Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
My course on Mythology finishes week 8 Sunday with a quiz on material about Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and Euripides’ The Bacchae. Over Thanksgiving week we have another 250 word essay due, the final writing assignment. I’ve chosen to answer this question: “In tragedies, the worlds of the divine and the human often come into direct contact, but in different ways in each tragedy. Choose one tragedy and analyze how it imagines the relationship between humans and the divine.” Just weeks 9 and 10 to go.
(Caravaggio, 1595, Uffizi)
Don’t know how many of the 50,000 world wide students have stuck it out, but this is a wonderful way to refresh and deepen knowledge about Roman and Greek mythology. It has also increased my analytical skills for use in approaching any myth, which includes, of course, the Metamorphoses.
In the Bacchae Sophocles approaches the story of the doubter Pentheus, king of Thebes, from the perspective of Dionysus, a god challenged. The same incident occurs in Book 3 of the Metamorphoses and I translated it. My main goal in all this work in the Latin is to embed the stories and the characters firmly in my mind.
While reading The Bacchae, a sudden burst of insight. Here’s the insight: The focus of this myth is how a god demonstrates his/her divinity when challenged. The story of the golden calf in Genesis is a similar story. So is the story of Adam and Eve. Even Job.
This is, if you consider it, an ur-story since at some point every god or goddess had to establish their bona fides to persons who would worship them and so people would worship them. We tend to come at religious life after this delicate and not at all obvious in its outcome encounter has already happened. In the Bacchae and the story of Pentheus in Ovid Pentheus gets the ultimate penalty for challenging Bacchus. He dies, his kingdom perishes and his people go into exile. Powerful demonstration of divinity on the part of Dionysus.
