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muse of Sophocles appears to have avoided such exciting themes.

"The Bacchanals" was not brought out in the lifetime of Euripides. It was exhibited by a younger man of the same name, his son or his nephew. If it were, as it is supposed to have been, the work of one far advanced in years, it displays no trace of declining powers, and, in that respect, is on a par with the Sophoclean "Edipus at Colonos." From its scenes and subject it was probably composed after Euripides had quitted Athens; and there may have been reasons for his writing this tragedy at Pella, as a compliment to his host and patron Archelaus. The play, indeed, was well suited to the genius of the land, and the people before whom it was represented. Northern Greece, Macedonia, and the adjoining districts, were devout worshippers of Bacchus, both in faith and practice. Alexander's "captains and colonels and knights at arms " astonished the more sober Asiatics by their capacity for deep potations. The women of Thrace, Thessaly, and Macedonia, when the purple vintage was garnered, and the vats overflowed with red juice, celebrated harvest-home by putting on ivy-chaplets and tunics made of lion or deer skins, by brandishing the thyrsus, and by wild and violent dances. Olympias, the mother of Alexander, was a Bacchantè, and at certain seasons of the year whirled around the altars of the god, with snakes depending from her girdle and her hair. In this picturesque, if rather savage dress, she is said to have won the heart of King Philip, himself a most loyal subject of the jovial deity.

The poet of "The Bacchanals," now a voluntary exile at Pella, seems to have reinvigorated himself under a new sky, and to exult in his freedom. He had gone from a land tamed and domesticated by the hand of man, to a land in which nature was still imperfectly subdued. In the place of vineyards, oliveyards, and gardens, forests and mountains greeted his eyes. Broad rivers were in the room of the narrow and uncertain streams that watered Attica. The snows on Mount Parnes disappeared when the sun rode in Cancer; but they never departed from the sides and summits of Ossa and Olympus. There is a Salvator-like grandeur in the scenery described in "The Bacchanals." The action of the play lies indeed in Boeotia; but, instead of loamy fields and sluggish rivers, we are placed among rocks where the eagle builds her eyrie, or among forests tenanted by the wolf and bear.

The religious elements in "The Bacchanals " are worth noticing, since they differ widely from those commonly found in other plays of its author. The presiding god is a terrible as well as a powerful being. He admits of no half-service; he cannot abide sceptics; he makes short work with opponents. All such free and easy dealing with the gods as are met with in "The Phrenzy of Hercules" or the "Electra" disappears. Perhaps the Macedonians were not sufficiently civilised to relish tampering with old beliefs. There may also have been a change in the feelings of the aged poet himself. He may have said to himself, "What has it profited me to have so long striven to make others see

more clearly? Would it not have been wiser to do as my friend Sophocles has ever done, and view both gods and social relations with the eyes of the vulgar?" Unimpaired as his mental force must have been for him to write such a tragedy as "The Bacchanals," his bodily strength may have been touched by years. We are not told whether either of his wives accompanied him to Pella; if neither of them were with him, there was the less occasion for philosophy. Whatever the cause may have been, there is more faith than doubt or speculation to be found in this tragedy.

The action of "The Bacchanals" is laid in a remote age, and there is an Oriental quite as much as a Greek savour in the poetry. Cadmus, who has ceded the Theban sceptre to his grandson Pentheus, was by birth a Phoenician, not a Boeotian. He lived before the Greek Argo had rushed through the blue Symplegades to the Colchian strand. He is beyond recorded time; he "antiquates" common "antiquity." His intercourse with the gods has been intimate but not happy. Jupiter had taken a fancy to his sister Europa, and to one of his daughters-and by her, Semele, he is, though long unaware of it, grandfather to Bacchus.

When the play opens, all Thebes-its male population, at least is perplexed in the extreme. The women are all gone mad: they are off to the mountains, and many of them have taken their children with them; for their customary suits they have donned fawn-skins; they brandish poles wreathed with ivy: shouting and singing, dancing and leaping, they scour the plains,

climb the hills, and scare the fox and the wild cat from their holes. From this sudden mania neither age nor rank is free: sober housewives are themselves doing what a few days before they would have blushed to see done by others. Even the Queen Agavè and her attendant ladies are swept into the vortex, and prance like so many peasant girls at a wake.

The cause of this strange and unseemly revel is the appearance in Boeotia of a young man of handsome presence, with flowing locks like grape-bunches, and a delicate yet somewhat ruddy visage. His errand to Thebes is a strange one. He pretends to be a native of that city; he points to a charred mound of earth as his mother's grave, and, wondrous to relate, since he first visited it, the blackened turf is covered and canopied over with a luxuriant vine! He began by claiming near kinship with the royal house of Cadmus ; and because the female members scoffed at his pretensions, he drives them insane. His retinue are as strange as his errand. It is composed of dark-eyed swarthy women, such as might be seen in the streets of Tyre and Sidon celebrating the feast of Astartè with dance and song. The dull, yet by no means sober, Boeotians cannot tell what to make of these eccentric visitors. Some think that the magistratesthe Bootarchs-should clap them into the town jail : but how to catch, and, when caught, how to keep, these wild damsels, is the difficulty; for they are as slippery to handle as the eels in Lake Copaïs, and as fierce as the lynxes that swarm on Mount Citharon. Never had Thebes, since Amphion had drawn the stones of

its walls together by his minstrelsy, been in such perturbation.

Who the young stranger with grape-bunch locks is, the audience are told by himself in the prologue. He

is what he pretends to be, the son of Jupiter and Semele. He has travelled far before he came to Thebes to establish his rites and claim his kindred. "I have left," he says,

"The golden Lydian shores,
The Phrygian and the Persian sun-seared plains,
And Bactria's walls; the Medes' wild wintry land
Have passed, and Araby the blest; and all
Of Asia that along the salt-sea coast

Lifts up her high-towered cities, where the Greeks,
With the Barbarians mingled, dwell in peace." *

Hitherto, wherever I have come, mankind has acknowledged me a god: the first opposition I have met with is in this, the first Hellenic town I have entered :

"But here, where least beseemed, my mother's sisters

Vowed Dionysus was no son of Jove;

That Semele, by mortal paramour won,
Belied great Jove as author of her sin ;

"Twas but old Cadmus' craft: hence Jove in wrath
Struck dead the bold usurper of his bed."

In requital for such usage, he has goaded all the women of Thebes into frenzy :

"There's not a woman of old Cadmus' race

But I have maddened from her quiet house;

* The translated passages are all taken from Dean Milman's version of this drama.

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