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Friday
My English professor son Toby, who knows me very well, recently alerted me to a CNN article that put us in mind of Euripides’s 405 BCE play The Bacchae. Here’s the headline:
Italian officials slam tourist who ‘mimicked sex acts’ on a statue of Bacchus in Florence
If you want further graphic evidence, click on the link, which shows two shots of a young woman “kissing, humping and grinding” against Giambologna’s 1560 statue of the god of wine and sensuality. Whether or not you find it shocking, it’s thoroughly in the spirit of Dionysus’s followers. Here’s Euripides’s account of the Bacchae worshipping their god:
Oh, Thebes, Semele’s nurse,
crest your walls with ivy.
Burst into greenness, burst
into a blaze of bryony [ivy],
take up the bacchanalian beat
with branches of oak and of fir,
cover your flesh with fawnskin
fringed with silver-white fleece
and lifting the fennel,
touch God
in a fit of sanctified frenzy.
Then all at once the whole land will dance!
Bacchus will lead the dancing throngs to the mountain,
the mountain,
which is home to that mob of women,
who rebelled against shuttle and loom
answer the urge of Dionysus.
And further on:
Your ground flows with milk,
flows with wine, flows with nectar from the bees.
Like smoke from a Syrian incense,
the fragrant God arises with his torch of pine.
He runs, he dances in a whirl of flame,
he rouses the faithful
crazing their limbs with his roar,
while he races the wind,
his soft hair streaming behind.
And his call resounds like thunder:
“Go, my Bacchae, go!
Let Tmolus with its golden streams
reverberate with songs of Dionysus,
and the vibrant crash of drums.
Sing out in joy
with loud Phrygian cries,
while the holy sweet-throated flute
climbs the holy scale and the scaling maenads climb
up the mountain,
up the mountain.”
And finally, in a lovely conclusion:
It is then, that a girl like me
knows happiness. When she is free,
like a filly playfully prancing
around its mother,
in fields without fences.
Predictably, Italy’s culture ministry and Florence officials “have expressed their fury over the incident after pictures went viral on social media, with the Florence mayor’s office calling it an act that ‘mimicked sex.’” If they identify the young woman, whom they are presuming was inebriated at the time, they are threatening to ban her from the city for life.
Their reactions are not unlike those of Pentheus, king of Thebes, when he returns home from a voyage and discovers that his mother and aunts have all gone out to join the Bacchae:
Our women, I am told, have left their homes,
in a religious trance—what travesty!–
and scamper up and down the wooded mountains, dancing
in honor of this new-fangled God, Dionysus,
whoever he may be.
In the middle of each female group
of revelers, I hear,
stands a jar of wine, brimming! And that taking turns,
they steal away, one here, one there, to shady nooks,
where they satisfy the lechery of men,
pretending to be priestesses,
performing their religious duties. Ha!
That performance reeks more of Aphrodite
than of Bacchus.
And further on:
Take my word,
when women are allowed to feast on wine, there is no telling
to what lengths their filthy minds will go!
King Pentheus first shackles the women and Dionysus and then, after Dionysus breaks the chains and destroys the prison, turns voyeur and sneaks out to watch the women. (in other words, he’s like those “family values” politicos who are revealed to have slept around and/or paid for abortions.) As one witness reports, the Bacchae are quite a sight:
First, they let their hair fall down their shoulders
and those whose fawnskins had come loose
fastened them up, while others girdled theirs
with snakes that licked their cheeks. Some,
mothers with newborn babies left at home,
cradled young gazelles or wild wolf cubs in their arms
and fed them at their full-blown breasts
that brimmed with milk.
They they wreathed their heads with shoots
of ivy, oak and flowering bryony.
When they discover the peeping Tom, however, the women turn savage and proceed to rip Pentheus apart. Try to impose strict controls over women’s sexuality and women’s bodies, in other words, and they’ll react with fury.
Hmm, maybe the Supreme Court, J.D. Vance, and Trump’s GOP should take note.
