I read the Philip Vellacott translation of Bacchae and adored it so much better than the one by Anne Carson that I read before this, which while poetic, was more experimental and stylistically complex. I wouldn't recommend starting off with the Anne Carson translation if it's your first time reading Euripides' Bacchae or if you're not yet familiar with Anne's work and style.

I wanted to read The Bacchae because I had a sense that it had something to do with Dostoevsky's n  Demonsn, which I recently finished. It did, in the sense that both works tell the story of a city visited by Dionysian frenzy. In Euripides's drama, the frenzy is Dionysus's revenge on the women of Thebes for insulting his mother by claiming that she lied when she said that Zeus was his father. The dramatic conflict centers on Pentheus, king of the city and grandson of its founder, who wants to suppress the outbreak of Bacchic worship among the city's women. This draws him into combat with a disguised Dionysus himself, who eventually leads the proud Puritan--disguised as a female worshiper, ostensibly to spy on the reveling women--to his doom as he is torn to pieces by the frenzied women, including finally his own mother. The whole play reads like a mysterious rite that should have some official mythological title--The Sacrifice of the Stern King or something. The locus of the audience's sympathy is exactly nowhere--the raving puritanical leader, driven to increasing displays of power that reveal only his impotence, is, considered as a political "type," always bad news; while the vindictive god and his manipulated worshipers, who go by degrees from good anarchy (freedom and play in nature) to bad anarchy (violence without limit), offer a painful reminder of the checkered career of "revolution" in human history.

In the translator's preface to this volume, Philip Vellacott offers a kind of Freudian reading of the play in which Euripides is warning us that if we deny the claims of the Dionysian impulses to play and drunkenness--that is, if we become puritanical--these repressed urges will return with a vengeance and destroy us. That's as good an interpretation as any. Dostoevsky, writing after both monotheism and the Enlightenment, can't explicitly credit the Dionysian urges themselves--the necessity for relief from order, for a bit of creative destruction--because history offers them to him only under the sign of universalist political ideology (communism, anarchism, socialism), to which he counterposes Christianity. Maybe Euripides had the better poetic opportunity in being able to start from a polytheistic premise in which the different dimensions of human thought and feeling are each honored with autonomy. Then again, his tragedy moves with grim inevitability toward its violent end, so perhaps the translator's 20th-century optimism is misplaced because, whether in 5th-century Athens or 19th-century Russia, the rite must happen in full, including the bloodshed.

As for the rest of this volume:

I've owned it for almost 15 years, having bought it for a Greek civilization class in which we were assigned The Women of Troy. I only skimmed that play this time around, revisiting my undergraduate annotations, but it remains a remarkable work, less a drama than a series of lamentations by the eponymous women as they go into Greek slavery after the Trojan War. But the play is ironic--dramatically ironic, in fact--in that the Greeks have by their desecration of Troy's temples earned the gods' displeasure after their victory and are themselves about to be scattered over the seas, subject to the same violence from on high as the women they prey upon.

Helen is a strange comedy--a self-parody, acceding to the scholars, possibly first performed for an all-female audience at a festival honoring Demeter and Persephone. Fast-moving and uneven in tone, it posits (in an idea apparently derived from Herodotus) that the Helen taken by Paris to Troy was just an illusion generated by Hera to revenge herself on Athena, which means, as our translators points out, that the whole Trojan War was fought for literally nothing. This play finds Helen in Egyptian exile and dramatizes her reunion and escape with Menelaus.

The first and earliest play in the volume, Ion, is a bitterly and grotesquely funny story of paternity in which the title character, Apollo's son conceived in rape of a mortal woman, is reunited with his mother and both are convinced by the gods to pretend to go along with the idea that he is the illegitimate child of another man entirely, his mother's current husband, so that he can go on to found Greek settlements in Asia. This is Euripides at his most corrosive, with the gods as rapacious schemers and mortals as their changeable pawns; by the "happy ending," everybody stands accused.

Speaking of Dionysus and women and irony and intellectual reactionaries: I am reminded that Nietzsche hated Euripides for his subjection of the gods to ironic portrayal and criticism and for his sympathetic depiction of women and slaves and other untermenschen. For Nietzsche, Euripides was a kind of Ibsen of antiquity, a Socratic Enlightener dispelling the ritual quality of tragedy by forcing reason into the proceedings. But what makes Euripides great, sublime because not in spite of his pervasive mockery, is that his irony is so total--it encompasses the universe, so that we sympathize with the victims of history without imagining that much can be done about their plight, even as we also see that their tormentors and rulers are caught in the same capricious machinations of the amoral and immoral gods. If this is Ibsenite, it is more like The Wild Duck than like The Doll's House: a dramatic world in where there are no answers, where truth does not console, and where the innocent and the guilty alike pay the price.

We only read The Bacchae (not the "and Other Plays") but I quite enjoyed it. My pleasure wasn't in the idolatry, or the madness, or the savagery, but rather the opportunity to celebrate how the Triune God of the Bible is so much more glorious than Dionysius and how He provides true, everlasting joy. Our Lord gives rather than takes, He shares His glory rather than hoards it, He gives wine to gladden hearts rather than deaden hearts, and He forgives the repentant rather than punish all without mercy. This play also makes Lewis' inclusion of Bacchus as a servant of Aslan in Prince Caspian no small coup.

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Read again for Omnibus Tenebras.

I have no idea what was going on tbh

I read The Bacchae. Quick read, but not my cup of tea. Still beautifully written.

I was torn about how to rate this. Bacchae is without question a masterpiece (Euripides' best?), but I am skeptical of the other two plays. Herakles felt a bit lacking. I've seen bits of Women of Trachis and that account of Herakles' downfall was absolutely devastating. Euripides' version here felt a bit too intellectual. It attempted to go for the head rather than the heart and fell a bit short.

Phoenician women was fun (though I do see where critics come from when they argue that there are issues with the plot and a lack of focus). I liked this imaginative account of the fall of the House of Laios. The confrontation between Eteokles and Polynices was tense. Having Jocasta survive only to see the destruction of her boys was also an interesting touch. There was something slightly lopsided about the plot though, which made the play feel somewhat off.

Bacchae is a masterpiece though. This is Greek tragedy at its finest. Certainly a contender for my favourite. This play captures Nietzsche's Dionysian at its fullest. Everything is in flux and up for debate. What is divine? What is human? What happens when the one suddenly becomes the other? The plot structure of a conflict between society and wildness, law and order vs. freedom and unity, makes for great theater. Some of the most delightful passages describe the women resting in forest glades, one with nature; some of the darkest passages describe in brutal detail pieces of human flesh hangin from tree branches, dripping blood. What a wild ride.

The Bacchae, written by Euripedes, is a great tragedy work that uses the plays complicated society structure to demonstrate the battle between the two extremes: too much freedom and too much control. The first half of the play details Pentheus and his control over Thebes, and by the end we discover that too much freedom and celebration displayed by Dionysius left the play a tragedy. As the audience, we discover the battle between Appollinian and Dionysian perspectives are the cause for the struggle in their society. The battle between the two opposing Gods, Dionysius versus Pentheus, is a battle between egos. Dionysius is a threat to Pentheus and his demand for order and control. Dionysius would rather promote liberation, celebration, and chaos. It is understood throughout the play that the power and role these two Gods serve is a threat to their society.
A primary theme in the story was the women empowerment and liberation led by Agave, Pentheus’ mother, and her sisters as well. This contradicts the Apollinian ideology that is represented by Pentheus. It is easy to not side with Pentheus because of his ideas of control and order, but by the end there is a clear understanding the delusion plagued by Dionysius on his followers. Agave having the power to kill her son, but not register until later revealed shows the power Dionysius has to delude a group of women. This is where a balance between order and chaos needs to be in place, so that conflict would not continue. The struggle for self control and moderation is needed in the society. The battle of excessive freedom and excessive control would result in a conflicted society,. Euripedes reveals the complexity of societal structures and the theoretical arguments that pertain to the story. idea of delusion would against would The women were so out of their mind that they were under the impression that Pentheus himself was a lion when disguised as a Maenad. Pentheus was manipulated by Dionysius to not use his power and force. Pentheus represents the order, Legality, and control over women. In order to abolish this societal structure, Dionysius is responsible for the extreme chaos resulted by the death of Penthus and the exile of Agave and her sisters. Euripede delivers the idea of how a society can result if order and chaos is not in balance.
The Bacchae was an interesting story from beginning to end. The short play kept me attentive and left me wanting to read more Greek tragedies. Euripides produced a play that starts as a drama and ends in a tragedy The play questions if there is room in this society for non rational in a seemingly structure, ordered society. Euripedes created the play around 400 BCE for a society that could be entertained, yet question those in power and what if women were empowered as depicted in the Bacchae. This same idea can be applied today and makes us question those in control in order to identify a balance that is progressive and just.

‘and the two are not mixed? you have them separate?’
‘nothing could mingle them. they are good and evil.’

bacchanal anyone?? jkjk........unless ?

This volume collects Bacchae, Iphigenia among the Taurans, Iphigenia at Aulis and Rhesus.

Bacchae
So much can be said about this play and I'm interested to see what better minds have to say about it. As a complex tragedy on madness and reason as well as the divine and mortal this play is able to, at the same time, blur the lines between opposites in the mind while clarifying the distinction through morality.

Iphigenia among the Taurans
An excellent play on the presumed dead Iphigenia who survived through the sacrifice by means of a scapegoat (or scapedeer in that instance) who, after many years as a priestess, meets Orestes and finds the possibility for salvation. If the purpose of tragedy is to heal us through catharsis, then Iphigenia among the Taurans heals us through the love of siblings overcoming their shared trauma.

Iphigenia at Aulis
I admit I'm divided on this play. The first half is an excellent set up for a brilliant tragedy, in which Agamemnon must decide whether to sacrifice his daughter or face death with the pieces already in motion. The second half of the play, in which Iphigenia accepts her death "for Greece" and is ultimately saved, is incomarably lesser dramatically to the first half. While it fits Euripides' support of women's agency, it does leave a lot to be desired in a classic story of tragedy.

Rhesus
While the plot and style are interesting it still stands far enough away from the greatness of the other plays in this volume to be noticably non-Euripidean. As a retelling the events of book 10 from the Iliad from a Trojan perspective, the drama centers on the arrival of Rhesus, King of Thrace, and his sudden demise at Greek hands. While it is a brief play only around 1000 lines long, much is conveyed in so little speech but still less than we could expect from Euripides.

My edition of The Bacchae and Other Plays contains three plays by Euripides and one by an unknown playwright (previously considered to be Euripides).

Iphigenia amongst the Taurians tells the tale of Agamemnon's daughter who, after being almost slaughtered by her father as a sacrifice to Artemis, has been transported to the Crimean peninsula by the very same goddess. Picking up the story decades after her death was faked, it's unclear why Iphigenia was saved at all; had the priests read the omens incorrectly? Was the sacrifice a test of Agamemnon's faith? Was it a test of his drive to bring war to Troy? Artemis here is a mercurial force - her will is unknown, but she has absolute power of the events before and during the play.

The Bacchae, on the other hand, sees Dionysus bring down a terrible curse on the house of Cadmus after they had the gall to question his divinity. This god, at least, is much clearer to understand. Dionysus appears as a character on stage and opens the play with a vindictive monologue about his plan to avenge himself upon the people who are slandering his name. He puts the women of the city into a sort of bucolic frenzy - taking them from the city into the woodland where Pentheus (the King) is ripped to shreds by Agave (his mother). Less capricious than Artemis, Dionysus is nevertheless a god to be feared rather than loved.

Iphigenia at Aulis tells the conventional story we know of the story of Iphigenia - sacrificed by her father to ward off a curse by Artemis who won't let them set sail to Troy. This play's characterisation of all the big beasts here - Agamemnon shown dithering and doubtful; Menelaus as impatient and demanding; Achilles as gentle and caring - are great fun because they show a new side to each person. But there's less space for Euripides' characteristic attention to female characters in the battle camp, and Iphigenia's mad self-sacrifice is quite jarring.

Despite the final play being by a pretender, it was still enjoyable as an Iliad in microcosm. Also I love it when Odysseus pops up and seeing as he made no appearance in Iphigenia at Aulis, this satiated me.

What struck me most about these plays is Euripides' (and by extension, his audience's) perception of their gods. In as far as they are knowable or understandable, they are cruel and petty. Cadmus, in The Bacchae, tells the audience that it is best not to get on the wrong side of the gods - even if they don't fully believe in them. It's a sort of Pascal's wager - you're damned if you're wrong so you might as well as fake it. I find this pragmatic approach to religion fantastically and laudably cynical!

The Bacchae by Euripides was full of deep, meaningful societal issues that can be applied to our world today. Not only was there a struggle between structure (Apollinian) and free will (Dionysian), but it also showed the struggle for women’s liberation and the battle between different egos. For the time frame in which this piece of literature was written, it’s ideologies and themes were so complex and meaningful that they can even be placed in today's’ society. The struggles in this play that the characters faced were problems several people, if not all, can semi relate to; including me. Maybe not to the extent in which they were written in The Bacchae, but almost all of us face the struggle of balancing the two different egos; Apollonian and Dionysian.
tFor me I found myself in the middle between Pentheus and Dionysus, as most of us do. Some people lean more towards the Dionysian side of the spectrum. They love free will and really struggle with finding structure in their lives. I find myself on the other side of the spectrum. I struggle sometimes with letting loose and having a good time. I have had so much structure in my life that it’s hard for me to just let go of that. So to a certain extent I relate to Pentheus and saw where he was coming from. His whole life things have been done a certain way, he did not know any better which made it hard for him to accept the other side. I am different in the way that I am willing to accept those on the other side of the spectrum and sometimes envy how they are able to let loose and just have fun. I am willing to accept new ideas in which Pentheus was not. I think Euripides was trying to convey that message to everyone. That we all must be willing to accept the two different types of people and find a balance of that in out day to day life.
tWhat I did not like however, was the way women were manipulated in this play. At the beginning I was really impressed that Euripides was giving women a chance to be free and liberated. I saw the Maenads as strong, independent women, not under a man’s control. But as the play went on I came to realize that the idea being portrayed was merely the opposite of what I initially thought. Dionysus used these women to make a point to Pentheus and society at that time. When his point was made, he cast away these women and literally left them for dead. Agave and her sisters were blamed for the murder of Pentheus and exiled. The people had to have known Agave and her sisters were not in their right mind, but instead of letting the men take the blame it was given to the women. It was almost as if Euripides was giving women at the time a warning that if they were to disobey the structure, there would be consequences. This idea of maintaining a balance between Apollinian and Dionysian was specifically intended for the men of society at the time. Women still needed that structure.
tIn many ways we can apply Euripides teachings in The Bacchae to modern life, but in other ways the play speaks for its time. While many of the ideologies like structure and maintaining a balanced life have not changed, things like women’s liberation have further advanced in our society. For the better of course. I am glad that as a society we are advancing and while there are similarities between different times, we are able to reflect back and look at the progress we have made. The Bacchae allowed me to appreciate the progress in which modern day society has made.