Bacchae key quotes

• “There where the throng of women wait, far from their shuttles and looms, stung to madness by Dionysus”


  Chorus of maenads
• “You are mad, agonisingly mad”


  Tiresias to Pentheus
• "You do not know what your life is, nor what you are doing, nor who you are"


  Dionysus to Pentheus
• "though only a man, he dared to fight against a god"


  Dionysus about Pentheus
• "women overcoming men!"


  Messenger about maenads
• "most terrible, and yet most gentle to mankind"


  Dionysus about himself
• "she wins tears as her prize"


  Messenger about Agave
• "you punish too severely!"


  Cadmus to Dionysus
• "The city must learn its lesson well, even against its will, for not celebrating my rites; and I must vindicate my mother Semele"

  Dionysus; prologue
• "I myself will go to the ravines of Cithaeron where my bacchants wait, and I will set them dancing!"

  Dionysus; prologue
• "I rush on in my joyful labours of Bromios, work that does no weary me" 


  Chorus of maenads
• "Make yourselves holy with the staff of wildness! / At once, the whole land will dance - / It is Bromios who leads the holy bands!"


  Chorus of maenads
• "The joy of eating raw flesh"

  Chorus of maenads
• "The ground flows with milk, flows with wine, it flows with the nectar of bees"

  Chorus of maenads
• "Joyfully, then, like a foal with its grazing mother, the bacchant kicks up her flying feet and leaps!"

  Chorus of maenads
• "what we two old men agreed: to make ourselves a thyrsus each, put on fawnskins and garland our heads with ivy wreaths"

  Tiresias to Cadmus
• "Dionysus, who has appeared to mankind as a god, is the son of my daughter, and we must honour him as much as we are able"

  Cadmus to Tiresias
• "Where must we go to dance, to dance his steps and shake our grey heads?"

  Cadmus to Tiresias
• "I will not grow weary, night or day, striking the ground with my thyrsus; it is so sweet to forget that we are old!"

  Cadmus to Tiresias
• "I do not scorn the gods, as I am mortal myself"

  Cadmus to Tiresias
• "We do not hold intellectual debates on the gods"

  Tiresias to Cadmus
• "our women have abandoned their homes to take part in fake Bacchic revels, leaping around in the shadows of the mountains, dancing to honour this new god, Dionysus - whoever he is"

  Pentheus to Cadmus
• "one by one the women creep off [...] and serve the lusts of men"

  Pentheus to Cadmus
• "They claim to be maenads offering sacrifice, but they put Aphrodite before the Bacchic god"

  Pentheus to Cadmus
• "I will catch them in iron nets and put a stop to this obscene revelry"

  Pentheus to Cadmus
• "his blond hair smelling of perfume, his cheeks flushed, with the charms of Aphrodite in his eyes. Day and night he mingles with young girls, holding out to them his rites of ecstasy"

  Pentheus to Cadmus
• "I will put a stop to him pounding his thyrsus and tossing his hair - by cutting off his head from his body!"

  Pentheus to Cadmus
• "my mother's father - an utter laughing-stock, playing the the bacchant with the fennel staff! I am ashamed, grandfather, to see you so empty-headed at your age"

  Pentheus to Cadmus