capital after the defeat of Crassus at Carrhæ. The actor who represented Agavê, entered bearing the actual head of Crassus; and the soldier who had really slain Crassus broke out in the audience, clamouring for the ghastly trophy. That was what semi-Hellenised savages made out of the Bacchæ!
What does it all mean? To say that it is a reactionary manifesto in favour of orthodoxy, is a view which hardly merits refutation. If Dionysus is a personal god at all, he is a devil. Yet the point of the play is clearly to make us understand him. He and his Mænads are made beautiful; they are generally allowed the last word (except l. 1348); and the swift Ionic-a-minore songs have, apart from their mere beauty, a certain spiritual loftiness. Pentheus is not a 'sympathetic' martyr. And there is even a certain tone of polemic against 'mere rationalism' which has every appearance of coming from the poet himself.[1] The play seems to represent no volte-face on the part of the old free-lance in thought, but rather a summing up of his position. He had always denounced common superstition; he had always been averse to dogmatic rationalism. The lesson of the Bacchæ is that of the Hippolytus in a stronger form. Reason is great, but it is not everything. There are in the world things not of reason, but both below and above it; causes of emotion, which we cannot express, which we tend to worship, which we feel, perhaps, to be the precious elements in life. These things are Gods or forms of God: not fabulous immortal men, but 'Things which Are,' things utterly non-human and non-moral, which bring man bliss or tear his life to shreds without a break in their own serenity. It is a
- ↑ See, e.g., Bruhn's Introduction.
