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In Bacchae the opponent of the Dionysiac thiasos is an autocrat.
Teiresias tries to persuade Pentheus to accept the new god by saying
‘you rejoice when a throng stands at the gates, and the polis magnifies
the name of Pentheus; he too (i.e. Dionysos), I think, takes pleasure
in being honoured’ (319–21). The ‘tyrant’ Pentheus has been treated
like a god, processionally escorted – like Dionysos – into the city. But
now it seems inevitable that Dionysos will usurp Pentheus’ central
position in the festival. An egalitarian function of the gods in Athenian
democracy, and especially of Dionysos, was, by providing a focus for
communal devotion, to deny it to any human individual.
However, Athenian democracy, having emerged from tyranny
at the end of the sixth century
BC
, was by the time of Bacchae again
fearful of a tyrannical coup, and was eventually conquered by
the Macedonian monarchy. And a generation after this conquest the
Athenians greeted the powerful Macedonian Demetrius Poliorke¯ te¯ sas
if he were a god (Chapter 4). As a focus for communal celebration,
Dionysos is in the Athenian democracy imagined as subversive of
autocracy, but for this very reason may in an actual autocracy be
appropriated by the autocrat.
In the prologue of Bacchae Dionysos claims to have introduced
his cult – and set people dancing – throughout Asia as far as Bactria,
and threatens Pentheus with military action (21, 52). He was in fact
not without military experience, having fought with the gods against
the giants. Subsequently, not long after the conquest of India by
Alexander the Great, Dionysos too was said (by the influential historian
Cleitarchus) to have conquered India, with the result that Alexander
could be imagined as having imitated Dionysos. In the great pro-
cession of king Ptolemy II Philadelphus in Alexandria, the triumphal
return of Dionysos from India was enacted in such a way as to
suggest not only his association with Alexander’s conquests but also
the association of both the divine and the human conqueror with the
Ptolemies. Dionysos’ triumph became a popular theme of literature
and visual art, and as a symbol of universal joy persisted into
nineteenth-century Germany (Chapter 10).
Although there is no good evidence that Alexander himself was
during his lifetime identified with Dionysos, many of the successors
to his empire – the monarchs of Egypt (the Ptolemies), Syria (the
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