Late Kurosawa and Greek Drama

[Mr Sausage]

I don't find Euripides (or Marlowe) at all artificial, for instance, but I can imagine Mr Sausage has different criteria to determine what is or is not artificial.

Artificial as in heavily stylized, not artificial as in fake. Athenian drama is not naturalistic: much of it was sung, when it wasn't being chanted.

[Tommaso]

Schreck, of course I didn't want to imply that just because you like one film of a particular genre you have to like others as well. Especially with this genre, these two films are about the only ones that I really admire (three, if you want to count "Kagemusha" here as well).

I tend to think the term 'expressionism' might be misleading in this discussion, given that everyone defines it differently and we already had a long debate about defining or restricting the term here. I'm on the conservative side here, i.e. I really need the dreamlike atmosphere/lighting of "Warning Shadows" if not Caligari-style sets to find the term meaningful for me. As I can't really make out something like this in "Ran" or "Kagemusha", I'm not sure what you mean by 'expressionistic' in this respect; but artificiality in a more general sense highlighting the 'message' is there for sure. And that's one of the reasons why I see similarities between "Die Nibelungen" and "Ran" beyond genre-specific qualities, and why I don't see Lang's film foremost as "heroic fantasy adventure" a la "Lord of the Rings" (just to name a much used and abused example for a film falling into that genre for me). The importance of a formalistic/manneristic approach to the direction - the symmetry in Pt.1 of the Lang film; the colour schemes and the general 'stateliness' in "Ran", and less so also in "Kagemusha" - makes viewer identification almost impossible for me (whereas Jackson surely counted on his audience identifying with the poor hobbits...). Perhaps this is why I never tried your approach to "Ran", i.e. on emotional terms and via identification. Such an approach of course is exactly what Kurosawa wanted and also achieved from the viewer with his b&w films. So that is why my reaction to both films ("Nibelungen" and "Ran") is about the same as yours to "Die Nibelungen": awe and wonderment; but in 'cold blood' so-to-speak. These are not films you 'love' as you would a Powell and Pressburger film.

EDIT: I see Sloper's post has come in meanwhile, and as usual he expressed things far better than me. The descent from the burning castle is indeed my favourite moment of the whole film; and it's even more awe-inspiring than the end of "Kriemhilds Rache". And I do love that Takemitsu score, too. Even better for the film than Kurosawa's first idea to have Mahler's "Lied von der Erde". Sloper, I share your points about some of the b&w films, especially with regard to "Stray Dog". Still, this is one of my favourite Kurosawas, and I think it is due to the viewer identification really working well here.

[HerrSchreck]

Yes, you'll find there is always someone who will claim something about this or that text..

Indeed. You are one of them. You and I are both additions to the pile, no more, no less. Establishing interpretive primacy in the zone of aesthetics is a fools game, particularly with such prickly subjects as "inwardness". I was seeking to establish that a distinction is made between Euripides' work and the paradigm of the age vis a vis this topic. You agree the distinction is made but you don't agree with any of it-- fair enough... you don't find it inward enough to be inward, and so you don't agree.

Reclaiming the Greeks as moderns is not a new project...

I don't think anybody was engaged in "reclaiming the Greeks" i e en toto above. They're discussing character elements within Euripides. But rather than assume the role of public relations for the writers quoted above, and answer the multitudes of questions (I'd need to go back and revisit the texts of Euripides et al and refresh my memory), I'm satisfied with your response (which I expected, to be frank) though I don't agree. Not with that nor with your take on the nature of the texts themselves.

[Mr Sausage]

I was seeking to establish that a distinction is made between Euripides' work and the paradigm of the age vis a vis this topic. You agree the distinction is made but you don't agree with any of it-- fair enough... you don't find it inward enough to be inward, and so you don't agree.

Yes, that is a summary of our discussion. But you have not established anything beyond the fact that some people disagree, a point hardly worth mentioning. Other than that, you've established nothing about Euripides' work beyond posting two inarticulate quotes (one of them being Wikipedia no less), and an article citation for which you provide no quotes or a summary of the argument, and which I cannot even tell if you've read or not (the author describes Euripides' characterization of Medea as a continuation of the innovations of Sophocles, who "provided his audience with the whole scale of accessibility to his character's inner life, when he employed interior focalization in a speech to depict an inner debate" (644). Her point is not that Euripides violated or altered the "paradigm," but that he just logically extended an extant practise. She also goes on to agree with Barthes that literary characters are not 'persons' but 'figures'). Euripides is also not special among the three tragedians for altering the "paradigm of the age." Aristotle tells us that "Aeschylus was the first to increase the number of...actors from one to two; he reduced the [songs] of the chorus, and made speech play the main role. Sophocles brought in three actors and scenery" (4). Euripides' distinctiveness as a playwrite in general is being over-stated: he shared innovation and greatness equally with the other two.

You'll find all sorts of attempts to reclaim marginal figures in Greek plays (women especially) as being this or that, and frankly Medea is no better a candidate for the "internal self" reading than the Elektra and Antigone of Sophocles, or the Cassandra of Aeschylus. It is nevertheless a highly suspect view of literary history, for aesthetic and social reasons as I've pointed out. You have actually done very little to call into question my assertions on these points, and I maintain that the characters in the Greek tragedies are not representations of full human beings as you'd find, say, in Proust. If anyone thinks that makes them lesser works, so be it.

I don't think anybody was engaged in "reclaiming the Greeks" i e en toto above. They're discussing character elements within Euripides.

The Euripides discussion is one example of a general tendency, was my point.

[HerrSchreck]

I've been trying to recapture the link that I took one of the quotes from but I literally can't reformulate my search string that I put in originally to reclaim the link, I'm sorry-- it was an online encyclopedia or literary reference and I can't remember which. There was a bunch of links all revolving around the same subject, and I grabbed a few-- there's an issue of the Cambridge Classical Review "(C.) Thumiger Hidden Paths. Self and Characterization in Greek Tragedy: Euripides' Bacchae. (BICS Supplement 99.) Pp. xvi + 266. London: Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2007. Paper, £30. ISBN: 978-1-905670-13-0."

Here's a quote from Brittanica's entry on Euripides:

The historical interest of such a life as that of Euripides consists in the very fact that its external record is so scanty-that, unlike Aeschylus or Sophocles, he had no place in the public action of his time, but dwelt apart as a student and a thinker. He has made his Medea speak of those who, through following quiet paths, have incurred the reproach of apathy. Undoubtedly enough of the old feeling for civic life remained to create a prejudice against one who held aloof from the affairs of the city. Quietness, in this sense, was still regarded as akin to indolence. Yet here we see how truly Euripides was the precursor of that near future which, at Athens, saw the more complete divergence of society from the state.

In an age which is not yet ripe for reflection or for the subtle analysis of character, people are content to express in general types those primary facts of human nature which strike every one. Achilles will stand well enough for the young chivalrous warrior, Odysseus for the man of resource and endurance. In the case of the Greeks, these types had not merely an artistic and a moral interest; they had, further, a religious interest, because the Greeks believed that the epic heroes, sprung from the gods, were their own ancestors. Greek tragedy arose when the choral worship of Dionysus, the god of physical rapture, had engrafted upon it a dialogue between actors who represented some persons of the legends consecrated by this faith. The dramatist was accordingly obliged to refrain from multiplying those minute touches which, by individualizing the characters too highly, would detract from their general value as types in which all Hellenic humanity could recognize its own image glorified and raised a step nearer to the immortal gods. This necessity was further enforced by the existence of the chorus, the original element of the drama, and the very essence of its nature as an act of Dionysiac worship. Those utterances of the chorus, which to the modern sense are so often platitudes, were not so to the Greeks, just because the moral issues of tragedy were felt to have the same typical generality as these comments themselves.

An unerring instinct keeps both Aeschylus and Sophocles within the limits imposed by this law. Euripides was only fifteen years younger than Sophocles. But, when Euripides began to write, it must have been clear to any man of his genius and culture that, though an established prestige might be maintained, a new poet who sought to construct tragedy on the old basis would be building on sand. For, first, the popular religion itself the very foundation of tragedy-had been undermined. Secondly, scepticism had begun to be busy with the legends which that religion consecrated. Neither gods nor heroes commanded all the old unquestioning faith. Lastly, an increasing number of the audience in the theatre began to be destitute of the training, musical and poetical, which had prepared an earlier generation to enjoy the chaste and placid grandeur of ideal tragedy.

Euripides made a splendid effort to maintain the place of tragedy in the spiritual life of Athens by modifying its interests in the sense which his own generation required. Could not the heroic persons still excite interest if they were made more real,-if, in them, the passions and sorrows of everyday life were portrayed with greater vividness and directness? And might not the less cultivated part of the audience at least enjoy a thrilling plot, especially if taken from the homelegends of Attica? Euripides became the virtual founder of the romantic drama. In so far as his work fails, the failure is one which probably no artistic tact could then have wholly avoided.

As I said sausage, I can;t give you the deeply analytical discussion you're looking to have because my readings of these texts were long ago and far away, and I frankly really don't care enough. My question to you about Euripides was based on an echo rising up from my education long ago and far away that says "Yes he's right about the first two but Euripides maybe not so much." I did some quick checking around and found support for my recollections. Naturally you being the student that you are-- and us two having our history-- the discussion will want to go deep and wide. But I just don't have the expertise or the memory on this (or care enough) to go all out. A simple "No I don't agree with that opinion," from you satisfies me.

As far as

But you have not established anything beyond the fact that some people disagree, a point hardly worth mentioning.

Yes it is worth mentioning-- they are worth at least as much consideration as the postings of an anonymous college student on an internet message board.

[Mr Sausage]

Here's a quote from Brittanica's entry on Euripides:

A nice enough entry. But it never actually addresses the specific issue. For example: "the passions and sorrows of everyday life were portrayed with greater vividness and directness." Nothing in that sentence indicates an unusual level of inwardness in Euripides' characters. The "greater vividness and directness" is relative to the plays of Euripides own day, not relative to modern notions of literary vividness and directness. And this: "In an age which is not yet ripe for reflection or for the subtle analysis of character, people are content to express in general types those primary facts of human nature which strike every one." The author shows his Euripidean bias. That is simply not true: Achilles and Odysseus are often very subtly analyzed characters (see, for example, Bernard Knox's introductions to the Fagle translations of the Iliad and Odyssey), and the Elektra of Sophocles and Cassandra of Aeschylus are no less complex and subtle creations as Euripides'. Again, the case is being overstated, which tends to happen in brief pieces like Encyclopedia entries. The issues tend to get polarized.

I think the major point many are trying to make about Euripides' characters, but rather muddling in issues of "reality" or "realness," and which maybe you're also trying to point out to me, is that Euripides makes his characters more ordinary and common versus the Aristotelian dictum that tragic characters must be better and more lofty than regular people (the better to watch them fall). That's acceptable enough (although I think it priviledges certain plays, like Medea, while ignoring others, like Orestes, whose characters are all deeply confusing and difficult to understand or identify with), but I'm willing to argue over whether that makes them more "human" or "real" or "inward" or something like that.

[HerrSchreck]

I think the major point many are trying to make about Euripides' characters, but rather muddling in issues of "reality" or "realness," and which maybe you're also trying to point out to me, is that Euripides makes his characters more ordinary and common versus the Aristotelian dictum

Not it at all, as anyone can see.

Could not the heroic persons still excite interest if they were made more real,-if, in them, the passions and sorrows of everyday life were portrayed with greater vividness and directness?

Heroic, exciting persons (not "ordinary" and "common"), made real, with their passions and sorrows-- their emotional life-- portrayed vididly and directly. The crux of the conversation-- authentic characters with real human emotions (ex. passions and sorrow), not archtypes (at least by contrast w contemporaries).

Anyhow, thanks for the input, Mr_s.

[Mr Sausage]

Heroic, exciting persons (not "ordinary" and "common"), made real, with their passions and sorrows-- their emotional life-- portrayed vididly and directly. The crux of the conversation-- authentic characters with real human emotions (ex. passions and sorrow), not archtypes (at least by contrast w contemporaries).

Hmm. I guess you really haven't read the Greek dramatists in a while, especially if you believe either Sophocles' or Aeschylus' characters are inauthentic and without "real human emotions," because that's really not the case. I also think you're overlooking the fact that in order to make heroic, mythic characters more "real" (that vague and confusing term again) they have to be made more common and ordinary, that's how it works.

But I guess my point now is: you really, really ought to read some of the plays again. Don't just accept the ideas of a couple encyclopaedia capsules, neither of which come from sources dedicated to classics. You may think I'm wrong, but don't take that to mean those other sources are right: there's more than just two sides to this. However much these sources want to (over)state Euripides' shocking changes to dramatic form, those changes were shocking--if at all--only to his contemporaries. To us, his plays read as part and parcel with the other Greek dramatists. There is no striking, obvious difference between the three, no great formal, aesthetic, or human divide; Euripides is not the Shakespeare of Attic drama. Read him along-side the others and I believe you'll find the differences far less striking than these capsules would have you believe. Hey, even in that article you cited, the revolutionary internalization part in Medea occurs, the author tells us, only for a brief moment at the end of a single speech mader by a single character in a single play, and that's all. I really think if you read Sophocles' Elektra and Antigone you'll find how immediate, direct, and powerfully human the emotions are in those plays (and they'll ring your guts out), and that they are not inferior, or less human, or more archetypal than stuff like Euripides' Herakles or Bacchae (the latter is a really, really unpleasant play about a man who wants to peep at lesbians so bad he angers Dionysus and is torn apart alive and handed to his mother. Yeesh.).

For what it's worth, if you do decide to revisit some of them, might I recommend Anne Carson's two books of translations: Grief Lessons--Four Plays by Euripides, and An Oresteia? They're very interesting, very readable translations. Carson is herself a poet of genius, in addition to being a venerable classics scholar, and she uses very direct and pared down language in her translations (and writes astonishing headnotes). If it's the only thing you take away from any of these posts, I will be perfectly happy with that.

[Sloper]

The Bacchae is a quite amazing play. One interesting bit of context I remember from my undergrad days is that the actors would have played multiple roles, altering their masks (and perhaps their clothes) accordingly. In The Bacchae, for instance, the actor playing Tiresias – who warns Pentheus, in very menacing terms, of the dangers involved in challenging the god Dionysus – would also have played Dionysus. The disturbing thing is that the actor playing Pentheus would also have played his mother, Agave. What happens in the play is that Dionysus puts Pentheus into a trance and (if I remember rightly) has him dress up as a woman so that he can spy on the female bacchantes’ ceremony. Offstage, Pentheus is hunted down by the bacchantes, and dismembered by his own mother, who then comes on stage triumphantly bearing his head. This means that the contemporary audience would have watched the lead actor decry the outrages of the bacchantes, then dress up as one of them, walk off stage, and come back on as his own mother, clutching the head of his former self – the ‘severed head’ prop would presumably have incorporated, or merely consisted in, the Pentheus-mask.

Medea would also have seemed pretty extraordinary, since I think the myth as it was known in the fifth century B.C. did not include the part about Medea killing her children (though they still died somehow), so there would have been some genuine suspense in watching the heroine’s vacillations over whether or not to commit this awful deed, in addition to killing the princess and her father. Consider, then, how it might have felt to witness that first performance, to see Medea unexpectedly turn into a child-killer, and then to see her transform into a quasi-goddess, lording it over the ineffectual male hero, Jason, and ride off to seek shelter in Athens – that is, in the very place where the play was being performed. Taken along with The Trojan Women, which I mentioned above, this all adds up to quite provocative, challenging stuff. I don’t know these dramatists as well as you, Mr S, but do you really think there is anything quite so daring in the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles, great as they are?

(I feel kind of sorry for Kagemusha-fans, by the way. When we’re not talking about Ran, we’re talking about Greek tragedy...)

[HerrSchreck]

My mother still has my father's pristine gilt-bound edition from the 1960's of the full Harvard Classics which I'm in line to receive at some point.. just looking at it when I go over there makes me misty with memories, and causes me to salivate for the things I haven't read, and for the things I want to read again.

When you're approaching your mid 40's like me and you have an apartment that's so stuffed full of books that you can't stop tripping over them, nor open a closet without a landslide from within.. and you have to stack your clothes in a corner because all dresser space is hogged, and your brain is crammed with a lifetime of reading.. you'll understand the difficulty of discourse over Greek plays you read over 20 years ago.

[Mr Sausage]

, Pentheus is hunted down by the bacchantes, and dismembered by his own mother, who then comes on stage triumphantly bearing his head.

I'd forgotten his mother was involved. If I recall, Dionysus makes the Maenads believe Pentheus is an animal, which is why they're so eagre to perform the ritual sparagmos on him. It's a good play to test against these claims of Euripides' humanness in characterization, since the emotions and the actions are so outrageous (and cultural specific) that the reader may very well find it difficult to sympathize fully with it.

It's a great play, but it's also really unpleasant to read. And thanks for the bit about the actors, I didn't know that. My knowledge of the plays is more text-based than performance-based.

Taken along with The Trojan Women, which I mentioned above, this all adds up to quite provocative, challenging stuff. I don’t know these dramatists as well as you, Mr S, but do you really think there is anything quite so daring in the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles, great as they are?

Hmm. I think Euripides is being deliberately and forcefully audacious with stuff like that (one wonders, with Medea's flight to Athens, if Euripides isn't recalling and travestying Aeschylus' Eumenides where Orestes flees to Athens and defeats the furies through due process at a fair trial, mythic crimes being righted and absolved by the majesty of the Athenian justice system), so he might very well have the others beat in the daring department. But in terms of sheer emotional power, I don't know that he ever overgoes the overwhelming immensity of Elektra's grief, in the Sophocles play, which bursts all boundaries and approaches the metaphysical (and which makes her a much more vivid and interesting character than as portrayed by either Aeschylus or Euripides). Some of Euripides' plays approach farce. I don't know, I suppose a strong case can be made that he's the best of the three dramatists.

When you're approaching your mid 40's like me and you have an apartment that's so stuffed full of books that you can't stop tripping over them, nor open a closet without a landslide from within.. and you have to stack your clothes in a corner because all dresser space is hogged, and your brain is crammed with a lifetime of reading.. you'll understand the difficulty of discourse over Greek plays you read over 20 years ago.

Have you ever bought a book that looked fascinating and then when you got home found out you'd already bought it months earlier?

[dad1153]

When you're approaching your mid 40's like me and you have an apartment that's so stuffed full of books that you can't stop tripping over them, nor open a closet without a landslide from within.. and you have to stack your clothes in a corner because all dresser space is hogged, and your brain is crammed with a lifetime of reading.. you'll understand the difficulty of discourse over Greek plays you read over 20 years ago.

Sounds like my Harlem studio apartment except (a) I'm in my mid-30's and (b) it's DVD's and videogames instead of books that have overtaken my crammed small space. :-k

[Sloper]

Mr. S - yes, I hadn't thought of Medea as a response to Aeschylus, but you may well be right. Though I've never read Aristophanes, I know that he was very fond of parodying his illustrious predecessors, and I'm sure Euripides was sometimes doing something similar. I also agree that Euripides can seem farcical - in a very good, sometimes scary, way - and from what I know of Sophocles' plays, they certainly have greater profundity and emotional depth, and perhaps have exercised more influence over subsequent writers because of that.

[Mr Sausage]

Though I've never read Aristophanes, I know that he was very fond of parodying his illustrious predecessors, and I'm sure Euripides was sometimes doing something similar.

Well, Aristophanes was a comic playwrite, so he was always parodying something or other. Not only did he parody other writers, he'd parody people who would be sitting in the audience. In one play, I can't remember which, he walks an actor playing a prominant Athenian citizen (present in the audience) on stage and has another character say of him: "he smells like little boy's penises." You should read him: he's vulgar and hysterical.

[Kirkinson]

, Pentheus is hunted down by the bacchantes, and dismembered by his own mother, who then comes on stage triumphantly bearing his head.

I'd forgotten his mother was involved. If I recall, Dionysus makes the Maenads believe Pentheus is an animal, which is why they're so eagre to perform the ritual sparagmos on him.

The Maenads know who he is when they murder him, but Agave is subsequently entranced to believe they have killed a lion. She comes back to the palace at the end, looking for Pentheus so she can show him the kill she's so proud of, unaware that the head she's carrying is his.

It's a great play, but it's also really unpleasant to read.

I don't know, I found it enrapturing and emotionally devastating. A friend and I read it aloud (albeit in English) just a few weeks ago. Perhaps it makes a difference when one actually speaks the words. Even in the most "unpleasant" passages, I found it very engaging.

[Mr Sausage]

I don't know, I found it enrapturing and emotionally devastating. A friend and I read it aloud (albeit in English) just a few weeks ago. Perhaps it makes a difference when one actually speaks the words. Even in the most "unpleasant" passages, I found it very engaging.

Engaging and emotionally devastating, certainly. It's just not a play I enjoyed reading, nor one I look forward to reading again. That doesn't take away from its artistic merit, but there's just something so rancid about this play's achievement, like Euripides is edging towards the grand guignol of the Jacobin tragedies without being outlandish enough to mitigate the extreme pity and terror of the thing. I react to it the same way I react to John Ford's (not that John Ford, the seventheenth century dramatist) incest tragedy 'Tis Pity She's a Whore: great play, but you feel like taking a shower afterwards.

[Michael Kerpan]

I personally _like_ the fact that Euripides veers into comic territory. Interestingly, Noh theater can do something similar (though mostly this is not recognized in the West).

I would never criticize Aeschylus's or Sophocles's characters. I simply have a preference (on average) for those of Euripides (in terms of interest -- albeit not necessarily "amiability").

Bacchae is probably my favorite Athenian tragedy. I find it a very scary play. I feel it is a pretty subversive presentation of Greek theology (but know this is not necessarily a consensus opinion).

[Mr Sausage]

I feel it is a pretty subversive presentation of Greek theology (but know this is not necessarily a consensus opinion).

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this. I always thought it was a fairly standard 'arrogant man angers the gods and pays for it' story along the lines of the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, where a bunch of sailors mistake Dionysus for a prince and try to take him aboard their ship as ransom, against the warnings of the lone intelligent sailor among them, who thinks there's something too godlike about the stranger. Dionysus' punishes the sailors' arrogance by turning into a lion and slaughtering those onboard, while transforming all those who jumped overboard into dolphins.

[Michael Kerpan]

After I do my next Euripides review, I can try to be more specific. My recollection is thatl there is a mis-match between the rhetoric as to the attrbutes of Bacchus and the divine behavior we have just observed.

[HerrSchreck]

Have you ever bought a book that looked fascinating and then when you got home found out you'd already bought it months earlier

I don't think so (though I seem to be recalling a faint echo of something like that) but I have repurchased books that I thought I'd lost or lent out (never lend books out that you care about, nor keep precious first editions around the vicinity of a young teething border collie mutt; I learned that the hard way years ago over a first edition pristine of KV's Slaughterhouse Five) only to have them turn up in some shadowy corner of my mess of an apartment.

Something that's related: I'd mentioned on this site a few months ago that I've been rereading a shameless pulp love of mine, the 1930's short stories of Robert E Howard (the depression-era contributor to Weird Tales & creator of Conan, Bran Mak Morn, SOlomon Kane, tons of boxing, detective, and horror tales, etc, great writer and a sentimental fave from my youth), and Del Rey has been issuing in nice trade paperback editions a vast amount of his work grouped in certain ways, with corrected texts, rough drafts, outlines, unfinished ms's, etc, even his hand drawn maps of his Hyborean Age. Anyhow, they group them by character, and then a few more by genre, so you've got three books with all the original 1930's Conan tales. Fair enough. Then there's a volume devoted to Kull, another to Solomon Kane, another to Bran Mak Morn.. okay great. So far so good. Now they release side by side with these "The Best of Robert E Howard vol's 1 and 2", two volumes of tales and poems which are meant to stand alongside these other volumes to complete your REH library-- only problem is each one of them contain two Conan tales apiece, so that's the first overlap, coming to approx 100 duplicated pages. Then they put out "The Horror Stories of Robert E Howard" which contains three or four stories that are in the aforementioned "best of" volumes and a couple in the others. Between the bunch of them, there is at least one full book's worth of duplicated manuscript text, and since these were all released side-by-side, pretty damned annoying. My hunch is they were released under the idea that some would by one or two but not all books, but really, the guy is such a legend and has such a drooling fanbase they MUST have known folks would snap up each and every volume greedily. And greed is, I think, the operative word here.

[Sloper]

I feel it is a pretty subversive presentation of Greek theology (but know this is not necessarily a consensus opinion).

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this. I always thought it was a fairly standard 'arrogant man angers the gods and pays for it' story along the lines of the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, where a bunch of sailors mistake Dionysus for a prince and try to take him aboard their ship as ransom, against the warnings of the lone intelligent sailor among them, who thinks there's something too godlike about the stranger. Dionysus' punishes the sailors' arrogance by turning into a lion and slaughtering those onboard, while transforming all those who jumped overboard into dolphins.

After I do my next Euripides review, I can try to be more specific. My recollection is thatl there is a mis-match between the rhetoric as to the attrbutes of Bacchus and the divine behavior we have just observed.

It may be a case of wishful thinking - because I'd hate to think that Euripides wanted us to be on the side of Dionysus for this one - but I agree with MK about The Bacchae. Given that the festivals at which these plays were performed were in honour of Dionysus (apparently the actors' masks would be dedicated to him at the end of the competition), Euripides' portrayal of the god seems very ambiguous and un-heroic. In the example you cite, Mr S, the sailors are trying to take advantage of this 'prince' out of greed, but in The Bacchae he's just invaded Thebes and turned it upside down, and the new king is understandably upset about this. The key, I think, is that Pentheus is very young - whether this would have been brought out in the original performance I don't know, but it certainly could in a modern production - little more than a boy really, and anxious to assert his authority. His concern to preserve order, and his horror at the thought of the Theban women marauding lewdly about the city and countryside, might well have appeared more sympathetic to Euripides' audience than it does today, when the bacchanal is asscociated primarily with hippies (though see Donna Tartt's The Secret History for a terrific story about a modern-day bacchanal-gone-horribly-wrong).

Also, I think the issue in the play has to do with Dionysus not having been recognised in Thebes as a proper god, and the chaos he inflicts upon them is a punishment for this: in a sense, the insult to Dionysus is more down to Pentheus' forbears, including Cadmus and Agave, than it is down to him. Certainly in Homer there are lots of instances of the gods behaving capriciously or spitefully, and I don't have a copy to hand, but I'm pretty sure The Trojan Women features some quite damning remarks about the gods' callousness. And, in a sense, Medea - being the granddaughter of the sun god - is not much less divine than the half-human Dionysus... Anyway, just some thoughts; like all great plays, this one can be read (and performed) from any number of angles.

[Mr Sausage]

Euripides' portrayal of the god seems very ambiguous and un-heroic.

This in itself is not subversive. Depiction of the gods as petty, irrational, mercurial, and handing out questionable forms of justice became popular with Homer (Xenophanes, a singer contemporary with Homer, thought the latter's depiction of the gods was immoral), whose depiction of the gods became the depiction of the gods in Greek culture and in the Greek popular consciousness.

In the example you cite, Mr S, the sailors are trying to take advantage of this 'prince' out of greed, but in The Bacchae he's just invaded Thebes and turned it upside down, and the new king is understandably upset about this.

Well, turning things upside down is what Dionysus does. He is the great transgressor and boundary crosser: he is androgynous in dress and looks, he encourages ecstatic emotions and a loss of self within communal frenzy; when the sailors attempt to tie him up in the Hymn, the ropes repeatedly fall off of him, because of course he cannot be restrained. Dionysus and Maenadism presented real anxieties for the Greeks (most of which are demonstrated by Pentheus) because they represented loss of control and an overturning of social structure. In Greek black figure vase painting, the men are painted all black but the women are painted white. This is because a good woman was supposed to never see the sun, ie. never leave the household and be seen in public, so she had no sun-tan. Menaedism not only allowed them outside, but out of the control of men entirely, to do whatever they wished unsupervised. So why did the Greeks allow it to go on? Fear of Dionysus. The gods are petty, and tho' you point out that in the Hymn the sailors are trying to take advantage of a "prince," it is not out of a general feeling of justice that leads Dionysus to punish them. He doesn't care if they take princes. He punishes them for not knowing he is a god (he might still be a very young god in the Hymn), and it doesn't matter if they had no way of knowing. The gods are capricious about these things. One celebrated the gods, and performed the rituals, not because one thought the gods were admirable and deserved praise, but because if one didn't the gods might punish the community. This is why the Christians were such a problem in ancient Rome (who inherited the Greek gods and forms of worship): they refused to perform the rituals, and communities would be outraged because everyone might very well be punished for it.

So what I mean to say is that the depiction of Dionysus as a transgressive figure destabilizing society and punishing people horribly, regardless of whether or not their faults were understandable, is in line with the common perception of him.

But I'm not arguing against Kerpan's statement. I read the play differently (more like the above), but I'm intrigued by the possibility Kerpan raises and would like to hear more. He may very well have a convincing reading of the play's approach to theology that I would agree with.