Some information about Euripides
Euripides represents the realism trend. And he uses easy style in his dialogue and simple language in his plays. Euripides also represented the philosophic opinions and disccused the new issues and the realism events that was continuous to this days.
Compare between Euripides and the others
Euripides represented the emotions that were spread during the fifth century. He immixed in his plays the old and modern, between the portly building for the old tragedies and the romantic drama. The dramatic conflict in Euripides's play, was neither between the god and god as in Aeschylus, nor between the god and human like Sophocles, But it became between the opposing motivators inside the soul like the merit and vice or between the weal and evil.
Aeschylus concerned by the religion purpose. Sophocles inserts new ideas that were appeared with the cultured classes. Then Euripides's plays have the form worldly more than religious although they were acted in religious ceremonies.
The Bacchae Themes:
The Greeks of the 5th century B.C. prized balance and order in their lives. Their art and architecture, laws, politics, and social structure suggest a culture that sought equilibrium in all things, including human behavior. Even their gods aligned themselves with opposing a spects of human essence. Apollo was the Greeks gods of prophecy, music, and knowledge. He represented the rational, intellectual capacity of the human mind and its ability to create order out of chaos. As the god of wine and revelry, Dionysus represented the opposite but equally..
Plot:
Dionysus first comes on stage to tell the audience who he is and why he decided to come to Thebes. He explains the story of his birth, how his mother Semele had enamoured the god Zeus, who had come down from Mount Olympus to lie with her. She becomes pregnant with a divine son; however none of her family believes her. Hera, angry at her husband Zeus' betrayal, convinces Semele to ask Zeus to appear to her in his true form. Zeus appears to Semele as a lightning bolt and kills her instantly.
At the moment of her death however, Hermes swoops down and saves the unborn Dionysus. To hide the baby from Hera, Zeus has the fetus sewn up in his thigh until the baby is ready to be born. However, Semele's family - her sisters Agave, Autonoe, and Ino, and her father, Cadmus - still believe that Semele blasphemously lied about the identity of the baby's father and that she died as a result. Dionysus comes to Thebes to vindicate his mother Semele, at the start of the play has returned to take revenge on the house of Cadmus, disguised as a blond stranger. He has driven the women of Thebes, including his aunts, into a feral frenzy, sending them dancing and hunting on the mountain of Cithaeron, much to the horror of their families. Complicating matters, his cousin, the pompous young king Pentheus, has declared a ban on the worship of Dionysus throughout Thebes
The old men Cadmus and Tiresias, though not under the same spell as the Theban women, have become enamored of the Bacchic rituals and are about to go out celebrating when Pentheus returns to the city and finds them dressed in festive garb. He scolds them harshly and orders his soldiers to arrest anyone else engaging in Dionysian worship.
The guards return with the disguised Dionysus himself, who is locked up but, being a god, quickly breaks free and creates more havoc. Word arrives that the Bacchae on Cithaeron are behaving especially strangely and performing incredible feats; wearing live snakes as necklaces, nursing wild cubs, and making wine and water spring up from the ground and from stones. Dionysus decides to taunt his cousin further and convinces Pentheus to investigate the situation on the mountain himself, an undercover operation which requires the king to dress as a female Maenad to avoid detection.
The god's vengeance soon turns from mere humiliation to murder. A messenger arrives at the palace to report that once they reached Cithaeron, Pentheus wanted to climb up an evergreen tree to get a better view of the Bacchants. The blonde stranger used magic to bend the tall tree and place the king at its highest branches. However, once he was safely at the top, Dionysus called out to his followers and showed the man sitting atop the tree. This, of course, drove the Bacchants wild, and they tore the trapped Pentheus down and ripped his body apart piece by piece.
After the messenger has relayed this news, Pentheus' mother, Agave, arrives carrying the head of her son which she and the other Maenads pulled off. She has been driven so mad that she believes it is the head of a mountain lion; she proudly displays it to her father, eager to show off her successful hunt, and she is confused when Cadmus does not delight in her trophy. By that time, however, the spell is beginning to wear off, and as Cadmus reels from the horror of his grandson's death, Agave slowly realizes what she has done. The family is destroyed, Agave and her sisters are sent into exile, and Dionysus, in a final act of revenge, returns briefly to excoriate his family one more time for their impiety.
Compare between Oedipus Rex and the Bacchae
Similarities:
1. _Both the place in Thebes
2. _Both the plays, tragedies and based on historical myth.
3. _Both involve family members killing one another
4. _Both have the character Tirasias as the blind prophet who is one of very few who are not hurt by the plot or consequences.
Contrasts:
The Bacchae s protagonist is a god Dionysus, whereas Oedipus is a mortal, however, I found Oedipus rex and pentheus more comparable than Dionysus and Oedipus. Both are kings, both find tragedy in their hubris and ignorance.
Comparing Oedipus and the Bacchae
Sophocles and Euripides, contemporary playwrights during the 5th century, wrote two Greek tragedies based in Thebes, Greece. In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and in Euripides’ The Bacchae the reader/audience can identify a few similarities, one of them is the presence of the blind prophet Tiresias who, towards the beginning in both plays, speaks the truth but he is not listened to. Oedipus and Pentheus both great kings of Thebes, start out as being confident and in control. As the plot unravels, the audience sees them as unbalanced individuals since the opposite of what they intended has happened, Oedipus is the “polluter” as Tiresias had told him, and Pentheus is under Dionysus’ control and goes “ off to get what I deserve ” . Sophocles and Euripides both show how other characters, such as the blind prophet Tiresias, speak the truth and should be listened to, how both protagonists; Oedipus and Pentheus fail to listen to the prophet and rely on their confidence of being powerful rulers resulting in their dramatically ironic ending. The playwrights use dramatic irony to convey the theme of a mother’s role in the destruction/downfall of their own child; Jocasta’s actions lead her son to blindness, and Agave, butchers Pentheus her son.
The blind prophet Tiresias the one who speaks the truth but no one listens to what he has to say. He tells Oedipus that he is “the murderer of the king whose murderer you seek, and advices Pentheus to not “be too confident a sovereign’s force controls men.” However, neither man listens to the blind prophet’s words and thus meets a tragic ending; Oedipus blinds himself while Pentheus dies at the hands of his mother and at the hands of his mother and aunts. Both powerful rulers start the play with a purpose; Oedipus to find the murderer of Laius and be the hero for the people of Thebes, and Pentheus to “end this perverse nastiness, this Bacchic celebration”. Oedipus soon realizes that he could be the land’s “pollution” and has been blinded his whole life, while Pentheus who doesn’t listen closely to the words of the stranger “You’ll be carried back . . . in your mother’s arms” lets Dionysus guide him to the mountain where he dies. Neither king thought he could lose control of his own life, thus meeting their dramatically ironic ending. Oedipus who thought was free of the curse had already killed his father and married his mother, blinding himself to “never see the crime” he had committed; and Pentheus, an orderly and controlling man, under Dionysus’ control, dresses in woman’s clothing eventually using Jocasta’s own brooches to “dash them on his own eyeballs” and blind himself. In The Bacchae, Agave was “irreverent to the god” and had “acted badly” towards Dionysus’ mother, Semele, lying and angering Zeus who wiped out Semele “by that lightning bolt.” Under “Bacchic madness” in Cithaeron, Agave saw Pentheus as a lion and “slaughtered her only son”.
Sophocles and Euripides, contemporary playwrights, wrote tragic tales during the 5th century in Greece. Although Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Euripides’ The Bacchae have different endings, they still show some similarities due to the fact that the playwrights lived during the same period of time. The similarities in characters, dramatically ironic plot, and underlying theme are all evident to the readers/audience. Sophocles and Euripides attempt to explain to the audience the reason and origins of violence in the play. Oedipus the King and The Bacchae depict a “heroic” king, who refuses to listen to reason from the god’s prophet, a mother, who unknowingly contributes to the downfall of her own child, resulting in a dramatically ironic destruction of the king’s life. In ignorance, Jocasta married Oedipus, her own child, and under Dionysus’ spell, Agave killed her own son “What people thought would happen never did. What they did not expect, the gods made happen.”
