اساطیر و خدایان یونانی از جذاب‌ترین موضوعات برای منه. قهرمان کتاب کاهنه‌های باکوس دیونیزوس هست. دیونیزوس خدای شراب و انگور و شهوته و جوان ترین ایزد در بین خدایان یونان.
حاصل ازدواج کادموس و هارمونیا چهار دختر به نام های سمله، آگاوه، آتونوئه و اینو و یک پسر به نام پلیدروس بود. زئوس پادشاه خدایان، فرزند رئا و کرونوس، عاشق سمله میشه و حاصل این عشق دیونیزوس هست. آگاره که به این عشق باور نداشت، به سمله گفت از زئوس در خواست کند که خودش را به تمامی به او نشان دهد. زئوس که عهد کرده بود به تمام درخواست‌های سمله پاسخ مثبت دهد، خود را به سمله نمایاند و سمله چنان سوخت که حتی پس از مرگش هم دود از آرامگاهش بلند بود. زئوس، دیونیزوس را در ران خود جا می‌دهد و تا زمان متولد شدن از او نگهداری میکند. پس از اعلام خدایی، پنتئون پسر آگاوه از پرستش دیونیزوس سر باز میزنه و میخواد با اون بجنگه اما گرفتار کینه‌ی دیونیزوس میشه و این نمایشنامه شرح ماجرایی هست که در برخورد دیونیزوس و پنتئوس به وجود میاد. یک رویارویی همراه با شیدایی، جنون، نفرت و سنگدلی. دیونیزوس یک خدای بسیار انتقام گیرنده هست و سرنوشت دشمناش بسیار غم‌انگیزه. این نمایشنامه میتونه برای علاقه‌مندان به این ژانر جذاب و کمی سخت خوان باشه.ه

Müthiş bir çeviri..
Ama o kadar..
Yunan tragedyası diye başlayıp şu kısacık kitabı zor bitirdim gerçekten..
Sanırım sevemiyorum bu Yunan Mitolojisini ya da o döneme ait eserleri..
Büyük bir heves ve istekle başlayıp da zorla biten bir kitap oldu maalesef..

"Gods should not be like mortals in temper"

”He shall learn that Dionysos, son of Zeus, is by turns a god most terrible and most gracious to mankind.”

4,5/5!

The Bacchae is one of Euripides's most famous tragedies. Dionysos, the god of revelry and wine and madness and celebration, has arrived in Thebes, accompanied by his devout female followers, the maenads. Dionysos is angry that the people and leaders of Thebes have denied him and refused to worship him, and he essentially wants to teach them a lesson about what it means to anger a god. The women of Thebes have forsaken their homes and joined his celebrations and are now running wild in nature with their hair loose and their bodies covered in animal skins, and the leader of Thebes, Pentheus, is left desperate to stop this new, chaotic god from ruining their city and its women.

The Bacchae is a very interesting play. I love how you can interpret it in so many ways: I've heard people say it is a cautionary tale for men, warning them to not try and control women. I've also heard people call it a horror story about what happens when women are allowed to leave their homes and live on their own terms. Some emphasise Dionysos's cunning rage and see this play as a warning about what it means to defy gods and how that never ends well. Some celebrate it as a rare story where women are allowed to be liberated and free of the constraints of their society. I think The Bacchae is, in some ways, all of the above. There is so much to unpack in this play, everything from the relationship between men and gods to gender roles and the playful way Euripides, especially through the character of Dionysos and his followers, approaches those roles. To me this is definitely a play I want to read again at some point, so I can focus more on some of these smaller details and themes rather than just the plot.

The Bacchae is, as all Greek tragedies are, occasionally rather harrowing, brutal and violent, but it is also very funny at times. Dionysos is the sassiest god I've ever encountered in Greek literature, and every scene he's in is just pure gold. He is also just a really fascinating dude. He is half-mortal and half-god, he can be both incredibly violent and petty (like all gods) but his followers also see him as someone who brings them joy, contentment, peace from their worries and liberty. He makes people dance and he makes them happy, but he also makes them mad and violent if he so pleases. He is quite the contradictory fellow, and someone who stands apart from the rest of the Olympians, at least in my opinion.

I highly recommend the Bacchae! It's not my favorite of Euripides's plays, but I did really, really enjoy it. I think it would also be a good place to start if you want to get more into Euripides and greek drama!

NEW THOUGHTS AFTER MY REREAD:

I have been meaning to read this play again for the longest time and underline my favorite passages and make notes in my copy, and I am so happy I finally just sat down and did it. Going through the text with my pen really gave me a whole new level of love for this play (I decided to bump the rating up to 4,5/5!).

This time around I found myself really paying attention to the way Dionysos and his followers keep breaking all these things the Greeks saw - and in many ways we, today, still do – as foundational and the norm, and I am not just talking about the way the maenads and Dionysos break gender rules and lure others to break them too in terms of dress. All these basic ideas of womanhood are distorted: women leave their babies and children behind, the act of breastfeeding becomes repulsive when it is revealed the women suckle baby animals, women engage in physical fights and tear men apart violently, and so on. As an enjoyer of all kinds of gender mayhem and fuckery, this play is an absolute goldmine. This time around I also paid way more attention to the way Dionysos not just bends the "rules" of gender but also inhabits his own place between god, man and beast: he is a god who spends most of the time in a mortal's disguise and he is often referred to as a bull or some other animal, described as a beast. The maenads are given a similar treatment: they are a herd, a pack of wild animals, predators and hunters. All of this – so fascinating.

Pentheus was also a much more engaging character this time around. I like that he is not a completely horrible person, just a bit of an idiot and a proud asshole who cannot stand to see norms being broken or to have a new, "exotic" religion come and destroy the purity of the women of his city. He is someone I both felt annoyed by and felt for, as he is, from the minute he decides to deny Dionysos's power, doomed to a brutal ending – an ending which was, by the way, wonderfully foreshadowed from the get-go by mentions of Actaeon. His dynamic with Dionysos is also pure gold: the god is toying with him, Pentheus seems to be attracted to Dionysos despite also being annoyed by this "stranger", and ahh, I just loved their scenes. There was also, lurking underneath the surface, their familial connection, which Pentheus is not aware of.

Speaking of the familial stuff, I absolutely adore how present Semele is in this play, despite having died years ago. Dionysos introduces himself as the son of not just Zeus but, almost more importantly, of Semele and the insults towards her are a huge part of what drives him. The fact that Dionysos is so outraged over this insult toward his mortal mother whom he never met kinda warms my heart cause so often, in myth, the mothers and women in general are forgotten or just not treated as anything that important. But Semele is important to her son.

"Quando falta o bom-senso ao homem audaz e simultaneamente poderoso e hábil na palavra, ele torna-se um cidadão perigoso."
28


Com obras destas, fica difícil escolher um tragediógrafo de eleição. Os três grandes poetas gregos autores de tragédias (Ésquilo, Sófocles, Eurípides) competem belamente, não haja dúvida. Já quase desisto da insistência de que o primeiro deles é realmente o melhor... quase.

Agora a parte gira.

De três anos à boleia em Clássicas, o latim não resistiu lá muito bem, mas isto, curiosamente, ficou:

As Grandes Dionísias, celebravam-se no início da primavera e duravam vários dias durante os quais o público participava em sacrifícios, cerimónias cívicas (como homenagens fúnebres, militares etc.) e, claro, assistia à representação teatral.
Um dia estava reservado à comédia e três à tragédia (com a representação de 3 tragédias + 1 drama satírico).

E quem era este público?
Certamente homens (embora as mulheres, garantidamente, participassem nos primeiros dias do festival para as procissões e sacrifícios) e certamente aliados da Liga de Delos (uma das coligações entre cidades aliadas durante a guerra aos persas - a par da Liga do Peloponeso -, liderada por Atenas. Estas ligas representavam o expoente máximo da democracia grega - gorado pela guerra, claro, do Peloponeso.

De entre as representações que aí tomavam lugar, nas Dionísias, sabemos hoje, ironicamente, que muito poucas obedeciam à temática dionisíaca. Isto talvez se explique - entre várias outras razões de origem esotérica - pelo facto do dionisismo ser um culto flagrantemente feminino. Ora pois, a cultura helénica assentava fortemente na fórmula do patriarcado, logo, em valores misóginos.*

Em As Bacantes, Eurípides - frequente concorrente no festival - retoma a tragédia mítica e traz-nos um rei (Penteu) derrotado pela força do deus (Baco), e um traçado geral da forma como o homem soberano encara a postura, o papel e o "potencial" da mulher ateniense (diga-se desde já que, quando as mulheres são retratadas como Ménades - sacerdotisas bárbaras de Baco - a despedaçar homens e animais em êxtases orgiásticos, o suposto potencial não é propriamente simpático...).

À parte isso, não deixa de ser curiosa a escolha de Eurípides por várias outras razões, entre elas a forma como escolhe apresentar os deuses e os homens - neste caso, o deus e o homem:

Desde logo, porque, para um grego, existem três categorias de seres vivos:

Animais;
Humanos;
Mortais.

Estes últimos obedecem, por ordem, a estas qualidades:

Racional e mortal;
Racional e imortal.

Espantosamente, nem Penteu nem Baco parecem honrar o primeiro desses atributos. Falta a ambos, desde logo, aquilo a que um ateniense chamaria de aretê (virtude essencial para a formação de um herói, por exemplo) e que consistia no respeito pelos valores morais da civilização. Neste caso, e para Penteu, o respeito pelos deuses; para Baco, o respeito pelo inimigo.

Assim, e porque a ambos manca essa qualidade, o rei desrespeita o deus e o deus vinga-se no rei (e na família toda que isto é uma tragédia que se preza!)

Ficam os reis desde já avisados, e contra isto pouco há a dizer:


"Infinitas são as manifestações da vontade divina; infinitos os acontecimentos que os deuses desencadeiam contra o que tinhamos previsto. Os que esperamos, esses não se realizam, os que não esperamos, um deus lhes abre o caminho."
91


Esta peça fez Eurípides subir na minha consideração ao ponto de ficar envergonhada pelas vezes que já disse não gostar da sua Medeia.
É assim bom!





* sobre esta temática, e os desafios contemporâneos de interpretação e encenação, existem vários estudos muito interessantes, nomeadamente: "Rebel Women, Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today", editado por John Dillon and S. E.Wilmer

This is the greatest Greek play I have read. I am just speechless. The way Euripides crafted this play was just...no words can give it justice. The rising intensity, the characters, the writing. I'll leave the rest of my thoughts for my actual review but...wow. Just wow.

Όσους κολακευτικούς χαρακτηρισμούς κι αν χρησιμοποιήσω,θα είναι λίγοι.Λίγα θεατρικά έργα με άγγιξαν όσο αυτό-διαβάστε το και θα με θυμηθείτε!

Χωρίς λόγια. Μετάφραση Βάρναλη.

O voi cita (aprox) pe draga mea colega Madalina cu un comentariul pe care l-a facut la Don Quijote, insa il aplic la Bacantele: “Devine mai buna cu fiecare recitire”

Reading Daisy Dunn’s Not Far from Brideshead reminded me of E. R. Dodds’ superb edition of Euripides’ Bacchae and revived my desire to revive my long dormant Greek. Along with the aid of the Perseus Word Study app and Arrowsmith’s translation, I’ve read The Bacchae again, this time the entire Greek text. And what a splendid vade mecum Dodds’ commentary has been! In my days of teaching Greek tragedy in translation I loved presenting The Bacchae with its chorus of wild women from Asia to students as a gripping (and ripping) horror show, with the sparagmos and the omophagos of Pentheus literally at the hands of his mother and aunts, but I’d not realised the maenads would eat the babies they snatched from the village and was unaware that Agave’s recovery of her senses paralleled a Siberian shaman’s awakening from a trance. Reading Greek also took me back in memory to that marvellous decade in Austin at the University of Texas when for a short time Arrowsmith, along with Carne-ross, Herington, and Sullivan (my Latin tutor) made the Classics a vital area of contemporary literary culture. Of course it didn’t last and by the next decade it was all blown to the winds, but for one brief decade Classical studies in Austin seemed like a very heaven.

Dionysus is my favourite ancient Greek god. Why? Because he is the coolest, simple as.

n  “He is life's liberating force.
He is release of limbs and communion through dance.
He is laughter, and music in flutes.
He is repose from all cares -- he is sleep!"n


- The Young Bacchus by Caravaggio, 1595.

Not only is he the god of theatre (a huge passion of mine) but he is also the god of wine, festivals, ecstasy and madness. Every set of self-respecting Gods needs one like him on the team. In a way he represents excess, the excess of human emotion and passion. Every so often we all need a good binge of some sort and any god that denies our needs is a very poor god. Dionysus gets it. He understands.

And he is capable of great good and filling the needs of his subjects, but his whims can easily slip into darkness. In this play he presents himself in a clam collective manner; he does not really represent the aspects of human nature he is god of: he merely facilitates them. He gives man the opportunity to go too far; it’s up to him if he takes it and falls into complete intoxication. And this bespeaks his enthralling power. He is not controlling and does not tamper with free-will, if his subjects worship him to heavily then it is of their own accord.

The Dionysian cult Euripides creates here is one completely necessary in the society of Ancient Greece. He is the solution for the ongoing battle between freedom and restraint. He suggests that the irrational and the indulgent are both necessary for society to function and develop. Any society that denies these things will fall apart in misery. So Dionysus is an important force, but one that should be taken is small measures.

So this is a good play, and it’s completely character driven and loaded with this message (supposedly as a learning tool.) It’s real fun to read.

Dioniso è sicuramente per indole una delle divinità più divertenti del panteon greco: risulta simpatico per il suo desiderio di distruggere tutto, di punire coloro che lo oltraggiano... ma sempre con un pizzico di follia e qualche goccia di vino. Oltre al modo di fare fanciullesco della divinità, poco spicca di questa tragedia, per quel che mi riguarda una di quelle meno entusiasmanti di Euripide.