Review A.F.H. Bierl, Dionysos Und Die Griechische Tragodie

7/30/2019 Review A.F.H. Bierl, Dionysos Und Die Griechische Tragodie

1/6

1

Bryn Mawr Classical Review 03.02.03

Anton F. Harald Bierl,Dionysos und die griechische Tragdie.Politische und "metatheatralische" Aspekte im Text. Classica

Monacensia 1. Tbingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1991. Pp. xii +

298. ISBN 3-8233-4861-2.

Reviewed by Thomas Marier, The Johns Hopkins University.

B.'s purpose is to ascertain the "functions" of Dionysus in tragedy as it was

experienced by the fifth-century Athenian audience (2). The influence ofGerman reception theory is evident in his orientation, though not in his

bibliography. Thus, to assess the audience's response to references to

Dionysus, B. undertakes to recover the Athenians' understanding of the god,

the "horizon" of their expectations with respect to him (21, 27, 147). The

Athenians thought of Dionysus as the god of wine, maenadism, and the

afterlife; B. argues that he was also regarded as a god of politics and the

theater -- indeed, these were his foremost provinces, at least during the

dramatic performances of the last third of the fifth century (220).

Yet for the Athenians, in B.'s view, Dionysus was not just a god whose

domain included all these disparate phenomena; he also had an essence thatinhered in all of them. According to B.'s "maxim of interpretation" (128),

that essence was ambivalence. Dionysus spanned pairs of opposing qualities

such as life and death, peace and war, polis and wilderness. B. arrives at this

essence by an avowedly structuralist procedure: he lumps together all

available data pertaining to the god, contrives oppositions from these data,

and asserts that the relation of ambivalence between these oppositions was

the god's quiddity. At this level of abstraction, a case could be made for the

ambivalence of practically all gods and even heroes in tragedy. What, then,

does ambivalence tell us about the Dionysiac? It is possible that the god was

understood as essentially ambivalent by the Orphics who carved EIRENE

POLEMOS and ALETHEIA PSEUDOS on bones found in Olbia on thenorthern coast of the Black Sea (15 n. 35), or that Heraclitus (22 B 15 Diels-

Kranz) saw him as essentially ambiguous, but can we assume that the

Athenian audience did?

B. finds fault with those (e.g. Girard) who have emphasized the subversive

god of myth (especially ofBacch.) virtually to the exclusion of the cohesive

god of cult. This emphasis on the negative side of the god has given rise to

the notion that Dionysus was non-political, that he could only oppose, but

not be integrated into, the polis (Vidal-Naquet). B., by contrast, sees the cult

of Dionysus as vital to the polis. The Greater Dionysia, for example,

promoted civic solidarity (153-54 on Plato,Leg. 653c7-d5); it "unified allthe citizens into a huge, homogeneous, Dionysiac retinue" and "as it did so

their worries and fears were dissolved in the joyous rapture of the religious


2/6

2

community" (20). Tragedy, as a part of the festival and the cult of Dionysus,

was also vital to the polis. B. considers the "political dimension" of

Dionysus in tragedy, adopting a line of inquiry that began with J.-P. Vernant

(45-110). In the theater the Athenians experienced vicariously the negation

of their own values and norms. Paradoxically, this experience made the polisstronger. By exposing the citizens to alien power structures, for example,

tragedy made them aware of the fragility of their own democratic

institutions. It also gave them an opportunity to deal with problems to which

they could not address themselves in other public fora, to scrutinize their

attitudes, to play out scenarios, to experiment.

Various oppositions may be construed between the imaginary world of the

plays and the real one in which the Athenians lived: present and past, inside

and outside, self and other. B. argues that Dionysus is "the point at which

the ambiguities that span the tragedies take definite form and from which

their true meaning arises" (48). The god is mentioned most often in theplays that have Thebes, the antitype of Athens, as their setting (Septem, Ant.,

OT, HF, andBacch.). In each of these plays an autocrat (Eteocles, Creon,

Oedipus, Lycus, Pentheus) rushes blindly to his undoing. In every case B.

attributes the autocrat's demise to his excessive rationalism. The ruler is

punished by Dionysus, the god in whom the old, circular, theonomic way of

thinking and the new, linear, rational one are united. For the Athenians the

lesson to be drawn from the Theban tragedies was that the good ruler must

not attempt to govern by reason alone but must recognize the "other" (by

which B. seems to mean a source of transcendent authority; 64, 69).

B. locates Dionysus on the map of tragedy, establishing a scale with which

to measure the "degree of otherness" (222) of places where Dionysus

appears, i.e. the extent to which they differ from Athenian norms. He puts

positive Athens at one end of this scale, negative Thebes at the other end.

Argos, in Euripides' Or., is close to Thebes on the scale because it is the

scene of madness and attempted murder described in Dionysiac terms (91).

Delphi occupies the "middle space" (92) between Athens and Thebes. InIT,

where Euripides emphasizes the chthonic side of Dionysus (Orestes and

Iphigeneia are rendered inactive by chthonic forces in the course of the

play), Delphi tends towards the "negative" pole, while inPhoen. Delphi is

portrayed as positive by the chorus of Tyrian maidens.Phoen. 226-38evokes Delphi as the panhellenic cult of Dionysus. For the Athenian

audience this passage was felt to be "a part of the worship of Dionysus"

because Athens sent women to Delphi every two years to take part in

Bacchic rites as thuiades on Parnassus (99; cf. 93).

Finally, B. looks at the two plays in which Dionysus appears in connection

with Athens: OC, where he is situated in a locus amoenus on the periphery

of the city (by granting asylum to Oedipus, Theseus shows his "openness to

the other," 103), andIon, where Euripides dared to represent an Athenian

mother plotting to kill her own son. InIon the chorus of Athenian women,

calling on Dionysus, suggests that Ion is a theomakhos deserving to die asPentheus did, for Athens should not be ruled by a foreigner (714-717). In

denying that Athenians participate in the revels on Parnassus, the chorus


3/6

3

"projects the wild side of Dionysus onto Delphi" (108). Athens is on the

verge of turning into Thebes. Ultimately, however, Athena intervenes ex

machina to set things straight. Thus, the "lesson" of this play is that the polis

must integrate "the other, that is, the wild half of the god Dionysus" (108).

As for Creusa's attempt on Ion's life, Euripides seems to be warning hiscontemporaries that "the democracy must uph old its values" if it is not to

sink into the vortex of violent attack and counterattack (109).

The evidence adduced by B. for the Athenian understanding of Dionysus as

a preeminently political god is unfortunately far from compelling. He

appeals to F. Kolb's "revolutionary thesis" (Agora und Theater, Volks- und

Festversammlung[Berlin, 1981]) that in the sixth-century agora the

orchestra was located within the sacred precinct of Dionysus Lenaeus and

served not only as the site of early dramatic performances but also as a

political and juridical center, and concludes that politics and the cult of

Dionysus, of which early drama was a part, therefore formed "an indivisibleunity" at that time, and political decisions were made under the tutelage of

"the god of the polis par excellence" and carried divine authority (51-52).

But as R. Seaford (CR 33 [1983] 288-89) has pointed out, this thesis

depends on dubious arguments from proximity (e.g. if the orchestra was

near a political statue [the tyrannicides], then it must have served a political

purpose [as a place of assembly]. Moreover, even if tragedy did have such

ties to political activity in the sixth century, it is hazardous to build an

argument for a fifth-century attitude on the basis of sixth-century evidence.

During the decades that separated the the earliest extant play from the

Peisistratid period tragedy probably changed no less extensively than did

other Athenian institutions. The notion, also Kolb's, that the tragedians of

the fifth century saw themselves as the successors of the priests of Dionysus

Lenaeus, who once advised the Athenians in political matters, is just a guess

(45). Nor can I see howIon 1074-86 and a fragment from Hermippus's

Phormophoroi (PCG 5 fr. 63 Kassel-Austin) show that Dionysus was the

"divine personification of Athens" (106). In the end, B. is left with the

allegory ofFrogs, in which Dionysus is the embodiment of the theater as an

institution of the polis (the primary purpose of which is to improve the

citizens rather than to indulge their passion for verbal and musical

exhibitions). In this sense he is also, I suppose, a "god of the polis."

It is, however, one thing to say that Dionysus' theater instructed, quite

another to say that its instruction was Dionysiac.Frogs gives no indication

of the Dionysiac knowledge that, according to B., a polis needs to save

itself. Here B. does not just mean that tragedy was political because for the

Athenians it served as a medium whereby certain problems of the polis were

publicly expressed. He means that tragedy conveyed a peculiarly Dionysiac

"message" (e.g. 73), which seems to have been that "government founded

on reason alone is extremely precarious, unless it succeeds in integrating the

other." In the course of the transition from "the traditional outlook, which

was marked by religious ideas" to "the new polis thinking that was based on

pure rationality" the Athenians ran the risk of forgetting that they weredependent on the gods (64). Tragedy was a part of a counter-enlightenment,

and served to remind the Athenians of this dependence. The political


4/6

4

wisdom of Dionysus lay in the recognition of the limitations of a form of

rule that recognized no authority beyond itself (autocracy in the tragic

fiction, democracy in fifth-century Athens). Thus, Pentheus could have

"saved the city" by accepting Dionysus, as Athens preserved itself by

celebrating the god's festival every year (74). It is difficult to see how thisDionysiac wisdom would have saved Thebes from the pestilence in OTor

Heracles from the wrath of Hera inHF. Even more difficult, though, is the

connection between this wisdom and Dionysus. B. often makes the

connection at the expense of the text. Is Antigone the "agent" of Dionysus

despiteAnt. 955-65, where she is likened to Lycurgus (67)? Is the condition

of those affected by the war in Septem best described as Dionysiac mania,

even th ough Dionysus is absent from that play?

Turning to Dionysus in his theatrical dimension, B. asserts that every

reference to Dionysus might have "metatragic" implications: by

"metatragedy" B. means a species of "metatheater," which he defines as "thetotality of mechanisms whereby the poet reveals that he is aware of himself

as the creator of drama and whereby the theater refers to itself" (116). B.

develops a model of communication to explain how evocations of the god of

the theater, including music, musical instruments, choral dancing, the

Muses, Graces, Mnemosyne (Dionysus assumed the entourage of Apollo

Mousegetes [99]), and the vocabulary of early dramatic theory (e.g.

mechane, Helen 813, 1034), were deployed by the poets to guide the

audience's response to dramatic events. B. is responding to O. Taplin, who

objects to the notion of metatragedy on the ground that reflexivity always

involves a rupture of dramatic illusion (as it regularly did in comedy). Thus,

B. attempts to bridge the gap between the illusion or "spell" of the dramatic

action and reflexivity; the spell, he says, was momentarily transcended, but

never broken as it was in, say, theparabaseis of comedy. The audience's

religious feeling (Ergriffenheit) would oscillate between the "fictive space"

of the drama and "the real space" of the theater within the sacred precinct of

Dionysus. The audience was perhaps conscious of the metatragic signal, but

only "to a very small degree" (118).

The use of Dionysiac references for this purpose presupposes a "metatragic

consciousness" that made such communication possible. B. imagines that

with the slackening of the ties between tragedy and the cult of Dionysus, thetragic poets grew increasingly aware of Dionysus as a theater god, at least

during the festival, and they began to employ terms from his cult to call

attention to the operations of the theater. The language of cult became a

tragic "metalanguage" (120-21). Aeschylus, for example, employed the cult

term bakkheia at Cho. 698 to prepare the audience for the murder of

Clytemnestra (the word would have suggested a sudden reversal from joy to

suffering).

B. notes that in the extant works of Sophocles (124-137) Dionysus is

mentioned explicitly only in choral songs. Here Dionysus appears as the

cohesive god of cult. B. examines three passages from precatastrophic songsof joy (Ant. 1140-54; OT1105-9; Trach. 216-220) in which Dionysus is

evoked as the god of festivity, music, and wine to show how the resulting


5/6

5

momentary illusion of happiness intensifies the shock of disillusionment.

"The audience," B. says in connection with the passage fromAnt., "when

confronted with its own cultic experience, is swept into the whirl of the

chorus's naive expectation of a happy outcome" (132).

Euripides (137-218) "considered the manifest connection between tragedy

and the cult of Dionysus and accordingly made him into the supreme

principle of drama" (138). The Euripidean chorus frequently evokes this

principle to aid the audience in its int erpretation of the action. This is

metatragedy in its true sense (137). If Sophocles threw light on the friendly

god of Athenian experience, Euripides reveals him in all his ambivalence:

the god as experienced in cult clashes openly with the imaginary god of

myth. In his exposition of the metatragic inHF(140-46), for example, B.

argues that Euripides intensified the effect of the reversals in this play by

connecting Heracles with Dionysus. For "no god, to Euripides' mind, better

expressed the change from one extreme to another than the god of tragedyhimself" (140). Thus, the first reversal (HF514) B. calls a metabole (141),

and the second is so labelled in the text itself (735; cf. 765-66, 884). The

word metabole is employed by Aristotle in his definition of peripety (Poet.

1452a 22-23), which B. regards as somehow connected with Dionysus (119,

143); he is tempted by the thought that Aristotle borrowed it from the poets,

or at least that it belonged to a dramaturgical vocabulary that had already

sprung up by the time ofHF(143 n. 88, 225). This word, B. thinks, signals

metatragically the critical moment when the action is about to take a sudden

turn (it does just that at the conclusion of the third stasimon, 815ff.). The

mad Heracles is characterized in Dionysiac imagery (esp. 889-98, just

before he kills his children). According to B., Heracles unites the two sides

of Dionysus: he reflects the positive, cultic side of the god in the first half of

the play, where he is the embodiment of Bacchic hope in the eyes of his

loved ones, and the negative, mythical side in the second half, where he

becomes their murderer.

In sum, an evocation of the Dionysus in his theatrical dimension might (a)

serve as a dramaturgical signal, a device to prepare the audience for a

subsequent turn of events. It might (b) induce the audience to experience

vicariously the optimism of the dramatis personae (e.g. of the chorus in

Sophocles' plays) by calling forth the "positive" cultic context. It might (c)call attention to the operation of tragedy, especially the sudden reversal,

which Aristotle called peripety; theatrical metalanguage (e.g. metabole [HF

735], eleos andphrike [Phoen. 1284-87],phroimion [HF753]) can suggest

the tragic principle of sudden reversal. Finally, it might (d) cause the

audience to reflect on the theatrical illusion (Hel., cf. Cho., IT) or on the

value of the theater for the polis (Bacch. does this by dramatizing, through

the monitory example of Pentheus, the breakdown of theatrical

communication).

In answering Taplin's objection that metatragedy involves the rupture of

dramatic illusion, B. proposes a highly unlikely model according to whichan evocation of Dionysus is a signal received momentarily just above the

threshold of consciousness. However, B.'s quasi-Nietzschean notion of


6/6

6

tragedy as a religious experience in which the individual was fused with the

collective (20, 112; "such an experience may have been had by maenads in a

thiasos" [cf.Bacch. 75 with Dodd's note], but was it had by the audience of

tragedy?) precludes metatragedy of any kind: one cannot undergo loss of

self and be self-conscious at the same time. Furthermore, B. admits that theaudience would not have been able to receive most of the signals that he has

detected (117-18 , 147, 159, 223). If the metatragic is largely a readerly

construct, how can he appeal to the festival as the cultic context of the

performance, as he does, for example, in his discussion of the Dionysiac

reference as an emotional trigger in Sophocles' choral songs?

Having developed a model that purports to explain the maintenance of the

dramatic spell, B. points to references that presuppose the rupture of that

spell. Does the chorus "partly transcend its fictional role" in the third

stasimon ofHF, where it summons the daughters of the river Asopus to

"Heracles' glorious victory contest (787-88), referring metatragically to thecontest from which Euripides wishes, on the strength ofHF, to emerge

victorious" (144)? Is Helen being told to take "the cult of Dionysus as a

pattern for her subsequent conduct" inHelen 1358-68, where fawnskins, ivy,

fennel wands, and flowing hair are mentioned (163)? Does this

recommendation to a woman who has conceived, and is staging, an intrigue

that requires her to cast aside her "self" suggest a connection between

maenadism and role-playing as forms of Dionysiac ecstasy? Would this

passage have been understood by the audience as a reflection of the nature

of the theater (169)?

Only by straining the texts does B. find in Dionysus the key to the political

in tragedy, to tragic geography, to dramatic irony, to the triggering of the

audience's emotions, or to peripety. He is looking for a previously unseen

nexus between Dionysus and tragedy. He accuses others (Nietzsche,

Vernant, Brelich, Goldhill) of "superimposing onto the plays criteria of

interpretation that are external to them" (220). Oddly, he makes use of the

ideas of these scholars (cf. especially S. Goldhill,JHS[1987] 75-76), and in

assuming that Dionysus was a god whose essence was ambivalence, he is

not immune to this charge himself.

Documents

Review A.F.H. Bierl, Dionysos Und Die Griechische Tragodie