Insanity In Euripides Bacchae

Euripides’ Bacchae is built on creating and exploring binary oppositions. A central opposition, sanity and madness, forces the reader to evaluate each character’s actions and motivations to judge them as sane or insane. By making these judgments, the readers assign different values to each character based on beliefs that they have acquired and cultivated since their early development and are affected by society and surroundings throughout their lives. For example, “good” values correlate with sanity while “bad” or “evil” acts are more inclined to be associated with madness than the opposite. The Bacchae messes with these innate perceptions by introducing to its readers characters that do not have strictly good or bad motivations, and thus do not perfectly align with our polar opposite connotations of sanity and insanity. The Bacchae are the strongest symbol of insanity in the play. They are classified as insane by their behavior and dress, both of which are central to the cult’s ecstatic worship of Dionysus. The women are clothed in the skins of wild animals and …show more content…
Dionysus is a much more complicated character than Pentheus for several reasons. While Pentheus is a leader and holds many legal and governmental powers, Dionysus’ powers are natural; he was simply born with them. Given this, there could certainly be jealousy underlying the feud between Pentheus and Dionysus. However, Dionysus appears mostly in the play disguised as a flush-faced, longhaired Lydian stranger. Although he is disguised as a mortal, his non-human powers are firmly felt throughout the play. The two sides of Dionysus exist simultaneously and this is exemplified in the following example: while the chorus hears the god command the earthquake, the foreigner remains inside the palace torturing