Tragedy is shot through with the decline of Athens. Tragedy itself doesn’t die, as Nietzsche alleges. But Athens does, and its death weighs heavily in the late work of Euripides.
The rise of the Athenian empire had been so rational, so democratic. But with the death of Pericles in 429 BC, Athens turned a corner—in truth wandered down a blind alley—and the sense one gets from the poet schooled in the hard knocks of Thucydides, and the disastrous Sicilian Expedition of 415-413 BC, is that no one is getting out of this shit alive.
Where is the goddess of wisdom now? Before its big, beautiful Armada had set sail for Sicily, the waves would part for Athens like the bum cheeks of a slave, while “the Furies” implied nothing more sinister than the sexposia of the hoi oligoi. But through a mixture of overreach and corruption, most notably Alcibiades’ treacherous dealings with the Spartans and the Persians (playing the enemies on both sides), the military campaign to Sicily quickly transformed into a bloody humiliating nightmare.
Athenian dramatic convention ruled out contemporary subject matter, so instead of Alcibiades, in 406 BC Euripides composed a play (one hesitates to call it “anti-war”) about Dionysus. The Bacchae was performed the following year at the City Dionysia, where Euripides was posthumously awarded first prize for his tetralogy.
Is it any exaggeration to say that the entrance of Dionysus in this play, from its first line, is out of this world? The shock and awe is unmistakable:
Lydia’s glebes, where gold abounds, and Phrygia have I left behind; o’er Persia’s sun-baked plains, by Bactria’s walled towns and Media’s wintry clime have I advanced through Arabia, land of promise; and Asia’s length and breadth, outstretched along the brackish sea, with many a fair walled town, peopled with mingled race of Hellenes and barbarians; and this is the first city in Hellas I have reached. There too have I ordained dances and established my rites, that I might manifest my godhead to men; but Thebes is the first city in the land of Hellas that I have made ring with shouts of joy, girt in a fawn-skin, with a thyrsus, my ivy-bound spear, in my hand…
At first, it’s not clear why Dionysus has set about conquering the East, perhaps apart from the abundance of Lydian gold. Was it simply for the thrill of making the natives dance, that they be moved by the pathos of an actually existing genius? Is it the music that makes people dance? Or the one wielding the instrument? Is it the song? Or is it the singer? In any case, having now reached Thebes, Dionysus puts the population on notice that he has come armed. To put it bluntly, at Thebes he fully intends to raise hell.
As becomes clear in his announcement, Dionysus is out to avenge his disgraceful slander, having been dismissed as a mere mortal by his mother’s family. The glittering truth is that Dionysus is the son of Zeus, a bona fide God, not a mere mortal like the rest of his lousy relatives, his cousin Pentheus included, who now rules Thebes. “And when I have set all in order here,” Dionysus warns,
I will pass hence to a fresh country, manifesting myself; but if the city of Thebes in fury takes up arms and seeks to drive my votaries from the mountain, I will meet them at the head of my frantic rout. This is why I have assumed a mortal form, and put off my godhead to take man’s nature.”
Prophecy can be such a drag. Just think of poor Princess Cassandra. It drove her mad because no one was either willing or able to believe her when she saw the Grim Reaper hovering behind Agamemnon. (A study of the Cassandra Complex is long overdue.) And yet when it comes to Dionysus, prophecy is rendered not only impotent, but meaningless, because the man-god is already out of his tiny mind. Only it’s worse than that with Dionysus, since the madness has already spread, as Pentheus discovers when he stumbles across former King Cadmus and Tiresias, the blind “seer,” engaged in some Bacchic revelry in the mountains.
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The postmodern default position when interpreting Euripides’s pantheistic play is to condemn Pentheus and praise Dionysus for his deconstruction of the former’s tyrannical power. But this is to pretend that Dionysus’s significance stems from his free-wheeling character, and that his challenge to Pentheus’s authority is a challenge to all authority. “Apollo = negation, Dionysus = affirmation,” insist the Nietzscheans.
The problem with this idea is that if you’re going to dissolve difference in the “primal oneness” of existence, then what basis could there be, ethically or ontologically, for discriminating against Pentheus in favour of Dionysus? What would be the difference between a tyrant and a liberator? Nietzsche maintains that there are nothing but tendencies, forces, relations, and interpretations. There may be an Apollonian, authoritarian and warlike Dionysus, just as there may be a Dionysian Dionysus, one committed to creative life and the eternal return. The guardrails separating Dionysus from Apollo are forever shifting in this most “Nietzschean” of plays.
Such creative freedom, however, is politically constrained. I don’t see any evidence of a Dionysian Apollo, or a Dionysian politics, in The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche explicitly rules out any such thing in section 7 of the book. For Nietzsche, tragedy is “metaphysical consolation” for the fact that “state and society” are in constant change and flux (for Nietzsche, “politics” concern “superficial changes”). In other words: tragedy is metaphysical consolation for the fact that it can’t change the world.
The Bacchae ends with the Maenads ripping Pentheus to shreds. When Agave finally confronts the horror of her role in his murder, there is zero consolation. Dionysus shows no mercy to Cadmus or Agave, and departs, one imagines, to resume his diabolical vocation of sowing chaos throughout the world.
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In 412 BC, in the immediate aftermath of the Sicilian Expedition, Euripides wrote Helen. Athenian decadence is somewhat muted here; or perhaps not. It isn’t exactly a great play. Euripides uses a trivial remark (a joke) by Herodotus, that instead of having been abducted by Paris, Helen was never in Troy at all, and spent the entire Trojan War in Egypt under the protection of the Pharaohs. I don’t know of many Hellenistic queens in West Asia, but the idea of Queen Rania of Jordan, for example, being hidden in a cloud by Hermes, then set down in Egypt by Zeus, in order to save the honour of the daughter whose mother Zeus raped, might be a euphemism for Wahhabi statecraft.
A ridiculous one, for that matter, I must admit. But it captures perfectly the fact that no one in Jordan would lose any sleep over the Queen’s disappearance. Any more than ordinary people in Euripides’ play lose any sleep over Helen’s imbroglio. The Chorus (“Maidens of Hellas”) comprise her ladies-in-waiting. This isn’t a tragedy in which a disgruntled people threatens to revolt. More like a scenario in which Helen left her hairdryer in Sparta, and in Egypt there are no hairdryers. “Alas, alas! for the mournful super-human force [daimōn] who controls your destiny [moira], lady!” — ”A hairdryer! a hairdryer! my kingdom for a hairdryer!”
It’s not fair to criticise Euripides for his lack of imagination. No one in fifth-century Athens would have been expecting a film by David Lynch. But if you’re going to indulge in counterfactual history then it might at least have occurred to Euripides that one outlandish phenomenon leads to another and, before you know it, you’re in Cloud Cuckoo Land. (Of course, the Athenian playwright who really and explicitly picks up on Euripides’ “comedy” is Aristophanes).
In Helen the plot dictates that Paris runs off with an eidolon, a Helen look-a-like. Call it a multiple. But why stop there, given that, when it comes to lunacy, the House of Atreus is unsurpassed? Just take a look at their family tree. If Helen isn’t the real Helen, then why should Paris be the real Paris? Wouldn’t a rival god respond to Hermes and Zeus’s deception by having an eidolon abduct the eidolon, so that Paris might have spent ten years in Egypt without unwanted distractions, having Olympian sex with Helen?
Although of course that leaves open the question of why Helen’s husband Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon would have spent ten years in Troy, laying siege to a city when neither Paris nor Helen were even there. The gods would never have allowed that to happen. More likely they would have spirited away the real Menelaus and Agamemnon and delegated the siege to their eidolons, thus leaving the real Menelaus and Agamemnon free to do… what? Lay siege to Egypt, of course.
Although in that case you could hardly leave the real Priam, Hecuba, Hector, Cassandra, and the rest of the Trojan clan to face off against a bunch of phonies for ten years. That would be quite undignified.
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Where logically does all the dynastic and deistic subterfuge end? In one variant in the micro-trivia of madness. The House of Atreus is nothing but the delusion of Orestes, who isn’t Orestes at all, just some raving nomad from the East; just like the lunatic Dionysus who takes himself for a god.
In another variant the mise-en-abyme might end with the Persians. After all, how could a Greek hope to make an eidolon of Xerxes? Hellas might engage in all manner of diplomatic skulduggery on the ground; they could even murder Persian envoys during “peace talks”—as actually happened during the Persian invasion of 491—490 BC. But history suggests that, when Hellas triumphs over Persia on the battlefield, the Persians don’t surrender, they fight to the last.
Isn’t there the danger that in the actual West Asian war Iran makes an eidolon of itself? The striking thing with Iran is just how prolific and powerful are its eidolons. Marvel at the relentless enthusiasm with which such multiples are generated, the communistic indifference of Iran’s fighters. The same goes for Hezbollah. No sooner is a leader assassinated than another one springs up, like the magic brooms in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, to take their place.
What courage, what devastating courage!
And yet at the same time no one controls the pure multiple. It’s certainly not within the scope of any foreign power to replace one “leader” with another. But neither is it within the scope of the State to control — to “count as one” says Alain Badiou — the pure multiple. Even Iran doesn’t understand Iran: “Iran” merely represents the pure inconsistent multiple. We might say that, in today’s battle, Dionysus has been outdone by Hybris.
Can the resistance continue in the absence of Iran? What would a war on Iran “without Iran” actually mean?
To victory, only victory.
Always.
Jason Barker is contemplating the river
Featured image: Young and old from Syria to Iran celebrate the spring festival of Nowruz. (Reuters: Orhan Qereman). Courtesy of ABC.
