Transcript of 604. Greek Myths: Sex, Drugs & Tragedy (Part 3)

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much loved chat community, go to therestishistory. Com and join the club. That is therestishistory. Com.

This episode is presented by Adobe Express, the quick and easy Create Anything app. What does that mean? Well, say you need to make a presentation or a video or a social media post or a flyer. To some, certainly to me, that sounds intimidating.

But Tom, with Adobe Express's intuitive features like templates, generative AI, and real-time collaboration, it has never been easier. Adobe Express. Try it for free. Search, Adobe Express, in the App Store. Agave was foaming at the mouth. Her rolling eyes were wild. She was not in her right mind, but possessed by Bacchus, and she paid no heed to Pentheus. She grasped his left arm between wrist and elbow, set her foot against his ribs, and tore his arm off by the shoulder. It was no strength of hers that did it, but the God filled her and made it easy. On the other side, Inau was at him, tearing at his flesh. And now, our Tinoe joined them, and the whole maniacal horde, a single and continuous yell arose, Pentheus shrieking as long as life was left in him, the women howling in triumph. One of them carried off an arm, another a foot, the boots still laced on it. The ribs were stripped, clawed clean, and women's hands, thick red with blood, were tossing, catching like a plaything, Pentheus's flesh. So that is the devastating climax of the most shocking, the most blood-soaked and notorious of all Greek tragedies, the Backeye, by the great Athenian dramatist Euripides.

It's a terrible scene. Penthius is being ripped into pieces by these women possessed with the spirit of Baccais, as he describes it, and the little bits of his flesh are left scattered under rocks and over trees. Tom, you chose this lovely reading. Yeah, I did. In the episode. Why?

It's unbelievably dramatic. It reads a description from the Walking Dead or 28 Days Later It has a real zombie vibe. The scene where this is happening is Mount Kitharon, which is the very same mountain range south of Thebes in central Greece, where the infant Eedipus in Sofocleys' play which we talked about in the previous episode, was taken from his parents' palace. So generally, it's a place where terrible things happen. But the action in this play, in the back eye, with this poor man being torn to pieces, is set four generations before the time of Eedipus. So Pentheus, the guy who's being torn to pieces, he was the grandfather of Jocasta, who was Eedipus's mother/wife. He ruled as Eedipus was going to rule in due course as the king of Thebes. We highlighted in the previous episode how the Theban royal family is the most dysfunctional dynasty in the whole of Greek myth. This episode absolutely sets the seal on this reputation because Agave, who you described ripping off Penthis's left arm, is Penthys' mother. Oh, my God. I know, and Otonoé, who are joining in the fun, are his aunts. As family rendezvous go, picnics up on the mountain, this is a very, very bad one.

What's going on here is not that you used the Walking Dead parallel. They're not zombies. Although in a way they are, they have become possessed, haven't they? They've become ravers, I see in your notes. What's that? Minads.

Minads, yes. They've become what the Greeks call Maynads, literally ravers. They have been gripped by a frenzy that in Greek was called a baqaya. When you join a baqaya, if you're a minad, you dress up in the skins of fawns or leopards, and you roam the uplands, you leave the plains, centers of civilisation, and go up into the hills. Up there, you either you suckle wild animals, so you put them to your breast, or you tear them to pieces with your bare hands. This is a rite of ecstatic This memberment called spouragmus in Greek. If you are a minad who is particularly off her face, then you might go one step further and tear the flesh off your victim and eat it raw, which, again, the Greek is called omophagia. The excitement of it is that you are subverting every norm that governs conventional society in Greece. You are abandoning your city for the uplands, for the wilds. You're human, but you're turning into a wild beast. If you're a woman, then you are casting off all the the rules, the assumptions, the decorum that is supposed to govern your behavior. In the Baccai, Euripides describes the Mayanad as turning men to flight.

So men are playing the role of women.

It's subverting gender norms, as critics would say now. We love doing that in the rest of history.

This is what the Baccaia is all about. But having said that, it's not just minads who are doing it. You also get men who are called satires, and the satire has a hint of the goat.

David Lloyd George.

Yes. Well, like Lloyd George, it's the exciting sense that you're casting off the norms and you can do whatever you like. Minads, satires, both are following the same God. One of the names that this God has is Bacchus for obvious reasons, he's the God of the Macheia. He's also known as Omesties, the Eater of Raw Flesh. He has a whole host of other names. But his original name, the name by which the Greeks generally refer to him is Dionysus.

Right, so Dionysus. Of all the Greek gods, Tom, I have to say, I've always found him the most mysterious, and obviously, he's the most unsett because of the rights that are associated with him. We We talked in previous episodes about how people generally encounter the Greek myths when they're children, as children's stories. But Dionysus doesn't really fit in them at all. When people think of the Olympians, he's not one of the names that first comes up. But as we'll see, as I know you're going to talk about, scholars have become more and more interested in Dionysus over the last century or so. And he's moved from the periphery, really, to center stage in historians' understandings of the Greeks and their, and I was about to say their religion. I know you question the word religion, and their experience of the- The supernatural.

The supernatural, yes, exactly. Yes. Yes. Dianysis tends not to feature in children's books. Also, he has always been a challenge to those who have an idea of ancient Greece as a world of serenity and harmony and light and rationalism and all of that. This was a stereotype of ancient Greece that was very popular, particularly in Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries. Enthusiasts for ancient Greece were always mooning over the noble simplicity and quiet grandeour, as one of them put it, of Greek civilization. But there was a reaction against that bubbling under in 19th century Germany. The classicist who most famously reacts against it is the great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who broadly ends up talking to a horse in a quite Dianaisian manner. But very early on in his career, long before that, he published a book called The birth of Tragedy. He was only 28 when he did it. He was already a professor of Greek. Essentially in that book, he is doing for Dianysis what Freud would do for Eedipus a couple of decades later, make him into, I guess you call him a meme now, an expression A notion of something that seems simultaneously very ancient, but thrillingly modern, thrillingly 19th century.

What Nietzsche is doing in The birth of Tragedy is to contrast Dionysus with Apollo, who for the Greeks is the God of light, of beauty. Nietzsche insists that you can't really understand Greek civilization if you just emphasize the light and the beauty. You also have to recognize the deeply Dionysian qualities that Greek civilization had as well. Nietzsche is more than familiar with the Baccai. The Baccai plays a key role in the birth of tragedy. He's all this tearing people to pieces and things. He says He recognizes the darkness. He said an effusive transgression of the sexual order whose wave swept away all family life and its venerable principles, an abominable mixture of sensuality and cruelty. He's saying that's a bad thing. Not in favor of that. But then he is also saying that it has a brilliant size to it. Essentially, it's fun, or as he puts it, the blissful rapture which rises up from the innermost depths of men. I mean, that is German for fun, basically.

I'm sure that he expressed that in one word.

A lot of huge German word. The essence of the Dianis in Nietzsche says, basically, it's like getting drunk, it's like getting pissed, it's intoxication. Dianaisus, for the Greeks, is the God who invents wine. So famously, Dianisus is the God of getting drunk. But he's also the God who is there when humans experience the thrill of nature that has not been tamed by humans. So the thrill of the wild. Also, and I think very germanely, and this is part of what Nietzsche found so fascinating about it, and it's certainly what people have found fascinating about it in the 20th century, the sense of ecstasy that you get when you dissolve your own individual sense of yourself into a That's what it was, it was really loud.

A huge theme of 20th century writing, 20th century criticism. I know you're going to make a comparison with the 1960s. Having read loads of countercultural stuff in the 1960s, people were always going on about this. They loved it. About the joy of Dionysian revels, and that was what the '60s represented, and that was the spirit. We were absolutely reveling in the idea of that there being something... It is quite a Freudian idea that there's I think deep down buried that needs to be let out by drinking or by taking drugs and by forgetting your individuality and becoming one with your friends, you will express some deeper, more authentic truth.

That's As you say, a massive thing in the '60s, but going into rave culture, I mean, a main ad is literally a raver. The idea of going off to a field in Hampshire and taking ease and whiz, you could dignify it by saying this is Dianison. But there is also a much The darker side to Dianison, the notion of the Dianison in the 20th century. There was a seminal study of the Baccai written by a guy with a splendid name of RP Winnington Ingram, which came out in 1947. Immediately after the Second World War called Euripides and Dianysis. Winnington Ingram had witnessed the Nuremberg Rallies. In the introduction to his book, he wrote, We have lived through events which have demonstrated tragically the dangers of group emotion. He doesn't specify what it is, but in 1947- We all Everyone knows what he's referring to. You can see why the idea of the Dianysum, it's a very powerful one, because if it can embrace both the counterculture of the '60s and the Nuremberg Rallies, you're covering a lot of bases there. I think that although today, classicists do not accept the precise details of the technical arguments that Nietzsche goes into in the birth of tragedy, what they do accept is his broader case, which is that Dionysus has a really central role in Greek civilization, in Greek culture, and more generally, the irrational.

There's a famous book by E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational. Even Apollo. Apollo is counter appointed to Dionysus by Nietzsche, but Apollo is an absolute bastard as well. He's killing everyone left, right, and center, too. So the sense of the dark and the strange, and the weird, and the ecstatic is crucially a part of Greek mythology.

But a Greek myth, but not of the legends, right? So here's the thing. A lot of people, when they saw we were doing a series about Greek myths, it would have been like, oh, they're going to do Heracles, they're going to do Perseus, they're going to go, oh, Dionysus, that's a niche you want to choose. And is that because Dionysus, he doesn't really feature a lot of the canonical stories. Now, why is that? Is he even mentioned in the Iliad at all?

There are very fleeting references to him by Homer, by Hesiaid, and he's not a central figure in any way, as you say. And that is crucially important because as we've said already, the Greek understanding of the gods is mediated by poets, not by priests or prophets.

What about temples? Are there temples?

Not many temples either. In fact, as happens in the plot of the Baccai, Dionysus seems much keener on pulling temples down than having them erected to him. I think a further reason why Dionysus seems slightly at the margins of the conventional understanding of Greek myth is that he is conventionally portrayed as a very young God, very youthful. He is also described as coming from beyond Greece, and particularly from the east. In the Bacri, for instance, Dionysus describes himself as arriving in Thebes from Asia, the fields of Lydia and Phrygia, fertile in gold. Willington Ingram, in that book, which published in 1947, he completely takes for granted that Dionysus is a very recent import, that he's only just come to Greece. This is why he's not really mentioned by Homer or or by Hesiaid. But actually, our understanding of who Dionysus is has been completely transformed since the 1940s. Because in the 1950s, tablets from the Mycenaean citadels in Greece and from Crete were cracked, and these very ancient tablets. It revealed that actually, Dionysus is one of the oldest Olympians. He has a temple on one of the islands in the Aegean that has been dated as far back as the 15th century BC.

He's been part of the Greek imagination for a very, very long time. Although he's hazy, perhaps in the public imagining as a figure of myth, and although his cult does seem weird and strange when compared to the cults of other gods. He is no less Greek than Apollo, and that's basically what Nietzsche had intuited. His strangeness is not a bug. It's an absolute feature. It's there at the heart of Greek culture right from the very beginning.

Well, let's try to tell his story a little bit. Obviously, the fact that he's not covered by these great poets, or he's not really covered in the same detail, means that it's harder to piece together, to create a canonical story for him as we did for... You told the story of Jesús, for example. You could do it with Hermes or Apollo or whoever. Now, there are lots of different rival traditions, aren't there? One of them is that the Titans tore him apart, and then they ate him, and then they put him back together, which strikes me as it's drawing on the rituals that he's associated with. And then the other is that he's the son of Zius and Persephone, who's the queen of the underworld. Which one of those do you go for, or do you go for neither?

Okay, for all of them. Bear in mind that Persephone was Jesús's daughter. Yeah.

Okay.

By his sister. There's a whole load of incest going on there. There's a lot going on there. There's also there were traditions that there were actually two gods called Dionysus. Essentially, I think what you have is that the stories told of Dionysus are like haze of smoke. It's impossible to get a finger on them. They're always drifting away. But having said that, in Thebes, there is a very distinctive tradition, and it derives from the one significance reference to Dionysus that we do get in Hesia. We talked about him in the first episode. He wrote a poem called The Theogony that discusses where the gods came from. To the extent that there is a canonical account of the origins of the gods, Hesia provides it. What Hesia has to say about Dionysus, even though it's very fleeting, has a lot of weight. What Penthias had said, Cadmus's daughter Semele, Bordeceus, a resplendent son in shared intimacy, Mary Dionysus, immortal son of mortal mother. And Cadmus, who we talked about in the previous episode, the Phanesian- Sowing dragon's teeth. Sowing dragon's The Phenician Prince, who had gone to look for his sister Europa, never finds her, comes to Thebes and founds Thebes.

He is the father of Agave, the mother of Pentheus, who tears him to pieces. And that means that Pentheus, the son of Agave, is the cousin of Dionysus.

So very much a family affair.

Very much a family affair. This is the story that Euripides, who is in Athens, just down the road from Thebes, is drawing on for the opening of the Backeye. The play opens with Dionysus himself. He's standing on the stage and he announces to the watching audience who he is. I am Dionysus, son of Seus. My mother was Semele, Cadmus's daughter. From her womb, the fire of a lightning flash delivered me. As so often in tragedy, we don't get the full story because the playwright is assuming that the audience already knows it. And the reason that Euripides can assume that people know this is because another famous playwright called Eeschales had actually written a celebrated play about exactly this drama. And so as far as we can tell, the story that is told in Thebes and then recycled by the Athenian tragedians about the birth of Dionysus in Thebes goes as follows. So Sémilée is a priestess of Zius in Thebes, and she's very beautiful. And so inevitably, she attracts the attention of Zius, who transforms himself into an eagle and repeatedly descends her and very rapidly gets her pregnant with Dionysus. And it's evidence from the beginning that Dionysus is something special because you only have to touch Sémolée's pregnant belly and you are driven into a ecstatic madness.

Hira, the wife of Seuss, relentlessly jealous, understandably, because of Seus's record of phalandering, she finds out about this. It's a slightly Snow White in the Disney film vibe. She transforms transforms herself into an old crone, and she visits Semele, and she says, You think that this this eagle coming every night is Seuss, but I mean, how do you know? Are you sure about this? And Semele starts to worry about this and says, Well, how can I find out? And here it says, The only way that you can know it is use is if you ask him to reveal himself in the full refulgent glory of his divine splendor. And Semele says, Okay, well, that's I'll do that. She's in bed with Seus. I don't know whether he's turned into a Seus or whether he's still an eagle, I mean, stroking his feathers or whatever. She says, Darling, promise me something. Seus says, I promise you whatever. And Semenle says, Absolutely, swear it, solemely. You cannot break it. And Zuz says, Fine. And then Semenle says, I want you, if you are Zuz, to show me your full glory. And Zuz desperately tries to back out of it, trying to Please don't make me do this.

But Semenle insists. And so Zuz has no choice. And he reveals himself this scorching blaze. It's like looking into the heart of, I don't know, an atom bomb going off or something. It completely shrivels and destroys Sémolée, and she's left as charred smoldering ash. And Zuse picks up the unborn baby who's been left undamaged by this manifestation, and he sews the fetus into his thigh. And then a few weeks later, Dionysus is born. So a very implausible story your father would probably describe it as. He would. But this is what the Thebans absolutely thought had happened. This is the story that is being invoked at the start of Euripides' play because Dionysus describes in it how his mother's house smolders with the still living flame of Seus's fire. Dianysus notes approvingly that Cadmus, who is still alive, so the by this point, aged founder of Thebes, has consecrated the house of Semele as holy, as sacred to the gods. Dianysus himself boasts of having decked it round with sprays of young vine leaves. So the vine, of course, is holy to Dianysus.

That's Thebes. But there are Athenian traditions as well, aren't there? They're rival traditions, because the Athenians say, Okay, fine. He was born in Thebes, but he came to Athens. They have a festival, celebrate it, don't they? The Anthesteria, which is held in the It is.

As is the way with Dionysus, it's simultaneously ecstatically joyous and deeply, deeply unsettling. So the fun side first. Essentially, the Anthesteria is a great communal celebration. All of Dionysus's festivals are communal. It's all about the ecstasy of becoming part of a huge crowd. It marks the opening and the drinking of the previous year's vintage. Everybody in Athens chairs in this. Slaves share in it, and women who normally are discouraged from drinking wine, they can have a tipple. It's great fun. There's a huge procession. Dionysus is escorted into Athens from Piraeus, the port, and a cart. This cart has been made up to look like a ship. As the cart is led into Athens, it's surrounded by huge phaluses. The whole celebration is inspired by a famous poem that describes Dionysus's victory over pirates. The pirates are taking Dionysus as a passenger. They try to kidnap him and murder him. And Dionysus turns into a lion. And as he does so, vines start to grow out from the mast and to wrap the tendrils, wrap around the rigging and then the ores and everything. And all the pirates are turned into dolphins.

Just on the festival, this is a very boring and banal question, sorry, but you said, Dionysus is escorted into the city in a car, decorated like a ship. When you say, Dionysus, do you mean a statue? Is it an effigy of Dionysus or someone playing the part?

We will come to exactly who Dionysus is in this celebration in a minute. You're absolutely right to fix on that because the thing that is representing Dionysus is incredibly interesting and then ties into the second festival that we'll be talking about. Exciting. Tantalizing. But just sticking to the Anthesteria at the moment, this idea of a great festival of Dianysis arriving in a city is clearly something that Euripides is echoing echoing in the back eye. The other thing that he is echoing in the back eye is the absolutely central role in this festival that is played by women. There is a band of women who are called the Venerable Ones. Presumably, they're more elderly. They are appointed to make a night time sacrifice to Dionysus in one of the few temples that have been erected to him. But it's telling that this temple is not in the city, it's out in the marshes. It is only ever opened during this festival. They all go out there, and one of them who has been appointed to queen of the Venerable Ones, then we are told, has sex with Dionysus. What exactly that means, we will never know.

We have no idea what that actually means. But there are illustrations on vases made in Athens that shows the venerable ones at this this shrine out in the marshes. They're drinking and they're dancing and they're making sacrifice before the idol of Dionysus. This idol, Dominic, this is what you were asking It's very primitive. It's not the glowing sculpture that you would get in the museum today. It's not what you imagine as a Greek statue. It's essentially a pole with a mask hanging from it.

How would you have carnal relations with a mask?

Well, it's a mask hanging from a pole. I suppose the pole- So who knows what's on the pole?

Yeah, the pole. But I mean, the mask, what part of that?

Anyway, I'm overthinking it.

I'm not overthinking this element.

You're not overthinking it because it is an intriguing question. If you've got a festival with huge fallaces, we don't know. I think lots of Greeks didn't know. That was part of the fascination of what were these women getting up to in their temple. So you can see that it would, as with us, inspire all kinds of male fantasies and questions that is then part of the context for what Euripides is doing. That mask, from the evidence of Athenian pottery, which is really the only evidence that we have, does seem from very ancient times to have been specifically associated with Dionysus. The mask plays a key role in the other great festival that is celebrated in Athens. In this festival, the huge mass of the city's male citizens assemble in a theater on the slopes below the acropolis to watch the staging of myths by actors who are wearing masks. This is a festival called the Great Dionysia, and it was staged in late spring. And unlike the Anthesteria, it's of relatively recent origin. So the late sixth century BC, Anthesteria origins reach back centuries and centuries. This festival is inaugurated while Athens is still under the rule of tyrants.

But the tyrants get expelled The democracy is founded, and this festival, and particularly the acting out of stories by people wearing masks, becomes a key part of the culture of democratic Athens. It has at its heart this amazing cultural innovation that the Athenians call drama. That obviously includes tragedy, but it also includes comedy, and it includes things called satire plays. These are plays that have satires, so the male followers of Dionysus as a chorus.

That's its own genre, satire.

That's its own genre.

How many of them survived?

We have fragments of it. Tony Harrison wrote one. It's It gives you people a sense of what it might have been like. Right.

Was it good?

Yeah, it's good. I mean, if you like a satire play.

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I don't know anything about satire plays, so I don't know if you'd like it. Well, give it a go. I should give it a go.

Open-minded. Yeah, I'm very open-minded.

You know me.

You've got your satire plays. They're clearly Dianaisan. But actually, the tragedies and comedies, even though they don't always... I mean, most of the surviving ones don't have Dianysis at its center. Nevertheless, it's clear, I think, that the The whole festival is very, very Dianison. To quote Richard Seaford, who wrote an excellent book on Dianysis, The Drama Festival was performed in a sanctuary of Dianisus, along with rituals for Dianisus during a festival of Dianisus. On top of that, Dianysis is viewed as one of the key sources for poetic inspiration.

I think we can conclude from that that Dianysis definitely had a part to play in drama.

He absolutely does. Also, think about the communal nature of it.

The crowd, the audience.

Huge numbers of people gathering. Do women attend? We're never told that they don't, but there's probably not room for them. I mean, maybe a priestess or two there, but probably this is the mass of the male citizens who are there. They're sitting down to watch stories that may not feature Dionysus himself, but these stories tend to have themes that echo stories that are told about Dionysus. Royal dynasties tearing themselves to pieces. You get that in Eedipus, for instance. D dramatic moments of revelation, dramatic moments where fortunes are upended and reversed, and the downfall of someone who thinks to defy the gods while a chorus watches on. All of that you get in Eedipus. But what you get in the back eye is Dionysus himself. So he is there nakedly. For the Greeks, it's the equivalent of drinking wine unmixed with water. If you think about a conventional tragedy, Dionysus isn't present. That's the watered down wine. If you have Dionysus at the center of the tragedy, that is like drinking neat wine. The Greeks tended not to do that because they knew that it was incredibly dangerous.

It's exciting. So we've got to the neat wine. It is powerful, it's intoxicating, it's dangerous. And that is the back eye. And we're going to be asking the second half, why and when was it staged? When it was, what did people think of it? What on Earth was the point of it? And what did people think of it when they first saw it? And how does it point towards an excitingly radical interpretation of myth, Tom? I'm just reading from your notes here. Yeah, you're doing it brilliantly. Yeah. One that continues to influence how we tend to conceptualize the world to this day. I don't think we've ever had a more exciting cliffhanger. So come back in a minute.

Dominic, can I just say, you could give it more welly because it really is exciting. What is happening in Athens at this point, and the back eye is channeling it, is something that is going to profoundly affect the way that the Greeks understand the world, but also continues to influence the way that we understand the world to this day.

After the break, probably the most important half hour of your lives, a half hour of Tom Holland chat that will change the way you see the world, you see the Greeks, that you understand the meaning of your own life and your purpose on this Earth. Come back after the ads, or if you're a member of the Rest of the History Club, plunge in right away to this intoxicating bath of undiluted wine.

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Welcome back to The Rest is History. I can only imagine the excitement and the tension as people look forward to this, the most thrilling 25 minutes of content-It really is. We will ever produce. 25 minutes that will probably change all our lives because Tom really wanted to give this some welly because he thinks it's so important. It's the Backeye. It's Euripides' play. It was first staged in 405 BC. Even then, did people know how important this would be all these years later for listeners to the rest of his history? I don't know.

Maybe they did. No, I don't think that was uppermost in their minds. No. Because in 405 BC- They think about other things. They absolutely are thinking about other things. It is a posthumously produced play. Euripides had died the previous year, according to tradition, in Massodon. And one year later, so in the spring of 404 BC, Athens is going to surrender to Sparta. We talked in the previous episode, there's been this great war that's been raging since 431 BC. Athens is on the brink of defeat, and when the defeat comes, it is absolutely total. Everybody who is taking a seat to watch the Baccai when it is premiered knows what they're staring down the the barrel on. They're staring down the barrel, not just of defeat, but of potential anihilation. Their city could be flattened to the ground by the Spartans. I think that that raises two obvious questions. The first is, what exactly Were they watching that spring morning of 405 BC? Then secondly, how did it impact them, bearing in mind what the horrible political context was?

Okay, let's start with the plot. So what are they watching?

What's the story? So we've described how Dionysus arrives and tells the audience who he is. He has come from across the sea, but his own family have rejected him. And part of the reason for that is that although he has revealed himself as divine to the audience, he hasn't done so to other people in Thebes. He's in disguise. And already, the punishment that he's visiting on his family for refusing to acknowledge him is kicking We're told that Dionysus's aunts, so that's Agave, I know, or Tonoë, have been driven mad. They've gone out onto the uplands. They put on their dainty fawn outfits, and they are roaming the mountains. Pentheus, he's an absolute square. He's not into this. He doesn't find it groovy at all. He is shocked in all kinds of ways. So women running free, that's bad. His grandfather, Cadmus, and Theracius, you remember our old friend Theracius? Oh, yeah. From.

I had a little stint as a woman.

Yes, and then become a man. But now he's got back into dressing up as a woman because he and Cadmus have both dressed up as my nads. They're very elderly. They look ridiculous. So again, Penthes is not approving of that. The claims of Dionysus's followers that he's a God, Penthes also thinks this is utterly blasphemous and shocking. So he orders that Dionysus should be captured, brought into his presence, and then stoned into death. He also orders that a crack squad of elite Pict men should go up into the mountains and capture the main ads and stop them getting up to their shenanigans. However, obviously, it doesn't work out. Dionysus is captured, but it doesn't take him long to reveal to Pentheus, to the Thebans, to the audience, his terrifying divine power. So Pentheus thinks that Dionysus is being tied up, but in fact, it's a bull that's being tied up. Pentheus can no longer distinguish between this bull in the stable and Dionysus. Dionysus then makes Pentheus's palace shake, collapse, and then the rubble of the palace is consumed by a great blaze of fire. And Pentheus emerges back onto the stage, completely bewildered by this, stabbing at the air, He's starting to lose it.

At this point, a herdsman arrives. He's come down from the heights of Mount Kitharon, and he reports what he's seen there. Basically, he's seen the minads, and they are picking up snakes, twining them into their hair. They are putting Penthes' elite squad of crackpicked men to flight. The women are doing this armed only with staffs tipped with pine cones. Again, very, very unsettling. They are going around and every time they find a cow or a bull, they tear it to pieces. The herdsman reports, You'd see some ribs or a cleft hoof tossed high and low and rags of flesh hung from pine branches, dripping blood. Now, by this point, it's as though the ease and whiz are kicking in for Pentheus. He's getting increasingly spaced out. He essentially is putty now in Dionysus' hands. He does whatever Dionysus tells him to do. And Dionysus persuades Pentheus that what he should really do is go up into the heights and spy on the main ads, and that the best way to do that would be for Penthius to dress up as a woman, to dress up as a main ad.

I feel like nothing good is going to... Well, I know that nothing good is going to happen to Penthius. He's making some bad choices.

He is making some, but then again, he's off his face. So Penthius says, Yeah, that's a brilliant idea. And by now, he's really tripping. So he says, I seem to see two sons are double Thebes. He looks at Dionysus, and he sees a pair of horns sprouting from his head, and he is starting to recognize the God for what he is. So he puts on his fawn-skin dress, and then Dianysis leads him off stage, and they're going up to the mountain. It doesn't take long for a messenger to appear on the stage and to report what happened next. We're told that Pentheus had reached the heights of Mount Kitharon, and he wants a good of the main ads who are rampaging around, having their rave, all of that. So Dionysus pulls down a pine tree, and he puts Pentheus on the top of the pine tree, and then he twang, he lets the pine snap back up. So the Pentheus is then at the top of the tree, looking down at the mainads. Then Dianysis, the rotter, yells over to the mainads and says, Hey, look at this. There's a spy pointing up at the hapless Pentheus who's on the top of the tree.

The mainads get absolutely mad and they start shaking the tree. Then the herdsman says, From his high perch, plunging, crashing to the earth, Pentheus fell with one incessant scream as he understood what end was near. That passage that you read at the beginning of this show, that is what happens. He is torn to pieces. Shortly afterwards, on stage, Agave appears, and she is cradling her son's head. Effectively, what the actor must have been holding is the mask of Pentheus. Presumably, Agave played by the same actor who'd been playing Pentheus. So Agave thinks that what she's holding is the head of a lion. She thinks that's what she's torn to pieces. And it's only gradually in obedience to the promptings of Cadmus, her father, that she comes out of her ecstatic state and realizes what it is she's holding and what it is that she's done. She's devastated. She and her sisters are sent into exile, and Cadmus and his wife are turned into snakes. So a bad day for the royal family of Thebes, and the moral of the story is summed up by Cadmus at the very end of the play. If any man derides the unseen world, let him ponder the death of Pentheus and believe in the gods.

So a blood-soaked denumal, an absolutely devastating play. The obvious question is, what does it mean? What's the point? Because are we to see Pentheus as the villain, as it were, who's being punished for not embracing the spirit of Dionysus? Or is Pentheus a martyr, a victim? And should we feel sorry for him? And is Dionysus actually a terrible person or terrible God? I guess that's the point about the green myths, isn't it? That It's impossible to fix a simplistic meaning on something that seems so slippery and so nuanced, but also, frankly, so strange and so terrifying.

Absolutely. There are critiques who see Pentheus as the villain, see him as or Dionysus as the villain. You You could stage it as being about the coming of the Nazis. You could cast Dionysus as Hitler, or you could stage it with Pentheus as some boring square who is refusing to drop out and join the hippies. And as you say, that is the measure of the richness of this, of Greek myth and of tragedy, is that two and a half thousand years on, it still has this richness. It can be interpreted and adapted.

But I'm guessing that that's a very modern way of viewing it, the Athenians when they saw it as part of a communal experience that is a central part of their city's calendar, and you know how important their civic culture is to them. They would not have said, Oh, this has multiple meanings. It's very slippery and nuanced. They would have said, It has one meaning, and the meaning is this.

So what is it? Well, I think the context is key. The fact that they are staring down the barrel of total ruin, and they're sitting there watching the dramatic portrayal of a city being utterly destroyed. So Euripides is very precise about this in the back eye, that the ruin that's visited on Pentheus is also a ruin that is visited on Thebes. To quote Euripides, The city's streets tremble in guilt as every Theban repents too late his blindness and his blasphemy I think it's impossible to believe that Athenians wouldn't have felt those lines as incredibly chilling and thought about how the ruin that's going to be visited on Thiebes might well be the that's visited on them. What's more, it's the men who are sitting there thinking about it, and they're watching Pentheus, the king who has responsibility for the day-to-day affairs of his city. In a democracy, it's the mass of the male citizens who have that responsibility. They're watching Pentheus lead Thebes to disaster, and they must have been reflecting, well, Pentheus is us. We, the citizen body, who have responsibility for the day-to-day running of the city, whether it goes to war, how we conduct that war, we, likewise, have led our city to ruin.

I think it must have been devastating.

But their mistakes, if they are mistakes, have been political, military, diplomatic ones. Pentheus's mistake is that he doesn't fully embrace what you would call Tom, to do a Tom Hollandism, the dimension of the supernatural. Is Euripides arguing that that is also the Athenians' mistake? Is there a slightly Savana Rolla aspect, Savana Rolla and Florence aspect to this? Well, basically, you haven't. This is an opportunity for you to revive your gravelly voice, Tom. Savana Rolla's voice. But is your opinion saying the mistakes, the political mistakes, are merely a symptom of a deeper moral, spiritual malaise?

Well, as in the back eye, so in the the dying days of the Great War with Sparta, the Athenians would take for granted that the gods are actors in the drama of what is happening. Normally for the Athenians, the readiness of the gods to intervene in the affairs of their city is seen as a positive. To quote Greg Anderson, who I've already cited in this series in his book, The Realness of Things Passed, For the Athenians, the gods of Attica were not some group of faceless, superhuman hired contractors. They were something closer to benevolent governors or caring parents, beings who perpetually monitored and managed the shared local environment, taking a personal interest in the life and well-being of their chosen people. The chosen people is the demos. That is what the democracy is. It's the rule of the chosen people of Attica, the chosen people of Athena. This notion of the Athenians as a chosen people of Athena and of other gods as well, worshiped by the Athenians. This embraces women as well as men. In fact, it is women far more than men who are entrusted with the rituals that exist to please the gods and thereby to keep the demos secure.

That's why these women are going off to the temple of Dionysus in the swamp. They're the ones who preside over the sacred rituals, but there are other rituals as well. So from childhood, they've been doing it. So at the age of 10, we're told the girls of Athens go out to a shrine of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, on the shores of Attica, and there they turn into bears. And they run with Artemis, or they tend the sacred snake on the acropolis, or they weave robes for Athena, which are carried up onto the acropolis and are used to adorn her statues. Euripides himself, he is fully conscious of this role that women are mandated to play in securing the health of the demos and of Athens, because we have a fragment from an otherwise lost play in which he states this explicitly. To quote this fragment, As regards relations with the gods, matters which I judge to be more important than anything. It is we women who have the leading role to play. So he's ventriloquising woman in this fragment. For there are many rights which cannot legitimately be performed by men, but which flourish when women conduct them.

The order which prevails in the engagements of mortals with the gods is then, it can be said, a female one. And so that being so, again, imagine how terrifying it must have been to sit there knowing that your is on the brink of total ruin, watching women running amok, worshiping Dionysus in a way that causes ruin for the state. In the back eye, women are imbroiled in the collapse of Thebes just as much as men are. Again, I think that the relevance of this for the first audience of the Baccai would have been stupifying. They must have thought, I mean, what's the lesson of the Baccai? That men can adopt policies that are disastrous, but also that women who are mandated to keep the gods on side can run completely amok and be complicit in the destruction of the city as well. I think that that is a theme that must have been overwhelming for the audience, the sense that men and women alike are imbroiled in the disaster that the Athenians, like the Thebans, are facing.

What is the argument that Euripides is making then? What is the argument that he's How does this story illustrate the deeper failings? Is it that they haven't honored the gods, that they've lived in an ungodly way, that they have- Yes, I think that's absolutely...

I think Euripides He's just saying that... Well, I mean, it's a drama. He's not saying it, but it's a possibility that is haunting the contours of the drama. He's saying that men, like Pentheus, in the day-to-day running, they can disrespect the gods, they can lead their city into disastrous policies, but also that it's possible for women who are mandated to honor the gods and to keep the gods on side, that they can also fail in that responsibility, and that if men and women both fail, then the consequences for a city is disastrous. Now, that, of course, is to assume that the gods are real. There is another possibility, one that is not countenanced in the back eye, where the god, Dionysus is on the stage, the last message is believe in the gods. But Euripides was notorious for having explored the possibility that the gods did not exist in other plays. Again, another fragment that hasn't survived in total from a play called Baleriphon. Baleriphon was a hero who- Fights the chimera. Fights the chimera and rides around on Pegasus, the magical flying horse. In it, Bellerophon describes murderous leaders, so leaders of cities that come to disaster.

He describes these murderous leaders, people who deprive citizens of their property and break their oaths to sack cities. And despite this, they prosper more than those who live piously in peace every day. I know two of small cities that revere the gods, which are subject to larger, more impious ones, overcome as they are by a more numerous army. So that has a real resonance in the terrible war between Athens and Sparta. All these things have happened. And in it, Bellerophan argues, therefore, there can be no gods, because if there were gods, and they wouldn't commit crimes like this to happen. Exactly.

And of course, I suppose you could say Bellerophan is just a character. Euripides doesn't believe this himself. But for Euripides to imagine a character who thinks like that suggests that there must be people who think like that. He's not going to imagine the unimaginable. So Euripides is countenancing the possibility, at least, that there is an argument to be had about whether the gods are real.

Yeah, well, we don't know what Euripides himself thought, and it's worth emphasizing that Bellerophon does have a magical flying horse. And in the play, he flies on Pegasus up to Mount Olympus to see whether the gods are real or not. And they are. They are because he gets... Yes. So in the play, his doubt is answered in a tragic way. But it is a staple of the comedies which are being staged in the Dianes there, as well as the tragedies. Euripides appears in comedies by Aristophanies, the most famous of all the great great Athenian comic writers. For Aristophanies, it's a standing joke that Euripides is an atheist. To quote Aristophanies, he's always persuading men that there aren't any gods. For Aristophanies, Euripides is the spokesman for a real, a sinister elitist trend. Metropolitan atheists. Metropolitan liberal trend. This trend, essentially, is to believe that the stories that are told by Homer and by Hesia and by the other ancient poets are inadequate to explain and characterize the true character of the divine. This is a trend that is more than a century old by the time that Euripides is writing the Baki. It originates on the opposite side of the Aegean to Athens, so in what's now Turkey, Anatolia, in the mid-sixth century BC.

In time, so just a few decades after the death of Euripides, this intellectual trend will come to be called filosofia. The love of wisdom. So philosophy, which is probably the most... Well, I mean, not probably. I mean, it is the most radical and influential of all the intellectual achievements of ancient Greece. It It originates as a reaction against the stories that were told by the poets, very specifically. It manifestsates itself in all kinds of ways. It's critique of the of homeric, anthropomorphic gods, the gods who look like humans. It's completely devastating. There's a guy called Xenophones who writes, If cattle and horses and lions had hands or could paint with their hands and create work such as men do, horses like horses and cattle like cattle also They would depict the God's shapes and make their bodies of such a sort as the form they themselves have.

In other words, we only think that their gods look human because we're human. If we were horses, we'd think they look like horses.

And Zenoff and Ees goes on to say that black people worship black gods and that redhead people worship redhead gods.

The redhead gods? I'm not aware of any redhead gods.

The Thrations, Dominic. Oh, really? The Thracians had red hair and they worship redhead gods.

Okay. Well, I stand corrected.

Other philosophers insist that the use doesn't hurl Thunderbolts, that the sun isn't a fiery chariot, that the universe instead is formed out of air or moisture or fire, out of universal eternal substances. And the very word mythos, which in Homer signifies a story that is infused with authority, with truth, that actually it means the opposite, that a mythos, a myth, is a fable, a fantasy. The philosophers oppose this to another word, logos, which means recent argument. So you have myth, fantasy, and you have logos, recent argument.

In a sense, this answers the question I asked at the very first episode of this series, which is, did the Greeks genuinely believe this? Did they believe there were people with heads with the head of a ball or people on flying horses and all this stuff? And the answer is clearly, no. A lot of Greeks, or some Greeks, not a lot, maybe a Well, come to how many. Did not and said, Come on, this is rubbish. It's interesting. The philosophy is born in opposition to story. That's basically what you're suggesting.

It absolutely is. The most famous philosopher of all who was a young man in his 20s when the back eye was staged, and then when Athens fell the following year, he goes so far as to argue that in an ideal state, the poets, Homa, Hesiot, and so on, should be banned. That man, of course, is Plato. Plato, in the Republic, his attempt to describe the ideal form that a city should take, wrote, Poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up. She lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled if mankind is ever to become happier and better. And so therefore, he says, Hesiot shouldn't be allowed in all this stuff about Cronos cutting off the testicles. I mean, it's just unacceptable.

Controvenes all kinds of health and safety regulations.

I don't think that's the prime objective. But essentially what he says is this is an invitation to insurrection. Before you know it, all kinds of people will be having their testicles cut off, and we can't have that. He also thinks that here are seducing zeus, and all this. It's just blasphemous, and he doesn't want any of it.

He still very much believes, if he thinks it's blasphemous, he believes there is a supernatural element that needs to be treated with respect. But he thinks these are basically silly children's stories.

He does, yes. That introduce the gods and actually demean them. Yes. Therefore, Homer should be banned. You said lots of people believe this. The question then is, does this mean the end for the myths? With the emergence of philosophy, with Plato and so on, is myth going to die? It doesn't, and for two reasons. The first of these is that the stories that are told of the gods, the heroes, and so on, are so intimately interwoven into the fabric of Greek life, all the cults, the festivals, and so on, but also just the mental headspace. I mean, these stories are so powerful. They're so strong. They can't just be banished. The Sandbrook perspective on this, surely, would be- Most people don't think about this at all.

They're tilling their fields.

Exactly. They're not intellectuals. They're not worrying about philosophy or ever. So myth remains part of... It's just the air that they're breathing in. Exactly.

That would make total sense. If you said to somebody, Are you interested in the stories of Usuncronos? Or whatever, they'd say, Sure, everyone knows these stories. Do you believe them? They'd say, I don't really think about them that much, to be honest with you. I mean, we observe the rituals, of course, but I've got better things to think about.

So if we look at Plato, he sets up this school outside Athens called the Academy. And it's so influential that in the long run, it gives us the word academic. But it's worth emphasizing, it stands outside Athens. It's not in the city. It is named after the tomb of a hero, Academus. The presence of myth is there right in the heart of Plato's school. The academy cannot remotely compare for splendor and cost and prestige with the temples that continue to stand in Athens. No one is going to say the academy is more important than the Parthenon.

It's the equivalent of a liberal arts college in upstate New York, where they're coming up with all kinds of wacky theories and whatnot, and they're living outside capitalism. But actually in New York City, no one cares, and they're just- Kind of.

Yes, I suppose,. But the other thing to emphasize is that philosophy doesn't banish myth, it just creates a new one. So Xenophones, even as he's saying, cows would worship cows, what he's really disputing is the fact that the gods look like humans. He absolutely believes in a god. It sounds very much, it will sound familiar to Monotheus today. Xenophones wrote, There is one God, greatest among gods and men, similar to mortals, neither in shape nor in thought. And those who are arguing that the Cosmos is made of air or fire or moisture or whatever, the assumption is that these elements are themselves divine. So in that sense, the whole Cosmos is divine. Plato is himself the greatest of all myth makers. And what he does with momentous consequences for the way that we continue to think today is that he makes the real unreal and the unreal real. Because what he's arguing is that beyond the world as we perceive it, there is another world which is perfect, immortal, unchangeable. The way that this is always summed up is that you have tables, all kinds of tables, but these are merely reflections of the perfect table that exists in an ideal state.

What Plato is doing, he's banishing the Homeric gods, but he's enshrining new gods. These are essentially abstract nouns, the just the beautiful, the good, whatever. Rather than a baqueia, so going out and celebrating on the mountain, what Plato is offering his followers is an ascent, the idea that the individual has an ideal form, namely in the form of a soul or whatever you want to call it, and that the soul can ascend from the dimension of the material to, as Plato puts it, the best of everything which can be comprehended by thought and which is eternal. This, in effect, is God and This concept is going to be a massive influence on Christianity, on Islam. To quote Voltaire Burkert in his great book on Greek Religion, Since Plato, there has been no theology which has not stood in his shadow. There's a sense in which the Greek reaction against myth that Plato exemplifies, but you also have Aristotle and other philosophers, too. This is part of the great river which will feed into the emergence of Christianity and Islam, and therefore is of Titanic significance, I think.

So now with Plato and with his ideas, we are heading towards, we're not quite there yet, but we're heading towards the Hellenistic era, the age associated with Alexander the Great and his successors. And I guess the obvious question is, after Plato and after the massive political disruption of the emergence of Massodon and Alexander and his empire, what does this mean for Greek mythology and the Greek stories of the gods. And how does Alexander, in particular, how does he come to it? Because he assumes such massive existential significance. How does he change the way that Greeks think about the relation between mortal and the immortal? And Tom, this This takes us to one of my favorite Greek myths, which is the story of Jason and the Argonauts, the Quest for the Golden Fleece. And this is what we'll be doing next time, isn't it? It absolutely will. The exciting thing is, so we actually have our own crew. We have our own Argonauts, and they can listen to that episode right away. Is there any way that somebody who's not on the Argo right now could join the Argo? Do you know of any such way?

They absolutely could. They could sign up to the Argo by going to therestishistory. Com and joining the merry crew there and going to win the Golden Fleece.

And if you think this last half hour of this show was absolutely mind-blowing and life-changing, let me tell you, that episode on Jason and the Argonauts will knock everything that's gone before in the Rest is History into a cock tat. So don't delay. Join the Argo, sign up at the Rest is History, and listen to it right away. Goodbye.

Bye-bye. Hey, it's Anthony Scaramucci, and I want to tell you about my podcast, Open Book, which just joined the Goalhanger Network work, which we're all very proud of. In my latest episode, I interviewed Goalhanger's very own James Holland.

We spoke about World War II and what World War II teaches us about today.

Here's a clip. Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Well, I think he was a great man.

I think he was a man of vision.

He was a man of enormous geopolitical understanding, and he was a man who offered possibilities.

When you're in a life and death struggle, you need people that can persuade you. You need people that can bind you.

You need men of vision, of charisma. That's the problem with the moment is we haven't got those guys.

I mean, he's flawed, of course, all the great men are. But thank goodness for the developed world and the democratic world that he was leader of Great Britain in 1940 and throughout the whole of level 2. He literally, in so many different ways, man of the century, I think, because Roosevelt was a charmer. Roosevelt was a great strategist. He pulled the Americans through the Depression and helped them manage the war.

But without Churchill holding ground in May and June of 1940, it would have been a much darker, much worse world.

It would have been not a lot that the Americans could have done without Churchill's steadfastness and his inspiration to his fellow citizens.

If you want to hear the full episode, just search Open Book wherever you get your podcast.

You are not luminous, Watson, but you are a conductor of light.

Here they are. Dr. Mortimer, I presume? Yes. Hi. John. Dr. John Watson. Who is your client?

He was my client. Sir Charles Baskerville. Keep reading.

A local shepherd noted, I saw first that of the maid, Hugo Baskervilles passed me thence on his black mare, and there behind him, running mute upon his track, such a hound of hell that, God forbid, should ever be at my heels. I wish I felt better in my mind about it. It's an ugly business once, an ugly, dangerous business. The more I see of it, the less I like it. I shall be very glad to have you back safe and sound in Baker Street last night. Hello?

Dollhanger You're not Sherlock Holmes. I'm Henry Baskervilles. From one of the biggest audio-dramas of all time.

Is it Bobby?

In a creepy way?

Like in there's an evil giant hound that likes the taste of Baskervilles.

The seminal Goths novel by Arthur Conan Doyle. They're watching. Who?

Who are watching?

It's not safe. Rimpe and Maya. I could just make out its pitch black form. Welcome to Deepest. Everything a hellish void. Dark Who are you?

For this piercing yellow glow of eyes. Darkmore. What do you want?

Of giant facts. No. Sherlock and Cole, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Listen now. Five stars, says the eye paper. Hugely popular, says the Guardian. A successful reinvention of homes for a younger generation, says the Times. Search Sherlock and Co wherever you get your podcasts.