Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
Euripides’s Revolution under CoverAn Essay$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.
Euripides’s Revolution under Cover: An Essay

Pietro Pucci

Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9781501700613

Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: August 2016

DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501700613.001.0001

Show Summary Details
Page of

PRINTED FROM Cornell University Press SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.cornell.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of Cornell University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in Cornell for personal use. date: 24 February 2021

Victory and Defeat

Victory and Defeat

Chapter:
28. Victory and Defeat
Source:
Euripides’s Revolution under Cover
Author(s):

Pietro Pucci

Publisher:
Cornell University Press
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501700613.003.0028

This chapter examines Euripides's polemical representation of the anthropomorphic divine characters and the distressing vision of the failure of the state in Bacchae. More specifically, it shows that a brutal Dionysus would not have had access to the city. Like Euripides's other wretched stories of revenge, the story of Dionysus's revenge exhibits various symmetries. Pentheus and Dionysus gain satisfaction in the same way: Pentheus by insanely attacking the source of prophecies, Dionysus by inflicting on Cadmus the future sack of the seat of Apollo's oracular voice. This chapter considers Cadmus's imputation that Dionysus has behaved like a mortal and how Dionysus justifies his actions. It suggests that the anthropomorphism of Greek gods is absurd because as universal forces they need nothing personally or emotionally. It also explains how Bacchae renews the presentation of the tragic ambivalence of revenge.

Keywords:   revenge, Euripides, Bacchae, Dionysus, Pentheus, prophecies, Cadmus, Apollo, anthropomorphism, Greek gods

Cornell Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.