Search -
College Lectures on the Exodus of the Bacchae of Euripides ...
College Lectures on the Exodus of the Bacchae of Euripides Author:Edgar Cardew Marchant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE EXODUS OF THE BACCHAE OF EURIPIDES. This play was written at the end of the poet's life, when Euripides was living at the court of Archelaus, who usurped ... more »the throne of Macedon in 413 B.c., on the death of Perdiccas V., and reigned until 399 B. c. Not only did Archelaus effect many material improvements in Macedon (Time. II., 1oo), but he patronised art and literature. It is probable that the Bacchae was produced before the Macedonian court and was not seen on the Athenian stage before the poet's death (4o6 B. c.).1 The notion that the play is an apology for earlier free-thinking, a manifesto in favour of the current religion, was started by Tyrwhitt. The one bold passage in the play, that in which the story of the miraculous birth of Dionysius is rationalistically explained away by Teiresias (l. 284 f.). was declared spurious by Dindorf, and is very probably, like the well-known passage in Antigone, an actor's interpolation, designed to gratify the taste of an Athenian audience for such trifling.But, however that may be, the theory that Euripides wanted to make his peace with the popular religion may be regarded as exploded. It has been pointed out that the Hippolytus, written nearly 3o years earlier, contains similar sentiments. Euripides chose a subject specially suited to a Macedonian audience. The story demanded the language of conformity, and he supplied it. I do not deny that in the latest plays—the Phoenissae, the Bacchae and Iph. in Aul.—he avoids rather than seeks opportunities to combat the justice of the gods; but this avoidance is natural in an old man who had ceased to be a fighter and had reached at last that serene frame of mind that finds a parallel in the Shakespeare of the Tempest. But that Euripides had not ceased to be, in the Aristophanic, popular se...« less