POETRY & POLITY: TRAGIC PERSPECTIVES ON

THE NATURE OF POLITICAL ASSOCIATION

Anitra Laycock
lay@dal.ca

1. Introduction

The Greek polis with its simplicity of form and its citizen homogeneity offers a
fruitful model for investigating fundamental parameters underlying and determining the
ethico-political nature of human association. To inquire into the nature of the polis is in
essence to ask how the reasoning and feeling sides of the human psyche are found
expressed in justice and friendship in human community.1 In metaphysical terms, the
polis is understood by Aristotle to be an essential unity that is a 'composite whole of
parts'; an 'ethical substance' defined by him as the communion of citizens in a polity.2
Although Aristotle thus gives the polis a logical structure for thought, he is in fact only
making explicit the notion of a unifying polis ideal that is present throughout the Hellenic
period, one expressed in the great civic festivals, in funeral orations, in myth and in the
reforms of legislators like Solon and Cleisthenes.3
Since the polis takes form concretely in matter, inevitably it falls short of the ideal
expressed through its essential nature. What is most especially the polis is identified with
its polity as the rational ruling part that defines the common good. However, demanding a
place within the structure of the rationally ordered whole are all those natural distinctions
that mark the side of feeling and the private good of individual citizens and their families.
In the resultant dynamic interplay between these parts of the political association

1
In every human association (koinōnia), Aristotle observes, there seems to be some sort
of justice and friendship, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1159b26-27.
2
A koinōnia politōn politeias, Aristotle, Politics 1276b1-2. The 'formal cause', the polity
(politeia), acting on the communion (koinōnia) of citizens (politōn) as 'matter', brings into
being the 'whole', the polis as a distinct entity. On the ontology of composite objects, see
Verity Harte, Plato on Parts and Wholes, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). It is Aristotle,
she notes, who first explicitly sets out the nature of the problem (11). On the polis as an
'ethical substance', see Fred D. Miller, Jr., Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle's
Politics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 151.
3
See Sophie Mills, Theseus, Tragedy and the Athenian Empire, (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1997); Robert Parker, Athenian Religion: A History, (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1996); Simon Goldhill, "The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology," in John J. Winkler and
Froma I. Zeitlin (eds.), Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social
Context, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 97-129; Arthur W. Pickard-
Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2nd Edition, (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1968).
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instability readily arises with concomitant shifting balances of power. Each 'part' seeks to
assert its own ascendancy, its own privileged relation to the good that, in the flux of the
sensible world, appears as a 'whole' divided. As a result, the concord (homonoia) that is
the mark of the just polis is disturbed.4 The sides of reason and feeling, no longer ordered
together in justice and friendship in relation to a common end as their good, come
increasingly into opposition, a disjunction which has at its heart the divided nature of man
himself as 'rational animal'.
Fifth-century Athenian tragic drama offers an important insight into the historical
decline of the polis, one that offers a rich resource to Plato and Aristotle as they
subsequently undertake their own investigations into the essential nature of political
association. Over the course of the period of around a century during which tragic drama
actively flourishes in Athens, a movement takes place within which modal shifts in tragic
understanding can be detected. Driven by the spirit of questioning received values which
characterizes the fifth-century enlightenment, the dramatic portrayal of human freedom
undergoes significant transformation; whereas in the post-Marathon glory days, freedom
is embodied in the ideal of citizenship, it comes increasingly to be seen during the course
of the century as the satisfaction of individual ambition and private gain. With the
decline in effective power of the objective moral order of the justice of Zeus, which as
causal principle has conferred a structure on the 'whole', the examination of the nature of
political association focuses less on the ideal than on the perturbations that are destructive
of it. The aetiology of this pathological process will be illuminated here through an
examination of ethical issues explored in Aeschylus' Eumenides, Sophocles' Antigone and
Euripides' Bacchae. These dramas reveal, I will argue, how the ideal of the polis as a
'whole' is disrupted as the 'parts' lose their inner coherence and order, to become by the
end of the century no more than what Aristotle would call a 'heap'.5

2. Aeschylus' Eumenides
In Eumenides, the political community is examined from the perspective of a
unified composite whole in which the forces of necessity and freedom are reconciled and
there emerges, under the aegis of Athena as demiurge, a charter for the foundation of the
just city in the idealized polis of Athens. Nomos and physis are at one in an objective
rational order that is the good of the 'whole'. More than any other extant fifth century
tragic drama, the Oresteia trilogy seeks to probe the underlying nature of political
association to ask how justice is present within it as the ordering principle of human
community. Clearly and consistently throughout the trilogy the language of justice (dikē)

4
On the association of justice and political friendship with homonoia, Plato, Republic
351d5; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1167a22-b16. See further, Jacqueline de Romilly,
"Vocabulaire et propagande ou les premiers emplois de mot Ὁµόνοια," in Mélanges de
linguistique et de philologie grecques: offerts a Pierre Chantraine. (Paris: Klincksieck,
1972), 198-208.
5
See Aristotle, Metaphysics 1041b11-12.

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and its implications resound as the central and sustaining theme.6 In the development of
a charter myth for the foundation of the ideal polis, Aeschylus asks questions about the
nature of the just city that Plato will later raise in Republic.7 This is not of course to
assert that the Oresteia is a philosophical treatise, but to note that its political
considerations, concretely expressed through the medium of the poetic imagination, are a
coherent expression of concerns shared by poet, philosopher, legislator, and historian
alike.
As the mythical paradigm for the ideal of the just polis unfolds in the drama,
drawn within its orbit is a historical present in which familial and tribal values,
traditionally sustained by a justice based on blood loyalty, must respond to the challenge
posed by the demands of the new all-encompassing unity, the ethical justice of the polis
order. Coming into focus before the watching Athenians are the very dilemmas with
which they have grappled in the political turmoil that has punctuated their march towards
the democratic polis of the Periclean age.8 What emerges in the course of the Oresteia is
an understanding that humans must be able to contain the beast within if they are to
successfully traverse the gap between a world of tribal vendetta and the civilizing sphere
of the polis. The irrational and instinctive aspects of human nature are to be subordinate
to a new and rational form of justice which originates, not in the particular ties inherent in
kin relationships and tribal autocracy, but in the ethical bonds resident in the institutions
which assure the collective good of the citizenry as a whole, which are prior to the
distinctions they properly contain.
The conflict and contradiction that pervade Agamemnon and Choephoroi are
focused, in Eumenides, on a seemingly intractable ethical dilemma in the soul of Orestes
where justice is locked in battle with justice, so that to act justly is at once to act
unjustly.9 If the difficulty that is presented here is to be successfully addressed, and
justice is to claim its place as a unified and comprehensive principle of cosmic order
active in human society, then the drama must show how these contradictory appearances
of justice at war within Orestes can be effectively reconciled. In order to move beyond
the dividedness of the appearances of justice and seek out the unity which can ground and

6
See on this Anthony J. Podlecki, The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy, 2nd
Edition, (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1999), 63; Alan H. Sommerstein, ed.,
Aeschylus, Eumenides, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 19; Colin
Macleod, "Politics and the Oresteia," in Colin Macleod, Collected Essays, (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1983), 29.
7
See Simon Goldhill, "Greek Tragedy and Political Theory," in The Cambridge History
of Greek and Roman Political Thought, eds. Christopher Rowe & Malcolm Schofield,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 79.
8
Discussion on the political import of Eumenides has been reviewed in a balanced
account by Desmond Conacher, Aeschylus' Oresteia: A Literary Commentary, (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1987), 197-222. See also Podlecki, (1999) 81-100.
9
According to Apollo, the Erinyes will punish Orestes if he does not avenge the murder
of Agamemnon, Aeschylus, Choephoroi 283-4. However, they will also pursue him for
committing matricide, Choephoroi 924-5.

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stabilize their opposition, Aeschylus brings on stage in Eumenides, to account in person
for their ways towards men, the divine agents that are laying claim to administer justice at
Zeus' behest: the Erinyes and Apollo. The division in the soul of Orestes is thus extended
to expose a fundamental dichotomy within the order of the divine over the nature of
justice. What is yet to be discerned is how there can be a mediation between the natural
and instinctual chthonic realm of the Erinyes -- a world in which beast, man and god are
conflated -- and the rational order of the Olympians: an ordering of nature and reason that
will establish the proper relationship between beasts, men and gods.
With the radical opposition of the Erinyes and Apollo laid bare (198-231), the
structure of the problem is in place. Each of these divine powers claims for itself the
right to be in actuality the sole principle of just order for the family. The polar
contrariety, which immediately divides and sets apart the Erinyes and Apollo, is a
dramatic reflection of the opposed interests seen historically to separate the older tribal
order centred on the family blood-tie from the emergent polis order. The Erinyes' justice,
grounded in necessity, the ineluctable claim of individuals and families to the blood-right
of revenge, is confronted by Apollo's position that the integrity of the ethical order,
reflected in the complete primacy he accords to the marriage tie, is paramount. The
Erinyes cast aside in dishonour the Olympian protectors of marital unions, Apollo claims
(213-215).10 Yet, even while Apollo's justice, as it stands, may already be recognized as
an advance in the sense that it offers a means of resolving the dilemma, in this case
through ritual purification, it nevertheless remains the case that these two expressions of
justice are essentially the same in that that they are equally partisan and retaliatory; the
anarchy the endless cycle of individual blood vengeance entails is countered by the
despotism of an abstract rationality which seeks to equate itself immediately with a
collective good.
Yet, taken on their own, the positions of the Erinyes and of Apollo are
nevertheless incomplete. Although contrary, the Olympian and the Chthonian are at the
same time held in a determinate relation to one another, one in which each side of the
opposition contains implicitly that which characterizes the other. Hence, while reason
may be distorted by passion in Apollo, it is also the case, as the Erinyes will come to
amply demonstrate, that the forces of the irrational are open to being informed by
reason.11 Aeschylus makes clear, in Eumenides, a recognition that, if the tension and

10
Not only Aphrodite and Hera but Zeus himself thus suffer dishonour. Apollo's
response to the privileging of the parent-child blood-tie by the Erinyes effects a
recognition that the primary bonds which hold together the family as the basic social
group are not those of blood but the ethically-based attachments that draw feeling and
natural necessity within the sphere of the rational self-conscious.
11
Apollo, the voice of divine reason, is abusive, contemptuous, and dismissive of the
Erinyes in his encounters with them, arrogantly disdainful of their status as goddesses
(179-197). In marked contrast to the torrent of invective poured upon them by Apollo,
god of wisdom and foresight, the Erinyes are, in their response to this outburst,
respectful, polite and unemotional, replying to Apollo's vituperative jibes with studied
logic (198-231).

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opposition which persists between these forces is to be successfully ameliorated, it will
not be by the complete rout of one protagonist by the other, the whole equated with one
of the parts. What is needed is a measure that can comprehend and unify this primary
contrariety so that the natural and the rational -- whether in the soul, in the family, in the
city, or in the cosmos -- are not seen as opposed, but as contained within a whole that is
comprehensive of their difference: the differentiated moments of a single activity which
is the justice of Zeus, actualized in the human community as the ethical life of the polis.
Accepted by both sides as moderator, Athena incarnates the unifying measure that
sustains the Athenian ideal. In Eumenides, Athena is represented as the idea of Athens
personified.12 In fact, Athena concludes, the matter is too great to be entrusted to mortals
or god alone for judgement; a decision must be reached in concert (470-472). A
resolution will be worked out between the city's divine patron, Athena (288), as Zeus'
representative, and the best of her citizenry, chosen by Athena herself (487-8). In this
ideal Athens, Athena herself assumes the functions of the ruler of the polis. In this role
she will establish a court of justice to try the case, a mythical charter for the foundation of
the historical Court of the Areopagus which is to endure for all time (483-484), providing
a legal forum in which the arguments presented by opposing sides can be weighed and
judged objectively under law: reason grounded in the justice of Zeus and informed by the
exigencies of particular circumstance. Yet, it is important to recognize that the
appearance of justice established through the mindless mechanical observance of
external forms is not to be conflated with the reality.
The division in the human jury, which accords an equal respect to the competing
claims of instinct and reason, is a further manifestation of the ambivalence already
witnessed in the soul of Orestes himself, and of the polarity which is so patently on
display in the clashes between Apollo and the Erinyes. In the individual, in the
community, and in the divine, necessity and reason have countered their claims. Only in
the person of Athena is this duality finally taken up and overcome in the justice of Zeus,
the ordering principle of the political community as a 'whole'. Athena's casting vote is
not to be seen as a decision unilaterally imposed, but one achieved only in concert with
her citizens and arrived at following the outcome of their own deliberations. In accepting
Athena's ability to lead them out of their dilemma, and direct the course of action, the
citizens accord a priority to the authority of divine reason without effacing that natural
difference that marks them as individuals. Through the practical wisdom that she
embodies, Athena demonstrates that political reason begins with the universal of thought,
the idea of what is good for the polis, and that, as ordering principle, gives form to the
whole.13 This is the very essence of Athena, the cosmic justice of Zeus made actual in
the life of Athens through the rule of rational law.14 In becoming the logos of the

12
Sommerstein, (1989) 132-133.
13
What Aristotle refers to as heteron ti, the 'something else' that must be present to order
the parts into a whole. See Aristotle, Metaphysics 1041b 11-48. See also Metaphysics
1043b4-14.
14
Podlecki, (1999 63-100), notes Aeschylus' use of the language of the law courts
throughout the Oresteia.

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institutions of the polis, exemplified here in the deliberations of the court of the
Areopagus, reason ceases to be abstract and the just polis becomes actual.
Nevertheless, even a divinely mandated Justice embodied in the Laws and
interpreted by a human tribunal consisting of the best of the citizens, is not of itself
sufficient to maintain order and prevent discord (stasis) from breaking out in the polis
when confronted with innate individual human desires and passions, ever-threatening to
set private interest before the common good. Only when factional strife has been
banished from the polis (977-978) does there arise the possibility that citizens bonded to
one another in friendship will love and hate as one (a koinophilēs dianoia, 984-986).
Athena has demonstrated her statesmanship with her decisive leadership of the court
proceedings. Now, in her handling of the anger and bitterness of the Erinyes, she
provides an exemplary model of how through, the power of persuasion (Holy Peithō,
885), the successful statesman is able to win over even the fiercest and most obdurate
opposition and keep the ship of state on its true course. As she attempts to bring the
Erinyes within the civilized order, Athena recognizes and appeals to their unspoken need
for a broader recognition and acceptance. Hence she offers them a place of honour in her
city and a cult of their own, a chance to be an integral element in maintaining the
integrity of the polis.
Gradually, under Athena's wise guidance and persuasive power, the Erinyes are
brought from a narrow concentration on blood vengeance to a broad social mandate that
encompasses the natural side of human life (930-931). The emotional energy and drive
they embody -- which, unfocussed, represents a powerful disruptive force threatening to
tear the polis apart -- will, when harnessed in the service of the common good, prove
equally potent in catalysing the cohesive bonds of friendship that bind the citizens
together as one. Both sides, reason and passion, must be present in a human
community.15 As chthonic powers, Athena indicates, the Erinyes possess not only the
capacity for destruction but also a contrary and contrasting potential for beneficence.16
Henrichs argues that "the Erinyes require the existence of the Eumenides to achieve their
full meaning, and vice versa."17 Understood in this way, the polar contrariety of the
Erinyes-Eumenides reveals the goddesses as a dyadic potency capable of being actualized
for benefit or harm, pleasure or pain. In Eumenides, this potential is actualized

15
Plato and Aristotle will lay great emphasis on the significance of passion (thumos)
properly oriented as a cohesive force rather than a potent source of discord (stasis).
16
There is no evidence prior to Aeschylus that the two groups of deities (Erinyes and
Eumenides) shared a common function. Sommerstein (1989, 11) suggests that Aeschylus
is here "making a startling innovation."
17
Albert Henrichs, "Anonymity and Polarity: Unknown Gods and Nameless Altars at the
Areopagos," Illinois Classical Studies 19 (1994): 54. Henrichs (1994, 28) argues
convincingly that "Erinyes ('Angry Ones') and Eumenides ('Kindly Ones') are the two
names for the polar identities of the same group of powerful divinities who dwell beneath
the earth". He brings together a wealth of evidence that would identify the Eumenides
with the cult of the Semnai Theai (Holy Goddesses) whose underground home was on the
Areopagus (1994, 39).

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beneficially by Athena, and the goddesses are accorded a meaningful place within the
rational order of the polis. Now properly Eumenides, the goddesses urge unbounded
blessings, both material and social, for Athens and her people. Nevertheless, Athena
reminds them, they retain a potent threat of retribution for those who transgress (932-935,
952-955). Indeed, in Bacchae, Euripides amply demonstrates the disastrous
consequences that follow the failure to properly integrate this polar duality of the
irrational.

As the Oresteia concludes, the city celebrates its collective identity. Zeus and
Moira come together as one in endorsing the peace treaty that has been established
between reason and natural necessity (1044-1046). The extension of the rule of Zeus into
the human realm provides a rational ethical order for the polis and its institutions, while
the goddesses govern the sphere of the natural and instinctual. Reinforced by the positive
emotive power of collective cult, the law is taken up into the minds and hearts of the
citizens, promoting internal harmony and keeping at bay the menace of political discord
as each citizen sees himself actualizing his own freedom objectively in attaining to the
common good.18 At the centre of the polis stands the Court of the Areopagus, its divinely
given mandate to invoke that reverence and fear for the Laws that is to sustain the just
political community. As Macleod remarks, "the parallelism of city and individual is part
of Aeschylus' thinking as much as it is of Plato's."19 For both poet and philosopher alike,
the concern is to identify directly the life of human flourishing (to eu zēn) with the just
community.20
Yet, amid the euphoria that marks the conclusion of Oresteia, there is a note of
caution that must be sounded. The natural world is characterised by movement and
change. What has been achieved is not the finality of an indissoluble good but the respite
of a peace treaty crafted from the primary contrariety of Apollo and the Erinyes, a
division of the opposing powers of despotism and anarchy that, through the mediation of
Athena, has been overcome in the unity of Zeus. Although reconciled at the close in the
justice of Zeus, these powers nevertheless retain the potential to break free, exhibiting
themselves in that human recklessness which brings in its train disaster and ruin. To

18
On the importance of collective performance of ritual to the integrity of society, see
Albert Henrichs, "Changing Dionysiac Identities," in Jewish and Christian Self-
Definition. Volume 3. Self-Definition in the Greco-Roman World, eds. Ben F. Meyer and
E. P. Sanders, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 150. See also Richard Seaford,
"Historicizing Tragic Ambivalence: The Vote of Athena," in History, Tragedy, Theory:
Dialogues on Athenian Drama, ed. Barbara Goff, (Austin: University of Texas, 1995),
216.
19
Macleod, 32. See Aeschylus Eumenides. 522-5. Peter Euben, in The Tragedy of
Political Theory: The Road Not Taken, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990),
argues similarly (67).
20
Nevertheless, the differences between the justice of Aeschylus, founded on traditional
piety, and that of Plato based on a rationally articulated objective good, will in Plato's
view prove defining and will necessitate the removal of even the works of Aeschylus
from the public life of Kallipolis.

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understand that this is the case, however, is not eo ipso to bring into question or to
subvert the polis ideal, but rather to bring to consciousness a recognition of the
difficulties to be addressed in its realization. In this way, Aeschylus' ideal Athens, Plato's
ideal city, and indeed Aristotle's unconditionally best constitution of Politics Book 3, are
analogous. Thus, amid the overt joy and optimism with which the trilogy concludes, the
hope and expectation for the attainment of the polis ideal, Aeschylus clearly remains
aware of the inherent fault lines that inevitably persist in human community as it
alternately reaches towards and falls away from the just political community that is its
end.

3. Antigone
In Sophocles' Antigone, as in the Eumenides, justice clashes with justice. There is
an important difference between the plays, however, in the way that they resolve this
clash. In Eumenides, Aeschylus presents a clearly articulated resolution to the dilemma
by establishing the relation of the parts to the whole.21 In Antigone, by contrast, the
human mind is no longer content to be held within the bounds of a traditional moral
order. Whereas Aeschylus has looked at the political community from the divine
perspective of the encompassing 'whole', Sophocles focuses on the human dilemma and
on the problematic relation between the 'parts' in a world where divine and human
knowing are seemingly incommensurate, and man has begun actively to assert himself as
the measure of what is. Yet, the polis in Antigone is still the extension of the rule of Zeus
into the human realm. The gods remain the ultimate objective arbiters of the validity of
human actions. Their presence is everywhere felt in the fatal clash of Creon and
Antigone, a confrontation in which "knowledge, or the presumption of knowledge,
reflects the limits of human power and man's responsibilities to the areas of the unknown,
the uncontrollable, the sacred."22
At this critical nexus for 'tragic consciousness' the path for man divides and the
fate of the polis as a 'whole of parts' is played out. Faced with the inescapable
recognition that the objective good that sustained the older order has fallen into a division
in which he finds himself caught between public and private good, man has two choices.
He can take the path that historically the Greek enlightenment was to take: the road that
leads to an ever-multiplying diversity of conflicting human goods, the worth of which
individual human subjects and their chosen allies are the judges. Thus we arrive at the
end-stage polis portrayed in the works of Euripides and Thucydides towards the close of
the fifth century. Alternatively, man can attempt to find a way of addressing the primary
sources of tension and polar opposition within the political community, seeking to bridge
the tragic divide by restoring an ordered relation of the 'parts' to the objective good of the
'whole,' a new rational understanding which can withstand the fifth-century

21
A koinōnia politōn politeias in which the citizenry comes together in a common bond
of friendship, a (koinophilēs dianoia) under the justice of Zeus.
22
Charles Segal, "Sophocles' Praise of Man and the Conflicts of the Antigone," Arion 3
(1964): 49.

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enlightenment challenge to its integrity. This is the path that the philosophy of Plato and
Aristotle will take, their ultimate challenge to overcome a division of reason and feeling
that has its source within the soul of man.
Human ingenuity, the Chorus in Antigone tells us, possesses a propensity for both
nobility and for baseness (365-7). If mankind is successfully to address ethical dilemmas,
such as Antigone discloses, humans must seek to know themselves, their own nature and
its limitations. Indeed, it is lack of understanding that is the true human tragedy, the
quintessential tragic divide that must be bridged. The problem that results in the impasse
manifested in Antigone is not intrinsically insoluble. Sophocles himself shows in Ajax, in
the clash between the Atreidae and Odysseus over the burial of Ajax, that it is possible to
negotiate a resolution to such an issue of contention. Unquestionably, conflicts arise in
which two goods can be identified but, due to force of circumstance, one can only be
achieved at the expense of the other. However, if the opposition between rival goods in
Antigone is indeed truly irremediable in this way, as MacIntyre argues, then it is not
susceptible to ethical deliberation in any meaningful sense.23 No one deliberates about
what cannot be otherwise, Aristotle points out.24 With goods thus simply opposed and
incompatible, any choice that is made must be recognized as being arbitrary. By contrast,
the tragic power of the Sophoclean ethical dilemma resides in the fact that, as a result of
the inability of humans to understand the nature of their motivations, the good becomes
irrevocably divided against itself in a way that is potentially avoidable.25
Aristotle conceives of the tragic action as a whole from which all that is
extraneous and contingent has been removed, one bound by the limits of the necessary
and the probable, expressing thereby the choices that certain kinds of people will make.26
Tragic action, with its deep intuition into the human dilemma and its emotive power,
brings into view the end from which it has fallen away, the good life for man in the stable
and well-ordered political community. Through the concatenation of the 'necessary and
the probable' in the unfolding of the structure of the tragic action there comes about the
possibility of an understanding, not only that the Athenian polis ideal is a fragile one but
why it is so. Those who witness the tragedy of Thebes enacted before them may thus
learn from the suffering that the city endures. If the implications for human coexistence
that the tragic conflict lays bare are to be made concrete in the life of the polis, the citizen
audience must themselves fully appropriate the import of the action by taking up and

23
Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd Edition, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1984) concludes that Antigone exposes an inherently irresolvable conflict due to
"rival and incompatible demands" of family and polis (132). See further MacIntyre, 143.
24
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1112a21-30; Aristotle, Poetics 1451a30-35.
25
When I say 'potentially avoidable' I mean in relation to the essential nature of the
problem as it presents, which in this case is the burial. It is not of course avoidable in
terms of the structure of the individual tragic plot as a particular concretion of this
problem. Aristotle's discussion of voluntary action as a precondition for ethical activity is
relevant, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1109b30-1115a3.
26
We are responsible for the kind of person we are and hence the voluntary choices we
make, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1114b21-23).

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resolving within their own souls the dilemma the poet explores.27
The ideals of open discussion and citizen participation in deliberations, so prized
by democratic Athens, are not those on display in Creon's Thebes as Sophocles portrays it
in Antigone. In the aftermath of civil strife, with the very survival of the polis at stake,
Creon is prepared neither to tolerate the voicing of any opinion other than his own nor to
repose any trust whatsoever in those with whom he interacts. In their essence, the ideals
that Creon sets forth as his political platform are unexceptional and indeed will even
come to be seen as providing a paradigm for responsible political action.28 His policies,
he states, are founded upon two basic contentions: first that whoever is to guide the polis
should never be deterred by fear from following the best counsels (ta arista bouleumata)
and second, that a friend should never be considered of more importance than one's own
country (178-181).29 Rational purpose (phronēma) and friendship (philia), virtues that
Aristotle deems most befitting the concern of the legislator, are what Creon repeatedly
professes to hold most dear.30 However, as Creon proceeds to put his avowed principles
into effect under the exigency of civic unrest, we observe him, as Podlecki notes, "in the
very act of becoming a tyrant."31 What is already emerging in Creon's first speech, along
with his insistence on the absolute priority to be accorded to safeguarding the interest of
the polis, is the identification of the common good with the particularity of his own
deliberative judgement (191).32 The polis is the only good and is the sole embodiment of

27
See Mark Griffith, Sophocles: Antigone, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), 43; Charles Segal, Interpreting Greek Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text, (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1986), 205. For a consideration of audience response, see
Ismene Lada, "'Empathetic Understanding': Emotion and Cognition in Classical Dramatic
Audience Response," Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 39 (1993): 94-
140.
28
Hence, Demosthenes, 19.246-50 chides Aeschines for not following the guidance
Creon offers here in Antigone.
29
These are very much the sentiments Thucydides will later attribute to Pericles on the
outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. See, for example, Thucydides, 2.21.2-2.22.2 and
2.60.1-7, in particular 2.60.2.
30
Philia (friendship, fellow feeling) more than anything else, even more than justice,
Aristotle argues, holds the city together and prevents insurrection, Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics 1155a23-6. On the very different understanding of philia espoused
by Creon and Antigone, see Bernard Knox, The Heroic Temper, (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1964), 80-88. On Greek conceptions of philia, see Mary Whitlock
Blundell, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek
Ethics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 39-49.
31
Anthony J. Podlecki, "Creon and Herodotus," Transactions of the American
Philological Association 97 (1996): 359. See too Karl Reinhardt, Sophocles, trans. Hazel
D. Harvey and David Harvey, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), 69; Warren J. Lane & Anne
Lane, "The Politics of Antigone," in Peter Euben, Greek Tragedy and Political Theory,
(Berkeley: University of California Press,1986), 169.
32
Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles, (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), remarks the predominance of 'I' in Cleon's address

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the concept of friendship. Anyone who is to be a friend of the polis must identify
completely with Creon as its rational voice, and hence with his edicts. Aware that his
decree forbidding the burial of Polyneices is unpopular in certain quarters (289-292) and
plagued by constant fear of duplicity and intrigue, Creon is racked by suspicion and
mistrusts everyone he encounters.33 Hence he debars from the decision-making process
even those whose loyalty to the state has long been established.34 The only 'best counsels'
(179) to which Creon will now defer are his own.35
Creon's equation of the good of the polis, which is to say its safety, with an
unquestioned obedience to his dictates as leader is early evident in his description of the
proper disposition for the citizenry as submitting rightly to the yoke of his domination
(291-292). Whoever is placed in power by the polis must have obedience to even his
least command, irrespective of whether he is in the right or not (666-667). No greater evil
can affect society than civic disobedience, Creon declares, for, it is through such
anarchia that cities are destroyed. The distinction between peitharchia, unquestioned
obedience to his dictates as ruler, and anarchia, the breakdown of social order, is for
Creon an absolute one, admitting of no mediation (663-676). Creon's sentiments are
echoed by the demagogue Cleon, who argues, in Thucydides' account, that the worst
political policy is to pass legal measures but not abide by them. A polis having inferior
laws that it keeps unchanged is stronger than one having good laws that lack authority.36
Aristotle, in considering the nature of political association, looks first to the
particular: the good of the individual citizen as he perfects himself in virtue through
friendship and justice in relation to family and fellow citizens. Only while such
friendship flourishes, he argues, is the just polis is possible.37 By contrast, political
reasoning for Creon begins with the universal, the idea of the polis as a contentless
abstraction that is prior to what he, as ruler, determines to be its good: that political
arrangement which will preserve it as a stable entity. That the polis is for Creon a purely
rational and undifferentiated community is reflected in the emptiness of his abstract
formal reasoning in which everything can be absorbed into a rigid relationship of logical

(169). See also Griffith, 156.

33
Not just Antigone, but also the Chorus 280-284, Guard 310-312, Ismene 493-494,
Haemon 746, Teiresias 1055.
34
The past loyalty of the Chorus of Theban elders (165-169) and the seer Tereisias (995)
is acknowledged by Creon.
35
By contrast, it is inferred in his opening speech that Creon has in the past consulted the
Theban Elders.
36
Thucydides, 3.37.3.
37
Aristotle makes clear at the outset of a lengthy discussion of friendship, in the Ethics,
that the polis is conceived ideally as a community of friends whose common end is the
promotion of concord (homonoia), Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1167b2-3. Friendship
(philia) is the innate motive force that brings people together by choice in a common
concern for the good of the whole achieved in the life of noble actions, Aristotle Politics
1280b17-38.

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contrariety, and ultimately reduced to the simple opposition of good and bad.38 In effect,
Creon differentiates the existence of the polis from its essential nature: life (to zēn) from
the life in which humankind best flourishes (to eu zēn). Creon and Aristotle are in
agreement on the importance of friendship in holding cities together. However, whereas
Creon assimilates friendship directly to justice conceived as unquestioned obedience to
the imposed rational order, Aristotle argues that the kinds of friendship that characterize
the political community arise from mutual agreement among citizens as to what is just
and advantageous for the polis.39
It is not only the order of the polis that Creon assimilates to his own rational
purpose but also the cosmic order of Zeus. Zeus the all-seeing is his proclaimed witness,
confirming him in the actions he undertakes on behalf of the polis (184). Secure in the
superiority of his own intellectual powers, Creon is blind to signs of disparity between his
own knowing and that of Zeus, the overt expressions of his hubris in relation to the gods
punctuating disclosure of the full course of his undoing (278-279,1039-1044). Sophocles
provides Creon full reign to exhibit the extent to which his blinkered understanding falls
short of his own expectations for himself. In successive encounters with Antigone, with
Haemon, his son, and finally with the blind seer Teiresias, Creon rejects, in turn, the
universal unwritten laws of feeling which bind together the human race (446-525), the
role of persuasive deliberation in decision-making for the common good of the polis
(635-723), and finally the inspired utterances by which the will of Zeus is conveyed to
man (988-1114). The elements constitutive of Athena's polis ideal as a composite whole
in Eumenides are in Creon's Thebes detached and opposed under the stress of adversity.
The absolute distinction Creon makes between his nephews, Eteocles and
Polyneices, in terms of 'friend' or 'enemy' to the polis, is challenged by Antigone with an
equally unequivocal assertion of the unassailable demands of kinship bonds. Creon's
edict forbidding the burial of Polyneices, she insists, is of merely mortal contrivance and
runs counter to 'the unwritten and undying laws of the gods'.40 Neither Zeus nor that
Justice (Dikē) which belongs with the gods below has laid down such laws for mankind
(450-455).41 On the authority of these ancient religious sanctions, Antigone founds her
claim to have an inalienable duty to bury her own kin (philos), her beloved brother, in
defiance of Creon. For Creon, by contrast, the universal unwritten laws of the gods to
which Antigone defers have no standing in comparison to his own determination of what
the city is to hold due to a friend as opposed to an enemy. Whereas it is possible for an

38
See Helene Foley, "Antigone as a Moral Agent, in " Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek
Theatre and Beyond, ed. M.S. Silk, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 60. See too
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness; Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and
Philosophy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 54-58 and Blundell, 115-
130.
39
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1160a8-14, 1167b2-16.
40
On the unwritten laws, see e.g. Thucydides, 2.37.3; Lysias, 6.10-11; Xenophon,
Memorabilia 4.4.19-20 and Griffith, 201.
41
See Jebb's comments in Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments: Part III Antigone, 3rd
Editon, ed. and trans. Richard Jebb, (Amsterdam: Hakkert,1971), 89.

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astute political friend (philos) of the stature of Odysseus to overcome the opposition of
Agamemnon to the burial of Ajax, even if in so doing he fails to convince him that he is
wrong, what Creon sees before him is no philos of standing, but rather an irrational
hubristic female whose defiance in transgressing his edict is a threat to a rational order
identified with male dominance, and who must therefore be broken like a slave.42 The
point Antigone makes is essentially that which Aethra, mother of Theseus, makes in
Euripides' Suppliant Women and that Odysseus establishes in Sophocles' Ajax when he
tells Agamemnon that it is not Ajax but the laws of the gods (nomoi) he will be
destroying in forbidding the burial.43 Like Creon, Agamemnon has insisted that the good
man must be obedient to human authority and that an enemy remains an enemy, alive or
dead.44
The overt distinction that emerges in Antigone, between the apparently conflicting
obligations of the universal unwritten laws of nature and human reason asserted in
positive law, is symptomatic of an incipient breakdown of an older ethical order for
which 'all human laws are sustained by the one divine law'45 and human freedom can be
found, as at the end of Eumenides, objectively realized in a universal necessity which is
one with the divine rule of Zeus. In Antigone, the human sphere of the polis has begun to
assert for itself a self-determinate existence distinct from the divine as man brings physis
under the dominion of human nomos. Guthrie, commenting on the changing
understanding of the intellectual basis of nomos during the fifth century, observes that "so
long as religion remained an effective force, the devising mind could be the god's, and so
there could be nomoi that were applicable to all mankind."46 This quest, central to
Antigone, for an understanding of the nature of those universal norms considered most
constitutive of the human good in praxis, leads Aristotle in his turn to a consideration of
the distinction between natural and political justice, and back to the specific question
Sophocles raises. There are two kinds of law, Aristotle observes. On the one hand, there
are the particular laws, both written and unwritten, which are held by each community,
laws which are in themselves conventional; relative to the time, place, and circumstance
of their execution. On the other hand, there are the overriding universal laws based on
nature that humans everywhere divine in some way.47 This is what Antigone infers,
Aristotle concludes, when she argues that it is by nature just to bury her brother
Polyneices, in contravention of a specific decree of Creon, arguing that 'not today or
yesterday, but eternally this [natural justice] lives and no one knows from whence it
appeared'.48
Ideally, what is just by nature should hold the same power everywhere whether it

42
See Segal, (1981) 83. Creon's rejection of family ties here is absolute.
43
Euripides, The Suppliant Women 19; Sophocles, Ajax 1343-1344.
44
Sophocles, Ajax 1352, 1372-1373.
45
Heraclitus fragment 114 (Diels-Kranz 22B114).
46
W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, v.3, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1969), 55. See also p. 130.
47
Aristotle, Rhetoric 1373b1-10. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1134b18-22.
48
Aristotle, Rhetoric 1373b10-13, 1375b1-2. Cf. Sophocles, Antigone. 456-7.

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appears to do so or not, Aristotle argues. However, while there is a general recognition
that there are natural laws concerning just and unjust action that are of widespread
applicability, they are not necessarily without exception. Rather, these laws hold with
such a high degree of probability that to all intents and purposes they can be said to be
true.49 This being the case, it has to be recognized that, since no law operative in the
natural world of motion and change can be said to be completely without exception, at
every level the possibility for division and conflict exists. Hence, while the gods will
eventually affirm the burial of Polyneices to be in accord with both natural and polis
justice, this does not exclude eo ipso the possibility that in other circumstances the matter
of burial might be differently construed.50 At the same time it must also be allowed,
Aristotle argues, that those posited laws which are found to vary widely from state to
state are not simply arbitrary, but find their proper origin within the context of an ideal
polity, however inadequately this may be realized in practice.51 Underlying all the
manifest diversity there is an order to the natural world, albeit only incompletely
understood by man. For Sophocles, as for Aristotle, and indeed all of the classical
tradition, the polis is an extension into the natural of a divine and unchanging order.52
Thus the workings of a universal natural justice and the particular laws which organize
and safeguard the polis are not to be considered as standing a priori apart and opposed
but rather to be held in a determinate relation to one another. Nor can the confrontation
between Antigone and Creon be said to be in principle beyond the reach of human
resolution; the tragedy lies in their inability, being the kind of people they are, to bridge
the gap that separates them by means of effective communication.
As events disclose, Antigone is undoubtedly in the right to pursue actively the
provision of burial rites for her brother in accord with her understanding of the 'unwritten
and unfailing laws of the gods' (454-455). However, while she is able to intuit the end,
the burial of Polyneices, as the good to be sought in practice, and in so doing presents a
noble and pious figure, Antigone is nevertheless unable to articulate within the social
context of the polis, the realm of language, an appropriate means to achieve this end.53
The undoubted 'rightness' of her cause notwithstanding, in the absoluteness of her open
and public revolt against the decree of the ruler, she not only backs Creon into a corner
from which his pride will allow him no escape, but in the manner of her actions she both

49
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1134b19-20, 1134b28-32.
50
Cf. the climax of Oedipus Coloneus. Here, in the presence of Theseus' calm and
measured authority, coupled to his respect for religious sanctions, a healing can take
place between reason and feeling which is not possible in Creon's Thebes. See on this,
Andreas Markantonatos, Tragic Narrative, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), 163-165 and Segal
(1981) 400-403.
51
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1135a3-7.
52
See Homer, Iliad 16.431-458.
53
Persuasion (Holy Peithō), successfully employed elsewhere by Athena, Odysseus and
Theseus, is not attempted by Antigone. This is key to her tragic status. It remains the
case, even when it is considered that whatever mediation she might have sought would
surely have been unsuccessful against Creon. See Charles Segal, Sophocles' Tragic
World: Divinity, Nature, Society, (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1995), 120.

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isolates herself irrevocably from her living family and further destabilizes her own polis,
the scene so recently of disastrous infighting in the royal household. In the final analysis,
despite that fact that they are reduced to tears by the thought of her fate, the Elders of
Thebes offer little support for Antigone's actions. It is her independent self-will
(autognōtos orga, 875) that is her downfall, the Chorus concludes; she goes to her death
of her own free choice, a law unto herself (autonomos, 821). A self-proclaimed
champion of the cause of justice, Antigone, in the eyes of these elders of Thebes, has
progressed to the furthest extremes of boldness (eschaton thrasous) only to stumble
against the high pedestal of the goddess, Dikē, Justice herself (854-856).54
In the confrontation of Antigone and Creon a parallel can readily be drawn to the
stand-off between the Erinyes and Apollo, their clash now alive at the human level.55
The Erinyes, as the disruptive force that emerges when the natural order within the polis
is disturbed, find on this analogy their Sophoclean counterpart in Antigone. With the
enforcement of Creon's edict, the honours due to the chthonian divinities are overturned.
The consequent disturbance of the political order causes the opposed claims of reason and
feeling, which in the Oresteia are resolved in the concrete unity attained in Athena's
polis, to become actual again. The Dread Goddesses, unleashed once more as the
implacable Erinys embodied in the fierce human will of Antigone, seek to reassert their
allotted due, in the face of reason abstractly imposed. Viewed in this light, Antigone's
relation to her sister Ismene takes on an added significance; their actions are related not
just in an external and superficial way to show Ismene as a foil for Antigone, but as
manifest expressions of the natural order in its determinate bipolarity.56 In the civilized
world of the well-ordered polis that is Athens at the conclusion of Eumenides, natural
difference is contained peacefully within the whole. However, as Athena makes very
clear, this state of concord in which the Eumenides are active holds only as long as the
chthonic goddesses are accorded their proper due; should this fail to be the case, the
dreaded Erinyes will once more exact a retribution (Eum. 990-995).

54
In her intractable single-mindedness lies both the source of Antigone's heroic greatness
and her error (hamartia). The Chorus are willing to agree with Antigone that there is a
kind of piety in the reverence she shows towards her brother's obsequies. However,
authority, for the one whose concern it is, can in no way be transgressed (872-4). On the
surface, the Chorus is taken to be speaking here of the power of Creon, who is present.
However, in the larger religious sphere it is the power of Zeus, in whom the ultimate
authority resides, that is inferred. No human transgression can withstand Zeus (604-14).
In the final analysis, it is not Antigone but Zeus who reveals to Creon the error of his
ways.
55
See Segal, (1981) 184. See too William F. Zak, The Polis and the Divine Order,
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995), 89.
56
As Semnai Theai, the dread goddesses of the end of Eumenides encompass a bipolar
potency, as Erinyes/Eumenides; one that is made actual in the rational order of the polis
(Aeschylus Eumenides. 930-931). The existence of an analogous relationship between
Electra and Chrysothemis in Sophocles' Electra argues that the poet did attach a
particular importance to this expression of a polarity in the natural.

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In conceiving the good of the polis solely in terms of his own abstract rational
determinations, Creon has attempted to divorce himself from what it is to be truly human:
a rational animal bound necessarily to physis, the sphere of the natural and particular. At
the last, he is brought to an understanding both of the limitations of human reason in
relation to the cosmic order of the divine and of the poverty of a human life that is bereft
of kin bonds. Creon's expressed desire to achieve the good for the city is doubtlessly
sincere, and it is evident that he has in the past been amenable to accepting wise counsel
(992-994).57 Nevertheless, Sophocles has clearly shown in his portrayal of Creon that the
ideals which hold together the polis as a community of free living citizens may become
subverted under the stress of civic life, and that the institution of the polis in its fight for
survival can take on a life of its own as an abstract formal entity divorced from the
rationale that justifies and sustains it. The polis is a delicate organism thriving only
within certain limits and any substantial change to its environment, including the trend to
military imperialism to which Sophocles was a witness, threatens it with extinction.
4. Bacchae
Euripides' Bacchae, written in the final years of the brutalizing Peloponnesian
War, looks out on a polis world in disarray, beset both from within and without. Against
the background of this intellectual and socio-political milieu, as "instinctive forces and
primitive drives surge up through the legal and political structure," the conflicts of
Bacchae take shape.58 The lessons to be learned from the actions of Creon pass unheeded
as the intellectual enlightenment gathers strength in Athens during the second half of the
fifth century. Polis justice, no longer conceived in terms of ancient pieties universally
operative, can readily be perceived in terms of a will to power, whether by individual,
faction, or state.59 Hence necessity and freedom come to coincide not as before in the
universal order of Zeus, but in the individual subject and, 'writ large', in the will of the
assembled masses as a 'tyranny of the majority'. So it is that the sophist Antiphon can
declare that whereas laws are imposed, nature is of necessity. Since much of what is just
by law is hostile to nature, wherever possible one must follow the dictates of human
nature rather than those of law.60 This is the case both for the individual and for the polis

57
It is only once a ruler has been put to the test in demanding circumstance that the full
measure of what lies latent in his character will be revealed, as indeed Creon himself has
confidently asserted, Sophocles, Antigone. 175-177.
58
Euben, (1990) 130. See also Knox, "Euripides: The Poet as Prophet," in Directions in
Euripidean Criticism, ed. Peter Burian, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985), 6;
Desmond Conacher, Euripides and the Sophists, (London: Duckworth,1998), 10;
William Allan, "Euripides and the Sophists: Society and the Theatre of War," in
Euripides and Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century, eds. Martin Cropp, Kevin Lee,
and David Sansone, (Campaign IL: Stipes Publishing, 2000), 148.
59
Thus, Protagoras is said to argue that whatever each polis believes to be just and noble
is for it as long as it considers it so, Plato, Theatetus 167c4-6. Cf. Plato, Protagoras
323a5-328d2d. On the historical Protagoras, see Anthony J. Podlecki, Perikles and his
Circle, (London: Routledge, 1998), 93-99.
60
Antiphon, fragment 44 (Diels-Kranz 87B44). See The Fragments of Antiphon the

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as a whole: 'the strong do what they can, the weak acquiesce' in what they must.61 As a
result, the political ideal, understood as a 'whole' which is comprehensive of its parts,
effectively ceases to exist and what remains in its stead is nothing other than a 'heap', a
mere aggregate of parts to be shaped and bent to the will of the stronger. Thus, some
fifty years after the production of Eumenides, an Athenian audience, in a very different
political clime, watches as once again a powerful divine dyadic force governing the
sphere of the natural and irrational sets itself in opposition to an arbitrary dictate of the
established rational order, and stakes its claim to a place within the city. With the
Athenian democratic polis approaching its own nadir, the citizens see before them how
the mythical polis of Thebes, unable to hold within one grasp the conflicting claims of
reason and feeling, is torn apart.
The dramatic action of Bacchae inarguably has at its centre the confrontation
between Pentheus and Dionysus that culminates in the eventual punishment of a
persistent theomachos (a god-fighter, 45). Yet, as the action unfolds, we must always
keep in mind that this is more than a conflict between the god and a hubristic individual
(39-40, 47-52). Ranged behind the opposed principals, their fate dependent upon the
outcome of the contest, are their respective constituencies, the citizenry of Thebes and the
Bacchants, in what can be considered the larger clash between culture and nature, city
and mountain.62 As the lawful human ruler of Thebes, Pentheus claims the sole right to
pronounce on behalf of the citizens what will provide and maintain the polis order.
However, like Creon in Antigone, he equates the defective wisdom of his own individual
human reasoning with the good of the polis as a whole.63 Those who might be expected
to advise Pentheus best in reaching a decision on the good for the polis, Teiresias and
Cadmus, while they urge the admittance of the god into the city, present a somewhat less
than noble picture, a marked contrast to the paradigm offered by Teiresias and Haemon in
their efforts to win over Creon in Antigone. Deaf and blind in his solipsism, Pentheus
vainly opposes himself to Dionysus and attempts to shut fast the gates of Thebes against
the incursion of the irrational. In the ensuing failure of human wisdom to successfully
transcend and comprehend the endless cycle of nature, myth offers a telling critique of
Realpolitik.

Sophist, ed. Gerard J. Pendrick, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Martin
Ostwald, "Nomos and Phusis in Antiphon's Περὶ ᾽Αληθείας," in Cabinet of the Muses,
eds. Mark Griffith and D. J. Mastronade, (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 293-306.
61
Thucydides, 5.891.
62
On city and mountain as contrasted dramatic spaces, see Charles Segal, Dionysiac
Poetics and Euripides' Bacchae, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 80-124
and Rainer Friedrich, "City and Mountain: Dramatic Spaces in Eurpides' Bacchae,"
Proceedings of the XIIth Congress of International Comparative Literature (1988): 538-
545.
63
Comparisons are often made between Creon and Pentheus. Segal (1982,100) notes
their self-identification with the polis. See also Euben, (1990) 143; Bernd Seidensticker,
"Pentheus," Poetica 5: 35 (1972): 46; Eric R. Dodds, Euripides: Bacchae, 2nd Edition,
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 97.

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The emotional and physical dismemberment that Dionysus instigates as the fate of
Pentheus is in its turn reflective of the spiritual dismemberment that has already invaded
and taken hold in the Athenian polis. At the very heart of the tragedy of Bacchae lies the
question of the nature of wisdom (sophia). The wisdom once recognised as the
prerogative of Zeus has been claimed by men. Fallen to earth and shattered, its broken
shards are now ends in themselves, pieces of wisdom gathered up by individuals and
factions to reflect and serve their own perceived needs. In the sphere of the divine, the
eclipse of Zeus' justice exposes to full view a darker force resident in his offspring
Dionysus, purveyor of an underlying natural, instinctual universal necessity (656), at
once most terrible and yet, it is important to note, also most gentle to mankind (861). The
conception of a dyadic potency for benefit or harm, pleasure or pain, which has been
encountered in the Eumenides-Erinyes of Aeschylus, and implied also in the relation of
Ismene and Antigone in Sophocles, reappears in a particularly potent form in Bacchae,
emerging in a tragic world which is without an Athena, a Theseus, or a Pericles standing
ready to harness the powers of Dionysus and draw them within the civilizing bounds of
polis cult.64

Understanding Dionysus as a dynamic synthesis of polar opposites is generally

considered to be the best way of dealing with his ambiguity.65 Whether he is envisaged
as a traditional god, a contradictory flux, or an elemental principle, Dionysus wields
power over a world of contrariety, a world which is ultimately resolved into a primary
overarching opposition of life and death: 'Hades and Dionysus are the same', declares
Heraclitus.66 In Bacchae, Dionysus is seen to be at once both a new god whom the polis
must civilize and accommodate, and at the same time an old god reborn, escaped from the
bonds of a bankrupt morality that can no longer contain him. Euripides inverts and
confutes mythical and historical understandings in such a way that what belongs properly
to maenadic myth appears in the play to be actual ritual practice, while the ethical norms
that belong historically to the polis world take on something of a mythic tenor,
particularly in the utterances of the Chorus.67

64
W. F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, trans. R. B. Palmer, (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana
University Press, 1965), notes the relation of Dionysus to other chthonic powers
especially the Erinyes (114). At Aeschylus Eumenides 500 the Erinyes refer to
themselves as mainades.
65
Albert Henrichs, "'He Has a God in Him': Human and Divine in the Modern Perception
of Dionysus," in Masks of Dionysus, eds. Thomas H. Carpenter, and Christopher A.
Faraone, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 3; Anton Bierl, Dionysos und die
griechische Tragödie: politische und 'metatheatralische' Aspekte im Text, (Tübingen:
Gunter Narr, 1991), 13-20, 128-9, 227; H. S. Versnel, Inconsistencies in Greek and
Roman Religion, Vol. 1 Ter Unus, (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 131-7. See also Goldhill, (1990)
126-7.
66
Heraclitus, fragment 15 (Diehls-Kranz 22B15); Otto, 121.
67
On the interplay of mythic and cultic elements in Bacchae, see Albert Henrichs,
"Between Country and City: Cultic Dimensions of Dionysus in Athens and Attica," in
Cabinet of the Muses, eds. Mark Griffith and D. J. Mastronarde, (Atlanta: Scholars

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As the dramatic action commences, Dionysus has made the initial move towards
asserting his primacy, stinging with manic frenzy the women of Thebes so that they have
abandoned their households and the civilized world of the polis to dwell upon the
mountain in communion with nature.68 On stage, the Chorus of Asian followers of
Dionysus extol the blessings they enjoy in that communion of soul which is the thiasos,
the maenad band engaged in the rites of its holy purifications (64-166). Striking a very
different note, the entrance of the two elderly Theban converts, Teiresias, the venerable
prophet of Apollo, and Cadmus, the celebrated founder of the polis of Thebes,
incongruously garbed as maenads, complete with fawn-skins, thyrsoi and ivy crowns,
could hardly in the context present more of a shock.69 If the leaders of the polis and its
institutions, the upholders of the physical and spiritual integrity of the polis, are thus
portrayed and if they do indeed cut a perversely comic figure to the watching audience,
this is because what they represent, the ethical order of the polis, is itself now a parody of
the noble ideals it once embodied.70
Both Theban elders assert that the acceptance of Dionysus conforms to the
traditional time-honoured practices for which they are the spokesmen. No argument can
cast down these ancestral customs possessed from time immemorial, declares Teresias
(200-203). Cadmus, in turn, will urge Pentheus similarly not to dwell outside the bounds
of the customary practices (331). The appeal to time-honoured customs, not to be
overthrown by any human wisdom, so reminiscent of Antigone, has often been remarked
as paradoxical in view of the fact that Dionysus is a new god.71 However, the
anachronisms can be ameliorated, if not completely reconciled, if we see, looming behind
the mythical new god and his historical fifth-century congeners, a conscious historical
reflection on an older tradition now ‘spent’ from out of which the god has ‘erupted.
Viewed from this perspective, the old men, Teiresias and Cadmus, as they confront the
problem of bringing the wild ‘physis-god’ within the bounds of civilization, paradoxically
invoke the audience’s memories of Dionysus domiciled within the polis as the god of
wine and festivity. Yet even as they echo the beliefs of the older tradition, it is soon

Press,1990), 257-8. See also Jan N. Bremmer, "Greek Maenadism Reconsidered,"

Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 55 (1984), 267-286.
68
The connection between the rationally ordered civilizing world of the polis and the
natural order that sustains it is thus severed. The existence of the polis is predicated upon
the household, the realm of regeneration and growth, rooted in necessity.
69
Desmond Conacher, Euripidean Drama: Myth, Theme, and Structure, (Toronto:
Toronto University Press, 1967), notes the "grotesquely striking contrast" they make (61).
Maenads are properly always female. On the perversion of ritual in Euripides' portrayal
of Teiresias, Cadmus, and later Pentheus, as maenads, see Henrichs, (1982) 139. See also
Rainer Friedrich, "Dionysos among the Dons: The New Ritualism in Richard Seaford's
Commentary on the Bacchae," Arion 7 (2000): 120-121.
70
Justina Gregory counsels caution in discussing Euripidean humour, "Comic Elements
in Euripides" in Cropp, Lee, and Sansone, 74. See also Dodds, 90-91.
71
The many and varied interpretations of the import of the new god/old god apposition
are summarized by Versnel, 178-9. For Dionysus as a new god, see Bacchae 219, 256,
272.

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evident that Cadmus and Teiresias are very much men of the late fifth century.
Performance of cult is for Cadmus and Teiresias a rational not an emotional enterprise: an
expression of self-interest. It is not through divine possession but by mutual agreement
(175) that Teiresias and Cadmus have come to a decision to follow Dionysus.
The primary concern for Cadmus (181-183) is the honour that attaches to having a
god in the family, something that he shows himself patently eager to exploit (330-342).
Even if Dionysus is not a god, they should consider him to be, for they will be telling a lie
for the sake of a good cause (334), bringing honour to their whole clan. Clearly, whereas
the forms of the older religious piety remain for Cadmus, they no longer carry with them
the untroubled convictions they once commanded, nor are they to be divorced from
utilitarian considerations of personal benefit, the furthering of individual and family
interests. Teiresias, in turn, reveals himself to be of quite a different ilk than the august
and fearsome seer whose divinely inspired auguries held sway in Sophocles' Thebes.72 It
is not prophecy that moves him to speak as he does but the facts, as he assures Pentheus
(368-369). In the age of enlightenment, a seer needs new skills to maintain his influence,
and it is quickly evident that Teiresias no longer looks to divine inspiration as the source
of his power but turns instead to rational explication, bringing theology firmly within the
bounds of pre-Socratic physics.73 Myths must be recognized as allegorical, their true
meaning revealed to be in accord with accepted scientific belief, their more bizarre
features explained away by rhetorical skill. Teiresias' allegorical rationalization of
Dionysus parallels that of the fifth-century sophist Prodicus in arguing that the god is to
be identified with a primary principle of human nurture (274-285).74
Like Cadmus, Teiresias impresses upon Pentheus the need to recognize Dionysus'
claims to be a god who must be accommodated within the bounds of civilized life. His
exhortation of Pentheus (266-327) is replete with the rhetorical cleverness characteristic
of the age owing more to the power of sophistic eristic than to the threat of Zeus'
thunderbolts.75 Confident in his own wisdom, Teiresias remains oblivious to the fact that

72
On the significance of Teiresias' speech, see Segal (1982) 293.
73
The two primary things (duo ta prōta) for men (274-275), the gods, Dionysus and
Demeter, are identified their gifts, wine (284-285) and bread (275-277). The underlying
contrariety is that of fundamental elements of Ionian physics, the wet and the dry, which
the sophist interprets in terms of utility. On this, see Dodds, 104-105. See also Paul Roth,
"Teiresias as Mantis and Intellectual in Euripides' Bacchae," Transactions of the
American Philological Association 114: (1984), 61. Conacher (1998, 22-24) usefully
compares the relevant passages in Bacchae and Prodicus.
74
Prodicus is reported to have said that the ancients considered everything beneficial to
life to be gods and it was for this reason he called Demeter bread, Dionysus, wine
(Diehls-Kranz 84B5).
75
For a detailed analysis of elements of the new intellectualism in Teiresias' speech, see
Roth. Roth describes Teiresias as a 'theological sophist' (59) and identifies historical
parallels among fifth century seers. In particular, he compares Teiresias to the portrayal
of the Athenian seer Euthyphro in the Platonic dialogues Euthyphro and Cratylus. Dodds
notes that Teiresias gives every appearance of being a 5th century intellectual, "one who

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in his rhetorical exposition he actively gives the lie to his earlier pronouncement that "we
do not employ cleverness with respect to the gods" (200). Yet, even as Teiresias extols
the benefits the god, conceived now in practical terms as a 'culture hero' who brings to
man with his gift of wine, the older concept of the civilized polis-god is in spirit
invoked.76 All this stands in marked contrast to the new and wild god that has actually
arrived at the gates of Thebes, and indeed to the anachronistic figure Teiresias himself
cuts in his maenad garb, blissfully unaware of his own perversion of polis ritual. Just as
Cadmus very evidently promotes the concerns of his own family, Teiresias, it can be
reasonably concluded, seeks actively to further the interests of what Dodds terms "the
ecclesiastical politics of Delphi."77 Neither for Teiresias nor for Cadmus does the good
of the polis as a whole motivate their concerns in urging the god be admitted within the
bounds of civilized society.
The picture that Teiresias and Cadmus present in their expected role as senior
policy advisors to Thebes, when considered in conjunction with what we later learn about
Pentheus as the city's self-willed autocratic ruler, illustrates very effectively how the polis
of Eumenides has fallen apart. The individual no longer sees his freedom as inseparable
from the objective good of the polis in accord with traditional divinely mandated laws.
The religion of Delphi, the order of the polity, and the claims of the family, all set
themselves up in Bacchae as distinct rational enclaves, spheres of influence which, no
longer in ordered relationship to one another and to an overarching principle in Olympian
Zeus, are effectually ends in themselves, competing communities in search of the
attainment of a particular good conceived in the light of their own self-promulgating
wisdom. The question then as now is 'Whose Justice? Which Rationality'? Ranged
against these foci of rational interest is found the powerful irrational force of the Bacchic
community of Dionysus, echoing through the Chorus the collective voice of a late fifth
century populace for whom there is another wisdom, a nomos which is coincident with a
universal enduring physis.
In a series of direct encounters, Dionysus attempts to open the eyes of Pentheus to
the distinction between the pragmatic determinations emerging from within the narrow
confines of his blinkered human reasoning and a larger encompassing divine wisdom that
transcends these mortal bounds. It is quickly evident, however, that meaningful
communication between Pentheus and Dionysus, purveyors of contrasting wisdoms, is
impossible (460-88).78 Pentheus gives every indication of being educated in the methods

has read his Protagoras and his Prodicus (91). See too Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, "Tragedy
and Religion: The Bacchae," in Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy, ed. Erich Segal,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 385.
76
For Dionysus as a 'culture hero' see Roth, 61.
77
Dodds, 91.
78
Pentheus has been brought up in the belief that Zeus destroyed Semele and her
offspring Dionysus for impiety (242-245). In effect, Pentheus' mother and her sisters
deny the mythos of Dionysus' birth to Semele and replace it with a logos (26-31). For
Pentheus, the Lydian Stranger must de facto be an impostor. To this premise he holds
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of demythologizing, rational explication current in the late fifth century, attempting to
define his opponent by categorizing him in terms of determinate empirical parameters
that tie him down once and for all (460-490).79 He remains oblivious to the universal
truths contained in the god's utterances, convinced that the Stranger is simply being
evasive (475) and manipulative (479). Impervious to Dionysus' repeated charges of
ignorance (480, 490) and impiety (476, 490, 502), Pentheus dismisses him as a brash
manipulator of words (489). "You do not know what your life is, nor what you do, nor
what you are," Dionysus charges (505). To which Pentheus replies, revealing only too
clearly the nature of the blindness that binds him fast, "I'm Pentheus, son of Agave. My
father was Echion" (506).
A powerful creator of images destined to sway the human mind, Dionysus dons
now the mantle of master sophist in an attempt to shake Pentheus' obduracy.80 Against
the background of earth tremors that threaten to topple the palace (605) and fire leaping
up from the tomb of Semele, Pentheus endeavours in vain to make the appearances of
reality the god conjures up to challenge him, conform to the simple empirical physical
laws upon which he relies (624-631).81 What cannot be subjected to a logical explanation,
consonant with sensory experience, has no reality for Pentheus.82 His inexplicable
silences, in the aftermath of the wondrous events he witnesses, are a telling indictment on

79
In the latter part of the fifth century, sophists take over responsibility for the education
of young Athenians seeking to attain positions of influence in the city. In place of the Old
Education, founded on customary religious beliefs (mythos), they offer the New
Education, grounded in rational, natural explanation (logos). Aristophanes' Clouds
insightfully exposes the implications of this shift, in the contest between Just and Unjust
Logos. The depiction of the youth Hippocrates in conversation with Socrates, in Plato's
Protagoras (311b-314c), is also illustrative of the dangers involved when the young
uncritically absorb the arguments and methodologies of the sophists. Pentheus too shows
evidence that he is a product of the New Education; he is clever at speaking (cf. 395) but
does not know what he is saying, as Dionysus points out (505).
80
Like Dionysus, the sophist wields a power that allows him to bring together in images
being and non-being so that everything is 'true'. Jean-Pierre Vernant compares the
powers Dionysus displays in Bacchae to those extolled by Gorgias in Encomium on
Helen: powers that "so bewitch the mind that no human being can resist them," The
Masked Dionysus of Euripides' Bacchae," in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, eds.
Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, trans. Janet Lloyd, New York: Zone Books,
1988), 403.
81
Justina Gregory, "Some Aspects of Seeing in Euripides' Bacchae," Greece & Rome 32:
(1985) concludes that Pentheus "relies on…secular language and experience" (27).
Conacher (1967, 63) refers to Pentheus as a "hard-headed" rationalist. For Vernant,
Pentheus is "narrowly positivistic" (403).
82
Whereas the Chorus react with awe and fear to Dionysus' miracles (600-603), Pentheus
sends for water to put out the fire (624-626). Despite all that he hears and sees, Pentheus
remains convinced he will be able to recapture the god by locking the city gates on him
(653).

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the nature and limitations of his wisdom.83 City and mountain will stand in opposition to
the end. For, while his power over the irrational allows Dionysus to effect the destruction
of Pentheus, he cannot accomplish his own appointed end, the incorporation of his
Bacchic rites within the polis, without the active cooperation of human wisdom.84
Fixated in his narrowly pragmatic and rigidly authoritarian stance, Pentheus seals his
tragic fate. Only when face-to-face with the inevitability of his appalling death does his
mind clear so that in, the end, he comes to recognize his errors and know, too late, that
Dionysus is the son of Zeus, a god whose rites must be observed (859-860).
The wisdom respectively espoused by Pentheus and Dionysus remains locked in
conflict throughout the play. Yet, while they appear completely opposed, Pentheus and
Dionysus are held nevertheless in a determinate relation to one another. Thus, Pentheus,
the self-declared voice of reason, is from the outset shown as being in a state of both
mental and physical agitation, whereas his divine opponent, the god of the irrational and
ecstatic, maintains an air of calm, arguing that the part of the wise man is to exercise self-
control (641). Half a century earlier Aeschylus portrayed, in the confrontation of Apollo
and the Erinyes, a very similar opposition. In Eumenides, however, it was possible to
conceive of a resolution, a higher divine unity that could draw these principles into
relation thus avoiding the extremes of anarchy or despotism that must result from the
overwhelming of one side by the other (Eum. 693-696). Like the Erinyes, Dionysus, as
his prologue and his historical incorporation into the polis bear witness, is ultimately
capable of accommodating his irrational ecstatic religion to the rational polis order.
Clearly absent from Euripides' Thebes, however, are the wisdom and persuasive
leadership skills so eminently displayed by Aeschylus' Athena. Indeed it is possible to
argue that in a very real sense the polis conceived as a 'whole' has already ceased to exist
in the Thebes of Bacchae even before Dionysus wreaks his vengeance. The polity, as the
laws embodied in the rational will of Pentheus, rigidly administers a sterile, lifeless order
in which the desiring and feeling side of the soul, the wellspring of friendship and
community, is subject to harsh repression, and its traditional foci of family and religion,
portrayed in the pictures of Cadmus and Teiresias, are revealed as expressions of
rationally calculated self-interest. It is indicative of the ongoing degradation of polis
ethos that there is a notable absence of any communal collective voice in Bacchae. 85

The escaped women of Thebes in their maenad bands form a purely natural
association, a communion (koinōnia) in which nomos is identified immediately with
physis and all distinctions which demarcate human and beast have been negated.86 The

83
Pentheus remains silent on the earthquake damage happening around him (587-589)
and on the phantoms with which Dionysus has him contend (616-631). Gregory, (1985)
discusses the significance of Pentheus' silences.
84
Dionysus can sting Pentheus to madness but significantly cannot imbue him with the
wisdom he lacks.
85
Charles Segal, "Chorus and Community in Euripides' Bacchae," in Poet, Public and
Performance in Ancient Greece, eds. Lowell Edmunds and Robert W. Wallace,
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 65-66.
86
See Rainer Friedrich, "Medea Apolis: On Euripides' Dramatization of the Crisis of the

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first messenger speech (664-774) dramatically evokes for its hearers the full dyadic range
of the Dionysiac experience, as it moves from the peace and sheer bucolic bliss of the
undisturbed bacchants to the raw violence and savagery they reveal as they are hunted
down. The contrary extremes of the delights and horrors portrayed, ranging from life at
its most pleasurable (704-11) to death and destruction at their most painful (734-68), are
fully indicative of the unlimited nature of the Dionysiac.87 Like the animals among
whom they live on the mountain and with whom they identify (699-700), the Theban
maenads, under the power of Dionysus, respond collectively and instinctually to external
stimuli; a herd (1022) they feel and act as one (75-76). The complete loss of self they
exhibit is a negation of all individuality.88 But human beings are more than herd animals,
Aristotle argues; by his very nature, man is a political being uniquely fitted for life in the
political association.89 Like the beasts, humans are capable of experiencing and
transmitting vocally to one another pleasurable and painful impulses. In addition,
however, humans through the power of language, can communicate an articulated
conception of good and bad, of what is just and unjust, which allows them to assume an
ethical responsibility for their actions.90 Yet, while law and justice are necessary to
human association, they are not of themselves sufficient to sustain the appropriate life for
a human (eu zēn) in the absence of the emotional bonds that draw the citizens together in
a spirit of common understanding (koinophilēs dianoia); both sides must find their due
place in the polis to militate against the internal divisions that lead to civil strife.
By contrast with the women of Thebes who have gone from polis to mountain,
abrogating in the transition their distinctly human ethical nature, the Chorus of Lydian
Bacchants have made the reverse journey, transposed from the wildness of the Phrygian
mountains to the civilized world of Greece with its rationally ordered polities. Like their
Theban counterparts on the mountain, the Lydian Bacchants express the full range of the
Dionysiac experience, tracing through their choral lyrics, a gradual but inexorable
movement from the peaceful and harmonious aspects of Dionysianism as a communal

Polis," in Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis: Papers from the Greek Drama Conference,
Nottingham, 18-20 July 1990, eds. Alan Sommerstein, Stephen Halliwell, Jeffrey
Henderson, and Bernhard Zimmermann, (Bari: Levante Editori, 1993), 235; R. P.
Winnington-Ingram, Euripides and Dionysus: An Interpretation of the Bacchae,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 92.
87
Contrary to what Pentheus believes, however, the messenger is quite clear that the
Theban maenads behave modestly, being neither drunk nor licentious (685-8). Indeed, it
could be argued that to break apart from the unity of the female collective, to move into
division by forming individual liaisons with males, is to destroy the emotional solidarity
which is its cohesive power, and take that necessary first step towards the natural
reforming of the rational and ethical bonds of family and polis they have left behind.
88
Winnington-Ingram notes the homogeneity of the Bacchants (97).
89
Aristotle, Politics 1253a2-8. Indeed, an impulse to political association is present by
nature in everyone, Aristotle argues, Politics 1253a29-30.
90
Aristotle, Politics 1253a9-18. It is just this kind of association that makes a household
and a polis.

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religious experience to culminate in a violent, vengeful ferocity.91 In the course of this
movement there is re-enacted an anatomy of the fifth century intellectual revolution.
Hence references to traditional practices (71) and to the dances of the biennial festival
(132-133) lend, from the outset, very much the air of a cult already established in the
polis, as opposed to the initial approaches of the votaries of a new god.92 Drawn within
the bounds of the polis for the first time, the Lydian Bacchants are nevertheless able to
awaken in themselves an understanding of the harmonious life of order, limit and
moderation that belongs not to maenadism but to the civilized rationally ordered world of
a polis at peace. This is paradoxical indeed in wild, exotic barbarian women. Dionysus
is invoked, not as the wild untamed nature god of the mythical past in which the drama is
set, but in terms of the civilized historical polis god of wine and the patron of the festival
that he will subsequently become (375-385, 417-424).93 Equally unexpected in these
adherents of a god of excess and dissolution of social bonds is their exhortation of
traditional tenets of Greek moral order.94 What holds together households, they declare,
is the calm life and good sense (390). Dionysus, son of Zeus, loves Peace and hates
excessive men (429). The cleverness exhibited by Pentheus is not wisdom but mindless
folly (387) as far as the Lydian Chorus is concerned, exceeding as it does the proper
bounds of mortal thoughts (395-396). The wisdom the Chorus acknowledges is that
simple customary wisdom that the mass of ordinary people (to plēthos…to phauloteron)
espouse (430-431).
For a sense of how these apparently incongruous utterances of the Lydian Chorus
might be understood in terms of the political ambience of the late fifth century, the
language employed in Thucydides' Mytilenean debate, offers an interesting insight. In
words very similar to those of the Chorus in Bacchae, the demagogue Cleon exhorts the
Athenian assembly (to plēthos) to take a stand. In most cases, the more ordinary men
(phauloteroi), rather than those who are more intelligent, are better at managing cities, he
declares. Ignorance combined with self-restraint is more beneficial to the polis than
cleverness accompanied by lack of discipline. In their efforts to outdo one another,
clever individuals, who wish to appear wiser than the laws, are more likely to bring about
the downfall of the polis.95 Although he urges moderation and respect for the laws, the
laws Cleon invokes are those of feeling, of physis, and not those articulated through
rational consideration of commonly held polis wisdom. The Athenian assembly must be
true to their unmediated, instinctual, emotional response in striking back at the
Mytilenians, Cleon insists.96 When departing from this course, the assembly can be
charged with exercising a lack of self-control. While mouthing adherence to traditional
political virtues of wisdom, justice and moderation, both Cleon and the Chorus of
Bacchae invert polis morality, achieving a 'transvaluation of values' that brings with it a

91
Conacher (1967) 69.
92
Dodds, 71. See also Conacher (1967) 60.
93
Marilyn Arthur, "The Choral Odes of the Bacchae of Euripides," Yale Classical Studies
22 (1972): 152-3.
94
Arthur observes that enjoinders to moderation and limit are a constant refrain (147-8).
95
Thucydides, 3.37.3-5.
96
Thucydides, 3.40.7.

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return to the tribal ethic of revenge justice.97
Hence we see in Bacchae how in the course of the action the overt picture that the
Chorus has initially presented of a civilized polis cult of Dionysus, in tune with the
traditionally established moral order, is rapidly disturbed by Pentheus' unremitting
hostility, to reveal a more primitive and dangerous underlying reality. Arthur notes the
similarity between the Lydian Bacchants and the Aeschylean Erinyes in their savagery
and thirst for vengeance.98 Yet, the course of the action of the two plays sees these
representatives of the natural, feeling side of community taking a very different, indeed,
opposing courses. Whereas the Erinyes, under the wise guidance of Athena, are finally
incorporated as Eumenides (Kindly Ones) into the inner life of the polis and its collective
cult, the Lydian Chorus, by contrast, paying only lip service to the civilised life of the
polis, is revealed as a purely natural association. Devoid of the measure of a rationally
articulated common good, the Lydian Bacchants persist inexorably in unmediated unity
with the unlimited dyadic power of Dionysus their divine principle. Thus, as Dionysus
prepares to lead Pentheus to his doom, the Chorus, while still professing the tenets of
popular morality, simultaneously exult in a fierce natural justice which extols wisdom as
'holding one's hand over the head of one's enemies' (877-81, 888-91).99 Expressing
themselves as being of one accord with physis, they assert the power of a divine justice
that belongs to the timeless, universal laws of nature (895-896). Like Cleon, the Lydian
Chorus insists that one must never think or act above these laws (890-892). They thus
move seamlessly from their earlier espousal of what the majority of ordinary people
consider normal practice (430-431) to the identification of this traditional morality with
the universal natural and instinctual laws of physis. With the central polis virtues of
wisdom, justice, and moderation assimilated to the immediacy of physis, now the
universal law underpinning and ratifying human action, civilization is overthrown and in
its place arises the 'law of nature', as Plato's Callicles defines it.100

5. Conclusion
The final moments of the action of Bacchae depict the human survivors, Cadmus
and Agave, painstakingly attempting to piece back together the dismembered body of
Pentheus. Symbolically this is significant not only as a recognition of the importance of
ritual, but also perhaps in the reflection it offers on the larger order of the polis, whose
parts can be reassembled in imitation of what once was but not thereby be brought back
to the fullness of a life now departed: a whole that is a unity prior to the distinctions it
contains. What has come to light amidst the burgeoning relativism and scepticism of the

97
Thucydides argues that the traditional moral vocabulary lost its original force with the
spread of civil strife and came to be applied however men saw fit to justify their course of
action, 3.82.4.
98
Arthur, 162. Cf. in particular Aeschylus, Eumenides 307-96. At Euripides, Bacchae
977-978 the Chorus calls upon the hounds of Lyssa, akin to the Erinyes, Dodds, 199.
99
Arthur, 162-163; Winnington-Ingram, 109.
100
Plato, Gorgias 483e3.

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fifth-century intellectual enlightenment is the realization that the older morality based on
traditional nomoi and customary observances is unable to withstand the challenges
mounted against it. Everything in the cosmos, man included, is now understood to be
ultimately subject to the primacy of an underlying law of natural necessity, so that nomos
is identified not with an objective rational order but with the demands of physis, as a
primal instinctual drive. Wisdom and justice reside in obedience to the dictates of nature,
and to argue otherwise is merely a device of the weak to thwart the interests of the strong.
In perhaps its most cynical and rationally self-serving form, this is found expressed in
Thucydides' Melian dialogue where the Athenians, brutally frank as to the necessities of
empire, justify their unwarranted attack on the unoffending Melians with the blunt
assertion that might makes right; by a necessity of nature wherever men have the power
they prevail.101
In Euripides, the human association is brought to the very threshold of a
Hellenistic world in which the individual, not the citizen, is primary. More specifically,
in the criticisms of the Olympians so many of his characters express, there emerges a
recognition that will subsequently become concrete for the Epicurean: if freedom from
perturbation for the individual is to be achieved, the gods must be banished from rule in
human affairs. Cadmus and Agave, like many other Euripidean characters, turn in their
extremity, not to the gods, but to each other, to a fellow human being.102 It is no accident
that Euripides, who in his own time achieved only a modest success on stage when
compared with his confreres Sophocles and Aeschylus, becomes the tragic poet of
greatest renown in the fourth century and beyond, nor that Bacchae comes to be
prominently celebrated among his works.103 Yet, even as Euripides was able to project
vividly the forces at work in the destruction of the traditional polis ethos, he is not simply
to be divorced from the ambience of the polis world of which he was a part. The
recognition and charting of forces active in the dismemberment of the polis, which brings
with it the questioning of old unexamined assumptions of a patrios nomos, does not
thereby eliminate the human requirement for life in a social order.
Aristotle records that Plato was influenced by and drew upon both the Socratic
search for definition in ethical matters and the Heraclitean doctrine that all sensible things
are in flux.104 In poetic form, it can be argued, the same radical oppositions, with all that
is consequently entailed for human society, have been powerfully and ruthlessly laid bare

101
Thucydides, 5.105.2.
102
Cf. Euripides, Hippolytus 1415; Heracles, 1397-8. Euripides shows the gods of Greek
myth to lack those values necessary to civilized society, notably friendship and justice.
For instance, Zeus, in Euripides is not concerned with moral justice but with right as
necessity. Thus Hecuba tellingly invokes Zeus as a 'natural necessity', Trojan Women,
886. In Heracles, Zeus is portrayed as also lacking philia, in marked contrast to the
human hero Heracles (574-582, 631-636). Other gods, Dionysus, Hera and Aphrodite are
cruel, vengeful and pitiless in their dealings with humans. "Who could offer prayers to
such a goddess," Heracles rails against Hera, Heracles, 1307-1308.
103
Knox, (1985) 11-12.
104
Aristotle, Metaphysics 987a29-b4.

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 LAYCOCK: POETRY & POLITY: TRAGIC PERSPECTIVES ON THE
NATURE OF POLITICAL ASSOCIATION
in Bacchae by the imagination of Euripides. So that, while it is possible to immerse
oneself in the play's scepticism and negativity, it is also, by the same token, from within
this darkness that the 'Owl of Minerva' will take flight and the polis will be given a new
and rationally articulated form for thought. Like Socrates, Euripides is acutely aware of
the significance of the issues raised by the contention that virtue has no nature of its own
so that its 'truth', moving in the sphere of language and opinion, is merely what it
becomes for each human individual in the pursuit of his own ends. While it is not the
work of the poet to provide a philosophical exegesis, in the contrasting positions his
characters adopt on the nature of wisdom in Bacchae, Euripides brings to light the
problematic nature of current understanding and the need to look beyond these partial
conceptions if the problem they present is to be resolved. Further opposed to these
conflicting dictates of human reason in Bacchae stands the Heraclitean world of appetite
and feeling contained within the powerful dyadic flux of opposites which is the sphere of
the Bacchants, who in the immediacy of their relation to their principle respond
instinctually to the dictates of physis, bereft of the light of considered reason and
moderation as the civilizing principles of political association.
Central to any understanding of human association will be the role that wisdom
and moderation must play in tempering the powerful instinctual animal drives that
continually threaten the stability of man's ethical nature and with it the very existence of
civilized society. This is the challenge Euripides bequeaths to philosophy: to Plato and
Aristotle. A new beginning must be made to the investigation of the essential nature of
political community. What is to be sought is the unifying logos that is the innate ordering
principle determining how the active and passive sides of the soul and society, the sides
of reason and feeling, can be brought together in a concretion of unifying form and
content so that justice and friendship will constitute the political community.105

105
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper for many helpful and
constructive suggestions.

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