Alexandra Seiler, University of Vermont
In the absence of stage directions, Athenian tragedy has deictic pronouns – ὃδε, οὗτος, and ἐκεῖνος. These words serve similar functions, usually indicating to the actors and the audience where a person or object is located. The proximal pronoun ὅδε normally points to objects in the speaker’s immediate vicinity, or sometimes even to the speaker themself; ἐκεῖνος, in contrast, usually refers to something or someone offstage, or otherwise distant from the events of the drama.
In Euripides’ Bacchae, however, forms of ὃδε often refer to Dionysus and Dionysiac ritual, even when neither is present on the stage. Sometimes these are references to the rites or equipment of the cult, such as at 482 when Dionysus states, πᾶς ἀναχορεύει βαρβάρων τάδ’ ὄργια, “all of the barbarians are celebrating these here rites;” and sometimes they point to the god himself, such as when the messenger urges Pentheus at 769-70, τὸν δαίμον᾽ οὖν τόνδ᾽…/ δέχου πόλει, “accept this here god into the city.”
Though it appears with startling frequency in the Bacchae, this use of the pronoun is not unheard-of in tragedy – Taplin 1997 states that “there are many places where a gesture of immediacy elicits a ὃδε even though the person is neither present nor just inside the skene,” and Lloyd-Jones 1965 notes that when this occurs, the pronoun is “applied to an absent person who is present to the speaker’s thoughts.” Existing research into deixis in tragedy (such as Paléologou 2005) has particularly emphasized the role of endophoric deixis, which points at something within a text, through either backward reference (anaphora) or forward reference (cataphora, a term coined by theorist Karl Bühler). This kind of examination can sometimes – but not always – shed light upon this pattern of reference with ὅδε.
But the text of a drama is never only a text – it’s also an event, which is represented and created by the text, simultaneously physical and unreal. In order to understand the unusual use of ὅδε in the Bacchae, then, I argue that we must consider the performance context of tragic theater, at a religious festival dedicated to the very god around whom the play revolves. Dionysus was perceived as present to this festival in a concrete, as well as numinous, sense; performances took place in a sacred space, at the theater attached to the Temple of Dionysus, and the festival began with a statue of the god being carried into Athens from its usual home at Eleutherai; after this procession, it remained at the temple for the duration of the festival. (Pickard-Cambridge 1946; Guettel Cole 1993) Bacchae’s references to the god and his cult with ὃδε thus become a metatheatrical acknowledgement of the play’s performance context and physical space, and a nod to the deity’s presence at the festival, both spiritual and physical.