Lecture 2: Outline

1. Dionysus: who he is, where he comes from, what he represents.

2. Characteristics of Dionysiac religion; iconography; followers.

3. Dionysus and the dissolution of boundaries.

4. Dionysus and doubling in Euripides’ Bacchae.

5. Prologue of the Bacchae (1-63): deus ex machina; Greeks vs. barbarians; the Thebans’ offense against Dionysus; two kinds of punishment.

6. Parodos (first choral ode) of the Bacchae (64-167): Dionysus’ conception and birth (the religious version); mountains vs. city, from ‘shuttle and loom’ (118) to orgiastic dances (105-119); Dionysus’ activities on the mountains (135-141).