Euripides' BACCHAE Complete

Translated, with notes, by Th. Buckley.

Euripides Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Euripides in Print

58 pages - You are on Page 8

Chorus: Alas for his impiety! O host, do you not reverence the Gods! and
being son of Echion, do you disgrace your race and Cadmus, who sowed the
earth-born crop?

Tiresias: When any wise man takes a good occasion for his speech, it is not a
great task to speak well; but you have a rapid tongue, as if wise, but in
your words there is no wisdom; but a powerful man, when bold, and able to
speak, is a bad citizen if he has not sense. And this new God, whom you
ridicule, I am unable to express how great he will be in Greece. For, O
young man, two things are first among men; Ceres, the goddess, and she is
the earth, call her whichever name you will.[17] She nourishes mortals with
dry food; but he who is come as a match to her, the son of Semele, has
invented the liquid drink of the grape, and introduced it among mortals,
which delivers miserable mortals from grief,[18] when they are filled with
the stream of the vine; and gives sleep an oblivion of daily evils: nor is
there any other medicine for troubles. He who is a God is poured out in
libations to the Gods, that by his means men may have good things--and you
laugh at him, as to how he was sewn up in the thigh of Jove; I will teach
you that this is well--when Jove snatched him out of the lightning flame,
and bore him, a young infant, up to Olympus, Juno wished to cast him down
from heaven; but Jove had a counter contrivance, as being a God. Having
broken a part of the air which surrounds the earth, he placed in it, giving
him as a pledge, Bacchus, safe from Juno's enmity; and in time, mortals
say, that he was nourished in the thigh of Jove; changing his name, because
a God gave him formerly as a pledge to a Goddess, they having made
agreement.[19]

[17] Compare the opinion of Perseus in Cicero de N.D. i. 15, with Minutius Felix, xxi.

[18] Pseud-Orpheus Hymn. l. 6. παυσιπονον θνητοισι φανεις ακος.

[19] Dindorf truly says that this passage smacks rather of Proclus, than of Euripides, and I agree with him that its spuriousness is more than probable. Had Euripides designed an etymological quibble, he would probably have made some allusion to Merus, a mountain of India, where Bacchus is said to have been brought up. See Curtius, viii. 10. "Sita est sub radicibus montis, quem Meron incolae appellant. Inde Graeci mentiendi traxere licentiam, Jovis femine liberum patrem esse celatum." Cf. Eustath. on Dionys. Perieg. 1159. Lucian. Dial. Deor. ix. and Hermann on Orph. Hymn. lii. 3.

Previous Page / First / Next Page of Bacchae

Euripides Home Page ||| Elpenor's Free Greek Lessons
Aeschylus ||| Sophocles

Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/euripides/bacchae.asp?pg=8