The Bacchae Critical Analysis

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Reading Response: Euripides’ The Bacchae Euripides’ The Bacchae is a play about the cult of Dionysus, and more specifically about what happened to the city of Thebes after the king, Pentheus, prohibited the worship of Dionysus. The play begins with a lengthy monologue from Dionysus, in which he describes his birth, and journey throughout the East. As the first character to appear in the play, he also explains the reasons why future events will take place. He describes the actions of his mother’s sisters, his aunts, and the actions of the king, Pentheus. Dionysus is a vengeful god, and the message that this play sends to the audience is that “When insulted, gods do not forgive” (line 1818). As Dionysus describes in his opening monologue, he was born from Zeus’s thigh after his …show more content…

He says that they scorn both him and his mother, saying that they “gossiped that this Dionysus is no child of Zeus, that Semele having slept with some man proceeded…to attribute her sinful conception to God. No wonder Zeus struck her dead…” (line 34-38). So after hearing about the words and actions of his aunts, he drives the three of them mad, and they are compelled to go into the mountains to worship Dionysus along with the Bacchae (followers of Dionysus) and the rest of the women in Thebes. The god Dionysus is taking revenge against the city of Thebes, and even says that the people of the city “…must learn…how much it costs to scorn God’s mysteries” (line 48-50). But the vengeance is not only towards the entire city, but is made more personal because the people that are scorning his mother and his own divinity are his mother’s family. As the reigning king of Thebes, Pentheus, his own cousin, has outlawed worship of Dionysus, and the god cannot let this injustice stand. He even describes the events that follow as a score that must be settled (line

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