Drugs, Cults, and the Patriarchy: Artistic and Cultural Understanding of the Maenads in late 5th Century Athens in the Context of Patriarchal Dominance
Robbie Stevens
Senior Thesis | 2024
Drugs, Cults, and the Patriarchy:
Artistic and Cultural Understanding of the Maenads in late 5th
Century Athens in the Context of Patriarchal Dominance
Robbie Stevens
Dr. Jewell
Greek Drama in Translation
December 15th, 2023
The Maenads, a woman-dominated cult in ancient Greece dedicated to the god Dionysus, were prolifically represented in 5th century Athenian art. This era was notably a time of significant social upheaval, both in the broader polis and in depictions of the Maenads. To understand how the Maenads were understood artistically and culturally, Athenian artistic depictions of the Maenads, primarily pottery and Euripides’s Bacchae, I will thematically examine and compare both the pottery to the Bacchae and wider events in Athenian society to understand the Maenads' place in 5th century BCE Athens. I will pay special attention to the Bacchae itself, due to its complexity and importance as a source. However, the Bacchae, along with much of Athenian pottery, cannot be taken as an entirely accurate representation of any actual literal Maenadic ritual. It is outside the scope of this paper to establish the ritual practices of the Maenads, and I instead have focused on dissecting how contemporaries understood the Maenads. To establish a rough picture of this I will integrate the
ideas underlying the Bacchae, rather than its literal depiction of any of the god’s rituals, along with pottery and other literary sources, to examine their points of thematic convergence and analyze the significance of that overlap. I contend the Maenads in the late 5th century were not seen as a threat to patriarchal power despite their freedom within the ritual, but were rather seen as a key way to help ritually purify the polis through their worship.1
To understand my research goal, however, we must understand the key background information surrounding it. The Maenads were both a mythological and historical religious cult of Greek women who worshiped the god Dionysus through various forms of ritual and ritualized madness. However, the Maenads were likely, at least by the 5th century BCE, “much more subdued and less exotic” than they are often portrayed in contemporary art 1 I will be using multiple translations, specifically George Theodoridus’s translation published by Poetry In Translation; and Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segals’s translation from The Complete Euripides to reduce reliance on one translation.
(Heinrichs 3). Evidence also exists that the Maenadic cult may have been associated with the use of entheogenic, i.e. psychedelic, substances beyond simply alcohol, especially since women were “Undisputed[ly]...forbidden wine” (Ruck 13) (Ubbels 131).2 However, it is distinctly beyond the scope of this paper to establish the exact practices of the actual Maenadic ritual. I am instead focusing on establishing how the cult and its practitioners were thought of culturally, especially in the context of the highly patriarchal Athenian society. Historically we find prose sourcing for the Maenad's historical activities during the Classical Greek period, approximately 510-323 BCE, in both “inscriptions…and prose,” such as in a marble epitaph describing how three Maenads were brought from Thebes to Magnesia to spread the cult there (Heinrichs 3-4). Euripides, a famed 5th-century Athenian playwright who lived from c. 480 to 406 BCE, wrote his play the 2 For further readings on the presence of entheogenic substances in Maenadic rituals see Carl A. P. Ruck’s Dionysus In Thrace.
Bacchae on the god Dionysus returning to the city of Thebes to establish his divinity and cult and punishing those in the city who resisted him. Dionysus is a multifaceted god who was chiefly worshiped as the god of wine and viticulture, yet was also the patron of drama. The Athenian theater competitions Euripides participated in were festivals in honor of the god.3 Yet in the backdrop of these festivals in the late 5th century BCE was the Peloponnesian war, a large-scale war between the city-states of Athens and Sparta and their respective allies. The war intermittently stretched from 431 to 404 BCE, during which Athens was subjected to a protracted siege that culminated in its defeat (Martin).
3 Viticulture is the cultivation and cultivation of grapes, especially for wine production.
Part I: Drugs, insanity, and maybe ‘Shrooms: An examination of patriarchy, femininity, and acceptance of the Bacchic and
Maenadic rituals in Euripides’s Bacchae
In his introduction to Euripides’s Bacchae, Charles Segal writes, “Whether the play means us to identify with the triumphant god or with the cost to his human antagonists remains the basic interpretive question [of the play]” (Segal 203). The reason this question remains so contentious is the framing of those options as mutually exclusive. I argue Euripides intended the audience to identify both with Dionysus as an inevitable and necessary part of society opposed by a cruel king who refused the proper place of the god and his rituals, and with the god’s victims, most importantly Pentheus, as a figure many can relate to, who is meant by the playwright to be a warning against rejecting the god's rituals. Segal notes that “Pentheus’s [rejectionary] response [and suspicion of the supposed sexual nature of the Bacchant’s ritual] may not have been atypical” (Segal 217). This possibly indicates
the playwright was reinforcing the ritual’s importance as an imperative element of the worship of the god. The playwright’s defense in the Bacchae is a moralizing tale describing the necessity of the ritual and the social harm, largely through allegorical violence, caused by attempting to disrupt the ritual and its rules, along with the importance of the ritual. It paints a picture of how the Maenads were perceived as key supplicants to the god, suggesting that those who patriarchally oppose their ritual oppose the god and invite harm upon the polis.
The Feminine nature of the ritual and the need to keep it that way in the play:
The Bacchae establishes the strictly feminine nature of the ritual within the play and outlines a clear, if allegorical, punishment for those who violate it. Dionysus’s opening speech explicitly established the feminine nature of the ritual, with the god
declaring how he “delivered a little bit of madness” to the Theban women, making them “leave their house and rush off all in a rage to the mountains where they now live” (Theodoridis, 33-4). However, while these women are considered Bacchants and not Maenades, both groups are established by Dionysus to be strictly feminine only. Dionysus refers to the Maenads as his “sisterhood of worshippers,” indicating that even in the recreation of his revels with unwilling hosts the ritual's strict gender regulation must be maintained within the play (Gibbons and Segal, 247). While Maenads and Bacchants are expressly delineated by the play, specifically by Dionysus, this separation defines the Maenads as Dionysus’s specific followers who traveled with him from “Mount Tmolos, fortress of Lydia, You whom…[he] brought from among the Barbarians To sit beside…[him] and share…[his] wanderings” (Gibbons and Segal, 245). He focuses his distinction on how these are the followers who were with him for a long time, whereas the Bacchants, in turn, are the new women he just possessed against
their will. Moreover, Euripides later blurs this distinction–with the Chorus declaring how Pentheus the “hunter of the Bakkhai…[fell] under the trampling herd of the Maenads” (Gibbons and Segal, 298). This distinction seems to suggest that both groups are practicing the rites of Dionysus, and the only significant difference in ritual practice is that the Maenads willingly left their homes to follow Dionysus, and are presumably not representative of any real group of followers. In turn, the ritual of the Bacchants is the story's loose representation of the women who are still integrated into society and simply engage in the ecstatic ritual. For consistency and clarity, this essay will maintain the play’s distinction between Bacchants and Maenads. It is worth noting that this distinction seems inconsistent outside of the play, so this distinction may be present in wider Athenian society at the time, or might be introduced for clarity by the playwright.
The importance of maintaining the gender regulation of the ritual is shown most clearly through the downfall of Pentheus, as
the play portrays his violation of the ritual as absurd and unjust, ultimately causing his death.4 The transgressiveness of his violation culminates with his desire to look upon the Bacchants, which Dionysus clearly shows by noting how Pentheus is “ready/to spy on…[his] own mother and her troupe” (Gibbons and Segal, 279). By putting his desire to spy on his naked mother in the same line and clause as spying on the Bacchants, Euripides associates the two concepts as similarly, if not equally, immoral. The absurdity of Pentheus’s desire to intrude on the ritual is further reinforced as he reacts to his feminine appearance in an almost childlike manner. He is suddenly obsessed with his appearance, asking if his face looks “more similar to my mother’s Agave’s or to Ino’s," and he dislodges one of his now femininely curled hairs “a bit…[by dancing] inside and as…[he] whirled…[his] head around a bit, like the Bacchants” (Theodoridis, 929-30). While his
4 In this essay, concepts like absurdity and what is considered civilization are understood within their 5th century Greek understanding rather than our modern understandings.
innocent and ironic excitement was possibly endearing to the audience, it also would have been clearly absurd and comical as he fawns over the cross-gender feminine traits and acts he previously rejected, further emphasized by Dionysus’s fussing over Pentheus’s hair, rove, and thyrsos-holding technique, all while Pentheus ironically marches towards his death (Theodoridis, 94143). This comic humiliation connects to the later theme of his regression into childhood, as Dionysus notes how Pentheus will be “carried home…in his mother’s arm," which Pentheus adds will “force…[him] to be spoiled” (Gibbons and Segal, 281-2).
That near comic irony is further emphasized through Pentheus’s madness, as we can see when he asks Dionysus if he could now “lift the whole mountain, its valleys and all the Bacchants on…[his] back," which Dionysus indulges, warning him not to destroy “the Bacchants’ haunts and the dens of Pan” (Theodoridis, 948-9). Additional irony is added as he ironically dismisses the Bacchants as “mere women” against whom he
refuses to use his supposed strength, despite both the warnings from the first messenger of their strength in battle and the audience's contextual knowledge of his doom (Theodoridis, 952). The scene ends with the Chorus ridiculing him for being “a man who mimics woman,/ A madman spying on the Maenads”; the play finalizes the absurdity of a man dressing as a woman to attend the Maenadic ritual through this ridicule right before they call for his death (Gibbons and Segal, 282-3). Euripides uses these calls for death from the Chorus to indicate the immorality of Pentheus’s sacrilege, as they shout to “let Justice appear” and for her to “carry a sword for killing…Echions unjust, unlawful, ungodly…offspring” (Gibbons and Segal, 283). The use of Justice here, invoking both the goddess and the concept, clearly relates Pentheus' actions as a threat and insult to proper society that must be dealt with similar to other crimes (Dodds Commentary 201).
This clear declaration of Pentheus’s spying as a sacrilege deserving retribution is echoed by Dionysus when he calls to the Bacchants
for Pentheus’s death, declaring how Pentheus made a mockery of “you [the Bacchants] and me [Dionysus]/ And my mystic rites” (Gibbons and Segal, 283). Dionysus here reaffirms that Pentheus’s wrongdoings are not just limited to his rejection of Dionysus, but also include his spying upon the Bacchants. Finally, the most fundamental and structural evidence for the immorality of violating the ritual is that the playwright sends an “unjust man” to do an unjust thing, and he is met with justice as retribution for his actions. (Gibbons and Segal, 283) Euripides spends a significant amount of the play, and its main climatic moment of anticipation, on establishing the violation of the feminine nature of the ritual as both absurd and immoral; by using this key moment in the play to emphasize this specific message of the ritual as feminine and necessary and the clear consequences for ignoring that, Euripides indicates the importance of that message to the ethos of the play.
Irrationality and immorality of rejecting the cult as seen through Pentheus:
The Bacchae further outlines the social importance of the ritual and the god and portrays their rejection as fundamentally irrational. Euripides frames the rituals of the god Dionysus as a purifying force in the play; this reflects a broader theme noted in Charles Segal’s introduction to the Bacchae that “throughout Attic tragedy Dionysos is invoked as a god of purification who can help the city at a moment of crisis” (Segal 208). This representation is established by Euripides, both with the Chorus referring to his rituals as “cleansing rituals…[done] high on the mountains," and by the god who notes that, though he cannot reveal the rites to Pentheus, “it would be good for…[him] to see [them]” (Theodoris). This detoxification inherently links with ideas of liberation coming from ritualistic madness. The god and his ritual “liberates…[practitioners] from the constrictions and restraints of ordinary social life” through his “gifts of wine…[and] group
ecstasy” (Segal 201). Dionysian rituals give one the ability to become free of social limitations and grant one the opportunity to live in a state that, in a way, is more authentic to one's base desires (one example of this is Dionysus opening Pentheus to his base desire to witness the perceived sexual activity of the Bacchants.) The possible use of entheogens would mean further knowledge of one's true self through the, as Carl Ruck writes in his book
Dionysus in Thrace about Entheogens in Greek religion, “extreme states of ecstasy" (Ruck 77). That freedom results in the ability to face and reevaluate one's perspectives and decisions outside of one’s emotions and social pressures. It further, as one would expect, allows for the purity of inhibition, and freedom from daily stress to live authentically to one's base desires. And that release from one's daily stresses can be an incredibly productive exercise. While this release was limited to women, the social benefit within the household still would have had positive ramifications. This purification mirrors the other masculine rituals of the god, like the
very theatrical festival and ritual the male audience was watching this play in, comparing the purification they got from the festival to the ritual in both effect and importance.
From its beginning, the Bacchae sets up the irrationality of rejecting Dionysus and his rituals through the contrast of Pentheus against Cadmus and Teiresias–the latter of whom declares that Pentheus was murdered because he “came to mock Dionysos and your Bacchic rites'' (Theodoridis, 1294).5 Throughout the actual events of the play, Cadmus is a figure of rationality who serves as a rational, wizened contrast to the foolish and youthful Pentheus, primarily through his acknowledgment of Dionysus’s divinity, even if done in the wrong “spirit” (Gibbons and Segal, 245). This is outlined near the beginning of the play when he says “We must obey everyone of Dionysos’ wishes, in every way possible. He is my daughter’s son and…is indeed a god/ Let’s show him our
5 Cadmus is the grandfather of Pentheus and is both the founder and former king of Thebes. Teiresias is the city's official seer. Both are elderly and Teiresias has gone blind.
respect as much as we can'', and even earlier where he is praiseworthy even to the god for “turning this [tomb] into a sacred monument in honor of his daughter” despite the god's contempt for him (Theodoridis, 13). The dynamic of those wise from age accepting the rites is further highlighted when the two old men, Cadmus and Teirisias, are the “only ones going to…Dionysos’s holy dance," and are the “only ones who can think straight” (Theodoridis, 198). Both of these old wise men are then immediately contrasted by the young and foolhardy Pentheus as he storms onstage with guards while declaring his contempt for the rituals. Furthermore, the identity for these two people who contrast Pentheus only heightens his foolish portrayal, as Cadmus is the grandfather of Pentheus, and Teiresias is the archetypical seer. As official seer of Thebes Teiresias has special knowledge of the divine, which is highlighted from the beginning as he teaches Cadmus how to “honor the god” properly (Gibbons and Segal, 251). Cadmus, as former king of Thebes and Pentheus’s
grandfather, represents the authority of “traditions from…[their] fathers," in other words, the traditional and proper way of doing things, and the ability of patrilineal control to coexist with the Bacchic rituals under one societal roof (Gibbons and Segal, 252).
Pentheus’s foolishness is thereby further exaggerated as he rejects the knowledge of the divine along with the authority of tradition and his father, all to the horror of the Chorus, who decry his irreverence towards “the gods and Kadmos” (Gibbons and Segal, 252).
67 His brash words and aggression are contrasted with Kadmos and Therisias’s wisdom and acceptance of the divine Dionysus and his feminine ritual as Pentheus rejects two core forms of societal authority.
6 The Play itself also explicitly reminds the audience from the beginning that the authority of the divine supersedes the authority of humanity, seen in how Kadmos, who is associated with social authority, immediately identifies Teiresias “a wise mans” and is taught the proper way to revere the god by him. (Gibbons and Segal, 251).
7 Even his own guards are “ashamed” to have arrested him and marvel at the wonders Dionysus has brought, which only further emphasizes Pentheus’s foolishness (Gibbons and Segal, 260).
The theme of the irrationality of rejecting the ritual is brought through the later parts of the play by the fundamental conflict in Pentheus’s psyche, shown through his distress, and later his conversation with and submission to Dionysus. From his introduction to the play up until his submission to Dionysus and his internal desires, Pentheus’s distress is an obvious contrast to every other named character. That distress stems both directly and metaphorically from his rejection of the god (and while named characters, namely Kadmos and Agaue, are shown unhappy after his death, their unhappiness is explicitly tied to their punishments for not properly respecting the god). Pentheus is shown as angry and rigidly patriarchal; from the moment he enters the stage he is “very agitated” over the “New evils” of women “[leaving their] houses for bogus revels” (Gibbons and Segal, 252). Moreover, his anger continues as he fruitlessly attempts to suppress the cult, whipping himself into a frenzy as he declares his intention to “Sacrifice…[and slaughter] the women…in those canyons”
(Gibbons and Segal, 273). He refuses to accept any shift away from his own patriarchal power, and sees Dionysus as a sexual threat who has tricked the women into “rank[ing] Aphrodite first” and who possesses “the charm of Aphrodite” which he uses to “[mingle] with young girls” through promise of “joyous rapture” (Gibbons and Segal, 253). He is unable to reconcile the momentary power given to women by the ritual to honor the god as anything but a threat to his own patriarchal power over the women's lives and sexuality. In his mind, he cannot allow women to give in to their base chthonic desires encouraged by the ritual lest his own patriarchal power collapse. Pentheus is only able to escape from his fury when he submits to his base desires through the guidance and suggestion of the god. Through this release, which is possibly metaphorically representative of alcohol or entheogen use which further opens one up to their base desires, he can admit his base internal desires to, as Froma Zeitlin puts it in her essay Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama, “see…[his mother]
participate in the sexual activities he imagines…and he longs to both assert his phallic power and to be cradled in her arms again like a child” (Zeitlin Thebes 136). In this exposed psychological state, not only is Pentheus’s desire to return to a state of childlike innocence made apparent (made more obvious by his childlike excitement over the transformation), his desire to interact sexually with his mother, whether observationally or physically, remains to him a means to assert power over the Bacchants. Before Pentheus is given madness by the god, he claims he must “proceed against them armed, or suffer… [the god’s] advice” (Gibbons and Segal, 276). This phrasing implies either option as a method to prevent “the Bakkhai from laughing/that they've won” (Gibbons and Segal, 276). Even Pentheus’s base desires fundamentally betray a conflict between submitting to the matriarchal authority of his mother within the ritual or asserting his patriarchal authority over the ritual. The god both purifies him of and encourages his conflicts. Dionysus allows him to joyfully embrace his femininity, yet the
god continues to lead him towards the Bacchants. Dionysus has split Pentheus into two selves, making him “doubled (or divided) with his masculine self," such that momentarily Pentheus is half in an identity “that makes…[him] one with the god and his worshippers" (Zeitlin Thebes 138-9). However, his unresolved urge for masculine dominance dooms him to remain, until his death, an outsider, even after the transformation by the god.
Here the misery and rigidity of Pentheus are contrasted with Kadmos and Teiresias to highlight the young king's emotional conflict and subconscious impurity. Dionysus, as mentioned before, is a god of purification, and these two old men who have embraced him are shown as pure and happy by dressing in the garments of the god and celebrating him. They have been cleansed of the toxic emotional buildup from daily life and social rules, unlike Pentheus, who is constantly angry and rigid. Both Kadmos and Teiresias are shown as having escaped the miseries of old age, that the Bacchic revels will allow them to celebrate “all day and all
night” and allow them the great joy to “forget that…[they] are old” and that through the god they may together climb the mountain to celebrate him (Gibbons and Segal, 251). Their happiness comes from embracing their intrinsic femininity dressed in “dappled fawn skins…[and] ivy…[and] thyrsos” (Gibbons and Segal, 253). By embracing their femininity in conjunction with their usual masculine identity as the seer of Thebes and former king of Thebes, they can unlock a sense of happiness that is left unavailable to Pentheus. Further, they are noted as holding thyrsos, which, as Dr. Ruck argues, are the “repository for psychoactive substances” and the psychoactive madness was “[ritualized] as vigorous dancing” (Ruck 33). The thyrsos symbolically allows Kadmos and Thesias to overcome their age and participate in the ecstatic ritual.
Pentheus represents those who would irrationally seek to place human will and law over the will of the gods. His death serves as a warning to those who would place human laws over the
divine, which is made explicit in Kadmos’s lament over his death that “Anyone who feels/Superior to the gods should study this/Pentheus is dead – Believe in the gods” (Gibbons and Segal, 297). The warning is clear: to let the ritual of the gods supersede any human constructs, especially, as noted in Zeitlin’s essay
Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama, the “civic, masculine authority” represented by Pentheus over the women of Thebes (Zeitlin Other 63). Pentheus is a warning to those who do not relinquish to the god, a humbling tale that reminds the people of the power of the god over them. This warning connects especially to any who think they must assert their masculine authority over the Bacchic rituals. It is a warning by the play of both the irrationality and risk of any attempts to disrupt the ritual, as the ritual itself proved entirely harmless until
men attempted to assert power over it, in the messengers' attempt to kidnap Agaue, and then Pentheus’s disruption.8
A key element of Pentheus’s portrayal as an absurd character is his utter lack of self-knowledge, which is a stark contrast to the god's total knowledge of him; that dichotomy of knowledge reinforces the social importance of the god as a means of self-knowledge. Pentheus’s irrationality caused by rejecting the ritual is bluntly told to the audience by Dionysus, who declares that he is “the sane one and…[Pentheus] is not” (Gibbons and Segal, 263). Yet beyond that, Pentheus shows us his lack of reason in his inability to understand what the disguised Dionysus is truly saying. Disguised Dionysus outright tells Pentheus that Dionysus is “right here, now, and sees what…[he is] suffering," before even more bluntly telling him “He's where I am. Because of your irreverence you cannot/See him” (Gibbons and Segal, 263). For those
8 This would further comment on any possible contemporary objections to use of entheogens or intoxicants in the ritual.
reasonable enough to accept the god this is an obvious admission that this supposed man from “Lydia” is Dionysus (Gibbons and Segal, 261). But Pentheus is not able to understand that, because he is the fool who, throughout the play, is at his core “an ineffectual youth…[who] fails in all the threats he makes in the course of the play” (Segel Introduction). Pentheus is the fool, who is intellectually unable to properly respond to the situation presented to him throughout the play.
Pentheus’s lack of self-knowledge is shown in his first conversation with Dionysus, where again we are told clearly by the god that Pentheus “does not know what…[his] life is, nor what/…[he] is doing, nor what…[he is] (Gibbons and Segal, 263). From a broad, thematic perspective, he lacks the self-knowledge of his more primal self and fails to understand the divide between what is a part of civilization and what is a part of primitivism. In Pentheus’s mind, he is a civilizing force standing against intoxicated primitive madness, but in reality, he rejects wild
ecstasy “mediated by the art of viticulture” and instead embodies “the natural toxins of the primordial world” (Ruck 8). By rejecting the part of the god that is “mediated’ with civilization, he invites “only the destructive forces of the wilderness to rise up in enmity” (Ruck 68). He does not understand what the implications of his rejection of the god are, nor what he himself represents. This symbolism is finalized as he is marched, in a state of delirious madness, towards the ritual named notably for Bacchus, not Dionysus, to meet his death. He rejects the civilization of the god, and so is met with the wrath of the god's primitivistic, unmediated self, represented through the Bacchants he controls.
The young king's utter lack of self-knowledge is emphasized further in his conversation with the god before he is feminized by the god. Dionysus “with a single word…exposes and releases all the longings that Pentheus has fought against in himself” (Segal 220). The god knows Pentheus because Pentheus is a primitive “antithesis” of him (Ruck 12). As the god lays plain
the desires Pentheus has repressed within himself, he is unable to resist. After that, the god makes it plain that Pentheus's reflection of him, seen most obviously in that as he is transformed by the god, he “donned the same effeminate dress that Dionysis had previously used to disguise himself as the prophet of the new religion” (Ruck 59). Pentheus is transformed into a symbolic herald of the new religion, just as the disguised Dionysus once was, through his role as the “sacrificial offering…[as] the fruit of the tree” to be harvested and placed “atop…[Agaue’s] Thyrsus, the appropriate palace for the gathered toxin” (Ruck 60). His death reflects both his similarities and differences to the god, though through his lack of self-knowledge, he is unable to recognize this. He takes the form of the god in his sacrificial form as “the deity harvested in the revel'' which allows the god to take the form of the “leader of the choral group” that knows “how to accept…[the rituals] blessings….[as] the joy that is complement of suffering” (Ruck 65). Pentheus is analogous to Bacchus as the “victim for the
liberation [from primitivism] of his brother Apollo;” however, Pentheus fails to ascend and “achieve the defining characteristics of the god in escaping from his mother's womb," instead being “totally subsumed into Agave’s personae” (Ruck 65). His sacrificial role relates him to the older, more matriarchal Bacchus born as Semel's son, yet he fails to ascend into the patriarchally mediated state of Dionysus as “the son of Zeus that…enabled…[him] to discover the vine” (Ruck 65). In this role, he is killed with “the precise characteristics he had impugned the god for when he disbelieved” the tale of his birth (Ruck 65).
Pentheus fails to ascend because he embodies the primitivism of Dionysus and society, and is sacrificed for the assimilation of the cult as an element of the civilizing force of Dionysus. His death explicitly leads to the implied acceptance of the ritual in Agaue’s final remark to “Let…[seeing Mount Kithairon] be for other
Bakkhai” (Gibbons and Segal, 300).9 Pentheus’s rejection of the god and his own primitive nature leads to his ignorance and inability to understand who he is and what he wants. It is through this that the god asserts his role over Pentheus by “releasing all the longings” Pentheus had repressed (Segal 220). This release allows the young king to finally know what he desires and be able to enact his final role as the heralding sacrifice to allow the new religion into Thebes. Pentheus, as the one who opposes the ritual, is the primitive force within the polis that must be overcome to establish true civilization.
Consequences of rejecting the ritual and the god and how that highlights the importance of accepting the Bacchic ritual in the play:
The individual consequences for rejecting and suppressing the Bacchic rituals in the play are made apparent. The broad scope
9 It is worth noting that what self knowledge he gains comes from the god, not from the ritual, so there is no conflict against the gender prohibition within the Bacchic ritual in the play.
of the punishment for rejecting the ritual is the basis of the message of the play as a moral tale, it portrays a broad scope of brutal, metaphoric punishments across society. The most obvious point of punishment is the death of Pentheus, which Euripides very pointedly portrayed in both a horrifying and possibly cathartic manner. His insolence is met with his own mother “setting her foot hard/Against this ill fated man,/And [“by the ease the god gave to her”] she tore his shoulder out” and as he was “groaning his last breath” and after the Bacchants “with bloodied hands were playing games/By tossing hunks of [his flesh]” and “His pitiful head” was mounted as if a trophy upon a thyrsos (Gibbons and Segal, 287).
The horror of this death is so emphasized that it remains visceral even through translation; Penthus’s death is very clearly, and unsurprisingly, highlighted by the playwright. Yet the death may also have been a relief to the audience: the arrogant, tyrannical king who rejects the wisdom of his father and the gods getting what he deserves. Yet that would likely not have negated the
horror of the moment, and the playwright purposefully expands the punishment of Pentheus and other individuals who rejected him from beyond simply the moment of the king's death.
Dionysus further punishes the fallen king through the ignominious nature of his death and his regression from maturity that occurs in his conversations with the god, and while Pentheus himself may be unaware of this punishment (due to being dead and his madness respectively), the audience bears full witness to the breadth of his punishment. When Pentheus reaches the Bacchants, his death is clearly made ignominious as he cries out “Mother, it’s Pentheus, your child! It’s me!/ You gave birth to me…Have pity on me, Mother! Don’t kill me” (Gibbons and Segal, 287). From his first conversation with Dionysus to his death he has been reduced from “the role of adult king and warrior to confused adolescent and finally to infantile helplessness before a raging, all powerful mother” (Segal 222). He has lost the masculine power and glory he began the play with and is reduced to suffering a humiliating
childlike death, whimpering for mercy to his own mother. In fact, his submission to Dionysus through choosing not to take up arms means he has failed “a major point of male generational passage and is fixed at the ephebic state," with the ephebe being “the youth between the ages of eighteen and twenty who carries light weapons and…[patrols] the frontier country as a scout and a ‘spy’” (Segal 222). As Segal critically points out, Pentheus’s submission to the god is not just a release of his control of himself but is also a clear backward regression. The god undoes his age, which in an abstract sense undoes all of his accomplishments over his life until he is left a whimpering child. Pentheus is robbed of the glory he could have achieved as a young man, who was once “The pride of the palace…[and] the strength of our city” (Theodoridis, 1307). While this punishment is clearly more fable than literal, his rejection of the divine rites of the god directly leads to his humbling, reducing him from a great king to a sacrifice to the god as a warning.
Another post-death punishment of Pentheus is the violation of his corpse, which was written as so extremely mutilated it would be “difficult to find it all/Again," and after a grisly search, Cadmus and the servants are forced to only “fit together all his body as best/…[they could]” [emphasis added] (Gibbons and Segal, 296). While he ultimately is largely put back together, it is clear that his body is deformed, especially given the games played “by tossing hunks of [his flesh]” (Gibbons and Segal, 296). His body is forced to be buried in a desecrated, ignominious form that in no way can be returned to any sense of noble glory.
Yet Penthus’s death and mutilation, when combined with the fact it was his own mother, Agaue, who killed him, extend Dionysus’s punishment beyond Pentheus’s person to also include his house. Agaue, devastated by the murder her own hands wrought, feels unable to properly grieve or conduct his funeral. She questions how she can “put…[him] in…[his] tomb” despite her fears others will not do so properly and with what “sort of
robes” she can bury him in; she further laments “How can I lift these limbs, and kiss torn flesh/That…[she herself] gave birth to” (Gibbons and Segal, 295). She is brutally forced by the play to face not only her child's death but that it was by her own hands. She is forced to be both mourner and murderer. His mother, who “once was blessed/With happiness…[is now] wretched” (Gibbons and Segal, 295). The joy once felt in the royal house of Thebes is torn down through the collapse brought on by the rejection of the god. This hardship is a consequence both upon Pentheus (though the audience, not Pentheus, is the one made to witness and interpret that) and against Agaue for her own rejection of the god’s divine birth.10 The horror of his death serves as punishment for both Pentheus and his house, especially given that now his line has been ended. Dionysus lays an extreme punishment upon the Theban royal family for rejecting him and his cult, which only compounds
10 Dionysus was born to the mortal Semele and the king god Zeus, yet many of the women of Thebes, including Agaue and Pentheus’s aunts, Semeles own sisters, believed Semele was lying.
with the more direct hardship Pentheus faced as he rejected the god.
In the end, Pentheus’s resistance was notably futile, as not only did the worship of Dionysus enter the city and dethrone him, but Pentheus personally submitted to the god before his death, which further reinforces the message of the cult as an irrepressible core part of society. Pentheus, as most clearly described in Froma Zetlin’s essay Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama, is forced to “trade his hoplite military tactics” and ultimately give up his “stubborn claim to unequivocal masculinity," and is instead turned into one with the very “effeminate appearance…[he] once had earlier mocked” (Zeitlin Other 63). Through the god's mind-altering powers, Pentheus cannot resist accepting the god and abandoning his original idea to violently repress his rituals and put its practitioners to death. This may be indicative of the irresistibility of the mind-altering entheogens that give self-knowledge, especially given how the
play notes both his possession of a thyrsos and questioning of how to properly hold and use it when he asks, “Which way is right is more as the Bakkhai do – to hold/The Thyrsos in my right or left hand” (Gibbons and Segal, 280). As he is further brought under the sway of the god, he is better able to understand his true desires, which whether a direct allusion to the power of entheogenic rituals in the indoctrination of the cult or simply an allusion to the potent and irresistible self-knowledge given by the cult, is a clear indication of the power of the cult over people and its inevitability as a part of an organized society.
Those post-death punishments compounded with the consequences he faces in life which were largely addressed earlier, notably the misery caused by his rigidity and his lack of the selfknowledge that could be provided by the god and his rituals. These all link to the aforementioned futility of resisting the ritual. His actions doom him to be met with the “grief” his name is well “suited for” (Gibbons and Segal, 263). Notably for the message of
the play, the Bacchae clearly shows a broader societal punishment for violations of the ritual through the resulting spread of the punishment, which results in the “unfounding” of the city of Thebes (Ruck 60). The entire ruling family of Thebes is exiled from the city, doomed to endure hardship and to “look upon…[their] native land no longer" (Gibbons and Segal, 298). That exile critically leaves the entire leadership of Thebes cast out from the city. This links to Dionysus’s depiction as a civilized force, specifically through the wine he brings, which is depicted as “emblematic of the triumph of cultivation and civilization over…primitivism” (Ruck 32). To reject the civilizing force of Dionysus is to reject civilization and invite primitivism into the polis. The play purposefully ends with an exaltation by the Chorus on the power of the divine, a final reminder of the god’s might over humanity and humanity's inherent need to submit to divine authority.
Conclusion: What did the playwright want us to think?
It is obvious from the structure of the play that Pentheus and those others are punished for their refusal to accept the god, but the much more literal message of the play was grounded in the societal role of the god's worship. Pentheus’s refusal to accept the feminine Bacchant ritual into Thebes directly resulted in his rejection of the civilization brought by Dionysus, who provides a medium for the polis to interact with its primal urges while maintaining the structures of civilization. That rejection led to Pentheus’s death at the hands of the unmediated Bacchants, and his own unmediated desires, leading to his being overwhelmed by his desire to once again be cradled by his mother and “subsumed into…[her] personae” (Ruck 64). Pentheus, because he rejects the god in the name of upholding civilization, is forced to endure a realm without the civilizing Dionysus, who bridges the patriarchal world of the contemporary polis of Euripides with the “[mediated] female realm of the mother” (Ruck 63). Pentheus fails to accept the
“triumph of cultivation and civilization…over primitivism” emblemized by the god’s Dionysian form as the vine-discovering son of Zeus, and so he is instead dominated by the matriarchal Bacchants who wear “animal pelts” to “access the spirit of the animal” as a method of “communion with the deity," who takes the name of the primitivistic Bacchus (Ruck 48). The construction of the god as a bringer of civilization emblemized by his cult emphasizes the cult's perceived importance in the play. Once primitivism has been rejected by Thebes in favor of the cult, the god takes the form of the “leader of the choral group who have come with him from the Phygian lands, where the religion is not destructive…in a society that knows ritually how to accept…[the cults] blessings” (Ruck 65). The god’s dualistic nature represents and enables the integration of opposing points; by having both a “witnessed father…[and] identifiable mother” give birth to him, he represents the integration of the matriarchal and patriarchal elements of his dualistic nature (Ruck 63). The Bacchae, by
showing the Bacchant’s ritual as a necessary extreme with dire consequences if opposed, serves a similar role to other myths enforcing important social behavior, such as the mythological stories of Zeus appearing as a beggar. Furthermore, Euripides establishes the Bacchic ritual as an essential part of the worship of the god himself, one which cannot simply be separated from the god, but is instead intrinsically a part of him and his nature as a dualistic entity. All this combines to form a moral tale, reminding the audience of the imperative public morals to respect both the god and his ritual through the threat of both divine revenge and social hardship.
Part II: Madness and Patriarchy: Examining 5th century
Athenian pottery depicting Maenads to understand how the cult was artistically and socially understood in terms of gender dynamics.
Unlike the Bacchae, which is highly mythological, by the 5th century Athenian pottery was increasingly becoming grounded in something that seemed much more literal at times. These changes reflected a broader shift in the understanding and role of the Maenads and the ritual within Athenian society. Between the beginning and end of the 5th century BCE, artistic shifts indicate that the Maenad's role in society grew significantly as they became further less transgressive and integrated into the polis’s patriarchal control, abandoning many of their more primitive aspects while growing as both a holy ritual and key part of civic maintenance. Many of the same themes underpin the Bacchae, and it is the intersection of these themes that helps illuminate broader Athenian social shifts to see the Maenadic ritual as a respectable, well-
integrated ritual whose upkeep was both necessary to the polis while also not dangerous to broader patriarchal control.
Maenads in the male ritual:
Whatever form Maenads took in Athenian society, they were obviously considered to some degree socially acceptable. A key piece of evidence for this is laid out in Barbara Goff’s book
Citizen Bacchae: Women's Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece, with Maenad's presence being “confined to the “male” shapes of symposium vases” (Goff 39). However this depiction “peaked” in the “late sixth century and in the fourth, while during the “drop off” period of the fifth century they were confined to large (=symposium?) vases” (Goff 39). The Maenad “starts to differentiate herself around the beginning of the 5th century” with identifying qualities “such as the thyrsus…or fawnskin” from generic women in the retinue of the god (Goff 40). Yet these established Maenads are quite distinctly associated with Dionysus as embracing his divine gift of holy “trance” and do not embrace
his gifts related to “sex," which is confined to the Satyrs who were also commonly depicted in association with the god (Goff 40).
This clear separation of the Maenads from sex is further clarified by the, as Goff notes, “never satisfied” sexual attempts of the Satyrs upon the Maenads (Goff 43). This rejection of sex from male pursuers by the Maenads does result in clear compatibility with the patriarchal need for patrilineal lineage determination. The rejection of sex by Maenads in the ritual is epitomized in one bowl with a Maenad's “strategically placed” thyrsos strike against the oncoming Satyr (Goff 41). This is notably echoed by the Bacchae, where Teiresias notes “In matters of Aphrodite/With respect to everything that lies in their nature/…[and thereby] a woman of true self-control will not/be corrupted” (Gibbons and Segal, 256).
While the presence of Satyrs does initially seem to create a further layer of impossibility, the Satyrs are seemingly not meant to be taken literally. Rather, they are a “joke at the expense of the [male] viewer," who is “identified with the scopophilic satyr," where the
joke is that for seeking to look at the naked Maenad, the viewer is “reduced to a hairy satyr” (Goff 43). More abstractly, Maenads are shown doing “few other human actions” besides being “entranced and possessed” by the god and his ritual (Goff 44). The Maenads are fully consumed with communion to the god, whether metaphorically or literally. While “the Symposium vases do not attempt to offer a realistic decision of Dionysiac worship," they do offer an idea of how the wealthy and powerful men wanted to perceive the Maenads, as they would have bought, commissioned, and used the vases. (Goff 44) What the Symposium vases thereby give us is not necessarily a fully literal depiction of any Maenadic ritual, but rather an idea sanctioned by and made comfortable with men, especially in their own interaction with the god.
How artistic depictions of the Maenads represented a cult compatible with societal patriarchal control:
When representations of the Maenadic cult are more closely examined, they notably align quite clearly into something
socially acceptable to the organized and patriarchal Athenian society. One of the most important factors in the Maenad's acceptability is that the Maenads clearly do not have sex in their revelry, and explicitly reject heterosexual sex.11 This was utterly incompatible with the aforementioned male patrilineal power dynamics, and yet despite the altered state of consciousness, no sexual relations between the Maenads are depicted. The Maenads are consumed entirely with worship and communion with the god. They are not bound to the mortal realm, but instead, as Dr. Krista Ubbels notes in her dissertation The Maenads: More Than Greeces
Good Time Girls: An Examination in Athenian Image, Text and Historical Evidence, are “proud and athletic dancers, and contrasted with the bulky, hairy and indignant satyrs," and though “the maenad’s head is tilted upwards and she seems out of touch with reality…[she] share[s] in Dionysos’ majesty and command[s]
11 Sapphic sex is simply not really addressed as it was not afforded the same cultural importance as queer masculine sex was.
the feeling of dignity” in Athenian pottery (Ubbels 41-44).12 Here the Maenads, unlike the aroused Satyrs, are shown at an intersection of the divine and mortal realms, and they possess elements of both. They are lithe, athletic, yet distinctively human dancers, but also share in the “majesty” and “dignity” of the god during the ritual in contrast to the earthly Satyrs (Ubbels 44). They are completely dedicated to the god during the ritual, confining any power they have strictly within the confines of the ritual in a way that does not encroach upon broader patriarchal authority.
Another key factor in Maenadic social compatibility is the near complete lack of violence in association with the cult; there is no evidence of any “‘actual’ violence on inscriptions that instruct or tell of Maenad duties and roles” (Ubbels 49). Furthermore, “violence of any kind by the maenads is rarely associated in any period of Attic vase painting," with images of Maenadic violence occurring “no later than 460 BCE…long before Euripides
12 This idea is credited to Dr. Elizabeth Walters, Ubbels’s thesis advisor.
conceived his terrifying portrayals in The Bacchae" (Ubbels 4952). So by the later half of the 5th century BCE Athens, a clear pattern emerges of representations of the Maenads rejecting violence, and notably the exceptions to this emerge strictly in defense of the sanctity of devotees against sexual violations to the ritual. In pottery, the Maenads are shown defending themselves from the advances of Satyrs, clearly epitomized in the aforementioned strategically placed thyrsos strike. The Bacchants in the Bacchae also reflect this pattern, rising up in violence only in defense of Agaue and against Pentheus’s intrusion. Any violence by the Maenads in Attic pottery is attributed rather strictly to rejecting the sexual advances of men, and all fall under patriarchal attempts to dominate the devotees, for which their defense is clearly shown as justified. The Maenads are informally sacrosanct while lost in the ritual, and this is reflected in prose too, showing it is not simply a poetic metaphor, though only later prose sources survive (Ubbels 32).
The behavior of these frenzied worshippers who are given near sacrosanctity to exceed usual bounds of society is notably not entirely abnormal; as Dr. E. R.. Dodds notes in his essay
Maenadism in the Bacchae, the “whole description of the maenads' raid on the Theban villages (Bacch., 748-64) corresponds to the known behavior of comparable groups elsewhere” (Dodds Maenadism 8). He notes how “In Liberia…novices who are undergoing initiation in the forest are licensed to raid and plunder neighboring villages, carrying off anything they want; so also the members of secret societies in Senegal, the Bismarck Archipelago, etc. during the period their rites have set them apart from the community” (Dodds Maenadism 8). This connection with the divine makes them dangerous to interfere with, both physically and spiritually, for doing so may invoke a response from either the frenzied practitioners or the patron spirit/s or god/s. Additionally, the specific Maenadic behavior of “flinging…long hair to the sky” and “flinging…[their] throat to the dewy sky” is “repeatedly
stressed” seen in both the Bacchae and Maenadic pottery is “not simply a convention of Greek poetry and art; at all times and everywhere… [this depiction] characterizes this particular type of religious hysteria” with similarly emphatic accounts of heads “tossed from side to side…above a bulging throat” in rituals ranging from a French doctors description of “possessive hysteria” to British Columbia and Morocco. (Dodds Maenadism 6-7). These strikingly similar accounts clearly imply the ritual satisfies something deep within people. Dodds cites both Adolphus Huxley's claim that "ritual dances provide a religious experience that seems more satisfying and convincing than any other," and the words of a “Mohammedan sage," that "he that knows the Power of Dance dwells in God" (Dodds Maenadism 3). As Dodds himself notes, dance is a form of “self surrender…[that is] easier to begin than to stop” (Dodds Maenadism 3). The power of the dance as a ritual to connect is something evidently ingrained in the human psyche to some degree, and the Maenadic rituals clearly overlap
with these other rituals. These clear similarities rituals along with the heightened states of consciousness all clearly invoke the probable presence of entheogens, though there is no firm way to prove or disprove this. The fact this ecstatic state of being is so common throughout humanity clearly links to Euripides’s portrayal of the ritual as both inevitable and a necessary emotional vent for society, which is further evinced by the increase in both the Maenadic cult and similar cults near the stressful end of the Peloponnesian war (Dodds Maenadism 17). The near sacrosanctity and the primal necessity of the cult to its practitioners is what enabled the more socially controversial parts of the cult to remain in Athenian and Attic art and society.
The Maenads, both as a cult and individual practitioners, were well respected in 5th century Athenian pottery, with the worshippers depicted with great respect. The fundamental artistic understanding of the cult itself is repeatedly shown to be one of respect, showing its basis as something that is fundamentally not a
threat to broader patriarchal society but rather a part of it. Ubbels observed that the Maenads comprised just over “50%” of the vases with “Wild Women” on Athenian pottery; these wild women, whom Ubbels defined as “the monstrous characters from myth such as Medusa or the gorgons, the foreigners such as Amazons, part animal females such as Sirens and Sphinxes” (Ubbels 119).
While some of the Maenad's prolificness in pottery can be attributed to their connection to common societal Dionysian rituals and drinking, the fact they are so commonly featured there still indicates their broader acceptance. The data Ubbels collected on the pottery reveals an interesting pattern in the fact that the second largest number of Wild Women depicted are Amazons, though by a significantly smaller margin (Ubbels 119). A clear pattern thereby emerges where a strong preference was shown for depicting Wild Women who actually existed, with a statistically smaller pattern of a preference for full humans, not hybrids. Depictions of Maenads, especially in the 5th century, contrast both
the amazons and the hybrids by being shown with significantly more dignity and positivity. The Maenads, unlike the Amazons, were not shown having “[sexualized/idealized bodies] or skimpy chitons like the ones sported by the provocative Amazons," and while there were “A very few exceptions, of course,...the Maenad defends her honor, while Amazons are typically depicted in submissive positions” (Ubbels 121). The Maenads further contrast the hybrids on Attic pottery, because the Maenad is, as noted before, either in contrast or conflict with the hybrid and primitive Satyrs. Additionally important is that the Maenads “existed within the gates of civilization…[which] is a notable distinction from other [wild women]” (Ubbels 118). They exist within the authority of patriarchal society and temporarily emerge from it, only to return to it, rather than existing outside of that authority as an external force. Through these contrasts some of the key elements of how the Maenad was understood as acceptable in art are highlighted: they are not shown as the threatening untamed primal
woman, but rather as a dignified, realistic if not real, regular upstanding woman, who have temporarily left the traditional bounds of social norms in an organized, respectable fashion, rather than opposing it as the threatening uncivilized chthonic hybrids and uncivilized foreign (non-patriarchal) Amazons.
Not only was the cult itself however shown as socially acceptable and esteemed, the actual practitioners were also well respected in Athenian art; it was clearly not seen as something negative for an individual to participate in the ritual. Many of the images of Maenads were “respectful…of the wives, grandmothers, aunts or daughters of Greek citizens," giving respect not only to the idea of them being Maenads but the individuals themselves (Ubbels 123). When they participated in the ritual, it was not perceived as some brash party, but as a holy ritual where the supplicant's “selfless abandon…[is] seen as a selfless devotion to Dionysus” (Ubbels 50). When Dionysus sends the women of Thebes into their state of Bacchic madness, “Euripides unmasks
the extreme maenads as aristocratic women possessed by irrational forces” (Ubbels 50). It is not the women from the bottom of society who are the focal points of the gods' madness and who Euripides chose to be the ones to reject the god outright, but the respected ones from the royal house. The rejection of this unavoidable madness results in the madness being uncontrolled and harmful, yet in turn, when the ritual is practiced willingly as the Maenads in the play do, it is a joyous event that results in “communal balance, and the devout and balanced citizen/woman as the cherished norm” (Ubbels 50). In wider society, the Maenads are “understood (especially from the perceived status from inscriptions and historical writings) to have been a select and privileged group of women” (Ubbels 118). The women themselves are respectable members of society who are entrusted with a sacred state ritual. This further shows that the ritual was not seen simply as some extreme party, but was an important event reserved for respected women in Athenian society.
Important changes in and to the artistic representation of the Maenads specific to the 5th century and how this helps us understand how they were perceived:
One of the key changes in the artistic representation of the Maenads is the aforementioned fading of brutal violence associated with Maenads, with the last depiction of Maenads as “violent minions of Dionysos occur no later than 460 BCE” (Ubbels 52). Euripides does stand as a clear exception to this trend, however, the Maenad's violence remains exclusively in defense of the practitioners, which retains the core idea in the pottery of Maenads defending themselves from Satyrs. Though his violence does exceed the more tame thyrsos defense, the violence is a poetic device to convey Euripides’s message. It is clearly an exception to the social norm seen in the numerous peaceful depictions in pottery, and since it accomplishes the specific goal of highlighting the importance of the ritual and the consequences of rejecting it, it is clearly a purposeful change by the playwright. In the Bacchae,
the rituals of the god are only dangerous if rejected while also it is unable to actually be rejected. The Maenads are the tame Chorus who attend to the god, whereas the Bacchants are the form that rejected the god but could not avoid him. They establish their role in society and defend the ritual when disturbed.
A related trend is the Maenads increasingly becoming distinct from Dionysus’s retinue as Dr. Ubbels notes while in the process images “increasingly seem to resemble regular women…as the thyrsos, snakes, deer, cubs, torches, etc. [appear less often] than the older vase images…after 460 BCE” (Ubbels 6). This possibly indicates increasing standardization of the nature of the ritual in Athenian society, for as society defined the nature of the ritual and its role in society and the state, it plausibly could have resulted in further artistic definition. This, however, remains only speculative, and this standardization of roles could simply be shifted in artistic convention or public taste. This would be another instance of the
cult becoming more compatible with 5th century society, as the ritual become an increasingly organized state-run affair.
Another key shift is the “Maenads on vases increase in both number and prominence from the early archaic period to the…end of the fifth century BCE," with Maenads “[appearing] more often as the primary subject on the Attic red-figure wares than on the earlier black figure wares” (Ubbels 37). An important trend that informed this final peak was the massive influx of foreign frenzy and chthonic gods into Athens due to “the stress generated by [the Peloponisian] war…[which caused] disagreeably primitive things…[to poke] up," especially among “the wives and daughters of Athenian citizens” who were under the same duress from war yet not “occupied” by it (Dodds Maenadism 18). This stress resulted in a spike in frenzied worship including a man who “just as the Great Expedition was setting sail for Sicily, or was under discussion…an unknown individual jumped suddenly onto the altar of the Twelve Gods and there mutilated himself in the manner
of a priest of Cybele," and a “long processions of women [who]…wailed and beat their breast in honor of a dead god whose name was Adonis," and “Aristophanes makes…[a] speaker complain of the beating of kettledrums and the voices of women crying out to Sabazius," who Dobbs calls an “unhellanized” form of the Dionysus, who was “remote enough from the official Attic cult, but much closer to the god of Thebes” (Dodds Maenadism 1820). This pattern of frenzied cults springing up in response to the extreme stresses of war in the late 5th century is further reflected in the Bacchae, where not only does Euripides, whether intentionally or not, associate the god Dionysus and thereby his nature as a purifying force, with newly imported gods like Cybele who the Maenads declare “blessed is he, too, who has faith in the mysteries of our Great Mother, Cybele” (Theodoridis, 77). A further influence of this social shift is that Euripides, “unlike his predecessors [Aristophanes and Sophocles], embraces blatant maenadism” rather than simply “maenadic metaphors” (Ubbels
39). That change only further evidences a significant cultural shift in Athens that changed how art represented Maenads and similar figures and rituals. This late 5th century shift in Athenian culture's effect on contemporary art emphasized the purifying nature of the cult as a means to vent latent primitive stresses and fears in society.
Conclusion: Piercing it all together
The maenadic ritual was able to be perceived positively within the patriarchal society of late 5th century Athens not only because of its perceived importance as a ritual of purification but also due to its perception as something that was not a threat to broader patriarchal domination. The Maenads may have exited the patriarchy of the polis, yet the key point is that they returned. They did not threaten the patriarchy's control over them. Society’s understanding of the Maenads was almost certainly influenced by the massive cultural upheavals of the Peloponnesian war and the import of new gods from it meant that Athens at the very end of
the century had numerous similar yet different cultures to influence views of the Maenads. An Athenian audience could “hardly watch a performance of the Bacchae without being reminded of” the massive cultural upheaval surrounding them (Dodds Maenadism 20). The convergence of key ideas in depictions of the Maenads is key in drawing and contextualizing how the ritual was understood culturally. Ideas reflected across a significant breadth of sources and mediums, such as the Maenadic rejection of penetrative extramarital sex, strongly indicate something that was reflected in contemporary Maenadic rituals. The Maenads could not remain, in art or actuality, the brutal flesh-eating cultists, and their shift in artistic depiction indicates the changing understanding of the cult, as something well integrated into society as a way to honor the god Dionysus without threatening the patriarchal domination of the polis.
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