Luigi Battezzato (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa)
Bonnie Honig presents a powerful new counternarrative of Euripides’ Bacchae, focusing on the Theban bacchants, and mobilizing as key concepts ‘heterotopia’ and ‘inoperativity’. This paper, by contrast, focuses on the narrative provided by the Asian bacchants of the chorus, only marginally present in Honig’s discussion. The chorus of migrant bacchants consciously offer their perspective on inoperativity, and create a series of heterotopias, materialising them onstage, via their song, and offstage, via their imagined future migrations. The chorus also explicitly de-humanise the king of Thebes, offering a “normative reason” (Alvarez, 2016), i.e. a reason that, in their eyes, makes regicide just.
The inoperativity of the Asian bacchants is double: not only are they migrants who abandon their poleis; they also encourage the women of other Asian and Greek cities to do the same (Eur. Ba. 13-21). In Thebes they also urge the bacchants to kill the king.
The songs describe a clear arc, stressing more and more the (negative) non-human aspect of the king, and the (positive) non-human aspect of the bacchants, and moving heterotopias from non-Greek (Asian: Phrygian, Lydian) to the heart of Greece (Delphi, Olympia, Thebes).
In the parodos, the song brings into the city the Dionysiac heterotopia (the ‘mountain’: 135-9, 165). The chorus evoke the presence of Asian (Phrygian, Lydian) places (140, 154) and ‘bring’ the god into Greece (86).
In the first stasimon, the migrant women imagine accessing some spaces in Greece (marginal Cyprus; Pieria and Olympus) as locations of erotic (Aphrodite, Pothos) and aesthetic (Muses, Charis) pleasure (402-16).
In the second stasimon, they imagine a Dionysiac heterotopia on the sacred sites at the heart of Greece: Delphi (559), Olympus, Pieria, and liminal Thrace (554-75). They claim that Thebes is ruled by a non-human leader (‘a mad monster, not a mortal man’: 542-3), a ‘Giant’ (544), which belongs to the margins, not the centre, of civilisation. The god-sanctioned migration shifts the ideological and cultic landscape of Greece.
In the third stasimon, they identify with non-human species (fawns) ( (Segal, 1997, pp. 78-124), (Thumiger, 2006)), ruling out completely the possibility of ‘operativity’ in the polis.
In the fourth stasimon, they legitimise regicide, claiming that the king is non-human (the son of beast or of an African monster: 998-90); his journey ‘to the mountain, to the mountain’ (986), a threat to the Dionysiac heterotopia, warrants death.
In the fifth stasimon, the migrant bacchants celebrate regicide (1153-5) and stress their ethnic distance but religious affiliation to the Theban bacchants. (1161-2). The chorus end their song with a statement that is usually read as bitterly ironical (e.g. (Dodds, 1960), (Seaford, 1996)), but that, from the point of view of the migrant bacchants, is in fact a celebration of the regicide and filicide: ‘it is a fine struggle to plunge one’s hand in the blood of a son so that it drips with it’ (1163-4). Only the migrant bacchants can consciously and willingly plot and celebrate the regicide.