The Fall Of Pentheus In Euripides Bacchae

Euripides’ Bacchae is one of his greatest works, a tragedy with popularity of such scope that even today people around the world are reading it, though most often in Classics classes. It provides the reader with a classical Greek tragedy, but also a gripping, funny, and ultimately sad story as we watch a proud man, the king of Thebes, Pentheus, ultimately fall to his own hubris, in his case thinking he can tame his people, or more specifically, outlaw the god Dionysus. This is meaningful beyond the obvious, as a symbol for trying to control your own “wild side” and how it inevitably ends in failure; For Pentheus his failure results in an absolutely gruesome death at the hands of his own mother, but my story tries to go in a different direction, instead offering Pentheus a way out of his predicament, in the form of Zeus, the divine ruler of the heavens and upholder of order. My story also tries to showcase some of the shortcomings of Dionysus’ wild nature in contrast to Pentheus’ level-headedness. Ultimately the ending of my version of the play has Pentheus fall prey to his own hubris as in the original, but adds a small touch relating him to another Greek myth.
Zeus, the son

To punish the people of Thebes, Dionysus released this uncatchable beast upon the citizens, ultimately to be turned to stone along with the mythical dog Laelaps by zeus, and transformed into the constellations Canis Minor and Canis Major, respectively. This relation to Thebes and Dionysus seemed to me too good to pass up so I worked an ending in where Pentheus would act under Dionysus’ wishes, and the calm, cunning nature of Pentheus during the challenges fits the idea of a fox, stereotypically associated with cunning and trapping prey. This ending is essentially the same as the original though, as Pentheus loses his life as the king of Thebes, through either literal death or servitude as a non human