A review by owlette
The Bacchae of Euripides by C.K. Williams

5.0

I bought this edition for the introduction by Martha Nussbaum in which she wrote this memorable line,

"The dignity of the god is to smile; the dignity of these humans is to weep,"

which I first came across in [b:Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character|6069|Achilles in Vietnam Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character|Jonathan Shay|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440731180l/6069._SY75_.jpg|9416]. This line comes in Nussbaum's discussion of the final scene of the play where Agave picks up the disassembled body of her son, Pentheus, which she and the Bacchae had torn limb from limb under the trance of Dionysus. Like all Greek myths and stories, this is a story about a spited god who pays disproportionate retribution on the offending humans or, most commonly as in the case of The Bacchae, their offsprings. (Like, yes, Agave was not very nice to your mother, and Pentheus is a transphobe, but did you really have to do this to mortals that can't fight back, Dionysus?) Neither side--neither Dionysus nor Pentheus--appears heroic or right in the eyes of the modern reader, and I doubt either would have in the eyes of the contemporary Athenian audience, which is why Nussbaum's guide is all the more valuable. She she explains why the past scholarship's attempts to cast this play as a clash of the barbaric vs the polis, the spiritual vs the reason, have been dissatisfying, which affirms affirms the reader's discomfort and alienation from the gory crime-and-punishment revealed at the end of the play. Not everyone likes to have someone else's interpretation to color their reading experience, but if you read Euripides' Bacchae in any translation and felt a little lost and sad after reading it, I recommend Nussbaum's introduction. This short writing is one of her best works.