The Bacchae
18 Mar, 2021
880 Classical and modern Greek literatures
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Euripides’ great tragedy, which was first performed in Athens in 405 BC when the Athenians were on the point of defeat and humiliation in a long war with Sparta. The action seen or described on stage was brutal: Pentheus, king of Thebes, is torn into pieces by his mother in a Bacchic frenzy and his grandparents condemned to crawl away as snakes. All this happened because Pentheus had denied the divinity of his cousin Dionysus, known to the audience as god of wine, theatre, fertility and religious ecstasy.
→ Listen on BBC Sounds website
Guests
- Edith Hall
19 episodes
Professor of Classics at King's College London -
Emily Wilson No other episodes
Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania -
Rosie Wyles No other episodes
Lecturer in Classical History and Literature at the University of Kent
Reading list
-
Frogs
Aristophanes (trans. Judith Affleck) (Cambridge University Press, 2014) Google Books → -
Bacchae and Other Plays
Euripides (trans. J. Morwood) (Oxford University Press, 2008) Google Books → -
Iphigenia at Aulis
Euripides (trans. Holly Eckhardt) (Cambridge University Press, 2012) Google Books → -
Reading Greek Tragedy
Simon Goldhill (Cambridge University Press, 1986) Google Books → -
Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun
Edith Hall (Oxford University Press, 2010) Google Books → -
Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium
Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Amanda Wrigley (eds.) (Oxford University Press, 2004) Google Books → -
The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm (trans.) (Random House, 2016) -
Dionysus: Myth and Cult
Walter F. Otto (Indiana University Press, 1995) Google Books → -
Euripides' Bacchae
Richard Seaford (trans. and ed.) (Aris & Phillips, 1996) -
The Bacchae of Euripides
Wole Soyinka (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004) Google Books → -
Looking at Bacchae
David Stuttard (ed.) (Bloomsbury, 2016) Google Books → -
The Secret History (
Donna Tartt (Penguin, 1993) Google Books → -
Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context
John J. Winkler (ed.) (Princeton University Press, 1992) Google Books → -
Costume in Greek Tragedy
Rosie Wyles (Bristol Classical Press, 2011) Google Books →
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Programme ID: m000t6kp
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000t6kp
Auto-category: 882 (Classical Greek drama)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello. When Athenians first saw Euripides play the Bacchae in 405 BC, they were on the point of defeat in a long war with Sparta.