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157 V Euripides’s Verdict The Bacchae This, Aristotle knew better than Nietzsche: Euripides may still be the most tragic of all tragedians, not least because he gave tragedy its last blow, as Nietzsche later concluded. Excessive dialectics, deus ex machina, whatever else smacks of rationalization in many of Euripides’s tragedies—it is hard not to concede to Nietzsche his point.1 Nevertheless, Euripides may claim the title of the most tragic poet not only by default but in a substantive way, and he may do so through his last tragedy alone. The Bacchae,2 his swan song, written in exile and performed posthumously, marks also the last work left of the three great tragedians. Finding the beginning in the end, The Bacchae enacts the Nietzschean drama par excellence, showing “the founding myth of the theater itself,” as Froma Zeitlin remarks (136), by staging its birth in the Dionysian cult.3 Here is a brief summary of the play: An exile god, Dionysus returns from his Asiatic wanderings to his native Thebes to set the record straight about his lineage and punish his Theban family for dishonoring his mother’s name and ignoring his divinity. In this conflict, his antagonist is Pentheus, the young prince of Thebes and Dionysus’s maternal cousin. A man of rationality, Pentheus rejects the ecstatic nature of Dionysian worship. The god’s faithful followers make up the chorus of slave women, the Bacchae, who exalt him as their liberator. Since the god has possessed the Theban women, who have taken to the mountains for a fertility rite, Pentheus feels taunted to go spy on them, capture them, and restore order. Dionysus’s terrible revenge is to take over Pentheus’s mind as well and to use the latter’s specular fantasies of the mountain orgy against him. Convincing him to disguise himself as a woman 158 for the love of truth so as to watch, Dionysus parades Pentheus through Thebes to the mountain whereupon he is torn to pieces by his own mother, Agave, who confuses him for a wild beast. The House of Thebes is completely destroyed as the god concludes his revenge by banishing even Pentheus’s old grandparents, Cadmus and Harmonia, despite Cadmus’s professed faith in him. For the first and last time, the god of tragedy appears on stage,4 rehearsing the most quintessentially tragic themes: the quest for origin and identity on the one hand and the veneration and vindication of the family dead on the other. Returning from exile to his native land, the young god seeks to establish his matrilineal heritage, prove his divinity, and impose rites of worship on his faithless kin. His tribute to the tomb of his mother, Semele, which opens the play, is followed by the oath to avenge her sullied name and restore her true reputation as Zeus’s consort. While the god’s search for origin enacts the genre’s own genealogy, Pentheus’s dismemberment commemorates the terrifying rituals of Dionysus Zagreus and reveals the symbolic structure of all tragic suffering to be the atonement of a mortal sovereign at the hands of divinity: tragedy’s antipolitical impulse takes center stage as two incommensurate discourses, two irreconcilable modes of truth-telling—the ecstatic and the civic—confront each other to the latter’s complete annihilation.5 In what follows, I will concentrate on the exchanges between Dionysus and Pentheus, which put forth two modes of truth and truth-telling. While the prophetic mode of Dionysus’s speech is enhanced by the god’s duplicity, the rationalist mode of Pentheus’s rebuttals demands a straightforward attitude. Yet Euripides’s mastery of reversals turns the tables in time: just as the liberating god speaks his prophecies shackled, so the straightforward Pentheus falls victim to the god’s duplicity and, masking himself as a woman, participates unwittingly in his own demise. Given Foucault’s interest in the transition of parrhesia from the oracle to the agora in Euripides’s Ion, where Apollo refrained from speaking parrhesiastically, I would like to consider this same transition in The Bacchae, where Dionysus speaks, but in a doublespeak that proves as deceitful as Apollo’s silence. The Bacchae should be read as the companion piece to Ion, if only for the reason that between the two plays, the question of parrhesia’s transition from the temple to the city is rehearsed between the pair of oracular gods who claim Delphi: Apollo and Dionysus. In The Bacchae, as...

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