Bacchae
About this ebook
Thebes has been rocked by the arrival of Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy. Drawn by the god’s power, the women of the city have rushed to worship him on the mountain, drinking and dancing with frenzied abandon.
Pentheus, the king of Thebes, is furious, denouncing this so-called “god” as a charlatan and an insurgent. But no mortal can deny a god, much less one as powerful and seductive as Dionysus, who will exact a terrible revenge on Pentheus, drawing the king to his own tragic destruction.
This stunning translation by award-winning poet Robin Robertson reinvigorates Euripides’ masterpiece. Updating it for contemporary readers, he brings the ancient verse to fervid, brutal life, revealing a work of art as devastating and relevant today as it was in the fifth century, BC.
What happens when a man who craves order confronts a god who embodies chaos?
- Order Versus Chaos: The rigid, arrogant King Pentheus is determined to enforce his law. But the seductive, androgynous god Dionysus has arrived to shatter Thebes’ foundations with ecstasy and abandon.
- Mortal Hubris: Ignoring the warnings of his elders, Pentheus denies the new god’s divinity, setting himself on a collision course with a power he cannot comprehend and a rage he cannot survive.
- Madness and Sanity: As the women of the city are driven to frenzied, ecstatic rites on the mountain, Dionysus uses Pentheus’s own repressed curiosity to lure him into a state of madness from which there is no return.
- Divine Punishment: Witness one of the most shocking conclusions in all of literature, a brutal and unforgettable revenge that serves as a timeless warning about the consequences of defying the gods.
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About the author
Robin Robertson is from the northeast coast of Scotland. He has published five collections of poetry and received a number of accolades, including the Petrarca-Preis, the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Forward Prize in each category. Apart from his translations of Euripides, he has also edited a collection of essays, Mortification: Writers' Stories of Their Public Shame, and, in 2006, he published The Deleted World, a selection of free English versions of poems by the Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer.
Daniel Mendelsohn a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, is the author of the international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. He teaches at Bard College.
