The Bacchae

Euripides · 480–406 BCE · Greece

Originally Βάκχαι (Ancient Greek)

Why it matters

A king tries to suppress the ecstatic cult of Dionysus and is torn apart by its frenzied worshippers, led by his own mother. Euripides' terrifying last play: what happens when reason denies the irrational, staged as the god's own revenge.

At a glance

Ecstatic choral passages and a deliberately ambiguous theology resist tidy interpretation.