ago. We might think of drug abuse as another instance today. Indeed, our society can conjure up a whole host of Dionysian rites, from modern sexual orgies to excessive drinking, and we have an Apollonian strain that calls for moderation and sanity in the face of such behaviors. In a time of crisis, we tend to challenge Dionysian behaviors more directly, as we have seen recently because of the AIDS epidemic. After a period of relative sexual freedom, we have become less indulgent because of a real danger associated with such behavior. Just as Euripides saw perils in the cult in the Bacchae, so do we see perils in the same sorts of ideas and behaviors today.
The last play by Euripides that has been preserved, the Bacchae, represents the author's misgivings on the spread of the cult:
It depicted the victory of Dionysus. . . who filled the souls of his worshipers with a sacred enthusiasm and triumphed over everything, even reason and its doubts. It brought to the stage the women of Thebes who were inspired to ecstatic frenzy in the copses of Cithaeron during the god's festivals, and indulged in strange and barbarous rites. . . (LTvOque 309).
What the play depicted that had previously been ignored as the state of mind of the followers of the cult,
. . . the maenadism or collective ecstasy of the Bacchae, drunk with the presence of their god in their hearts, breaking all bounds and triumphing in savage exaltation. It was a state of mind, which corresponds to a need for the total abandon of the soul to the divinity, that no official cult satisfied (LTvOque 309).
The image of the hero as represented by the Apollonian figure predates the Greek era and the creation of Apollo, as can be seen with reference to the ancient Babylonian work The Epic of Gilgamesh, a cycle of poems preserved on 12 incomplete Akkadian-language tablets found at Nineveh in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, with the tablets being fo...