He is impatient, bullying, and at times brutal. Pentheus is the prime example of a man inflicted with this trait. It is a trait possessed by many of the old and almost all of the young. It means recklessness, deep ignorance about oneself and the nature of the universe. AmathiaĪ difficult word to translate, it is roughly wisdom's opposite. It is a form of wisdom reserved for human beings: for the invulnerable gods, it is completely out of reach. Its distinguishing characteristics are acceptance and compassion, and this is the wisdom gained by Agave and Cadmus at the end of the play. There is another sacred form of sophia in Euripides, and that is the wisdom that comes from suffering (Arrowsmith 152-3). All of these characters command a different form of wisdom, each with its own set of limitations, and from these different perspectives we gain insights into the god's mysteries and the events of the play. There is the wisdom of the seer, of the old king, of the divinely possessed Maenads, of the devout Bacchae, and finally of the god himself. Wisdom takes many different forms in the play, and in Euripides truth has many faces.

Seemingly opposite forces tend to dissolve into each other, and powers we thought were neatly separated turn out to be part of the same order (or chaos). Another danger of analyzing the play through the lens of these oppositions is that Euripides tends to show how these binaries are inadequate. The Bacchae is about all of these forces, and more. The reader must not mistake any one of these oppositions as being adequate in explaining the whole work.

Critics have, in various interpretations, tried to make Pentheus and Dionysus into symbols for the two forces in any one of these binaries, with Pentheus representing the first half of each pair and Dionysus representing the second half. Many of the themes examined in this study guide will involve opposing forces: rationality versus irrationality, the Greek versus the foreign, skepticism versus piety, civilization versus savagery or nature, and so on. This play is extremely complex, and any attempt to boil it down to basic themes will oversimplify the depth and richness of the work. Skepticism versus piety, reason versus irrationality, Greek versus foreign, male versus female/androgynous, civilization versus savagery

The Bacchae by Euripides