What do you think?
Rate this book
The Bacchae of Euripides
From the renowned contemporary American poet C. K. Williams comes this fluent and accessible version of the great tragedy by Euripides.
This book includes an introduction by Martha Nussbaum.
This book includes an introduction by Martha Nussbaum.
Hardcover
First published September 9, 2014
13 people are currently reading
63 people want to read
About the author
C.K. Williams
70 books72 followersC.K. Williams was born and grew up in and around Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in philosophy and English. He has published many books of poetry, including Repair, which was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, The Singing which won the National Book Award for 2003, and Flesh and Blood, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998; a Guggeheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, the Los Angeles Book Prize, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He published a memoir, Misgivings, in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, Adam Zagajewski, as well as versions of the Japanese Haiku poet Issa.
His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998. and his most recent, In Time, in 2012. He published a book about Walt Whitman, On Whitman, in 2010, and in 2012 a book of poems, Writers Writing Dying. A book of prose poems, All At Once, will be published in 2014.
He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.
He published a memoir, Misgivings, in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, Adam Zagajewski, as well as versions of the Japanese Haiku poet Issa.
His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998. and his most recent, In Time, in 2012. He published a book about Walt Whitman, On Whitman, in 2010, and in 2012 a book of poems, Writers Writing Dying. A book of prose poems, All At Once, will be published in 2014.
He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
Read
December 3, 2022The amount of blood and violence is extreme in this play. Not for the faint hearted.
What made me think and rethink in this play are the women characters and the chorus. Women leave their normal place which is home duties at that era of history. When they leave it they leave it to the wild where they breastfeed animals and kill with their bare hands. Did that symbolize anything about the nature of women which I couldn't get or undertand?
Any help?
What made me think and rethink in this play are the women characters and the chorus. Women leave their normal place which is home duties at that era of history. When they leave it they leave it to the wild where they breastfeed animals and kill with their bare hands. Did that symbolize anything about the nature of women which I couldn't get or undertand?
Any help?
November 14, 2025
dionysus really said wouldn't it be funny if i...
October 7, 2023
Summary: The Bacchae is a classic Greek tragedy. Dionysus, slighted by his mortal aunts' malicious gossip that he is borne out of wedlock and not godhood, arrives at their hometown Thebes. He lures the women of the town into joining his bacchic revelry on Mount Cithaeron. Along with them are Dionysus' faithful Asian pilgrims and two Theban locals, Tiresias (an old seer) and Cadmus (former king). Pentheus, King of Thebes, is enraged and humiliated by the Dionysian celebrations. He sees them as both irrational and disrespectful. In his bluster, he unwittingly humiliates Dionysus which is all the excuse the god needs to exact the most brutal revenge on his mortal family. He lures Pentheus to the mountain and has him torn apart by his mother and aunts. Agave, thinking she has killed a lion, shows it off to the entire town until Cadmus awakens her to reality: she has killed her son, and their family is damned and exiled, fulfilling their foretold fates.
Review:
This is the first play I've ever read and it is so beautiful I cannot think of any flaw. This translation is gorgeous and made to be relished and reexamined regularly. God bless Williams and Euripides. Williams, particularly, has made it so that the poetry is very taut but accessible without modern cop-outs (looking at you, Anne Carson, and your taxi-taking Tiresias). There is a gravity to the stylistic antiquity of the language that feels tonally banal and serious at the same time. I love the chorus verses especially, with all their musical repetition. I'm grateful that TSH led me to this. My mind has latched on to Euripides' themes since. The introduction by Nussbaum is also an interesting read in itself and enriched my reading of Bacchae.
She discusses the Gods' proximity to bestiality and I find my main realization tangential: the perfection of their lives rings hollow. For all their godliness, they are subject to human failing but with immortal heartlessness. Greek gods are refreshing in their brutality as there is an honesty to it. They are bored. They play around in the mortal realm, where silly things have high stakes. Meanwhile, Christian God/s are just as cruel but on an insufferable moral high horse. Dionysus' petty and brutal revenge makes for good entertainment, for him.
It is good entertainment for us, too, this proximity to divinity-sanctioned madness. The more stringent humans are in their love for rationality, the deeper they fall into insanity. It is this tension that makes us human. I mean, look at Pentheus. I loved the exploration of this theme in terms of God, mortal, and beast. Nussbaum is quick to remind us that we are not to simplify a human being to be just "a stapling of God and beast". He is himself, of a unique nature shaped by these impossible tendencies to the extreme.
This madness and loss of control, Euripides shows, is solely acceptable if enabled by the divine. Is its allure its divinity, or man's tendency to beasthood but made palatable through divinity? Whichever it is, there is a subconscious pull towards terror, as it is shown as the highest form of mortal freedom there is. Euripides employs such beautiful imagery to sicken us: women, revelry in a darkened forest, wine, thrysi, fawnskin, and Dionysus' godlike beauty itself. As a larger metaphor, and as aptly put by Donna Tartt, beauty is terror and The Bacchae explores this in such a concise but wide way with uniquely alluring devices.
“What
is nobler
than
to hold
a dominating
hand
above
the bent
head of
the enemy?”
Excerpts (many):
-
“torn,
demented, from
the
holy.”
-
“the
first step
of the godly hunt
of
the unholy, ”
-
“this strange god some whole coherent form.”
-
“this strangeness and disorder are also in the spectators themselves, that they, or a part of them, have made it.”
-
“the green joy of the body”
-
“their pitiless belief that vengeance is the most beautiful thing. ”
-
“Whatever is kalon is always philon”
-
“ But what is the object of this moral/aesthetic appreciation? Vengeance and cruelty, punishment and death. It is not possible to separate the beautiful from the horrible. For the freedom to dance is also the hunting of the god’s enemy. And the cruelty of the god’s vengeance is a most beautiful thing, in the sense that it makes and has made possible the transcendent beauty of movement and passion”
-
“Nothing stands still for assessment.”
-
“the human being is not simply a stapling together of two unrelated groups of traits, the godlike abilities and the bestial limits.”
-
“The two “pieces” respond to and shape each other, producing something different and altogether new. Reason responds to need and need is educated by reason. The product of this interaction is social morality.”
-
“ A being with no limits cannot run a race; ”
-
“lack empathy with the struggle against limitation and need that is connected with them.”
-
“God seems to have something in common with beast.”
-
“Exalted and exalting, he totally lacks compassion; and his vengeance is not tempered by any sensitivity to the suffering he inflicts”
-
“What is stranger still is that, apparently, their full humanity depends on these exits.”
“What is a human morality, and what is its relation to the acknowledgment of Dionysus? Can there be a life that repudiates this religion and also remains moral, civilized, and fully human? Can there be a life that accepts and lives by this religion and also remains moral, civilized, and fully human? ”
“severity of form” (Dodds)15 is in striking tension with its strange and passionate content”
“which compassion was sometimes strangely mingled with a lack of sensitivity to one’s own excess and cruelty.”
-
“One is a pure reason, the other a dancing body.”
-
“the stranger is simply a fake, a charmer, no god at all.”
-
“concealing beneath his bluster the very desires he denounces, desires made sneaking and ugly by repression.”
-
“He is a god and exemplifies divine wisdom; but he is also heartless”
-
“witnessing sexual acts without being ensnared in the complexities of his own desires”
Analysis:
“The evidence of myth and cult together does in the end, Henrichs argues, provide a “consistent if contradictory”
-
“the religion of Dionysus as safe or tame or civilized, even when accepted, but rather as transgressive and heartless—and yet also as necessary, beautiful, divine.”
-
“full adult humanity cannot be attained in a life that resolutely closes off Dionysus and the impulses—erotic, ecstatic—that he brings to human life.”
-
“So the risks that Dionysian worship brings with it cannot be avoided altogether; they are there in humanity itself, and the only way to avoid them is by a violent suppression.”
-
“there is in humanity a permanent element that both fulfills and completes humanity and also seeks humanity’s extinction, ”
-
“We cannot and should not, being humans, close ourselves off from that element; for it will rage out of us and devour us. But if we open ourselves to accept it, then it may also rage out and devour us.”
-
“ecstasy and transcendence with the praise of moderation and keeping one’s place:”
-
“closing off passivity does not avoid passivity, as Athenians might like to believe. It simply brings passivity back in a more pernicious and shameful form.”
-
“pity makes a firm distinction between what is in our power, and therefore our fault, and what is not, and fear follows pity.”
-
“The dignity of the god is to smile; the dignity of these humans is to weep.”
-
“this fluidity is not simply weakness; it is, somehow, necessary for a good and fully human life. Or, to put it differently, the risk we run in trying to live humanly is not simply a risk of loss; it is a risk of evil. We do put one another together in pity and in love”
-
“Sometimes one may be lucky; sometimes one murders one’s own child; sometimes divine ecstasy is death.”
-
“Where, with pity, terror, and a peculiar awe, a community pieces itself together from the fragments of limbs torn in ecstatic rage. Dionysus presides.4”
-
“the
life
of calm, the
life of rational
tranquillity, ”
-
“What is
wisdom?
What
the fairest
gift the gods
can offer
us
below?”
-
“what has
long
been lawful,
over
centuries,
comes forever
out
of Nature.”
-
“He
is happy who,
from the
storm, from
the
ocean,
reaches
harbor, and he,
he
is happy who,
out of
labor, out
of toil,
has
risen. ”
-
“To understand
that we
are mortal
is to live
without insufferable
pain.”
-
“to be, day-
long, night-
long,
reverent,
pure, ”
-
“a light of sacred fire formed,
linking earth and heaven:”
-
“I’ve made mistakes, but I’m your son: don’t kill me!”
-
“Now I am nothing. You, a ruin. ”
-
QUOTES:
“Therefore I’ve stung them
with madness,”
-
“This city must learn, and know, against its will or not,
that it is uninitiated in my mysteries”
-
“in
the labor, difficult,
difficult
and sweet, the
sweet, exacting labor
of exalting
him”
-
“god, son
of god and
god, lead
him down!”
-
“a gold-
bound secret”
-
beast-nourished
serpents
“And the earth
flows, flows
beneath us, then
milk
flows, and wine
flows,
and nectar
flows, like
flame,
like the fire”
-
“Let’s not waste time. Let me lead you there.
TIRESIAS
Here, take my hand in yours.
CADMUS
I’m only human: I won’t despise the gods.”
-
upstart
deity,
-
“Whenever wine gleams at a women’s feast,
I say nothing’s healthy in those mysteries”
-
“Breaking off a fragment of the ether
the world floats in,”
-
“don’t believe that power
dominates in human life, and though
your sick imagination makes you think it,
don’t believe you’re sane.”
-
“You won’t persuade me to fight the god.
You’re mad, and there are no drugs to heal you,
because you must be drugged to be this painfully mad.”
-
“Come, we’ll support one another.
Hold your thyrsus. Two old men,
we mustn’t fall,”
-
“when the glistening
wine
into the holy,
ivy-bearing
god-feast”
-
“The gods
are far from
us: how far
in their azure
are they, how
far they
are, in their
eons:”
-
“Knowledge
is not wisdom:
cleverness
is not, not
without
awareness
of our
death,
not
without recalling
just how
brief
our flare
is. ”
-
“a life
rich by
day and
blessed at night”
-
“Untie his hands, he’s in my net,
he won’t be dancing out of this.”
-
“Look, the lintels
craze, and
look, the stones
craze! Over
the pillars, crazing,
the stone shatters!”
-
“O Light, without you there was no dance,
I was lost without you, Light.”
-
“the women from Thebes,
who shot bare-legged out of the city like arrows.”
-
“whose
fawnskin robes had slipped refastened them
with living snakes,”
-
“They carried fire on their hair
and weren’t scorched. ”
-
“Hopes
come one
by one, some
end well and
others
merely end.”
-
“Tell me, could I lift Cithaeron now—
Bacchae, cliffs, all of it: could I?”
-
“Will I need levers, or shall I tear the cliffs up
with my hands and put them on my shoulders?”
-
“Take me through Thebes now. Let all Thebes see
the single person man enough to dare all this.”
-
“My mother …
DIONYSUS
… a model for all men …
PENTHEUS
That’s my purpose.
DIONYSUS
You’ll be carried home …
PENTHEUS
You’re spoiling me!
DIONYSUS
… in your mother’s arms.
PENTHEUS
… No, you’re spoiling me.
DIONYSUS
Yes, I want to spoil you, in my way.
PENTHEUS
I’ll have what I deserve.
DIONYSUS
You’ll have the outcome you deserve.”
-
“Justice thrusts
through
the throat
now of the
godless, lawless
unjust son”
-
“all her crown of victory will really be
is tears. I want away from this calamity.”
-
“To know your human limits, to revere the gods,
is the noblest and I think the wisest course
that mortal men can follow.”
-
“a victory of tears
and
mourning. How
lovely is
the conflict, how
lovely,
with one’s bloody
hand
embracing,”
-
“CHORUS
… her savage …
AGAVE
… catch, lion …
CHORUS
… born, prod-
igious …
AGAVE
… catch …
CHORUS
… caught
prodigiously.
AGAVE
Prodigious
catch.”
-
“Put the dreadful burden
which was Pentheus here,”
-
“It was in the folds of Cithaeron, torn to shreds,
scattered through the impenetrable forest,”
-
“Here, Father,
take it in your hands, glory in my kill.”
-
“I cannot watch this. This is grief that has no measure.
What your poor hands accomplished was butchery.”
-
“With justice, but with too much severity,
Lord Bromius, our own blood, has ruined us.”
-
“CADMUS
Look carefully. Study it more closely.
AGAVE
I see horror. I see suffering. I see grief.”
-
“He, too, refused the god, and the god,
for this, has ruined us all—”
-
“Is there anyone who scorns the gods? Look now
at this murdered boy: now, believe!”
-
“show me how
to put his body back together.”
-
“This flesh I nurtured once, I kiss.
The fragments of this body I loved
once, ”
-
“First, your future will be suffering.
Then your future will be suffering again.”
-
“If you had understood your mortal natures
when you refused to understand them,”
-
“DIONYSUS
I am a god! You outraged my divinity.
CADMUS
Gods should not resemble mortals in anger.”
-
“Child, poor child, farewell.
Faring well, though, will be hard for you.”
-
“What we waited
for does not
come to pass, while
for what remained
undreamed the god
finds ways.
Just such
doing was this
doing.”
-
“You always know a voice like that, the wisdom in it.”
-
“I’ll dance, I’ll take my chances.”
-
“Take a lever, turn the whole thing over,”
-
“In this, more intelligent: customs vary.”
-
“Well, Bacchic backtalk. You wrestle well, with words”
-
“Take me. What isn’t to be suffered won’t be.”
-
“I left him there. I walked out quietly to you.”
-
“I’ll be patient: let him rage”
-
“don’t war against a god. Stay at peace.”
-
“They were soaring now, the god’s breath maddening them.”
-
helpless, wretched, treed.
“the priestess of the slaughter,”
-
“Your lives will wear away like sand.”
PHRASES:
divine vengeance
voluptuousness of disorder,
“the bitter, salt-sea coast of Asia”
warring with divinity
Words: Archaizing, scholia, diffidence, imperious, pedantic, imputed, dirge, expiate
Review:
This is the first play I've ever read and it is so beautiful I cannot think of any flaw. This translation is gorgeous and made to be relished and reexamined regularly. God bless Williams and Euripides. Williams, particularly, has made it so that the poetry is very taut but accessible without modern cop-outs (looking at you, Anne Carson, and your taxi-taking Tiresias). There is a gravity to the stylistic antiquity of the language that feels tonally banal and serious at the same time. I love the chorus verses especially, with all their musical repetition. I'm grateful that TSH led me to this. My mind has latched on to Euripides' themes since. The introduction by Nussbaum is also an interesting read in itself and enriched my reading of Bacchae.
She discusses the Gods' proximity to bestiality and I find my main realization tangential: the perfection of their lives rings hollow. For all their godliness, they are subject to human failing but with immortal heartlessness. Greek gods are refreshing in their brutality as there is an honesty to it. They are bored. They play around in the mortal realm, where silly things have high stakes. Meanwhile, Christian God/s are just as cruel but on an insufferable moral high horse. Dionysus' petty and brutal revenge makes for good entertainment, for him.
It is good entertainment for us, too, this proximity to divinity-sanctioned madness. The more stringent humans are in their love for rationality, the deeper they fall into insanity. It is this tension that makes us human. I mean, look at Pentheus. I loved the exploration of this theme in terms of God, mortal, and beast. Nussbaum is quick to remind us that we are not to simplify a human being to be just "a stapling of God and beast". He is himself, of a unique nature shaped by these impossible tendencies to the extreme.
This madness and loss of control, Euripides shows, is solely acceptable if enabled by the divine. Is its allure its divinity, or man's tendency to beasthood but made palatable through divinity? Whichever it is, there is a subconscious pull towards terror, as it is shown as the highest form of mortal freedom there is. Euripides employs such beautiful imagery to sicken us: women, revelry in a darkened forest, wine, thrysi, fawnskin, and Dionysus' godlike beauty itself. As a larger metaphor, and as aptly put by Donna Tartt, beauty is terror and The Bacchae explores this in such a concise but wide way with uniquely alluring devices.
“What
is nobler
than
to hold
a dominating
hand
above
the bent
head of
the enemy?”
Excerpts (many):
-
“torn,
demented, from
the
holy.”
-
“the
first step
of the godly hunt
of
the unholy, ”
-
“this strange god some whole coherent form.”
-
“this strangeness and disorder are also in the spectators themselves, that they, or a part of them, have made it.”
-
“the green joy of the body”
-
“their pitiless belief that vengeance is the most beautiful thing. ”
-
“Whatever is kalon is always philon”
-
“ But what is the object of this moral/aesthetic appreciation? Vengeance and cruelty, punishment and death. It is not possible to separate the beautiful from the horrible. For the freedom to dance is also the hunting of the god’s enemy. And the cruelty of the god’s vengeance is a most beautiful thing, in the sense that it makes and has made possible the transcendent beauty of movement and passion”
-
“Nothing stands still for assessment.”
-
“the human being is not simply a stapling together of two unrelated groups of traits, the godlike abilities and the bestial limits.”
-
“The two “pieces” respond to and shape each other, producing something different and altogether new. Reason responds to need and need is educated by reason. The product of this interaction is social morality.”
-
“ A being with no limits cannot run a race; ”
-
“lack empathy with the struggle against limitation and need that is connected with them.”
-
“God seems to have something in common with beast.”
-
“Exalted and exalting, he totally lacks compassion; and his vengeance is not tempered by any sensitivity to the suffering he inflicts”
-
“What is stranger still is that, apparently, their full humanity depends on these exits.”
“What is a human morality, and what is its relation to the acknowledgment of Dionysus? Can there be a life that repudiates this religion and also remains moral, civilized, and fully human? Can there be a life that accepts and lives by this religion and also remains moral, civilized, and fully human? ”
“severity of form” (Dodds)15 is in striking tension with its strange and passionate content”
“which compassion was sometimes strangely mingled with a lack of sensitivity to one’s own excess and cruelty.”
-
“One is a pure reason, the other a dancing body.”
-
“the stranger is simply a fake, a charmer, no god at all.”
-
“concealing beneath his bluster the very desires he denounces, desires made sneaking and ugly by repression.”
-
“He is a god and exemplifies divine wisdom; but he is also heartless”
-
“witnessing sexual acts without being ensnared in the complexities of his own desires”
Analysis:
“The evidence of myth and cult together does in the end, Henrichs argues, provide a “consistent if contradictory”
-
“the religion of Dionysus as safe or tame or civilized, even when accepted, but rather as transgressive and heartless—and yet also as necessary, beautiful, divine.”
-
“full adult humanity cannot be attained in a life that resolutely closes off Dionysus and the impulses—erotic, ecstatic—that he brings to human life.”
-
“So the risks that Dionysian worship brings with it cannot be avoided altogether; they are there in humanity itself, and the only way to avoid them is by a violent suppression.”
-
“there is in humanity a permanent element that both fulfills and completes humanity and also seeks humanity’s extinction, ”
-
“We cannot and should not, being humans, close ourselves off from that element; for it will rage out of us and devour us. But if we open ourselves to accept it, then it may also rage out and devour us.”
-
“ecstasy and transcendence with the praise of moderation and keeping one’s place:”
-
“closing off passivity does not avoid passivity, as Athenians might like to believe. It simply brings passivity back in a more pernicious and shameful form.”
-
“pity makes a firm distinction between what is in our power, and therefore our fault, and what is not, and fear follows pity.”
-
“The dignity of the god is to smile; the dignity of these humans is to weep.”
-
“this fluidity is not simply weakness; it is, somehow, necessary for a good and fully human life. Or, to put it differently, the risk we run in trying to live humanly is not simply a risk of loss; it is a risk of evil. We do put one another together in pity and in love”
-
“Sometimes one may be lucky; sometimes one murders one’s own child; sometimes divine ecstasy is death.”
-
“Where, with pity, terror, and a peculiar awe, a community pieces itself together from the fragments of limbs torn in ecstatic rage. Dionysus presides.4”
-
“the
life
of calm, the
life of rational
tranquillity, ”
-
“What is
wisdom?
What
the fairest
gift the gods
can offer
us
below?”
-
“what has
long
been lawful,
over
centuries,
comes forever
out
of Nature.”
-
“He
is happy who,
from the
storm, from
the
ocean,
reaches
harbor, and he,
he
is happy who,
out of
labor, out
of toil,
has
risen. ”
-
“To understand
that we
are mortal
is to live
without insufferable
pain.”
-
“to be, day-
long, night-
long,
reverent,
pure, ”
-
“a light of sacred fire formed,
linking earth and heaven:”
-
“I’ve made mistakes, but I’m your son: don’t kill me!”
-
“Now I am nothing. You, a ruin. ”
-
QUOTES:
“Therefore I’ve stung them
with madness,”
-
“This city must learn, and know, against its will or not,
that it is uninitiated in my mysteries”
-
“in
the labor, difficult,
difficult
and sweet, the
sweet, exacting labor
of exalting
him”
-
“god, son
of god and
god, lead
him down!”
-
“a gold-
bound secret”
-
beast-nourished
serpents
“And the earth
flows, flows
beneath us, then
milk
flows, and wine
flows,
and nectar
flows, like
flame,
like the fire”
-
“Let’s not waste time. Let me lead you there.
TIRESIAS
Here, take my hand in yours.
CADMUS
I’m only human: I won’t despise the gods.”
-
upstart
deity,
-
“Whenever wine gleams at a women’s feast,
I say nothing’s healthy in those mysteries”
-
“Breaking off a fragment of the ether
the world floats in,”
-
“don’t believe that power
dominates in human life, and though
your sick imagination makes you think it,
don’t believe you’re sane.”
-
“You won’t persuade me to fight the god.
You’re mad, and there are no drugs to heal you,
because you must be drugged to be this painfully mad.”
-
“Come, we’ll support one another.
Hold your thyrsus. Two old men,
we mustn’t fall,”
-
“when the glistening
wine
into the holy,
ivy-bearing
god-feast”
-
“The gods
are far from
us: how far
in their azure
are they, how
far they
are, in their
eons:”
-
“Knowledge
is not wisdom:
cleverness
is not, not
without
awareness
of our
death,
not
without recalling
just how
brief
our flare
is. ”
-
“a life
rich by
day and
blessed at night”
-
“Untie his hands, he’s in my net,
he won’t be dancing out of this.”
-
“Look, the lintels
craze, and
look, the stones
craze! Over
the pillars, crazing,
the stone shatters!”
-
“O Light, without you there was no dance,
I was lost without you, Light.”
-
“the women from Thebes,
who shot bare-legged out of the city like arrows.”
-
“whose
fawnskin robes had slipped refastened them
with living snakes,”
-
“They carried fire on their hair
and weren’t scorched. ”
-
“Hopes
come one
by one, some
end well and
others
merely end.”
-
“Tell me, could I lift Cithaeron now—
Bacchae, cliffs, all of it: could I?”
-
“Will I need levers, or shall I tear the cliffs up
with my hands and put them on my shoulders?”
-
“Take me through Thebes now. Let all Thebes see
the single person man enough to dare all this.”
-
“My mother …
DIONYSUS
… a model for all men …
PENTHEUS
That’s my purpose.
DIONYSUS
You’ll be carried home …
PENTHEUS
You’re spoiling me!
DIONYSUS
… in your mother’s arms.
PENTHEUS
… No, you’re spoiling me.
DIONYSUS
Yes, I want to spoil you, in my way.
PENTHEUS
I’ll have what I deserve.
DIONYSUS
You’ll have the outcome you deserve.”
-
“Justice thrusts
through
the throat
now of the
godless, lawless
unjust son”
-
“all her crown of victory will really be
is tears. I want away from this calamity.”
-
“To know your human limits, to revere the gods,
is the noblest and I think the wisest course
that mortal men can follow.”
-
“a victory of tears
and
mourning. How
lovely is
the conflict, how
lovely,
with one’s bloody
hand
embracing,”
-
“CHORUS
… her savage …
AGAVE
… catch, lion …
CHORUS
… born, prod-
igious …
AGAVE
… catch …
CHORUS
… caught
prodigiously.
AGAVE
Prodigious
catch.”
-
“Put the dreadful burden
which was Pentheus here,”
-
“It was in the folds of Cithaeron, torn to shreds,
scattered through the impenetrable forest,”
-
“Here, Father,
take it in your hands, glory in my kill.”
-
“I cannot watch this. This is grief that has no measure.
What your poor hands accomplished was butchery.”
-
“With justice, but with too much severity,
Lord Bromius, our own blood, has ruined us.”
-
“CADMUS
Look carefully. Study it more closely.
AGAVE
I see horror. I see suffering. I see grief.”
-
“He, too, refused the god, and the god,
for this, has ruined us all—”
-
“Is there anyone who scorns the gods? Look now
at this murdered boy: now, believe!”
-
“show me how
to put his body back together.”
-
“This flesh I nurtured once, I kiss.
The fragments of this body I loved
once, ”
-
“First, your future will be suffering.
Then your future will be suffering again.”
-
“If you had understood your mortal natures
when you refused to understand them,”
-
“DIONYSUS
I am a god! You outraged my divinity.
CADMUS
Gods should not resemble mortals in anger.”
-
“Child, poor child, farewell.
Faring well, though, will be hard for you.”
-
“What we waited
for does not
come to pass, while
for what remained
undreamed the god
finds ways.
Just such
doing was this
doing.”
-
“You always know a voice like that, the wisdom in it.”
-
“I’ll dance, I’ll take my chances.”
-
“Take a lever, turn the whole thing over,”
-
“In this, more intelligent: customs vary.”
-
“Well, Bacchic backtalk. You wrestle well, with words”
-
“Take me. What isn’t to be suffered won’t be.”
-
“I left him there. I walked out quietly to you.”
-
“I’ll be patient: let him rage”
-
“don’t war against a god. Stay at peace.”
-
“They were soaring now, the god’s breath maddening them.”
-
helpless, wretched, treed.
“the priestess of the slaughter,”
-
“Your lives will wear away like sand.”
PHRASES:
divine vengeance
voluptuousness of disorder,
“the bitter, salt-sea coast of Asia”
warring with divinity
Words: Archaizing, scholia, diffidence, imperious, pedantic, imputed, dirge, expiate
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 14, 2024
I bought this edition for the introduction by Martha Nussbaum in which she writes this memorable line, "The dignity of the god is to smile; the dignity of these humans is to weep," which I first came across in Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character.
This line comes in Nussbaum's discussion of the final scene of the play where Agave picks up the disassembled body of her son, Pentheus, which she and the Bacchae had torn limb from limb under the trance of Dionysus. Like all Greek myths and stories, this is a story about a spited god who pays disproportionate retribution on the offending humans or, most commonly as in the case of The Bacchae, their offsprings. (Like, yes, Agave was not very nice to your mother, and Pentheus is a transphobe, but did you really have to do this to mortals that can't fight back, Dionysus?)
Neither Dionysus nor Pentheus appears heroic or right in the eyes of the modern reader, and I doubt either would have in the eyes of the contemporary Athenian audience, which is why Nussbaum's guide is all the more valuable. She she explains why the past scholarship's attempts to cast this play as a clash of the barbaric vs the polis, the spiritual vs the reason, have been dissatisfying, which affirms affirms the reader's discomfort and alienation from the gory crime-and-punishment revealed at the end of the play.
Not everyone likes to have someone else's interpretation color their reading experience, but I recommend Nussbaum's introduction. It's one of her best writings.
This line comes in Nussbaum's discussion of the final scene of the play where Agave picks up the disassembled body of her son, Pentheus, which she and the Bacchae had torn limb from limb under the trance of Dionysus. Like all Greek myths and stories, this is a story about a spited god who pays disproportionate retribution on the offending humans or, most commonly as in the case of The Bacchae, their offsprings. (Like, yes, Agave was not very nice to your mother, and Pentheus is a transphobe, but did you really have to do this to mortals that can't fight back, Dionysus?)
Neither Dionysus nor Pentheus appears heroic or right in the eyes of the modern reader, and I doubt either would have in the eyes of the contemporary Athenian audience, which is why Nussbaum's guide is all the more valuable. She she explains why the past scholarship's attempts to cast this play as a clash of the barbaric vs the polis, the spiritual vs the reason, have been dissatisfying, which affirms affirms the reader's discomfort and alienation from the gory crime-and-punishment revealed at the end of the play.
Not everyone likes to have someone else's interpretation color their reading experience, but I recommend Nussbaum's introduction. It's one of her best writings.
July 15, 2022
the introduction written by brown grad martha nussbaum is such a nightmare to get through and she should be stripped of her degree. but other than that it was a very fun classic greek tragedy, would be 5 stars if the intro was cut and martha was fired😍
May 26, 2017
Moral of the story: don't disrespect Dionysus. If you do, it will be hard to pick up the pieces.
April 11, 2023
Very readable, compelling translation. Every time I read an ancient Greek play I wish I knew Greek. It will never be possible to fully understand the original poetry in its original meter, but in this translation the work still has impact. It really was a page-turner for me, and the way the translator has set the chorus' words makes visual impact on top of the poetic. It is easy to see how this is a seminal work of western art as well as theater, with its tight construction and deep, complex material handling many themes.
Regarding the play itself: I was particularly blown away (and it was a surprise because I had zero knowledge of this myth beforehand) by how clearly the story presages the story of Jesus. But beyond that, it sets the stage (literally and figuratively) for how writers would deal with themes of insanity and justice for centuries - I thought in particular of Shakespeare and lots of operas.
Martha Nussbaum's intro is a very helpful overview of Euripides scholarship, at least prior to 1990 when this was published. It makes some compelling and insightful points without pretending to have "the" definitive interpretation. It therefore leaves much food for thought and opens doors to different ways of considering the play. Overall, a good complement to the play itself.
Regarding the play itself: I was particularly blown away (and it was a surprise because I had zero knowledge of this myth beforehand) by how clearly the story presages the story of Jesus. But beyond that, it sets the stage (literally and figuratively) for how writers would deal with themes of insanity and justice for centuries - I thought in particular of Shakespeare and lots of operas.
Martha Nussbaum's intro is a very helpful overview of Euripides scholarship, at least prior to 1990 when this was published. It makes some compelling and insightful points without pretending to have "the" definitive interpretation. It therefore leaves much food for thought and opens doors to different ways of considering the play. Overall, a good complement to the play itself.
March 25, 2018
The god Dionysus goes to Thebes in human form to justify his godliness and is beset upon by the king of Thebes, Pantheus. In revenge Dionysis concocts a way that Pantheus goes to the mountains where a beserk band of women, lead by Pantheus' own mother, exact Dionysus' revenge.
This is reported to be the greatest tragedy of all time, and it is pretty bloody and tragic. As with all Greek plays the language is such that it is hard to discern what is happening. But a bit of work understanding the elements before reading the play helped. Still a lot of work, so language sinks this do mid range for me.
Cautiously recommend.
This is reported to be the greatest tragedy of all time, and it is pretty bloody and tragic. As with all Greek plays the language is such that it is hard to discern what is happening. But a bit of work understanding the elements before reading the play helped. Still a lot of work, so language sinks this do mid range for me.
Cautiously recommend.
November 2, 2017
Not sure how I feel about the book claiming to be both "The Bacchae of Euripides" and a "new version" by C.K. Williams. It seems to fall halfway in between. Not sure how I feel about that either. But I do know I'll always love and wrestle with this play.
November 8, 2021
Beautiful version of this classic tragedy.
July 3, 2022
I liked this version a bit more than the one adapted by Wole Soyinka. It was a lot less weirdly sexual and the story was a bit better written, more cohesive.
April 19, 2023
I LOVE THIS PLAY SO MUCH. I reread this at least once a year....these bitches are SO gay.
September 30, 2025
A thurogh introduction and a easly read translation.
March 19, 2017
What starts as your typical Greek tragedy very quickly becomes a thorny tale about gender deviancy and consent.
Agave is heartbreaking.
It's a strange read in 2017, but ripe I think for some queering up and complication of Dionysus as divinity.
Agave is heartbreaking.
It's a strange read in 2017, but ripe I think for some queering up and complication of Dionysus as divinity.
June 27, 2016
The gods should not resemble mortals in their anger.
I cannot recommend this translation by C. K. Williams. The Chorus is my absolute favorite part of any Greek play, especially tragedies, but Williams' decision to split up lines into "triads" in a kind of free-verse turned a classic play into pseudo-avant-garde tripe. The formatting is irritating, the lines make almost no sense whatsoever whether you imagine the entire triad read by a singe person or split between three.
But aside from my problems with the way the Choruses were handled, the play is excellent. I can see why this is one of Euripides' most popular works. However, it is a little unfocused (at least in comparison to Oedipus Rex by Sophocles) what with concentrating at first on Pentheus, then on his mother, Agave. I'm at peace with that, though. It's a good story of religious freedom (or the virtues of outlawing cults? That does not a happy polis make) and of what Plato was talking about when he said poets should stop telling lies about the gods acting like petulant children.
Probably would've been a 5-star rating if it hadn't been for the damn irritating Choral "triads."
December 5, 2016
I've read the Bacchae before and had a fairly detached experience the first time. CK Williams' translation brings a vitality and poetry to the work that the previous translation lacked. I also read this with two things in mind: Beloved with Sethe's Bacchic frenzy in the barn and the impending inauguration of the 2016 President-elect. Perhaps this play, warning of the excesses of authoritarian power and the denial of moral virtue, resonated more forcefully as a result. I highly recommend this play, and especially this translation, as the ancient Greek plays and epics lend such a fresh perspective on current philosophy, events, and musings.
December 27, 2014
Very violent...might make a timely horror movie.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews