CUP (2024) p/b 348pp £23.39 (ISBN 9781108948388)
The editors of this welcome addition to the Green-and-Yellow series are well aware that they have ‘big shoes to fill’: 80 years ago, the Clarendon Press published the now renowned edition of Bacchae by E.R. Dodds in its so-called Oxford ‘Red’ series of plays by Euripides: the edition was revised in 1960 ‘in the light of work which has appeared since 1943’ (Preface to second edition, pp. iii-iv). Why, then, this ‘up to date’ edition? The editors explain in their Preface that ‘scholarly thinking on the central themes of the play (e.g. gender and sexuality, or the tragic chorus and ritual song) and on many of the fundamental categories of Greek religion (e.g. the separation of belief and practice, or the distinction between myth and ritual) has changed considerably in the past sixty years.’
We learn from the Introduction that Euripides won first prize at the Dionysia four times during his lifetime, and once posthumously (with Bacchae): A-S give a reconstruction of Euripides’ theatrical career from 455 BC to c. 405 BC, naming all seventeen surviving tragedies (Rhesus is excluded as spurious, surely correctly). However, the only first prizes listed are Hippolytus and Bacchae and (not named) a victory at the Dionysia in 441 BC.
The Introduction is both long and deep and defies abbreviation in a form that would be helpful to a prospective buyer or user: however, in what follows, at least some of what the reviewer considers the outstanding features will receive attention. Thus A-S describe the play’s Setting and Staging; with three actors, the speaking parts are plausibly divided between Dionysus and Teiresias for the protagonist, Pentheus and Agave for the deuteragonist, and Cadmus, a servant, and the two messengers, a servant, herdsman and an attendant for the tritagonist: demanding indeed for the actors. Curiously, no depictions of tragic actors survive on fifth-century Attic vases; maenadic costume ‘is redeployed in mocking fashion when Pentheus dons actual female dress as well as the fawnskin and thyrsus.’ The editors list some previously unattested elements that may well be innovations by Euripides, notably that Pentheus is torn apart not by anonymous Bacchants, but by his own mother and aunts (but surely nowhere was there greater innovation—as noted by Aristophanes—than in Helen, with the Trojan War being fought over a facsimile of Helen (thanks to Stesichorus)? In an important section, the editors demonstrate that Bacchae condenses many quintessentially Dionysiac primary concerns—wine, revelry, madness, sex, song and dance—which are used both to power the conflict between Dionysus and his opponents and to enhance his bond with his worshippers. However, crucially, it presents the Bacchant chorus as approving only male drinking and asserts the Theban maenads’ sobriety and chastity.
Of course, although the maenadic behaviour in the play is a ‘typically poetic elaboration of real-life Dionysiac worship’, the nature and extent of this transformation is much debated: the editors come down firmly against omophagia and sparagmos, the reality lying in much tamer cultic acts; Dodds famously took the other side (The Greeks and the Irrational [1951, pp 276-7]). The editors then go on to say that in ‘reacting against the excesses of Dodds’ (p.19, note 70) some scholars have ‘denied the evidence for ecstatic women in Athenian cult’.
The editors next discuss cross-dressing (is Pentheus’ dressing scene a prime example of tragic ‘metatheatre’? They wisely play down the suggestion of the Bacchae here showing ‘self-consciousness of its own theatricality’: rather, the humiliation of Pentheus and Dionysus’ control is reinforced—as would surely be the theatre-goers’ direct reaction. (Here, the reviewer draws attention to Dodds’ masterly, and severe, appraisal of Pentheus, p.xliii in his Introduction). The Bacchae also reflects Dionysus’ status as a god whose festivals brought together the whole community (the reviewer here commends the notes by Dodds on 421-3 and 424-6). Again, the editors make a valid point when they argue that the Bacchae is more focused on human error and divine revenge than it is on ‘salvation’ or concepts of the afterlife—it is, after all, a play, not a sermon! We may remember the wise words of the youthful Tycho von Wilamowitz: what will be the effect of (a given) scene on the watching audience?
We now move on to another much debated topic; ritual and belief—which of the two comes first in Greek religion? For (the senior) Wilamowitz it was belief, and the pendulum has moved back in favour of belief from ritual—which is important in the shaping of the Bacchae, given that the question of how the characters express or deny their belief in Dionysus is central to the drama’s development: but once again, did the theatregoers worry themselves about such a philosophical matter? The diversity of Dionysus qua god is matched by the fluidity of religious belief itself, and the Bacchae reflects the nature of ‘real religion as a jostling mass of competing interpretations and uncertainties’ (Robert Parker).
A-S then look in detail at Dionysus and Pentheus (whose revulsion and curiosity about the sexuality of the Theban women give rise to a footnote in which no fewer than 16 scholars are cited), followed by the chorus of Lydian bacchants (naturally opposed to Pentheus); this section of the introduction concludes with Dionysus’ revenge ; the dramatization is rooted in longstanding Greek theological ideas, combining belief in the gods’ concern for humanity with an acknowledgement of their readiness to punish mortals if their claim to honour is denied.
A-S give a full account, first, of song, music, and metre, and then of language and style (of course the commentary discusses these in detail); interesting that Dio singles out the clarity and naturalness of Euripides (as opposed to Sophocles and Aeschylus)). All three dramatists are prodigious wordsmiths, enriching the shared Kunstsprache of tragedy with their own coinages and innovations: even by 1936, 585 hapax legomena in Euripides—including 40 in Bacchae—had been listed. Metres are set out line by line with scansions and description (e.g. dochmiac at 1019); your reviewer was introduced to the kaibelianus at 983 and the (Aeolic) hagesichorean—name from Alcman’s Partheneion?—at 1157, but neither is mentioned in the notes.
The section on Transmission and Text remind us how imperfect and fortuitous is our connection to the original text of Bacchae, which in our leading MS, the Laurentianus, ends at line 755, and we thereafter rely on the Palatinus, a copy of a copy of L. A-S rely heavily on Diggle’s OCT (vol iii, 1994); however the text printed here differs from that in a number of places (by my calculation, about 50; where needed, the changes, usually very small, are mostly explained in the commentary). Dodds made the sensible observation long ago that by now our texts are as good as we shall get, failing new evidence (e.g. via papyrus). At the disputed lines 1002-7 I happen to prefer the easier punctuation of the Diggle/Willink reading to that of A-S at 1005, but nothing much hangs on it.
The text is printed with a short apparatus criticus (A-S omit the two Hypotheses) and the Commentary follows. Much more is needed now in a commentary on a play than the standard ‘establishing, explaining and illustrating’ the text: scenes need to be set, entries and exits noted, theatrical aspects brought out: all exemplified by A-S in their introduction to the Second Episode (434-515)—perhaps especially at 439 where Dodds’ assertion that that the stranger (Dionysus) is wearing a ‘smiling mask’ is successfully challenged by A-S on both linguistic and theatrical grounds; the introduction to the Fourth Episode (912-76), where Pentheus’ cross-dressing and state of delusion are discussed, is equally convincing. The student using this Commentary is by no means mollycoddled (your reviewer, coming across a wholly unfamiliar word, received no help from it), but where s/he will benefit greatly is from reading the introductions to (e.g.) the Parodos (64-69) and the Episodes, and, indeed, many individual notes within them: 453-9, for instance, is a model in this regard. It must be a matter of taste whether one feels that the ‘pudding has been over-egged’ e.g. at the lengthy note at 1300 (the dismemberment of Pentheus). Dodds’ edition specifically mentioned pupils at school among his targeted readers; this edition by A-S certainly aims at a much more practised constituency. The Commentary is followed by 30 pages of Bibliography, a Subject Index, and a skimpy Greek Index.
As so often, the reviewer asks himself whether this book would have been on his own wish list as an undergraduate (and recommended to others): the answer is an emphatic ‘Yes’, though the many illustrative references in the notes would, one fears, have been taken on trust—and James Diggle’s recent Greek Dictionary would certainly have had to be on hand. As it is, the reviewer is grateful to have the commentaries of both Dodds and A-S on his shelves.
Colin Leach