604. Greek Myths: Sex, Drugs & Tragedy (Part 3)

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0:47Agave was foaming at the mouth. Her rolling eyes were wild. She was not in her right mind, but possessed by Bacchus, and she paid no heed to Pentheus. She grasped his left arm between wrist and elbow, set her foot against his ribs, and tore his arm off by the shoulder. It was no strength of hers that did it, but the god filled her and made it easy. On the other side, Aino was at him, tearing at his flesh. And now, Autinoe joined them, and the whole maniacal horde. A single and continuous yell arose, Pentheus shrieking as long as life was left in him, the women howling in triumph. One of them carried off an arm, another a foot, the boots still laced on it, The ribs were stripped, clawed clean, and women's hands, thick red with blood, were tossing, catching like a plaything Pentheus's flesh.

1:45So, that is the devastating climax of the most shocking, the most blood-soaked and notorious of all Greek tragedies, the Bacchae, by the great Athenian dramatist Euripides. It's a terrible scene. Pentheus is being ripped into pieces by these women possessed with the spirit of Bacchus, as he describes it. And the little bits of his flesh are left scattered under rocks and over trees. Tom, you chose this lovely reading in the episode. Why? It's unbelievably dramatic. and it I mean it reads like you know a kind of description from The Walking Dead or 28 days later it has a kind of real zombie vibe and the scene where this is happening is Mount Kitharon which is the very same mountain range south of Thebes in central Greece where the infant Oedipus in Sophocles play which we talked about in the previous episode was taken from his parents palace So generally it's a place where terrible things happen.

2:51But the action in this play, in the Bacchae, with this poor man being torn to pieces, is set four generations before the time of Oedipus. So Pentheus, the guy who's being torn to pieces, he was the grandfather of Jocasta, who was Oedipus' mother stroke wife. And he ruled as Oedipus was going to rule in due course as the king of Thebes. And we highlighted in the previous episode how the Theban royal family is the most dysfunctional dynasty in the whole of Greek myth. And this episode absolutely sets the seal on this reputation because Agave, who you described ripping off Penthis' left arm, is Penthis' mother.

3:38Oh my God. And Aino and Otonawe, who are joining in the fun, are his aunts. so it's you know as family rendezvous go picnics up on the mountain this is a very very bad one and what's going on here is not that they are you know you used your um the walking dead parallel they're not zombies no they're in a kind of way they are they have become possessed haven't they become ravers i see in your notes so what's that mynads mynads yes so they've become what the The Greeks called Minads, literally ravers. And they have been gripped by a frenzy that in Greek was called a bakaya. And when you join a bakaya, if you're a Minad, you dress up in the skins of fawns or leopards and you roam the uplands.

4:25You know, you leave the kind of the plains, centers of civilization and go up into the hills. And up there, you either you suckle wild animals. So you put them to your breast or you tear them to pieces with your bare hands. And this is a rite of kind of ecstatic dismemberment called spragmos in Greek. And if you are a mynad who is particularly off her face, then you might go one step further and eat, tear the flesh off your victim and eat it raw, which again, the Greek is called omophagia. And the excitement of it is that you are subverting every norm that governs conventional society in Greece.

5:12So you are abandoning your city for the uplands, for the wilds. You're human, but you're turning into a wild beast. And if you're a woman, then you are casting off all the kind of the rules, the assumptions, the decorum that are supposed to govern your behavior. and in the Bacchae Euripides describes the Mynads turning men to flight so men are playing the role of women it's subverting gender norms as critics would say now we love doing that and the rest is history and this is what the Bacchaeia is all about but having said that it's not just Mynads who are doing it you also get men who are called satires and the satire has a hint of the goat like David Lloyd George yes yes well like lord george it's this kind of the the exciting sense that you're casting off the norms and you can do whatever you like yeah and my nads satires both are following the same god and one of the names that this god has is bacchus for obvious reasons he's the god of the bacchaeia um he's also known as omestes the eater of raw flesh has a whole host of other names but his His original name, the name by which the Greeks generally refer to him, is Dionysus.

6:33Right, so Dionysus. Of all the Greek gods, Tom, I have to say I've always found him the most mysterious, and obviously he's the most unsettling because of the rites that are associated with him. And we talked in previous episodes about how people generally encounter the Greek myths when they're children, as children's stories. But Dionysus doesn't really fit in them at all. When people think of the Olympians, he's not one of the names that first comes up. But as we'll see, as I know you're going to talk about, scholars have become more and more interested in Dionysus over the last century or so.

7:04And he's moved from the periphery really to sort of center stage in historians' understandings of the Greeks and their, and I was about to say their religion. I know you'll question the word religion and their experience of the supernatural. Yes, exactly. Yes. Yeah, so Dionysus tends not to feature in children's books. And also he has always been a challenge to those who have an idea of ancient Greece as a world of serenity and kind of harmony. Lovely marble. Light and rationalism and all of that. And this was a stereotype of ancient Greece that was very popular, particularly in Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries.

7:48So enthusiasts for ancient Greece were always kind of mooning over the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur, as one of them put it, of Greek civilization. But there was a kind of reaction against that bubbling under in 19th century Germany. and the classicist who most famously reacts against it is the great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who oddly ends up talking to a horse in a quite kind of Dionysian manner but very early on in his career long before that he published a book called The Birth of Tragedy and he was only 28 when he did it he was already a professor of Greek and essentially in that book he is doing for Dionysus, what Freud would do for Oedipus a couple of decades later, kind of make him into, I guess you'd call him a meme now, an expression of something that seems simultaneously very ancient, but kind of thrillingly modern, thrillingly 19th century.

8:51And what Nietzsche is doing in The Birth of Tragedy is to contrast Dionysus with Apollo, who for the Greeks is the god of light of beauty and Nietzsche insists that you can't really understand greek civilization if you just emphasize the light and the beauty you also have to recognize the deeply dionysian qualities right the greek civilization had as well and you know i mean Nietzsche is more than familiar with the Bacchae the Bacchae plays a key role in the birth of tragedy and he you know he all this kind of tearing people to pieces and things. He says he recognizes the darkness. He said an effusive transgression of the sexual order whose waves swept away all family life and its venerable principles, an abominable mixture of sensuality and cruelty.

9:39So he's saying that's a bad thing. Right. Not in favor of that. But then he is also saying that it has, you know, the brilliant size to it. Essentially, it's fun. Whereas he puts it the blissful rapture, which rises up from the innermost depths of men. I mean, that is German for fun, basically. Yeah. I'm sure that he expressed that in one word. Yeah, in one huge German word. Yeah. The essence of the Dionysus, Nietzsche says, basically it's like getting drunk. It's like getting pissed. It's intoxication. And Dionysus for the Greeks is the God who invents wine. So famously Dionysus is the God of getting drunk.

10:16But he's also the god who is there when humans experience the thrill of nature that has not been tamed by humans. So the thrill of the wild. And also, and I think very germanely, and this is part of what Nietzsche found so fascinating about it, and it's certainly what people have found fascinating about it in the 20th century, the sense of ecstasy that you get when you dissolve your own individual sense of yourself into a crowd. A huge theme of 20th century writing and 20th century criticism, right? So, I mean, I know you're going to make a comparison with the 1960s. You know, having read loads of sort of countercultural stuff in the 1960s, people were always going on about this.

10:57about the joy of Dionysian revels, and that was what the Sixties represented, and that was the spirit, and we were absolutely reveling in the idea of sort of being something. It is quite a kind of Freudian idea that there's something deep down buried that needs to be let out by drinking or by taking drugs and by forgetting your individuality and becoming one with your friends, you will express some deeper, more authentic truth. And that's, as you say, a massive thing in the 60s, but going into rave culture, I mean, a Maynard is literally a raver. And the idea of going off to a field in Hampshire and taking Ease and Whiz, you could dignify it by saying this is Dionysian.

11:41But there is also a much darker side to Dionysian, the notion of the Dionysian in the 20th century. So there was a seminal study of the Bacchae written by a guy with a splendid name of R.P. Winnington Ingram, which came out in 1947. So immediately after the Second World War, called Euripides and Dionysus. Winnington Ingram had witnessed the Nuremberg rallies. And in the introduction to his book, he wrote, we have lived through events which have demonstrated tragically the dangers of group emotion. He doesn't specify what it is, but in 1947, everyone knows what he's referring to. And so you can see why the idea of the Dionysus, I mean, it's a very powerful one, because if it can embrace both the counterculture of the 60s and the Nuremberg rallies, you're covering a lot of bases there.

12:28And I think that although today classicists do not accept the precise details of the technical arguments that Nietzsche goes into in The Birth of Tragedy, what they do accept is his broader case, which is that Dionysus has a really central role in Greek civilization, in Greek culture, and more generally the irrational. right you know there's a famous book by e.r dodds the greeks and the irrational i mean even apollo i mean apollo is counterpointed to dionysus by nietzsche but apollo is an absolute bastard as well i mean he you know he's killing everyone left right and center too so the sense of the the dark and the strange and the weird and the ecstatic is crucially a part of greek mythology but a greek myth but not of the legends right so here's the thing a lot of people when they saw we're doing a series about greek myths would have been like oh they're going to do heracles they're going to do perseus oh dionysus that's a slightly niche one to choose and is that because dionysus he doesn't really feature in a lot of the kind of canonical stories now why is that why is he is he even mentioned in the iliad at all he they're very fleeting references to him by homer by hesiod and he's not a central figure in any way as you say and that is crucially important because as we said we've said already the greek understanding of the gods is mediated by poets not by priests or prophets.

13:50What about temples? Are there temples to him? Not many temples either. And in fact, as happens in the plot of the Bacchae, Dionysus seems much keener on kind of pulling temples down than having them erected to him. And I think a further reason why Dionysus seems slightly at the margins of the kind of conventional understanding of Greek myth is that he is conventionally portrayed as a very young god, kind of very youthful. and he is also described as coming from beyond Greece and particularly from the east so in the Bacchae for instance Dionysus describes himself as arriving in Thebes from Asia the fields of Lydia and Phrygia fertile in gold and Wilmington Ingram in that book which published in 1947 he completely takes for granted that Dionysus is a very recent import that he's only just come to Greece.

14:40And this is why he's not really mentioned by Homer or by Hesiod. But actually, our understanding of who Dionysus is, has been completely transformed since the 1940s. Because in the 1950s, tablets from the Mycenaean citadels in Greece and from Crete were cracked. And these kind of very ancient tablets. And it revealed that actually Dionysus is one of the oldest Olympians. And he has a temple on one of the islands in the Aegean that has been dated as far back as the 15th century BC. So he is actually, you know, I mean, he's been part of the Greek imagination for a very, very long time. And although he's kind of hazy, perhaps, in the public imagining as a figure of myth, and although his cult does seem weird and strange when compared to the cults of other gods.

15:33He is no less Greek than Apollo. And that's basically what Nietzsche had kind of intuited. And so his strangeness is not, you know, it's not a bug. It's an absolute feature. It's there at the heart of Greek culture right from the very beginning. Well, let's try to tell his story a little bit. So obviously the fact that he's not covered by these great poets or he's not really covered in the same detail means that it's harder to piece together, to create a canonical story for him, as we did for, you know, you told the story of Zeus, for example, or you could do it with Hermes or Apollo or whoever.

16:08Now, there are lots of different rival traditions, aren't there? So one of them is that the Titans tore him apart and then they ate him and then they put him back together, which strikes me as it's kind of drawing on the rituals that he's associated with. And then the other is that he's the son of Zeus and Persephone, who's the queen of the underworld. Which one of those do you go for or do you go for neither? I go for all of them. okay um and and bear in mind that that um persephone was uh zeus's daughter yeah okay yeah by his sister um so there's a there's a whole load of incest going on there there's a lot and there's also there were traditions that there were actually two gods called dionysus so essentially i think what you have is that the stories told of dionysus are like you know haze of smoke it's impossible to get a finger on them they're always kind of drifting away but having said that, in Thebes, there is a very distinctive tradition and it derives from the one significance reference to Dionysus that we do get in Hesiod.

17:07So we talked about him in the first episode. He wrote a poem called The Theogony that discusses where the gods came from. And to the extent that there is a kind of canonical account of the origins of the gods, Hesiod provides it. And so what Hesiod has to say about Dionysus, even though it's very fleeting, has a lot of weight. So what Hesiod said, Cadmus' daughter Semele for Zeus, a resplendent son in shared intimacy, marry Dionysus, immortal son of mortal mother. And Cadmus, who we talked about in the previous episode, the Phoenician - Sowing dragon's teeth. Sowing dragon's teeth. The Phoenician prince who had gone to look for his sister Europa, never finds her, comes to Thebes and founds Thebes.

17:51He is the father of Agave, the mother of Pentheus who tears him to pieces. And that means that Pentheus, the son of Agave, is the cousin of Dionysus. So very much a family affair. Very much a family affair. And this is the story that Euripides, who is in Athens, you know, just down the road from Thebes, is drawing on for the opening of the Bacchae. So the play opens with Dionysus himself. He's standing on the stage and he announces to the watching audience who he is. I am Dionysus, son of Zeus. My mother was Semele, Cadmus's daughter. From her womb, the fire of a lightning flash delivered me. And as so often in tragedy, we don't get the full story because the playwright is assuming that the audience already knows it.

18:36And the reason that Euripides can assume that people know this is because another famous playwright called Aeschylus had actually written a celebrated play about exactly this drama. And so as far as we can tell, the story that is told in Thebes and then recycled by the Athenian tragedians about the birth of Dionysus in Thebes goes as follows. so Semele is a priestess of Zeus in Thebes and she's very beautiful and so inevitably she attracts the attention of Zeus who transforms himself into an eagle and repeatedly descends on her and very rapidly gets her pregnant with Dionysus and it's evident from the beginning that Dionysus is something special because you only have to touch Semele's pregnant belly and you were driven into a kind of ecstatic madness.

19:29Hera, the wife of Zeus, relentlessly jealous, understandably, because of Zeus's record of philandering. She finds out about this, and it's a slightly kind of Snow White in the Disney film vibe. She transforms herself into an old crone, and she visits Semele, and she says, you know, you think that this eagle coming every night is Zeus. But I mean, how do you know? Are you sure about this? And Semele starts to worry about this and says, well, how can I find out? And Hera says, the only way that you can know it is Zeus is if you ask him to reveal himself in the full refulgent glory of his divine splendor.

20:12And Semele says, okay, well, I'll do that. And so she's in bed with Zeus. I don't know whether he's turned into a Zeus or whether he's still an eagle, I mean, stroking his feathers or whatever and she says darling um you know promise me something and Zeus says I promise you whatever and Semele says absolutely swear it solemnly you cannot break it and Zeus says fine and then Semele says I want you if you are Zeus to show me your full glory and Zeus desperately tries to back out of it you know try to say please don't make me do this but Semele insists and so Zeus has no choice and he reveals himself this kind of scorching blaze it's like looking into the heart of um I don't know an atom bomb going off or something it completely shrivels and destroys Semele and she's left as kind of charred smoldering ash and Zeus picks up the unborn baby who's been left undamaged by this manifestation and he sews um the fetus into his thigh.

21:13And then a few weeks later, Dionysus is born. So a very, a very improbable, implausible story your father would probably describe it as. He would. But this is what the Thebans absolutely thought had happened. This is the story that is being invoked at the start of Euripides' play because Dionysus describes in it how his mother's house smoulders with the still living flame of Zeus's fire. And Dionysus notes approvingly that Cadmus, who is still alive, So the very, by this point, aged founder of Thebes has consecrated the house of Semele as holy, as sacred to the gods. And Dionysus himself boasts of having decked it round with sprays of young vine leaves.

21:54So the vine, of course, is holy to Dionysus. Yeah. So that's Thebes. But there are Athenian traditions as well, aren't there? They're kind of rival traditions because the Athenians say, OK, fine, you know, he was born in Thebes, but he came to Athens. And they have a festival to celebrate it, don't they? the anthesteria which is held in the spring it is and it's it's um as is the way with dionysus it's simultaneously ecstatically joyous and deeply deeply unsettling so the fun side first essentially the anthesteria is a kind of great communal celebration and all of dionysus's festivals are communal it's all about the ecstasy of becoming part of a huge crowd and it marks the opening and the drinking of the previous year's vintage.

22:41And everybody in Athens shares in this. So slaves share in it and women who normally are discouraged from drinking wine, they also can have a tipple. And it's great fun. There's a huge procession. Dionysus is escorted into Athens from Piraeus, the port, in a cart. And this cart has been made up to look like a ship. As the cart is led into Athens, it's surrounded by huge phalluses. And the whole celebration is inspired by a famous poem that describes Dionysus' victory over pirates. The pirates are taking Dionysus' passenger. They try to kidnap him and murder him. And Dionysus turns into a lion.

23:22And as he does so, vines start to grow out from the mast and to wrap the tendrils, wrap around the rigging. and then the oars and everything. And all the pirates are turned into dolphins. Just on the festival, this is a very boring and banal question, sorry, but you said Dionysus is escorted into the city in a cart decorated sort of like a ship. When you say Dionysus, do you mean a statue? Is that an effigy of Dionysus? Well, we will come to exactly who Dionysus is in this celebration in a minute. I mean, you're absolutely right to fix on that because the thing that is representing Dionysus is incredibly interesting and then ties into the second festival that we'll be talking about.

24:02Exciting, tantalising. But just sticking to the anthosteria at the moment, this idea of a great festival of Dionysus arriving in a city is clearly something that Euripides is echoing in the Bacchae. And the other thing that he is echoing in the Bacchae is the absolutely central role in this festival that is played by women. So there is a band of women who are called the Venerable Ones. So presumably they're kind of more elderly. They are appointed to make a nighttime sacrifice to Dionysus in one of the few temples that have been erected to him. But it's telling that this temple is not in the city.

24:37It's out in the marshes. And it is only ever opened during this festival. And they all go out there. And one of them who has been appointed queen of the Venerable Ones, then we are told has sex with Dionysus. And what exactly that means, I mean, we will never know. We have no idea what that actually means. But there are illustrations on vases made in Athens that shows the venerable ones at this shrine out in the marshes. And they're drinking and they're dancing and they're making sacrifice before the idol of Dionysus. And this idol, Dominic, this is what you were asking about. It's very primitive.

25:16It's not the kind of, you know, the glowing sculpture that you would get in the museum today. It's not what you kind of imagine as a Greek statue. It's essentially a pole with a mask hanging from it. how would you have carnal relations with a mask well it's a mask hanging from a pole I suppose the pole so who knows what's on the pole yeah the pole but I mean the mask what part of that anyway I'm overthinking it I'm massively overthinking this element you're not overthinking it because it is an intriguing question and you know if you've got a festival with huge fallacies I mean we don't know yeah and I think lots of Greeks didn't know I mean that was part of the fascination of what were these women getting up to in their temple and so you can see that it would as with us, kind of inspire all kinds of male fantasies and questions that is then part of the context for what Euripides is doing.

26:05And that mask from the evidence of Athenian pottery, which is really the only evidence that we have, does seem from very ancient times to have been specifically associated with Dionysus. And the mask plays a key role in the other great festival that is celebrated in Athens. And in this festival, the huge mass of the city's male citizens assemble in a theatre on the slopes below the Acropolis to watch the staging of myths by actors who are wearing masks. And this is a festival called the Great Dionysia and it was staged in late spring. And unlike the Anthesteria, it's of relatively recent origin.

26:45So the late 6th century BC, Anthesteria origins reach back centuries and centuries. This festival is inaugurated while Athens is still under the rule of tyrants. But the tyrants get expelled. The democracy is founded. And this festival, and particularly the acting out of stories by people wearing masks becomes a key part of the culture of democratic Athens. It has at its heart this amazing cultural innovation that the Athenians call drama. So that obviously includes tragedy, but it also includes comedy, and it includes things called satire plays. And these are plays that have satires, so the male followers of Dionysus as a chorus.

27:32That's its own genre, satire. That's its own genre. Have any of them survived? Yeah. We have fragments of it. Tony Harrison kind of wrote one to give people a sense of what it might have been like. Right. Was it good? Yeah, it's good. yeah i mean if you like if you like a satire play yeah yeah actually i mean i check it out i mean i don't know anything about satire plays so i don't know give it a go i mean i should give it a go open-minded yeah i'm very open-minded you know me so you've got your satire plays they're clearly dionysan but actually the the tragedies and comedies even though they don't always i mean most of the surviving ones don't have dionysus at its center nevertheless it's clear i think that the whole festival is very, very Dionysian.

28:17So to quote Richard Seaford, who wrote an excellent book on Dionysus, the drama festival was performed in a sanctuary of Dionysus, along with rituals for Dionysus during a festival of Dionysus. And on top of that, Dionysus is viewed as one of the key sources for poetic inspiration. I think we can conclude from that that Dionysus definitely had a part to play in drama. He absolutely does. And also think about the communal nature of it. Oh yeah, the crowd, the audience. Huge, huge numbers of people gathering. Do women attend? We're never told that they don't, but probably not. There's probably not room for them.

28:55I mean, maybe a priestess or two there, but probably this is a, you know, it's the mass of the male citizens who were there and they're sitting down to watch stories that may not feature Dionysus himself, but these stories tend to have themes that echo stories that are told about Dionysus. So royal dynasties tearing themselves to pieces. So you get that in Oedipus, for instance. Dramatic moments of revelation, dramatic moments where fortunes are upended and reversed, and the downfall of someone who thinks to defy the gods while a chorus watches on. So all of that you get in Oedipus. But what you get in the Bacchae is Dionysus himself.

29:34So he is there nakedly. For the Greeks, it's the equivalent of drinking wine unmixed with water. If you think about a conventional tragedy, Dionysus isn't present. That's the watered down wine. If you have Dionysus at the center of the tragedy, that is like drinking neat wine. And the Greeks tended not to do that because they knew that it was incredibly dangerous. Oh, it's exciting. So we've got to the neat wine. It is powerful. It's intoxicating. It's dangerous. And that is the Bacchae. And we're going to be asking the second half, why and when was it staged? When it was? What did people think of it?

30:09What on earth was the point of it? And what did people think of it when they first saw it? And how does it point towards an excitingly radical interpretation of myth, Tom? I'm just reading from your notes here. Yeah, you're doing it brilliantly. Yeah. One that continues to influence how we tend to conceptualize the world to this day. I don't think we've ever had a more exciting cliffhanger. So come back in a minute. Dominic, can I just say, I mean, you could give it more welly because it really is exciting. What is happening in Athens at this point, and the Bacchae is channeling it, is something that is going to profoundly affect the way that the Greeks understand the world, but also continues to influence the way that we understand the world to this day.

30:51day so after the break probably the most important half hour of your lives like a half hour of tom holland chat that will change the way you see the world you see the greeks that you understand the meaning of your own life and your purpose on this earth come back after the ads or if you're the rest is history club plunge in right away to this intoxicating bath of undiluted wine and blood