- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Euripides’s Poetic Game and Law of Composition
- 2. Anthropomorphism
- 3. The Protection of the Self and the Role of <i>Sophia</i>
- 4. Some Connotations of <i>Sophia</i>
- 5. Polyneices’s Truth
- 6. Hecuba’s Rhetoric
- 7. Eros in Euripides’s Poetics: Sex as the Cause of the Trojan War
- 8. The Lewd Gaze of the Eye
- 9. The Power of Love: Who Is Aphrodite?
- 10. Phaedra
- 11. Hermione: The <i>Andromache</i>
- 12. Female Victims of War: The <i>Troades</i>
- 13. The Survival in Poetry
- 14. Figures of Metalepsis: The Invention of “Literature”
- 15. The Failure of Politics in Euripides’s Poetics: Politics in the <i>Suppliant Women</i>
- 16. Political Philosophy: A Universal Program of Peace and Progress
- 17. How to Deliberate a War
- 18. Democracy and Monarchy
- 19. The Battle
- 20. The Rescue of the Corpses
- 21. Return to Arms
- 22. The Polis’s Loss of Control and Authority
- 23. The Bacchants’ Gospel and the Greek City
- 24. Pentheus and Teiresias
- 25. Dionysus’s Revenge: First Round
- 26. Revenge Prepares Its Murderous Weapon
- 27. Initiation and Sacrifice
- 28. Victory and Defeat
- 29. Euripides’s Poetry
- Bibliography
- Subject Index
- Index Locorum
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
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
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- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Euripides’s Poetic Game and Law of Composition
- 2. Anthropomorphism
- 3. The Protection of the Self and the Role of <i>Sophia</i>
- 4. Some Connotations of <i>Sophia</i>
- 5. Polyneices’s Truth
- 6. Hecuba’s Rhetoric
- 7. Eros in Euripides’s Poetics: Sex as the Cause of the Trojan War
- 8. The Lewd Gaze of the Eye
- 9. The Power of Love: Who Is Aphrodite?
- 10. Phaedra
- 11. Hermione: The <i>Andromache</i>
- 12. Female Victims of War: The <i>Troades</i>
- 13. The Survival in Poetry
- 14. Figures of Metalepsis: The Invention of “Literature”
- 15. The Failure of Politics in Euripides’s Poetics: Politics in the <i>Suppliant Women</i>
- 16. Political Philosophy: A Universal Program of Peace and Progress
- 17. How to Deliberate a War
- 18. Democracy and Monarchy
- 19. The Battle
- 20. The Rescue of the Corpses
- 21. Return to Arms
- 22. The Polis’s Loss of Control and Authority
- 23. The Bacchants’ Gospel and the Greek City
- 24. Pentheus and Teiresias
- 25. Dionysus’s Revenge: First Round
- 26. Revenge Prepares Its Murderous Weapon
- 27. Initiation and Sacrifice
- 28. Victory and Defeat
- 29. Euripides’s Poetry
- Bibliography
- Subject Index
- Index Locorum
