A young god comes home to Thebes in disguise. The women of the city leave their looms for the mountain, and the king who jails his followers ends up spying on them dressed as a woman.
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Dionysus, son of Zeus and the Theban princess Semele, returns to the city where he was born, where his own aunts deny he is a god at all. He drives the women of Thebes out to Mount Cithaeron to dance and worship. The young king Pentheus sets out to crush the new rites, and the god leads him, step by step, up the mountain. The press starts at the opening, where Dionysus introduces himself beside his mother's tomb, still smoking from the thunderbolt that killed her. Nothing is readable here yet; support it and it will be.
Euripides wrote the Bacchae near the end of his life, probably at the court of King Archelaus in Macedonia, and died there in 406 BC. His son staged it in Athens the following year, and it won first prize. It is the only surviving Greek tragedy in which Dionysus, the god of the theatre, appears as a character.
The play is full of the god's gifts. The prophet Tiresias says Dionysus gave mortals wine, the one drug for grief, which lets the wretched sleep and forget their troubles. A herdsman reports women on the mountain who strike a rock and water springs out, scratch the ground and milk wells up, while honey drips from their ivy wands.
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