They were no longer able to enjoy unchallenged command of the Aegean with their fleet, as the Spartans now had naval forces capable of taking on the Athenian triremes. The Peloponnesian war had been dragging on for 25 years, and the military situation was getting progressively worse for the Athenians. That it is not initiated into my Bacchic rites, and that I plead the case of my mother, Semele, in appearing manifest to mortals as a divinity whom she bore to Zeus.“The Bacchae, as we know it, was first produced in Athens under the direction of Euripides’ son, also called Euripides, in perhaps 405 BC, a year or two after his father’s death, but when the tragedian first presented the play he was in Macedonia at the court of Archelaus (…) Approval for the production of the play would have been given in the summer of 406.

For this city must learn, even if it is unwilling, Therefore I have goaded them from the house in frenzy, and they dwell in the mountains, out of their wits and I have compelled them to wear the outfit of my mysteries.Īnd all the female offspring of Thebes, as many as are women, I have driven maddened from the house, and they, mingled with the daughters of Kadmos, sit on roofless rocks beneath green pines. For my mother's sisters, the ones who least should, claimed that I, Dionysus, was not the child of Zeus, but that Semele had conceived a child from a mortal father and then ascribed the sin of her bed to Zeus,Ī trick of Kadmos', for which they boasted that Zeus killed her, because she had told a false tale about her marriage. Taking a thyrsos in my hand, a weapon of ivy. In this land of Hellas, I have first excited Thebes to my cry, fitting a fawn-skin to my body and I have left the wealthy lands of the Lydians and Phrygians, the sun-parched plains of the Persians,Īnd the Bactrian walls, and have passed over the wintry land of the Medes, and blessed Arabia, and all of Asia which lies along the coast of the salt sea with its beautifully-towered cities full of Hellenes and barbarians mingled together Īnd I have come to this Hellene city first, having already set those other lands to dance and established my mysteries there, so that I might be a deity manifest among men.

I praise Kadmos, who has made this place hallowed, the shrine of his daughter and I have covered it all around with the cluster-bearing leaf of the vine. And I see the tomb of my thunder-stricken mother here near the palace, and the remnants of her house, smouldering with the still living flame of Zeus' fire, the everlasting insult of Hera against my mother. I am here at the fountains of Dirke and the water of Ismenus. And having taken a mortal form instead of a god's, I, the son of Zeus, have come to this land of the Thebans-Dionysus, whom once Semele, Kadmos' daughter, bore, delivered by a lightning-bearing flame.

The bacchae