Bacchae and Antigone

Bacchae. Pentheus, the king of Thebes, is the grandson of Cadmus (the founder of Thebes) and the son of Agave.  He leads the men of Thebes against Dionysus.  Pentheus refuses to acknowledge Dionysus' existence.  So, Dionysus says that he must prove himself to the men of Thebes (47-48).  He says that if he is attacked with force that he will retaliate (51-53).

In the first chorus, we hear a story about Dionysus' birth.  The bacchae report that his mother died at the time of birth and that Zeus had to keep him in his thigh in order to keep him safe before he could be born away from Hera (88-99).  Semele is merely the incubator for Dionysus' fetus for a short period before Zeus is able to be a surrogate mother for his own child with Semele.

In this story, we have a clash between Apollo and Dionysus.  This is representative of a conflict between rationality and irrationality.  We can contrast wisdom with foolishness to flesh this out.  A prophet of Apollo, Tiresias, represents wisdom, meaning conformity to tradition, prudence, "seeing" with "clear vision", rationality and understanding human limits.  Foolishness is then associated with defiance against tradition, impractical thinking, blindness, madness, silliness and hubris.  Hubris means the prideful ways in which humans try to be godlike and overstep their mortal boundaries.

Antigone is a play from Sophocles.  It is about a conflict between Antigone and Creon.  Antigone is devoted to divine authority whereas Creon is devoted to civic authority.  In general, men are portrayed as dominating nature by "taming" the wind, "snaring" birds, "imprisoning" beasts, "mastering" beasts and "yoking" the horse and the bull.  Man teaches himself language, knows to avoid bad weather, has a way to face obstacles, and escapes diseases.  In short, man is a problem-solver and a calculated actor.  There is emphasis on the power of human rationality.  Man cannot, however, escape death.  This is exactly what separates us from the gods.

Now think back to the story that the bacchae provide about Dionysus' birth.  Tiresias, as a prophet of Apollo (and hence rationality), provides another story about the birth of Dionysus.  In this alternate story, it is not the case that Zeus used his thigh as a womb but that Zeus made a dummy Dionysus from ether (air) in order to trick Hera into throwing out the dummy instead of Dionysus.  Tiresias claims that the story has gotten confused because the term for to turn someone into a hostage (as Zeus did with the dummy Dionysus), homeron, is close to the word for to sew (en meron).  So the story was originally about a hostage dummy but after being misheard, it turned into a story about Dionysus being sewn into a thigh rather than a story about a dummy being used as a hostage.