The Bacchae
Dionysus comes home to Thebes disguised as a mortal because the city refuses to call him a god. His cousin Pentheus, young and confident in his own reason, outlaws the new worship and jails the stranger. What follows is a slow inversion of everything the king believes about control: the god drives the women of Thebes into ecstasy on Mount Cithaeron, then coaxes Pentheus into a woman’s dress and up the mountain to spy on them, where his own mother, out of her mind, mistakes him for a lion. Euripides wrote it in Macedonia at the end of his life, and Athens saw it only after his death, in 405 BCE. Free to read here in PDF and EPUB.
About the Author
Euripides wrote for the Athenian stage through the long war with Sparta, and his sympathies ran toward the losers: slaves, foreigners, captives, women. Roughly nineteen of his ninety-odd plays survive, the largest surviving body of work by any Greek tragedian. He died in Macedonia in…
See all books by Euripides →
