene. The opening notes on both the first one (the miracles in the mountains) and the later one (the spying and death of Pentheus, 1043-1152) are particularly detailed and together serve as a valuable overview of these scenes in Euripides.
810-16: A&S argue against the view that, starting with the pivotal extra-metric monosyllable ἆ, Pentheus is “taken over” by the god; they observe that Pentheus continues to make choices and act freely. “Thus Pentheus is acting as he does because of divine intervention, but Dionysus merely makes it easier for him to pursue his true desire, rather than compelling him or taking over this mind.” It is only in the next episode that the young king with his hallucinations shows his psychic dissolution under the god’s influence; see n. 912-76.
963-4: In the discussion of Pentheus as a type of φαρμακός (“scapegoat”), I expected a reference to Oedipus in the OT.
1348 and 1349: A&S present an instructive note about the gap between “human hope and divine reality” and then discuss Zeus’s role in assenting to the events, arguing that Zeus’s harshness is not an “excuse” but a bald fact. It would have been useful to refer the reader to Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s The Justice of Zeus.
The editors acknowledge in the Preface a perhaps biased opinion that Bacchae is Euripides’ best surviving play. Perhaps not everyone will agree with this bias, but everyone will benefit greatly from this exemplary commentary, which will stimulate further excitement about and reflection on this most powerful and extraordinary drama.