Teatrul Clasic-Grecesc

“Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati
Faculty of Letters
Modern/Postmodern Remakes
of
Classical Greek Theatre
(A Practical Optional Course in English Literature

for 1st Year Students)
Course tutor:
Associate Professor Ligia Ghiţescu Pîrvu
Table of Contents
I. From Apollo and Dionysus to Apollonian and Dionysian 5

I.1. Apollo and Dionysus 5
I.2. Friederich Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy 20
I.3. Modern/Postmodern (Re)Interpretations. 24
II. Modern/Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre/Myth 35

II. 1. The Voyage of Dionysus towards Multiculturalism: from
Euripide’s Dionysus Xenos to Wole Soyinka’s Black Dionysus. 35
II. 2. The Apollonian and Dionysian Clash of Wills and Values
in Peter Shaffer’s Equus and The Gift of the Gorgon. 38
II. 3. The Symbiotic Apollonian-Dionysian Brothers and the Clash of
Cultural Values in Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God Brown and
Sam Shepard’s True West 45
II. 4. Medea’s Journey towards Postmodernism- the Remake
of the Theatrical Myth 48
II. 5. Home as Hades: Patterns of Exile, Self-exile and
Self-entrapment in Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending. 51
Bibliography and Exam Requirements 55
Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 3

I. From Apollo and Dionysus to Apollonian and Dionysian
I. From Apollo and Dionysus to Apollonian and

Dionysian
I.1. Apollo and Dionysus
Dionysus
The origin of the name ‘Dionysus’ is uncertain; it may be a compound noun
whose meaning is ‘the flow of light’ or it may mean ‘the son of Zeus’. The
name di-wo-nu-so-jo appeared in a Mycenian inscription, a fact which points
to the archaic, pre-Greek origin of the name of the god, an opinion shared by
both M. Eliade and W.F. Otto. The women of Elis invoked Dionysus by the
name Axié Tauré (Robert: 109) which means the ‘mighty bull’, the animal
worshipped by the Minoans.
Dionysus was the god of mystical ecstasy and of unleashed frenzy, the god
of wine, the god of paradox and excess, the god who died only to be reborn.
In the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, he is described as “a young man, his
lovely blue hair streams down around him, and over his strong shoulders he
wears a dark robe” (Wordsworth Dictionary: 74). He was often represented
with a thyrsus in his hand, in a chariot drawn by panthers and decorated with
ivy and vine or escorted by his followers, the maenads and the satyrs.
Dionysus Trigonos - Dionysus the Thrice-born God

This enigmatic god has a human mother and a divine father and
therefore he is a native of two realms. The myth of Dionysus’s birth is as
amazing and miraculous as that of Athena’s birth from the head of her father,
Zeus. The first who spoke of Dionysus as the thrice-born god was an
Epicurean, Philodemos, who was Cicero’s contemporary (Eliade: 364).
Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele, the daughter of Cadmus
and Harmonia.
The legend says that Hera contrived a plan for Semele’s destruction.
She assumed the form of Semele’s aged nurse, Beroe, and convinced her to
ask Zeus to come to her arrayed arrayed in all his splendour, but when Zeus
revealed himself in all his glory, Semele was consumed to ashes as her
mortal frame could not endure his immortal radiance. Zeus tore the child
Dionysus from her womb and kept him inside his thigh until it was due time
for him to be born. Therefore he is pyrigenês, the son cast out among his
enemies, motherless.
Dionysus was then given in charge to the Nysaean nymphs who were
rewarded by Zeus by being placed, as the Hyades, among the stars. Then
Dionysus was brought up by Athamus, king of Thebes and his wife Ino who
was Semele’s sister. The other sisters were Agave and Autonoe, the mothers
of Pentheus and Actaeon, whose terrible fate – both were torn apart like wild
beasts – is associated with the myth of Dionysus. Hera’s hatred accrued and
the boy had to be dressed in women’s clothes to divert her attention, but
Hera was not deceived and so she asked the Titans to kill Dionysus. The
Titans enticed the child Dionysus with toys – fir cones, golden fruit, balls of
wool, a mirror – then they took him away and tore him to pieces which they
threw into a boiling cauldron. Zeus consumed the Titans with lightning and he
gave the child’s heart and limbs to Apollo, who buried them on Parnassus.
The goddess Rhea reassembled the scattered pieces and brought Dionysus
back to life.
The Conquest of Divinity

In The Iliad, Homer mentions Dionysus only in the episode dedicated
to Lycurgus, a king of the Edonians of Thrace, who was against Dionysus’s
cult and who chased Dionysus’s maenads/nurses so ruthlessly that the god
himself had to dive into the sea where he was rescued by silver-footed
Thetis. Dionysus punished Lycurgus by driving him mad and by making his
entire country barren.
This episode points to one of the characteristic aspects of Dionysus’s fate,
persecution, and many scholars, Willamovitz and Rohde included, interpreted
Dionysus’s persecution as the opposition by the mainstream religion to the
cult of this newcomer.
The legend says that Hera struck Dionysus with madness and drove him
forth a wanderer through Egypt, Syria, Asia and Phrygia. In Phrygia he was
received by Cybele who taught him her religious rites and the cultivation of
the vine. Dionysus joined in her mystical frenzies and “through her, his
madness itself became a force over which he gained mastery” (Dictionary of
Mythology: 75).
On the Island of Dia, Dionysus is taken on board of a Tyrrhenian pirate ship.
He asks the pirates to take him to Naxos but, blinded by the lust of gain and
not knowing who he is they disobey his command. Therefore “all at once –
strange as it may seem, it is true – the vessel stopped in the mid-sea, as fast
as if it was fixed on the ground… Ivy twined round the oars… and clung to
the sails, with heavy clusters of berries. A vine laden with grapes, run up the
mast and along the sides of the vessel. The sound of flutes was heard and
the odour of fragrant wine spread all around. The god himself had a chaplet
of vine leaves, and bore in his hand a spear wreathed with ivy. Tigers
crouched at his feet, and forms of lynxes and spotted panthers played around
him. The men were seized with terror or madness” (Bulfinch: 202).
The pirates threw themselves overboard and were turned into dolphins, only
Acetes of Macedonia who recognized the god was spared and he
accompanied Dionysus to Naxos.
When Dionysus arrived in Thebes, king Pentheus, who refused to
acknowledge the god and who thought that his sacred rites were empty
mockeries, forbade the god’s rites to be performed. But the people of
Thebes, especially the women, rushed to celebrate the new rites and
followed Dionysus and the Bacchantes to the mountain Cithaeron where they
celebrated the god in orgiastic rituals. The god was captured by Pentheus
and thrown into prison but he eventually escaped and his vengeance was
terrible.
King Pentheus, angered by the shrill cries and the sound of the bronze
cymbals and of the pipes went himself to the mountain. There in her delirium,
his own mother, Agave, who thought he was a huge boar, tore him to pieces
with her bare hands. This episode is the subject of Euripide’s tragedy, The
Bacchae, in which the protagonist is Dionysus himself, a novelty in the Greek
drama of the time; the play is also one of the most important documents
about the cult of Dionysus and an illustration of the motif of resistance,
persecution, and triumph associated with Dionysus.
The legend of the daughters of Minyas also reveals the darker,
violent side of the god. When the priest of Dionysus summoned the women,
young and old, to put aside their looms and other domestic tasks and join the
6 Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre
festival, the women obeyed and went to hail Dionysus by his different names.
Only the daughters of Minyas remained indoors and continued to spin the
wool, thus scorning the god and dishonouring his festival. But while they
were working and telling stories, the sound of flutes and cymbals filled the
room, the The women were seized by terror and madness and this madness
made them develop a violent lust for human flesh; they cast lots on their sons
and one of them was torn into pieces and eaten. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
this gruesome story is not told: the three threads of wool became wine
tendrils and ghosts of wild beasts started howling around. daughters are just
changed into bats for having offended the god.
The Epicleses
Dionysus is a god of paradox and duality that are manifest in the
antitheses of ecstasy and horror, vitality and destruction, joy and madness,
sensuality and cruelty. He is the god who is born of the joining of divinity and
humanity, and he symbolizes both the frenzy of ever changing and self-
renewing life and the violence of death. Dionysus comes from the brightness
of the sky and the moisture of the earth and, as Walter Pater so poetically
explained in his Study of Dionysus, the god was born of fire and dew,
“thinking of Dionysus, then, as fire-born, the Greeks apprehend and embody
the sentiment, the poetry, of all tender things which grow out of a hard soil, or
in any sense blossom before the leaf… and his second birth is of the dew…
protected by the influence of the cooling cloud, the lower part of his father,
the sky, his second mother being, in some versions of the legend, Hyé – the
Dew” (Pater: 7-8).
Walter Otto associated Dionysus with water and moisture as well,
water being the element in which the primal mysteries of all life dwell. Like
Dionysus himself, water possesses a dual nature: a vital side and a
dangerous one.
To escape from his enemies Dionysus leaps into the sea and it is by
water that he comes to reveal his divinity in Thebes and Athens. He is first of
all known as the god of the vine and of the wine, which has within it the
power to comfort and to bring joy but also the power of madness and
destruction.
Dionysus is both life and death, the god who vanishes and reappears,
the god who dies and who is born again. A god of fertility, of life in all its
contradictions, blasting and blessing at once, Dionysus is also the Lord of the
Souls, the great hunter and the bestial deity who feeds on raw flesh; he is “a
Chtonian god, and, like all the children of the earth, has an element of
sadness; like Hades himself he is hollow and devouring, an eater of man’s
flesh” (Pater: 15). The many names by which he is known point to the
multiplicity of his forms and functions.
Dionysus Liknites is the divine child in the cradle who has just been
born, and who is surrounded by the nymphs of Nysa, his foster mothers or
his “nurses”, trophoi, who take care of him in a way which is partly maternal,
partly ecstatic. This legend became the subject of Aeschylus’s play,
Dionysus’s Nurses, of which only some fragments have remained. ‘The one
in the cradle’ is summoned to appear by women in Athens at the festival of
the Lenaea held in January which got its name from the Lenai, a chorus of
frenzied women who were followers of Dionysus. At the Anthesteria,
Dionysus’s most celebrated rituals, fourteen Athenian women, called the
gerarai, conjured up the god with the name Iakhos.
Dionysus Iakhos

The name Iakhos means ‘the giver of riches’ and this is how the
chorus of Sophocle’s Antigone invokes Dionysus: “Oh, thou leader of the
choral dance of the fire-breathing stars, lord of the songs of night, child
sprung from Zeus, appear, sovereign, with the women who attend thee, the
thyiai, who dance the night through ecstasy for thee, their king Iakhos!” (Otto:
82).
Dionysus Charidotes
Dionysus Charidotes is ‘the joy giver’, the god of ecstasy and terror, of
wildness and madness, the god born of a mortal mother and of an immortal
father, who is welcomed as the god of intoxicated delight, the bringer of joy.
But death encroaches upon the realm of the god who is extolled as ’the joyful
one’, and the ’giver of riches’ (Otto: 103).
Dionysus Zagreus
Dionysus Zagreus appears for the first time in an epic poem of the
th
Theban cycle Alcmeonis in the 6 century B.C.(Eliade: 364).
Dionysus, the thrice-born is himself a suffering god who dies by being
dismembered by his terrible enemies, the Titans. The most celebrated myth
of his destruction has him suffer as Zagreus, the ’great hunter’ who is himself
hunted and torn to pieces.
The central myth of the Orphics is the sacrificial murder committed by
the Titans. “… covered with gypsum and masked in plaster, the Titans
captivate a child, the young Dionysus, by disclosing to him beguiling objects
– a top, a rhombus, some articulated dolls, knuckle-bones, a mirror. And
while Dionysus contemplates his own image caught in the shiny metal, the
Titans strike him” (Detienne: 69). In the fearful struggle that follows, the
divine child assumes the shapes of the most dangerous of the animals, finally
becoming a bull, who is dismembered, boiled and roasted, with only the
heart, the principle of life, arkhé, being left.
“If the heart is the only part of Dionysus that escapes destruction, that
is because the preservation of this organ, the most vital in every animate
being, allows the god to be reborn even after he has been eaten. To repeat
the traditional discourse referred to by Aristotle: the heart is only the last
because it is first of all the first" (Detienne: 87).
th
In the 6 century B.C., Onomatocrit, an Athenian, was the first to
write a poem about Dionysus and the Titans (Eliade: 364). Eliade points out
the similarity between the legend of the Titans who cover their faces with
lime, titānos in Greek, and the mysteries of Sabazios, a Thracian god, the
counterpart of Dionysus; the teletai had the novices cover their faces with
lime or some other powder and then suffer a symbolical, ritualistic death. In
many primitive cults, the boiling or the burning gave man immortality and
ever-lasting youth, therefore the Titans may be the actants who confer
divinity and immortality to the child Dionysus. Like Dionysus, Orpheus
suffered precisely the same fate at the hands of the maenads. This phase of
the worship of Dionysus had its special development in the Orphic literature
and mysteries. The Orphics were in Walter Pater’s words “a picturesque
addition, also, to the extension of Greek life, with their white dresses, their
dirges, their fastings and ecstasies – and the central object of their worship
comes before us as a tortured, persecuted, slain god – the suffering
Dionysus – of whose legend they have their own special and esoteric
version” (Pater: 17).
No other god or goddess in Greek mythology offers such a bewildering
and frightening duality in his or her nature. “He, the nurturer and the god of

rapture; he, the god who is forever praised as the giver of wine which
removes all sorrow and care; he, the deliverer and healer…”, “the delight of
mortals”, “the god of many joys”, “the dancer and ecstatic lover, the bestower
of riches, the benefactor - this god who is the most delightful of all the gods is
at the same time the most frightful. No single Greek god even approaches
Dionysus in the horror of his epithets, which bear witness to a savagery that
is absolutely without mercy” (Otto: 113).
Dionysus Omadios, the bestial deity who feeds on raw flesh, or
Dionysus Omestes, the blood-thirsty render of men, Dionysus Morychos,
the dark one, the Lord of the Souls, Dionysus Melanaigos, the mad one,
Dionysus Bromios, the roarer, the loud shouter, Dionysus Lyaios, the
liberator, are names by which the god is also known.
Dionysus Bromios is the god of pandemonium and wildness. The
sound of flutes, drums, pipes and cymbals announce Dionysus and
accompany him. His followers are the frenzied maenads carrying the thyrsi,
also known as the Lenai, the Bacchae, the Thyads or the Bassarai. The well-
ordered routine of the world is shattered by their coming and they are greeted
with wild shouts of joy.
The moment the god enters the world, the ecstasy begins, the earth
flows with milk and wine, water gushes forth and grape vines bloom and
ripen.
The maenads, or the divine nurses, who in the beginning of the
oribasia (revel and rout), dance and suckle young animals, are seized with
madness and murdering lust and become bloodthirsty huntresses who tear to
pieces the young animals they nourished. Their divine leader, Dionysus is
himself a hunter, a render of men, Dionysus Omestes, the blood-thirsty one,
the eater of raw flesh.
Hunting is killing, often by dismemberment, and it is followed by the
devouring of raw flesh. “Dressed in the holy deer-skin, he hunts the blood of
dying goats with a ravenous lust for raw flesh. This is the song of the
Euripidean chorus of Dionysus” (Otto: 109). As a hunter, Dionysus may be
connected to the dangers and hardships of hunting during which the hunter
becomes akin to the wild beasts, to the wolf, for example, which by the name
of Lycurgus is one of Dionysus’s enemies.
Dionysus’s ravaging is as disturbing as the Titans’ violence, even
more, since his madness is catching; in the wild hunt the maenads behave
like ferocious beasts, Agave hunts down and rends her own son, Pentheus,
the daughters of Minyas rip to pieces one of their own children.
It is known that at Miletus, in the third century BC, the priestess of
Dionysus performed on behalf of the city a ritual gesture called ōmophágion
embāllein, that is, she placed a mouthful of raw meat in a basket as a
remainder of the great hunts for fresh flesh.
On the Island of Chios, the women seized with the god’s madness
used to tear a man to pieces in the honour of Dionysus Omādios; the
omophagic ritual of tearing to pieces the victim in the Dionysian cult is closely
related to the slaughter of Dionysus himself. Walter Pater mentions in his
study that Plutarch related how, before the battle of Salamis, with the assent
of Themistocles, three Persian captive youth were offered to Dionysus the
Devourer (Pater: 16).
The name Dionysus Lyaios or Lusios, that is, the ’Liberator’, refers to
the miraculous power which sets free the riches of the earth. Dionysus also
makes chains burst asunder and thus frees the maenads imprisoned by
Pentheus. Dodds remarks that as ‘the Liberator’, Dionysus enabled the

Greeks for a short time to stop being themselves and hereby set them free
and that was "the main secret of his appeal to the Archaic age : not only
because life in that age was often a thing to escape from, but more
specifically because her individual, as the modern world knows him, began in
that age to emerge from the first time from the ols solidarity if the family and
found the unfamiliar burden of individual responsibility hard to bear, Dionysus
could lift it from him" (Dodds : 76-77). His power of liberation also refers to
the fact that Dionysus went to the world of the dead and brought his mother
back. Semele – Thyone was worshipped in the festivals of Dionysus,
especially as the resurrected one since she is freed from the realm of the
dead by her son and she eventually gains immortality. The god is also known
as Dionysus Morychos, i.e., the dark one or the nocturnal one and
mysterious dedications called him the Lord of the Souls. Heraclitus said that
“Hades and Dionysus for whom they go mad and rage, are one and the
same” (Otto: 116).
Erwin Rhode in his famous work ‘Psyche’ maintains that the Dionysian
religion was connected to the cult of the dead as well, a theory which is
supported by the fact that the great festivals in Dionysus’s honour, the
Anthesteria and the Agrionia celebrated the dead and their return from the
underworld.
Thus Dionysus belongs to the realm of dying and he himself must die
only to be reborn; he is both life and death and his cult springs from the
unfathomable depths where life and death are intertwined.
Sabazios - Zagreus, the chtonic Dionysus, is called the son of Hades
by Aeschylus; Callimachus referred to Dionysus as the son of Zeus and
Persephone; he is the one who wanders in the night, the nocturnal one, who
had to be awakened, restored, sought for summoned forth into the light from
the abyss of eternal night.
“The god, with his multiplicity of forms, the lord and first-born child of
life and death is born of Semele as well as of Persephone, and entered
Hades as well as Olympus” (Otto: 196).
Ancient sources place Dionysus’s grave in Delphi near Apollo’s, and
Plutarch tells of a secret sacrifice made by the Hosioi in the temple of Apollo
“at the very same time when the thyiads were awakening Liknites, the infant
Dionysus in the cradle” (Otto: 190). Plutarch also informs us that “the Paean
of Apollo became silent in Delphi with the beginning of winter, and the
dithyramb was sung for Dionysus for three months” (Otto: 194).
Dionysus’s festivals in Athens were the Dionysia te kat’ agrous
(Piatkowski: 16), a rustic festival celebrated in December which included the
archaic phalophoria and pageants with masks and animals, the Lenai in
January, the Anthesteria in February – March and the Great Dionysia in
March – April. The most important of all was the Anthesteria which lasted for
three days; the first day was called Pythoigía, i.e., the opening of the pithoi –
the wine barrels, the second day was called Choes, the jugs, during which a
drinking contest was held, and the last day, Chytrái, was dedicated to the
spirits of the dead called the Kéres. The Chytrái were the cups in which the
participants prepared a sort of porridge made of plants and seeds which was
then offered to the Kéres who were thought to govern the fertility of the soil,
and “being Greeks, with quick and mobile sympathies, deisidaimones,
“superstitious” or rather “susceptible of religious impressions”, some among
them, remembering those departed since last year add yet a little more, and
a little wine and water for the dead also; brooding how the sense of these
things might pass below the roots, to spirits hungry and thirsty, perhaps, in
their shadowy homes” (Pater: 6)..
However, one must always remember that “Dionysus, son of Zeus and
a mortal woman, Semele, was born of the earth and yet is always striving for
the sky. Through Dionysus… men might be restored, not by escaping their
nature but by embracing it, not by expiating their guilt but by exercising it
constructively” (A Reading of the Oresteia: 17-18).
Apollo
For the Greeks Apollo was, first of all, the god of the sun and of the
light, Apollo Phoibus, that is, the pure, the brightest one; this is how Homer
and the post-Homerians viewed him – the symbol of the sublime, of victory
and of brightness. Furthermore, Apollo and his twin sister, Artemis, are the
only gods whom Homer honoured with the attribute ‘agne’ which means
‘pure, holy’.
However, the etymology of the name ‘Apollo’ is also uncertain; the
name may be a derivation of the Indo-European apel which means ‘to be
strong’ or of the Hitite Appulunas, derived in turn from abullu, ‘gate’, and
which could explain the Greek name thyraios, from tyra, gate, given to
Apollo sometimes. The Thesalian dialect calls the god aploun which means
‘simple’.
There are at least two paradoxical aspects concerning Apollo’s nature; the
first refers to the fact that the god who perfectly embodies the Greek ideal of
perfection, both physically and intellectually, has a name of uncertain origin
and the second points to Apollo’s best known exploits which conspicuously
do not show those virtues that were to be known later as Apollonian –
serenity, lucidity, respect for the divine laws as well as love for order and
harmony. However, the god’s weaknesses such as envy, thirst for revenge
and even hatred will gradually lose their anthropomorphic character and
Apollo will illustrate best the infinite distance between mortals and immortals.
In Istoria credinţelor religioase Mircea Eliade explains that the brutality and
agressivity of the first records about Apollo may reflect the history of the
penetration of Apollo’s cult in Greece, a cult, which eventually replaced the
worship of older deities such as Ptoos in Beotia, Ismenios in Thebes,
Python in Delphi. Eliade upholds the theory of Apollo’s Asian origin since his
most important temples were first located in Asia: Patara in Lycia, Didymos in
Caria and Claros in Ionia where Apollo was worshipped as Apollo Clarios.
Apollo is sometimes called Lykeios or, as Homer says, Lykegēnes, a name
which, in some scholars’ opinions, Fernand Robert included, means born in
Lycia, the ’Lycian’, but other opinions (cf. Bonnard: 166) are that the name
means ’the slayer of wolves’, and therefore points to the fact that Apollo is
the protector of the herds, the divine shepherd.
In Greek mythology, literature and art Apollo was represented as dazzling,
handsome, strong, a god of ever-renewed youth, the archetype of virile
beauty and at the same time of masculine qualities, the protector of the
kouroi, that is, ’the young men’. He was called Chrysocomes – ’of the
golden locks’ and Xantus, ’the fair’ and the legend says that his long curls
had never been cut; a traditional rite asked that young men made an offering
of the hair they had cut for the first time as a symbol of their entrance into
manhood. As the god of manhood and paternity, Apollo was called Apollo
Patroios.
Apollo the Olympian was the son of Zeus and of Leto, the daughter of the
Titan Coeus and of Phoebe. The legend says that the time came for Leto to
give birth to her twins, by Hera’s command, no piece of land allowed her to

settle. In the end, a small, barren, floating island, Asteria, heard Leto’s
prayers, took pity on her and granted her a resting place. There Leto gave
birth to the children Artemis and Apollo, both equally beautiful and proud,
both powerful archers, both characterized by the same mysterious aloofness
and inaccessibility.
The birth of the Delian god is described in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and
in Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos (apud Dumézil: 22-23 and Dictionary of
Mythology: 46). Leto begs the island to let her give birth to her children and
she promises that her son, Apollo, will raise on its barren soil a great shrine
which will become a famous oracle. The island fears that the god will not
keep his mother’s promise once he sees the bareness of the island but it
finally agrees.
Immediately after Apollo is born, he asks for his lyre and for his bow, he
acknowledges his powers of prophecy and divination and he covers the
island in gold; from now on Delos will be known as ’the shining one’, ’the
visible star of the dark earth’, and it will become a prosperous land.
The essence of Apollo’s divinity is characterized by ’distance’; he is born
on a far-away island in the middle of the sea of Greece and then he is taken
by the sacred swans to the fabulous land of the Hyperboreans, generally
supposed to lie in the extreme northern parts of the world, from hyper, i.e.,
’beyond’ and Boreas, i.e., ’the North Wind’, a land of perpetual spring and of
everlasting youth and health.
Apollo sends his arrows from the distance and he masters from the distance;
this ’distancing’ effect implies his detachment from proximity, that is, from
immediate reality.
The Epicleses
The first attributes of the god, the lyre, the bow, the art of divination and the
gold, point to Apollo’s various roles within the framework of pre-Homeric and
Homeric mythology. The gold, which initially links Apollo to the sun (his
arrows also symbolize the sun’s rays) will later be transferred to another
function, that of healing.
The epicleses, i.e., the names given to the god Apollo are closely related to
his functions or roles, therefore he is known as Apollo Pythian, Apollo
Delphic, Apollo the Archer God, Apollo Alexicacos or Apotropaios,
Apollo Musagetas, Apollo Soter – ’the saviour’, Boedromios - ’who helps
when called’, Arhegetes – ’the guide’.
Apollo Saurohtonos / Apollo Pythian is the dragon-slayer who delivered
the island of Delphi from the ravages of the Python, a chtonic deity who was
also the guardian of the oracle. After killing the serpent, Apollo becomes
Apollo Delphic, i.e., ’the seer’; he consecrates the shrine at Delphi with
Pythia his priestess and deliverer of oracles and then ”in case the passage of
time should blot out the memory of his glorious deed, the god establishes
sacred games which he called Pythian after the serpent he had vanquished”
(Ovid: 41). In Religia greaca Fernand Robert says that Plutarch in Aítia
hellenica mentions the Septérion, a celebration of Apollo which took place
every three years and which re-enacted the killing of the Python; a young
man, an amphithalés, that is, a man whose parents were still alive and
therefore had not been touched by impurity (death), played the role of Apollo
(Robert: 48).
Apollo, the supreme god of prophetic utterance had shrines at Argos, at
Didyna and at Claros as well, but the most sacred and the most frequented
was the one at Delphi, ’the omphalos’, i.e., ’the navel’, the spiritual centre of
all Greece. Here the voice of the divinity gave solace, hope or spiritual
guidance to countless suppliants, Persian, Egyptian and Greek alike since
the oracle was not confined to national or ethnic frontiers and the voice of
Apollo was universal. Delphi was an oracular site long before Apollo’s arrival.
Whatever the etymology of the place may be, the Greeks linked the name to
the word ’delphys’ which means ’matrix’, but it was better known as the
Omphalos; according to the legend, it was the place where Zeus’s two
eagles met again after having been set free at the two opposite ends of the
world.
His earthly counterpart, the priestess Pythia, was seated on a tripod and she
inhaled the hypnotic fumes which made her go into a trance; in this frenzied
state she spoke in panting gasps and broken sentences delivering the
prophecy of the god in ambivalent words. Then an attendant priest
interpreted Pythia’s oracles for the supplicants, offering a meaningful
sequence which nevertheless had cryptic undertones. As a god of prophecy
Apollo also reigns over the world of dreams, premonitions and appearances,
and he is sometimes called Loxias, i.e., ’the obscure’.
Pythia was inspired by Apollo but her pythic delirium was different from the
mad possessions of the Dionysian type. Her enthousiasmos was the result of
Apollo’s presence which filled Pythia’s visions with premonitions of the future.
Apollo’s enthousiasmos did not imply the communion with the god as in the
Dionysian rituals; goats were sacrificed at Delphi but no source tells of their
dismemberment or of omophagia.
Besides Pythia, there were the oneiros, the interpreters of dreams;
dreams were divided into: the symbolic dream, like a sort of riddle which
needed interpretation, the horama or vision, a pre-enactment of a future
event, the chrematismos or oracle, and the admonitio, a warning or advice
given by a priest, a parent or a god.
The temple at Delphi was highly ornamental and on the entrance walls
texts were inscribed. Apollo’s famous command Sophrosyne, i.e., ’know
thyself’ was carved on the pediment of the temple; metron ariston, ’the right
measure’, and medèn agan, ’nothing in excess’, both represent Apollo’s
creed as a god of self-restraint whose supreme values are law and order. In
fact, Apollo acts and judges in the name of Zeus, the supreme authority;
Apollo himself stands for law and order and he represents ’the legal aspect of
religion’, which made Plato call him patrios exegetes (Eliade: 268).
In The Greeks and the Irrational, E.R.Dodds argues that the image of Apollo
as ”the vicar on earth of the heavenly Father”, helped the Greek society
overcome its terrors and fears, the dread of divine phthonos (the jealousy of
the gods) and of miasma (pollution, impurity). ”The crushing sense of human
ignorance and human insecurity... would have been unendurable without the
assurance which such an omniscient divine counsellor could give, the
assurance that behind the seeming chaos there was knowledge and
purpose... Out of his divine knowledge, Apollo would tell you what to do when
you felt anxious or frightened; he knew the rules of the complicated game
that the gods play with humanity; he was the supreme Alexicacos, ’Averter
of Evil’ ” (Dodds: 75).
Apollo Hecatebolos, ’The Far Darting’ / Apollo Argirotoxos, ’With the
Silver Bow’.
Apollo is the Archer God whose symbol is the silver bow he always
carries with him. The arrows are deadly weapons which can either kill beasts
or inflict death upon the mortals who have defied the god. With all the
positive attributes, Apollo’s nature has also a darker, even terrifying side.

The legend of Niobe and of the murder of her seven sons and seven
daughters by the hands of Apollo and Artemis is well-known. Filled with
divine frenzy, Tiresias’s daughter Manto, who could foretell the future, rushed
through the streets of Thebes and urged the women to crown their heads
with laurel wreaths and give offerings to Leto and Leto’s children. The proud
queen Niobe, daughter of Tantalus, refused to pay homage to Leto, a
goddess whom the earth once denied a resting-place and who only gave
birth to twins. Driven by hybris, Niobe boasts about her many sons and
daughters thus fuelling the divine wrath. At Leto’s request Artemis and Apollo
punish Niobe and kill the sons first; maddened by grief Niobe ”stretched her
bruised arms to the sky, and moaned: ’Feast your heart, cruel Leto, on my
misery; have your fill of gloating over my grief... for I have died seven deaths
in the death of my sons... wretched though I am, I have still more children left
alive than you have, for all your happy fortune. Even after losing so many, I
still surpass you’. As she finished speaking a bowstring twanged...” (Ovid:
142).
Niobe’s daughters were killed one by one and Niobe, utterly bereft,
changed into a weeping stone.
Like his father, Zeus, Apollo often pursued with his attentions both
goddesses and mortals from Cyrene and Daphne - who, in order to escape
the god’s embrace asked her father to change her into a laurel tree, which
will become the sacred tree of Apollo - to Thalia and Marpessa; Apollo also
loved Hyacinthus whose death, caused accidentally by his discus during a
game, deeply affected the god who could not weep but who changed
Hyacinthus into a flower.
Suspecting his wife, Coronis, of infidelity, Apollo killed her with his
arrow; the god repented of the cruel punishment he had exacted and he
snatched his son, Asclepios, from his mother’s womb, saved him from the
flames and carried him to the cave of Chiron, the centaur. When his son was
killed by Zeus’ thunderbolt, Apollo massacred the Cyclops who had made it.
In the Iliad, it is Apollo who directs the hands of Paris and kills the
famous Greek hero Achilles. Later he also kills Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus at
Delphi where the latter was consulting the oracle. It seems that Delphi was
not only the place of oracles, a centre of spiritual and religious life, but also a
place of violence; ” ’the Delphic cutlass’ was the instrument of the famous
murders carried out because of Apollo’s promptings ... Aesop, the writer of
fables fell a victim of the Delphians” (Wordsworth Dictionary: 49).
Apollo was distant, proud and haughty and although he helped the
Trojans and the Argonauts, he despised ”that pathetic race which grows and
withers like the leaves of the trees” (Wordsworth Dictionary: 47). His dazzling
appearance inspired aidos and phóbos, i.e., awe and fear alike.
He was twice punished by Zeus for his defiance. Once he was
condemned to serve the king of Troy and because he was not well received
he sent a plague which devastated the country; a second time he was a
herdsman for Admetus, king of Therae who acknowledged the god and thus
he was rewarded with prosperity.
Apollo Alexicacos / Apollo Apotropaios / Apollo the Healer / Apollo

Medicus is the god of medicine who knew how to cure diseases and get rid
of evil, who mastered the purification rites, and who was invoked against
plagues; his gaze reached everywhere, nothing escaped his godly insight
and he was omniscient.
There were many other seers and healers who got their gifts from
Apollo. One of Apollo’s emissaries was Aristeas who was credited with the
powers of trance and bilocation and whom tradition brought into contact with
Pythagoras; another one was Abaris, sent by the God from the land of the
Hyperboreans to Greece; he was carrying a golden arrow as a symbol of his
Apollinic mission, and he wandered from place to place curing diseases and
foretelling earthquakes and other natural calamities, he ”banished
pestilences, predicted earthquakes, composed religious poems and taught
the worship of his northern god, whom the Greeks called the Hyperborean
Apollo ” (Dodds: 141).
In Roman antiquity the cult of Apollo penetrated and established itself
following a serious epidemic and Apollo was mainly worshipped as Apollo
Medicus, but his other functions were not neglected. In Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, Apollo addresses Daphne in a few words which synthesize
his divine essence and his powers: ”I am the son of Jupiter. By my skill, the
past, the present and the future are revealed; thanks to me, the lyre strings
thrill with music. My arrow is sure. The art of medicine is my invention and
men the world over give me the name of healer” (Ovid: 43).
Apollo also conducted the purification rites and Fernand Robert
mentions the fact that in the 5th century BC no birth or death were allowed on
Delos since they were considered enagés, impure, or ágos, that is,
containing impurity; if it happened, a ritual of purification was performed in
the name of Apollo.
Apollo Musagetas, ”The Master of the Muses” / The God of Music

For the Pithagoreans Apollo symbolized harmony in its two aspects: the
harmony of the musical notes and the harmony of the movements of the
spheres; the former can be expressed by the mathematical combinations of
the tetraktys, i.e., the first four numbers and the latter is defined by the same
laws in mathematics and in music, each celestial body carrying a siren who
sings one single note and the union of all these notes makes what is called
the music of the spheres. The disciples of Pythagoras celebrated the Muses
as the keepers of the knowledge of harmony and the principles of the
universe.
According to some earlier writings, the Muses, the daughters of Zeus
and Mnemosyne, were the goddesses of song but later they became the
divinities presiding over poetry, sciences and art as well. They were first
honoured among the Thracians from Pieria, situated around Olympus and
therefore the Muses were also called Pierides.
Initially there were only three Muses but afterwards their number
increased to nine: Clio, the muse of history, Euterpe, the muse of lyric poetry,
Thalia, the muse of comedy and of idyllic poetry, Melpomene, the muse of
tragedy, Terpshichore, the muse of coral dance and song, Erato, the muse of
erotic poetry and mime, Polymnia, the muse of sublime hymn, Urania, the
muse of astronomy, and Calliope, the muse of epic poetry.
The Muses were given to Apollo as companions by Zeus and the god is
often represented playing his lyre surrounded by the Muses.
With his lyre Apollo can charm the gods, the mortals, the wild beasts and
even the stones. Apollo’s song was known as the paean and it was sung
after the rites of purification.
”Be silent, listen to the Song of Apollo. Even the waves are quiet when the
bard plays the cithera and bow of Lycarean Apollo. Thetis,sad mother, no
longer bemoans the fate of Achilles when she hears the clamour of lé Paian,
lé Paian and the stone which cries lays aside its cares for a time, the damp

rock on the phrygian shores...” (Wordsworth Dictionary: 49).
One of the best known of Apollo’s exploits is his confrontation with the satyr
Marsyas who once recklessly boasted he could play better music on his flute
than Apollo on his lyre. The contest clearly illustrated the rivalry between the
two great cults - the Apollonian cult and the Dionysian one (Piatkowschi: 40).
The story of this ágon is part of a drama dedicated to the satyrs by Iophon,
Sophocle’s son. Marsyas was defeated and Apollo punished him cruelly.
Marsyas was nailed to a pine and ”in spite of his cries the skin was torn off
the whole surface of his body: it was all one raw wound. Blood flowed
everywhere, his nerves were exposed, unprotected, his veins pulsed with no
skin to cover them. It was possible to count his throbbing organs, and the
chambers of the lungs, cearly visible within his breast”. This appalling
description of Marsyas’ torment is given by Ovid in Metamorphoses (Ovid:
145).
The contest between Apollo and Pan, which the Delian god won, did not end
in horror; Pan admitted his pipes were inferior to the lyre and only foolish
Midas who objected was given ass ears as ”the Delian god would not allow
ears so foolish to retain their human shape...” (Ovid: 250-251).
During the pre-Homeric and the Homeric times, Apollo’s nature is
paradoxical and far from being characterized by those attributes which will be
known as Apollonian: lucidity, formality, harmony and order.
In Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, Apollo appears as the embodiment of the
new Olympian spirit of law and order; he is invoked as the god of archery,
roads (Cassandra calls him Apollo Aguiatês, that is, the Guardian of the
Highways), healing, prophecy, purification and the law. Platon, who called
him patrios exegetes said in ’The Republic’: ”It is for Apollo to dictate the
most important, the most beautiful, the first laws” (Dictionary of Mythology:
49).
In The Oresteia, Apollo Patroios opposes the Furies, the chtonic
spirits who have dominated the former matriarchal order. Apollo obeys
Zeus’s command and Zeus is the invincible masculine will. Apollo, in his
turn, commands Orestes to avenge his father in the name of justice but that
justice takes the form of matricide, the greatest form of guilt, but then Apollo
disclaims motherhood itself.
Apollo:
“The woman you call the mother of the child
is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed,
the new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her.
The man is the source of life – the one who mounts.”
(Aeschylus: 260)
Sometimes, his values, Law and Order, are undermined by his
methods of enforcement, therefore he can purify Orestes of blood-guilt but he
cannot ultimately release him from the Furies and he refers Orestes to
Athena for judgement.
Apollo turns to Athena with confidence because this masculine-virginal
goddess was the proof that a male god, in this particular case Zeus, would
give birth to a child parthenogenetically:
Apollo: “I give you proof that all I say is true

The father can father forth without a mother.
Here she stands, our living witness. Look –
Child sprung full-blown from Olympian Zeus,
Never bred in the darkness of the womb
But such a stock no goddess could conceive!”
(Aeschylus: 261)
Athena casts her ballot for Orestes and indirectly for Apollo but she
also gives the Erynnies their own shrines of worship and therefore they
become the Eumenides, i.e., "The Kindly Ones" of Athens, and a new order
is born. But by now, freed from his earlier excesses, Apollo has fully acquired
the most Apollonian of virtues, self-restraint, and has become the lucid,
intellectual, civilized victor of all that was dark, amorphous, irrational and
primitive, the perfect embodiment of the Olympian spirit which has survived
long after the Olympians were gone.
Apollo and Dionysus

Apollo and Dionysus seem to belong to worlds apart; Apollo is the
Olympian par excellence, Dionysus, a god of duality, belongs both to
Olympus and to the Earth and he is closely associated with the Underworld.
As Apollo belongs to air and daylight so Dionysus belongs to water and night,
as Apollo is calm, dignified and proud so Dionysus is mad, exuberant and
extravagant, “as Apollo inspired and rules over the music of strings, so
Dionysus inspires and rules over all the music of the reed” (Pater: 4).
Apollo’s essence is distant serenity, Dionysus’s is intoxicated madness;
“ever young and fair Apollo seems to reflect the brightest side of Greek
religion” (Moncrieff: 35) whereas his counterpart, Dionysus, seems to reflect
its irrationality. In The Phaedrus, Plato distinguishes four types of divine
madness : prophetic madness, whose patron is Apollo, telestic or ritual
madness, whose patron is Dionysus, poetic madness, inspired by the Muses
and erotic madness, inspired by Aphrodite and Eros (Dodds : 64). The
Dionysian ritual purged the individual of the irrational impulses and Dionysus
was as important to society as Apollo; "each god ministered in his own way
to the anxieties characteristic of a guilt-culture. The Apolline mediumship
aims at knowledge, whether of the future or of the hidden present, and the
Dionysiac experience… is pursued either for its own sake or as a means of
mental healing …. Mediumship is the rare gift of chosen individuals;
Dionysiac experience is esentially collective or congregational" (Dodds: 69).
If Apollo is more of the sky and Dionysus is more of the earth, if Apollo is
Uranian and Dionysus is Chtonian, then, a further dichotomy may be
established, that between the masculine principle and the feminine one, as
embodied by the clarity of the mind and the mystery of the life-giving blood,
by the victorious spirit which is Apollonian and by the ever-renewing, slightly
mad, whirling life drive which is Dionysian.
Both Apollo and Dionysus are surrounded by women, Apollo by the Muses,
Dionysus by the divine nurses, but while the Muses stand for the intellectual
sphere, the Lenai, who nurture and rear Dionysus in childhood, accompany
him in his wild dance, as they are themselves carried away by his frenzy and
passion. The Dionysian women represent the splendour and horror of Mother
Nature, which preserves and destroy with equal force.
Then is a feminine aspect in the nature of Dionysus which is revealed not
only by the names ‘the womanly one’ or ‘the womanly stranger’ given to him,
but also by the fact that his whole existence is illuminated by the presence of
women, from the maenads to his lover, Ariadne. Dionysus also has a
‘double’, a projection of his feminine nature, the young priest Dionysus with
his long, blond hair and feminine appearance. It is in this image that the god
enters the house of King Cadmus in Thebes in Euripides’ The Bacchae.

Throughout his mythobiography, Dionysus is characterized by his
bisexuality and by his struggle to achieve immortality for himself and for his
mother. On the other hand, Apollo is called Apollo Patroios, that is, the god
of paternity and manhood. As a psychic person Apollo is characterized by his
hostile relations with women culminating with matricide, not of his mother
Leto, but of the chthonian goddesses whose power threaten the patriarchal
order he stands for.
As son of Persephone, chtonic Dionysus is himself related to the
powers of the earth and of the underworld and therefore he is the natural
antagonist of Apollo’s masculine world.
In A Psychoanalytic Study of the Myth of Dionysus and Apollo – Two
Variants of the Son – Mother Relationship, Helen Deutsch calls Dionysus the
son who saves and Apollo the son who kills: “It is interesting to note”, says H.
Deutsch, “that the positive side of the Earth Mother’s existence is
emphasized in the Dionysus myth of the loving son, the negative, hating side
in the myth of Apollo” (Deutsch: 53).
Therefore Dionysus belongs to the feminine world of becoming and
destruction and Apollo to the masculine world of the intellect. Dionysus is the
god of everything that is wild, uncontrollable, instinctual, while Apollo governs
the rational, lucid, intellectual sphere.
Though sharply opposed, they are inseparable since their realms are joined
by the eternal bond between mother-earth Gea and father-sky Uranus and
therefore one cannot simply exist without the other.
Both Apollo and Dionysus are characterized by absence and distance. As
Apollo is believed to retire to the mythical land of the Hyperborean so
Dionysus vanishes into a mysterious distance wherefrom he makes a new
entrance every year. The trieteric festivals of his epiphany are related to the
ritual of his departure and his absence. The story of Lycurgus in the Iliad tells
that the mighty king once hunted the maenads of frenzied Dionysus
somewhere in the region of Nysa, and the god saved himself by disappearing
into the depths of the sea; the god’s disappearance was the subject of a cult
activity in the festival of the Agrionia while at the Anthesteria festivals the god
is expected to come from Lydia sailing over the surface of the sea.
In one version of the myth of Dionysus’s murder it is Apollo who gathers the
remnants of the slaughtered child and in a version of Orpheus’s death it is
Dionysus who punishes the perpetrators of the crime, the Bassarai, his own
followers; in several legends Dionysus is welcomed at Delphi, the most
Apollonian sanctuary.
In fact, at Delphi, Apollo shared the cult with Dionysus. The pediments
of the temple portray Apollo, Leto, Artemis and the Muses on one side, and
Dionysus and the Thyads on the other. The Omphalos itself is both
Apollonian and Dionysian, being related to the phallus, a symbol of fertility
but also of health with an apotropaic function since carved phalluses were
placed in the corners of the houses to chase away misfortune and illnesses.
“Even at Deplhi”, says Walter Pater, “his (Dionysus’s) claim always
maintained itself . …There, under his later reign, hard by the golden image of
Apollo himself, near the sacred tripod on which the Pythia sat to prophesy,
was to be seen a strange object – a sort of coffin or cinerary urn with the
inscription “Here lies the body of Dionysus, son of Semele”… and in the
shrine of Apollo itself he was worshipped with almost equal devotion” (Pater:
5).
The two gods were so closely associated at Delphi that some theological
speculations even identified the one with the other. The fact remains that at
Delphi Apollo made peace with Dionysus.
The myth of Orpheus best illustrates the clash between the Apollonian and
the Dionysian forces. The story of the Thracian poet and of his beloved
Eurydice is told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses.
th
In the 6 century B.C., a new religious movement developed, Orphism,
which was opposed to the official religion. Pindar insisted on the Apollonian
characteristics of Orpheus by invoking the poet with one of Apollo’s names –
Krysaor – the poet with the golden lyre. Although its name is derived from
Orpheus, an Apollonian symbol, the basis of the cult springs from the
Dionysian belief. The Orphics acknowledged the immortality of the soul and
incorporated the myth of Dionysus torn apart by the Titans.
As the legend tells, from the Titan’s ashes sprang the human race who
inherits both the cruelty of the Titans and a tiny portion of divinity. In Dodd’s
words, "the Titan myth explained to the Greek puritan why he felt himself to
be at once a god and a criminal ; the Apolline sentiment of remoteness from
the divine and the Dionysiac sentiment of identity with it were both of them
accounted for and both of them justified" (Dodds : 156).
Orphic Dionysus is different from Dionysus Omestes. Dionysus Orphicus
excludes omophagia and diasparagmό and encourages vegetarianism and
phónoi, i.e., to abstain from murders. Dionysus Omadios requires of his
devotees to indulge in omophagy and allelophagy – eating one another - the
best example being shown in the case of the daughters of Minyas who,
struck with madness, feel a desire to taste human flesh and dismember one
of their sons like a tender animal.
“They are the ones who justify the ritual scenarios of the Agrionia, in which
the priest of Dionysus, armed with a sword and chasing the descendants of
these banshees, had the right to slaughter whichever one he could catch"
(Detienne: 89). In Dionysus Slain, M. Detienne, who considers the four
important religious movements Pythagoreanism, Orphism, the Dionysian
religion and Cynicism, points out the fact that the split between Dionysus and
Apollo functions in Orphism as the profound split between woman and man,
“between the impure bestiality of one and the pure spirituality promised by
the other. Orphism exiles the savage violence of Dionysus into the animal
world of woman, who is thus, by her very nature, excluded from the Orphic
rule” (Detienne: 92). Willamowitz in Der Glaube der Hellenen affirms that
ancient Orphism was more Apollonian than Dionysian (Detienne: 117).
Orpheus’s links with Apollo and Dionysus confirm his reputation of initiator of
mysteries. Apollo and Dionysus are the only Greek gods whose cults imply
initiation and ecstasy. Enthousiasmos means the identification with the god
but the Dionysian ecstasy also means the surpassing of the limits of human
condition, a total liberation from all Apollonian rules and conventions and an
unmitigated communion with the vital, cosmic forces.
But the Orphics replaced the Dionysic orgia as a form of the communion
with the divine, with the katharsis, Apollo’s way of purification.
Ultimately, Apollo and Dionysus embody the psychological conflict between
the intellect and the hunger for release of the darker, instinctual drives.
“In Apollo all the splendour of the Olympic converges and confirms the
realms of eternal becoming and eternal passing. Apollo with Dionysus, the
intoxicated leader of all the choral dance of the terrestrial sphere – that would
give the total world dimension. In this union the Dionysiac earthly duality
would be elevated into a new and higher duality, the eternal contrast between
a restless, whirling life and a still, far-seeing spirit” (Otto: 208).

I. 2. Friederich Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy

In 1755 Johann Joachim Winckelmann published his impressive work
Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Malerei und
Bildhauerkunst – Considerations on the Imitation of the Greek Works in
Painting and Sculpture.
His aesthetic concept of the ideal beauty inaugurated the myth of the
serenity and harmony of the Greek philosophy and art, an idyllic
representation of perfect physical and intellectual beauty seen as noble
simplicity and greatness.
Goethe enthusiastically embraced Winckelmann’s ideal of Greek perfection
and in his own essay Antik und Modern he praised the Greek clarity of
perception much as Schiller did in Die Götter Griechenlands.
In his famous essay Laocoon, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, considering that
the ultimate goal of art was the representation of beauty, also contributed to
the idealization of Greek art. He affirmed that the Greek artist, in an unselfish
self-effacement, endeavoured to express beauty ‘per se’ in art with no
moralizing or educational aim and that the reason for the self-effacement
sprang from a deep love for beauty. He criticized French tragedy for its
erroneous reflection of Greek classicism and asked for a return to the origins,
to Homer and to Aristotle.
However, in 1896, Erwin Rohde’s work Psyche shattered the myth of
the Greeks’ calm and serene contemplation of the gods. In the chapter
entitled The Origin of the Belief in Immortality. Dionysus’s Cult in Thrace,
Rohde showed that the ’Edle Einfalt und stille Grösse’ – the noble simplicity
and calm grandeur - advocated by Winckelmann (Rohde: 10) was not
supported by the belief in the immortality of the soul which sprang from the
cult of Dionysus. The mainstream religion admitted the existence of the soul
beyond death but this did not imply its immortality which was a divine
attribute; the world of the gods and the world of the mortals were to be
forever apart and this was the very essence of divinity in Greek religion.
Once Dionysus’s cult with its ecstatic and exalted rituals entered the Greek
religion, it confronted the Apollonian spirit characterized by serenity and
noble greatness; later the two cults complemented each other to the point
that the Delphic year was divided, albeit not equally, between the two deities.
Rohde believed that the Greek spirit which so greatly manifested itself in art,
philosophy and tragedy was a synthesis of the two quite opposed but
complementary Apollonian and Dionysian drives.
With all the earlier developments of the studies of Greek mythology,
philosophy and art, it was Nietzsche who used for the first time the
Apollonian – Dionysian duality as an aesthetic category the dynamics of
which implied the concordia discors, that is the ‘discordant concord’. Like E.
Rohde and J. Burckhardt, Nietzsche vigorously expressed his disbelief in the
commonly-held view that Greek civilization was characterized by a
magnificent serenity, a view shared by Winckelmann and Lessing a century
before. In The Birth of Tragedy he wrote: “one also hears a great deal of
ineffectual fine talk about ‘Greek harmony’, ‘Greek beauty’ and ‘Greek
serenity’. Most of all in academic circles whose particular glory it would be to
drink deeply from the sources of Hellenism, one has learned betimes to come
to easy and comfortable terms with the Greeks, often to the point of
abandoning the Hellenic ideal and perverting the true meaning of classical
studies altogether” (Nietzsche: 122).
Nietzsche undertook an inquiry into the nature of the Greek gods and he
found that the two divinities that most influenced Greek life and art were
Apollo and Dionysus.
In Nietzsche’s opinion, the two ‘art – sponsoring deities’, Apollo and
Dionysus, initially in fierce opposition, ultimately made peace and begot Attic
tragedy which “exhibits the salient features of both parents” (Nietzsche: 19).
Apollo and Dionysus govern two separate realms of art, the plastic art and
the non-visual art of music, placed under the signs of dream and intoxication
respectively.
The illusion of the dream sphere belongs to Apollo, the soothsaying god.
Apollo best illustrates the principium individuationis formulated by
Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Idea as quoted by Nietzsche: “one
might say that the unshakable confidence in that principle has received its
most magnificent expression in Apollo, and that Apollo himself may be
regarded as the marvelous divine image of the principium individuationis,
whose looks and gestures radiate the full delight, wisdom and beauty of
illusion” (Nietzsche: 22).
On the other hand, the Dionysian rapture, induced by physical intoxication
shatters the principium individuationis and the individual forgets himself
completely, immerses himself into the revelry and frenzy of the wild music
and dances, becoming one with the others in a mystical experience of the
collective.
But then in order to shun the terrors and horrors of existence, the Greeks
turned their eyes to Olympian Apollo to satisfy their need for order and
balance.
The observance of the limits of the individual is expressed by Apollo’s
imperatives, sophrosyne, ‘know thyself’ and ‘nothing in excess’; conversely,
excess and hybris do not belong to the Apollonian sphere but to the
Dionysian spirit, under whose spell men become oblivious of the laws of
Apollo.
The rigid Apollonian norm finds its expression in the Doric art and especially
the Doric state, which is “a perpetual military encampment of the Apollonian
forces. An art so defiantly austere, so ringed about with fortifications – an
education so military and exacting – a policy so ruthlessly cruel – could
endure only in a continual state of resistance against the titanic and barbaric
menace of Dionysus” (Nietzsche: 35).
But, gradually, resistance became more and more difficult and ultimately by
an act of pacification the two antagonists were recruited and of their union,
the seed was planted for tragedy to be born.
Still, there is a further dichotomy in the realm of artistic expression as
embodied by the lyrical poet, first and foremost a Dionysian artist, and the
sculptor as well as the epic poet, both committed to the pure contemplation of
images, characteristic of the Apollonian artist; while the former lives in
images with a dreamer’s delight in appearance, the latter himself becomes
his images and his own subject-matter.
The same dichotomy applies to music; folk songs are clearly a manifestation
of the Dionysian spirit, a musical survivor of nature and cosmos. Music
manifests itself as will in Apollonian terms, or rather it appears as will which is
opposite to the aesthetic, contemplative and ‘un – willing’ disposition.
The dithyramb and the chorus begot Greek tragedy which at first recorded
the sufferings of Dionysus; up to Euripides, Nietzsche claims, Dionysus
remained the only protagonist behind the masks of the famous characters of
Prometheus or Oedip as the one true Dionysus appears in a multiplicity of
roles. On the other hand, tragedy is not only the Dionysian chorus but also

the Apollonian vision of the drama, an “Apollonian embodiment of Dionysiac
insights and powers” (Nietzsche: 57).
If the Dionysian spirit manifests itself in the dithyramb, the chorus, the wild
sounds of the cymbals and the dances, the Apollonian portion of Greek
tragedy is the dialogue and the language of the great tragic heroes is proof of
Apollonian determinacy and lucidity.
The imperative necessity of hubris is atoned by the deep longing for
justice and it is Apollo who tranquilizes the individual and reminds him of the
universal, un-changing norms. But lest the Apollonian spirit should freeze the
world into ossified schemes, the Dionysian tide must necessarily wipe the
world afresh. Under Apollo’s beneficent influence the Greeks became a race
of artists but the art that Apollo taught them was essentially contemplative
and subjective. Sculpture, architecture, painting and epic poetry became
mere records in beautiful but un-changing images and Apollonian art ran the
risk of becoming frozen. However, this did not happen as Dionysus, the very
antithesis of Apollo, taught the Greeks those arts which tried to capture brief
moments of joy, ecstasy or terror of everyday existence, dancing, music and,
above all, drama.
In fact, the very essence of Greek tragedy is the expression of the two
interacting artistic impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
After the birth of tragedy comes the death of tragedy, and this was brought,
in Nietzsche’s opinion, by the intrusion and development of an anti-Dionysian
spirit, the Socratic spirit. Its first manifestation was to be felt in Euripides’s
dramatic works, which turned to the dramatized epic, an Apollonian form. As
Euripides set out, as Plato was to do, to show the world the opposite of the
“irrational poet” (Nietzsche: 81), his aesthetic conception proclaimed reason
and consciousness supreme and he became “the poet of aesthetic
Socratism” (Nietzche: 81).
Socrates came to represent the main opponent to the Dionysian principle of
the older art of tragedy. Socrates, the arch-Sophist, defended the prestige of
knowledge and wisdom against sheer instinct and poetic figments of
imagination and single-handed, he embarked upon a mission to correct the
flaws of contemporary Athenian society. However, legend has it that
whenever his rational judgement seemed to falter, his daimonion, a divine
voice always whispered to his ear to defy his reason and to dissuade him
from believing that his ideas were adamant. It was the voice of instinctual
wisdom which acted like an inhibitory agent of criticism.
As it is well known, in the end Socrates had to compare before the Athenian
forum that condemned him to death, with the result that, far from becoming
less contagious, his influence accrued and Socrates became the venerated
mentor of the young Athenian élite, of whom Plato was the brilliant leader.
Socrates could not understand the irrational Dionysian frenzy, the disturbing
dithyramb, the tragic art; it is said that he only favoured the Aesopian fable
and that he failed to appreciate any non-philosophical work. It thus seems
that the Socratic spirit can only breathe in an Apollonian atmosphere of cool
clarity which leads to optimistic schematism. If “virtue is knowledge, all sins
arise from ignorance, only the virtuous are happy” then “these three basic
formulations of optimism spell the death of tragedy” (Nietzsche: 88).
Music, dancing, chorus, the ingredients of the beginnings of tragedy lose
their power, mystery is dispensed with and Dionysus must fly away and hide
once more under the waters of the sea, maenads, satyrs and masked actors
follow him and thus the stage is left bare; in this process “optimistic dialectics
took up the whip of its syllogisms and drove music out of tragedy. It entirely
destroyed the meaning of tragedy – which can be interpreted only as a
concrete manifestation of Dionysiac conditions, music made visible, an
ecstatic dream world” (Nietzsche: 89).
But then, legend has it, that while in prison, Socrates was calmly considering
his approaching end; he summed up his knowledge, confident that only
philosophy could explain the universe in a logical way. But somehow a
certain uneasiness crept into his well-ordered mind when he heard the voice
of his daimonion whisper to him like in a dream: “Practice music, Socrates!”
Socrates remains the great exemplar of the ‘theoretical man’ who has
always been in some sort of opposition with the artist; the artist endeavours
to unveil the truth fascinated by what is still hidden whereas theoretical man
takes pleasure in the process itself and not in its mysterious outcome.
Therefore, for the Socratic man who deeply felt that nature was fathomable,
the only valuable task was that of laying bare the nature of things and
separating true knowledge from illusion and error, Socrates and his
successors, down to the present day, have striven to attain the perfection
and clarity of the dialectic of knowledge and that spiritual calm which the
Apollonian Greek called sophrosyne. Probing into the workings of nature is
an incentive to which few Socratic minds could resist but the further they
went down on this path the more elusive truth became, and this optimistic
approach had to admit its limits. The insatiable zest for knowledge was
tempered by a tragic perception which needed art to make it tolerable. There
arises one fundamental question: is it possible that beyond our logical
universe there is a realm which defies logic and in which art is the necessary
complement of rational discourse?
To answer the question Nietzsche appeals again to the two artistic deities of
the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, who represent two radically dissimilar
realms of art. Through Apollo, the genius of the principium individuationis, it
is possible to achieve redemption in illusion, but the Dionysian spirit breaks
the spell of individuation and plunges us forth to the maternal womb of being.
Another question to be answered is what aesthetic effect would be obtained if
the Apollonian and Dionysian forces of art worked together, not separately.
If we agree with Schopenhauer that music is the immediate language of the
will then the Dionysian art affects the Apollonian art in that, firstly, music
makes possible a symbolic intuition of the Dionysian universality, and
secondly, it endows the symbolic images with supreme significance.
Music gives birth to the tragic myth which is Dionysian but it strives to
account for its own essence in Apollonian images. As Nietzsche says, “music
alone allows us to understand the delight felt at the annihilation of the
individual” and it will clarify for us “the abiding phenomenon of Dionysiac art
which expresses the omnipotent will behind individuation, eternal life
continuing beyond all appearance and in spite of destruction” (Nietzsche:
101-102).
In tragedy the Dionysian spirit tells us that life is eternal through its never-
ending cycle of births and deaths, and that for a short moment we can
experience the insatiable hunger for existence of the primal Being or the
Original Mother; we are faced with the splendour and the terror of becoming
and dissolution of the individual life but we also become aware of the eternity
and indestructibility of the life force or the world will.
In the plastic art, which is Apollonian, the individual suffering is overcome by
“the glorious apotheosis of what is eternal in appearance” (Nietzsche: 102).
Far away from the tumult of existence, the images remain frozen in an ideal,
eternal moment.

The inquisitive spirit of science destroyed myth by openly opposing the
mythopeic power of music; the latter Attic dithyramb only produced the
phenomena in a conceptualized form, forcing external analogies between
natural events and musical combinations. The anti-Dionysian spirit estranged
music from itself and from its function as a universal mirror of the world will;
the result was the new emphasis on character portrayal and on the shift from
stock characters of the new Attic comedy. The same anti-mythic trend
manifested itself in the denouement of the new plays when the metaphysical
solace was replaced by a happy deus ex machina end.
Once the Socratic culture which is rooted in the optimistic belief that science
is omnipotent comes to doubt about its infallibility, the Dionysian spirit of the
old tragedy might be reborn. Nietzsche’s criticism of the drawback of the
dialectical drive toward knowledge which stifles what is elemental and
instinctual leads him to the conclusion that “there may be an eternal conflict
between the theoretical and the tragic world view, in which case tragedy
could be reborn only when science had at last been pushed to its limits and,
faced with those limits, been forced to renounce its claim to universal validity.
For the new hypothetical tragedy the music – practicing Socrates might be a
fitting symbol” (Nietzsche: 104-105).
Through music the Dionysian world of tragedy acquires a metaphysical
significance; the individual forgets himself and aspires to complete
dissolution of self and reintegration in the cosmic being. The Apollonian spirit
rescues the individual from the Dionysian universality of self-destruction and
offers him images of life in their ideational essence.
It is a world of appearance which confronts itself with the world of primordial
reality, as if the Dionysian wisdom were made concrete through Apollonian
artifice. In order to endure life the individual needs the marvellous Apollonian
illusion to cover it with a veil of beauty. The two principles must develop in
balanced proportion, assonance alternating with dissonance.
In The Will to Power Nietzsche defines the term Dionysian as expressing a
certain need for surpassing one’s limited existential condition, a pantheistic
acceptance of joy and sorrow alike, the eternal drive of procreation as well as
the necessity of destruction, while the term Apollonian expresses the need
for individuality, for everything that can simplify, clarify and eliminate
ambiguity, a law-abiding liberty.
But the Dionysus of The Will to Power is different from the god whose rituals
gave birth to tragedy and who acknowledged Apollo as his divine
counterpart; he becomes a sort of super-god, a liberating and liberated spirit,
above law and morality, preaching the birth of the superman.
I. 3. Modern and Post-Modern Re/Interpretations

It has become a cliché to speak of Freud as one of the revolutionary
founders of modern thought, but it is difficult to express otherwise the
importance of the far-reaching implications of his theoretical and practical
work. The scope of this study is not to discuss or assess Freud’s work but to
try to find a similarity between his theory of the forces in the human psyche
which are at war and the Apollonian-Dionysian opposition.
One of Freud’s fundamental pieces of theory was that the human mind is a
dynamic entity “consisting in a number of mental forces, some conscious and
some unconscious, operating now in harmony now in opposition with one
another” (Freud: 21)
These phenomena were first observed and studied in neurotic patients but
eventually they turned out to be of universal occurrence. Freud’s analysis of
these phenomena enabled him to discover the nature of the unconscious
processes, which were related to the connative trends – desires or wishes,
which in their turn derive their energy from the primary instincts. The
unconscious contents of the mind have as their goal the obtaining of
immediate satisfaction regardless of the conscious parts, which are
concerned with adaptation to reality. The unconscious drives are to a great
extent of a sexual or of a destructive nature and therefore they are bound to
come in conflict with the more social and civilized conscious mental
processes.
Freud’s analysis of these processes led him to an inquiry into the nature of
dreams that, like neurotic symptoms, turned out to be “the product of a
conflict and a compromise between the primary unconscious impulses and
the secondary anxious ones” (Freud: 22).
Later he gave a new structural account of the mind in which the instinctual
trends were called the ‘id’, the organized realistic part the ‘ego’, and the
critical and moralizing function the ‘super-ego’.
In interpreting the dreams, Freud pointed to the fact that the ancients
regarded dreams as something introduced by a divine agency; many dreams
had a prophetic nature, they were ‘de tripode dictum’, which means from the
oracles such as Delphi. For the Greeks Apollo was the god of divination and
of prophecy and it was Pythia’s job to interpret his prophecies.
Certainly, Freud did not mention Apollo or Pyhtia or even Dionysus, who is
so much like the Freudian ‘id’, but two of his followers, C.G. Jung and
Norman O. Brown did, the former in his theory of opposites and archetypes,
the latter in his illuminating work Life Against Death, published in 1959, two
years after Jung’s death.
Life Against Death is, as the author states in the Introduction, a study of
Freud that starts from the premise that “to experience Freud is to partake a
second time of the forbidden fruit” (Brown: X).
N.O. Brown reshapes psychoanalysis into a wider general theory of human
nature, culture and history with a view to find an answer to “our present
dilemma which is: either we come to terms with our unconscious instincts
and drives – with life and with death – or else we surely die” (Brown: X).
His ambitious attempt is to define the conditions under which mankind could
be cured of its general neurosis, a way out from the inhuman character of
modern civilization.
The Freudian perspective that the essence of society is repression of the
individual and the essence of the individual is repression of himself is the
starting point; the first crucial hypothesis is that neurotic symptoms have a
meaning and the second is that the dynamic relation between the
unconscious and the conscious is one of conflict.
The essence of repression lies in man’s refusal to recognize the realities of
his human nature, hence the irruption of the unconscious into consciousness
through dreams and neurotic symptoms.
The psychic conflict is generated by purposes, wishes and desires. The
pleasure-principle comes into conflict with the frustrating reality principle and
this is the cause of repression. But then man makes his own reality and there
are various kinds of reality linked to a specific culture or society. Freud’s later
thesis is that man creates culture and society in order to repress himself and
that neurosis is the logical outcome of civilization and culture.
Therefore, N.O. Brown argues that the fundamental idea of Freud’s
Civilization and Its Discontents is that the varieties of culture can be
correlated with the varieties of neurosis, an idea which leads to the

conclusion that the pattern of history exhibits a dialectic of neurosis.
A psychoanalytical approach to history shows that mankind is making history
without having any conscious idea of what it really wants; the
psychoanalytical therapy would free man from the burden of his past and of
his history by filling up the gaps in his obsessive search for origins. “If
historical consciousness is finally transformed into psychoanalytical
consciousness, the grip of the dead hand of the past on life in the present
would be loosened and man would be ready to live instead of making history,
to enjoy instead of paying back old scores and debts, and to enter that state
of Being which was the goal of his Becoming” (Brown: 19).
But this desideratum is difficult to achieve unless we honestly recognize the
forms of Eros / life instinct and Thanatos / death instinct as operating with
equal force within ourselves.
In the context of the life instinct / sexual instinct / Eros, man remains a
pleasure-seeking animal, but the pleasure principle is denied by the reality
principle. The latter can be defined in an un-Freudian way by the pressures
of parental discipline, of religion inculcating superiority of the soul over the
body and of society that wants man to conform to its norms – altogether an
Apollonian concept.
While accepting these norms overtly, man obstinately thinks that Homo
ludens is a better choice than Homo laborans. If we think of cultures as
primitive or civilized, then “primitive is that level of culture in which the rhythm
of what Freud calls the primary process – the rhythm of dreams and
childhood play – is predominant. Civilized is that level of culture which
effectively represents the rhythm of the primary process in favour of
rationality and the reality-principle” (Brown: 37), the child Dionysus –
Liknites versus Apollo – Arhegetes, the infant world of pleasure and play
versus the reality-principle.
Another problem is the dualism of instincts inside man – Eros always has an
antagonist – and Brown’s psychological and eschatological proposition is that
man will be able to get rid of neurosis and discontent if this dualism is
abolished.
Much like N.O. Brown, H. Marcuse argues, in Eros and Civilization (1955)
that Freud’s definition of the reality principle is based on an economics of
‘scarcity’, i.e., the struggle for existence takes place in a world too poor for
the satisfaction of human needs without restraint or renunciation. Marcuse
postulates that, in order to be free, man should reject the performance
principle and return to non-repressive ‘culture heroes’ such as Orpheus and
Narcissus. In contrast to Prometheus and Apollo, the heroes of the
performance principle, Orpheus and Narcissus, who are akin to Dionysus,
represent another reality principle the experience of which brings liberation
and gratification. For Marcuse, Orpheus becomes the archetype of the poet
as liberator and creator, and Narcissus, the hero of the aesthetic
contemplation of the Ideal in oneself and thus they both embody the abolition
of the separation between man and nature and man and god.
In his later writings, Freud came to identify the instinctual dualism underlying
the conflicts in human life as the dualism of Life (Eros) and Death (Thanatos),
concepts as fundamental to psychoanalysis as matter and energy to physics.
The eternal and irreconcilable struggle of life and death is the ultimate
explanation of the human neurosis. Freud found a model for his view in
Empedocle’s work, a pre-Socratic philosopher who thought that the ultimate
principle of the universe is the conflict between love and strife; N.O. Brown
interprets the Freudian theory by drawing an analogy to Anaximander who
believed that the strife of opposites is produced by the separating of
opposites out of a primal state of undifferentiated unity, and Heraclitus, who
asserted the ultimate unity of opposites, including life and death. The former
assertion is relevant from a cosmic point of view as well as from a biological
one if we take into account Plato’s theory of the hermaphrodite, and the latter
may be a point of departure for the idea that unless man resolves to reconcile
the warring impulses within himself, he is doomed to neurosis and discontent,
in Brown’s words “our modification of Freud’s ontology restores the possibility
of salvation" (Brown: 84). The question that needs to be answered at this
point is how can Death be unified with Life?
In dealing with the death instinct Freud found three aspects; first, that the
human mind is directed at getting rid of tensions and reaching inactivity, a
total rest, second, that opposite to the pleasure-principle is a compulsion to
restore an earlier state of things, a return to the past, to the inorganic, and
third, that there is a primary masochism directed against the self which Freud
called the death instinct. Therefore, Nirvana, the repetition-compulsion, and
masochism represent different aspects of death.
Interpreting Freud’s theory about the death instinct, N.O. Brown points out
that “for Freud as for St.Augustine, mankind’s destiny is a departure from,
and an effort to regain, paradise; but in between these two terms, true love
on the one hand and lust for power (libido dominandi) on the other. In
psychoanalytical terms, the conflict inside human nature is at the instinctual
level; hence Freud’s dualism of Eros and the aggressive instinct” (Brown:
98).
If, as Heraclit said, life and death are in some sort of unity at the organic
level, at the human level they are separated into conflicting opposites. Man’s
aggressiveness represents a fusion of the life instinct with the death instinct
that changes the self-destructive tendency with the desire to kill which in its
turn replaces the desire to die. Thus, aggression in human nature is the
result of extroversion of the death instinct, which is repressed just like the life
instinct is.
The answer to the question formulated earlier is that the acceptance of
death and its reunification in consciousness with life can be achieved only by
the abolition of repression, by the liberation from the neurotic obsession with
the past and the future and furthermore, by the abolition of the conflicting
nature of the sexes and of the bodies and souls.
As Freud says, it is the attitude belonging to the opposite sex which
succumbs to repression; at the deepest level of the unconscious there is a
yearning for the androgynous or hermaphroditic which reflects the need of
the human body to overcome the dualism of masculine – feminine / activity –
passivity / life – death / Eros – Thanatos. The reference to the myth of an
originally bisexual creature is used by Freud to suggest that Eros is seeking
unification with its opposite.
We should add that this great anthropological myth is met not only in illo
tempore, at the beginning of the cosmogony but also at the eschatological
level, alpha and omega being a unification of opposing principles. It is only
natural that the primordial unity applied to human beings acquires a sexual
connotation to the point that there has been (and will always be) only one
masculine-feminine being, solar and telluric at the same time. In many
religions (Hindu, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) the return to the primordial unity is
achieved through coincidentia oppositorum. It is interesting to note that The
Japanese Kabuki Theatre uses the character of the onnagata, the woman-
man, a representation of the ambiguity of the androgyne; “figure idéale de

l’accomplissement … l’onnagata cherche non pas tout une feminité pure que
cette ambiguïté qui est celle de l’androgyne. L’onnagata joue et vit en femme
tout en se souvenant de l’homme qu’il est” (Banu G., Le Kabuki: 35). In some
Christian interpretations the original sin is connected with sexual dichotomy
and the Fall of Man is the fall of the androgyne, that is, of man as a complete
being. Masculine and feminine are just one aspect of the multiplicity of
oppositions among which the hostile brothers (Ghilgamesh and Enkidu), the
gemini or the divine twins (Apollo and Artemis), the two antagonistic sides of
one and the same god or goddess, the mythological dyads (Apollo and
Dionysus, Eros and Thanatos). Returning to the myth of the androgyne it is
worth mentioning that many gods were represented as having characteristics
of both sexes, such as Dionysus, Artemis, Athena, Cibele and Didon-
Astarte.
In The Personification of the Opposites, Jung speaks of the Anthropos, the
original or primordial man, an archetypal image of wholeness in alchemy,
religion and Gnostic philosophy: “There is in the unconscious an already
existing wholeness, the homo totus of the Western and the Chên-yên (true
man) of Chinese alchemy, the round primordial being who represents the
greater man within, the Anthropos, who is akin to God”(Jung Lexicon: 14).
The self is made manifest in the opposites and in the conflict between them,
coincidentia oppositorum; Jung uses the terms coniunctio, literally,
conjunction, to point to the union of opposites and the birth of new
possibilities, and complexio oppositorum to embody the opposites in a
single image.
Jung also distinguishes between Logos and Eros; Logos is the principle of
logic and structure traditionally associated with the spirit and the patriarchal
principle. The concept of Logos belongs to the masculine consciousness
whereas Eros belongs to feminine consciousness and either one could be
dominant in a particular man or woman.
“By Logos I meant discrimination, judgment, insight, and by Eros I meant the
capacity to relate. I regarded both concepts as intuitive ideas which cannot
be defined accurately or exhaustively” (Jung Lexicon: 59). In his later
writings, Jung associated Logos and Eros with solar and lunar
consciousness, archetypal ideas analogous to the concepts of yang and yin;
stressing again that Eros was more specific to feminine consciousness and
Logos to masculine, as the corresponding influence of the anima and
animus: “In a man it is the lunar anima, in a woman the solar animus, that
influences consciousness in the highest degree” (Jung Lexicon: 59).
The two Greek deities who best correspond to the lunar anima and the solar
animus are Apollo and his twin-sister, Artemis, but as an illustration of the
Logos (masculine) – Eros (feminine) opposition, the Apollo Patroios –
Dionysus Gynnis dyad is more appropriate.
In The Psychology of the Child Archetype, Jung proposes the concept of
’puer eternus’ used in mythology to designate a child-god such as
Dionysus Liknites, who is forever young, and in psychology, to an older
man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level. “The puer’s
shadow is the senex, associated with the god Apollo - disciplined, controlled,
responsible, rational, ordered. Conversely, the shadow of the senex is the
puer, related to Dionysus - unbounded instinct, disorder, intoxication,
whimsy. Whoever lives out one pattern to the exclusion of the other risks
constellating the opposite. Hence individuation quite as often involves the
need for a well-controlled person to get closer to the spontaneous, instinctual
life as it does the puer’s need to grow up” (Jung Lexicon : 82).
Jung defines the self as the archetype of wholeness and the regulating
centre of the psyche, a transpersonal power that transcends the ego and
embraces both the conscious and the unconscious.
The essential nature of the self is unknowable but its manifestations are the
content of myth and legend and, therefore, “the self appears in dreams,
myths, and fairytales in the figure of the ‘supraordinate personality’ such as a
King, hero, prophet, saviour, etc. or in the form of a totality symbol, such as
the circle, square, quadratura circuli, cross etc… When it represents a
complexio oppositorum, a union of opposites, it can also appear as a united
duality, in the form, for instance, of tao as the interplay of yang and yin, or of
the hostile brothers, or of the hero and his adversary (arch-enemy, dragon),
Faust and Mephistopheles, etc… Empirically, therefore, the self appears as a
play of light and shadow, although conceived as a totality and unity in which
the opposites are united” (Jung Lexicon: 89-90).
At this first point we may venture to make an analogy between the Jungian
shadow and the Dionysian spirit. The shadow represents the dark impulses,
the primitive instincts and the creative urge which may re-vitalize human
existence.
But the realization of the shadow is inhibited by the persona to which the
shadow stands in a compensatory relationship. The persona has Apollonian
qualities since civilized society depends on interactions between people
through the persona which is experienced as individuality, the principium
individuations Nietzsche spoke of; Jung argues further that the persona is
only a mask of the collective psyche, a compromise between the individual
and the society. But the demands of propriety and good behaviour may lead
to a trap and denying the unconscious self has its dangers, therefore the
process of coming to terms with the Other in us is well worth while. One of
these dangers is the trickster, which is a manifestation of the shadow, “both
subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being” (Jung Lexicon: 106)
whom the civilized man has forgotten but who has powers whose
dangerousness exceeds the wildest dreams.
In Freudian terms, sublimation, which is an attempt to relate the body and
the spirit, the individual and the society, may be an answer, “sublimi feriam
sidera vertice”, “my sublimations will exalt me to the stars” says Horace.
Sublimation cannot be understood unless we understand the nature of the
ego which continues to do battle against the id. Freud compared the relation
of the ego to the id with that of a rider to his horse and he also said that “the
ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which
contains the passions” (Brown: 159).
Interpreting the future of our civilization E.R. Dodds draws an analogy with
the rider and the horse. He argues that our civlization marked by scientific
advances beyond anything that earlier generations thought possible is now
confronted with the prospect of a society more open than any it has ever
known but that the prospect of this future society has brought "the
unmistakable symptoms of a recoil". Dodds wonders whether this recoil or
doubt is "the hesitation before the jump, or the beginning of a panic
flight…On such a matter a simple professor of Greek is in no position to offer
an opinion. But he can do one thing. He can remind his readers that once
before a civilized people rode to this jump – rode to it and refused it … Was it
the horse that refused, or the rider? … Passionally, I believe it was the horse
– in other words, those irrational elements in human nature which govern
without our knowledge so much of our behaviour and so much of what we
think is our thinking. And if I am right about this, I can see in it grounds for

hope"(Dodds: 254).
During the pre-Hellenistic Age the rationalists of the Apollonain type were
deeply aware of the power and the wonder of the Dionysian Irrational, but in
the Hellenistic Age many of them made the fatal mistake of thinking they
could ignore it. We, the moderns, "shall eventually understand our horse
better … understanding him better, we shall be able by better training to
overcome his fears; and…through the overcoming of fear horse and rider will
one day take that decisive jump, and take it successfully" (Dodds: 254-255).
Analyzing Feud’s works on sublimation, N.O. Brown points out that Freud
was right when he stated that civilization moves towards the primacy of
intellect and the atrophy of sexuality, but he proposes an alternative to
sublimation by referring to the Greek gods, Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo, as
we have already shown, is the god of civilized form in life, the god of
sublimation, but the Apollonian spirit is a negation of instinct. By negating the
instincts the Apollonian spirit becomes the symbol of pure spirituality “who
gave man a head sublime and told him to look at the stars” (Brown: 174)
ignoring the lower part of his body.
Nietzsche affirmed that the Apollonian world is the distant world of illusion,
as Apollo, the Far-Darter always keeps a distance.
In Freudian terms the world of appearance is a projection of the inner world
of fantasy, which separates the dream from instinctual reality. But the Greeks
also gave us Dionysus, in whose world life is not kept at a distance and seen
through the veil of illusion but is complete, immediate raw experience. For
Dionysus, the path of excess leads to a more vibrant kind of life which is not
negation or repression. In fact, Dionysus affirms the dialectical unity of the
instinctual opposites and he reunites male and female Self and Other, life
and death. In saying that the Apollonian preserves and the Dionysian
destroys self-consciousness, Nietzsche implies that we should strive to
construct a Dionysian ego, which becomes a synthesis of Apollo and
Dionysus.
N.O. Brown does not seem to consider this synthesis as wholly satisfactory
since it will be only”an ambivalent mixture, but no fusion, between the
instinctual opposites” (Brown: 176) and he concludes his chapter on Apollo
and Dionysus by affirming that the only alternative is “psychoanalytical
consciousness, which is not the Apollonian scholasticism of orthodox
psychoanalysis, but consciousness embracing and affirming instinctual reality
– Dionysian consciousness” (Brown: 176). We may advance the hypothesis
that the self struggles to overcome the split and conflict within itself by trying
to balance the opposites and arrive not at a synthesis but at an acceptance
of both Apollonian and Dionysian drives.
A possible answer is formulated by Freud in the concluding words of his
Civilization and Its Discontents:
“Men have brought their powers of subduing the process of nature to such a
pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another
to the last man. They know this – hence arises a great part of their current
unrest, their dejection, their mood of apprehension. And now it may be
expected that the other of the two “heavenly forces”, eternal Eros, will put
forth his strength so as to maintain himself alongside of his equally immortal
adversary” (Brown: 322).
The ’heavenly forces’ Freud speaks of, which battle against each other but
which are ultimately allies as well, are complementary as Dionysus and
Apollo who made peace at Delphi a very long time ago; the Ianus face, at
once Apollonian and Dionysian, symbolizes the essence of this duality.
th
Two of the most influential critics of the second half of the 20 century,
Monroe K. Spears and Ihab Hassan referred to the Apollo and Dionysus
concepts in discussing modernism and post-modernism. In Dionysus and the
City – Modernism in Twentieth Century Poetry, Spears defines modernism as
a break with the past in two main ways: as emancipation from convention
and as disinheritance, a loss of tradition, belief and meaning, an “exhilarating
smashing-up of images and idols” (Spears: 7). In the second chapter of his
book Spears relates the nature of modernism to the god Dionysus,
resurrected for the modern world by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. As
mentioned earlier in this chapter, the essence of Dionysus is the shattering of
the principium individuationis that Apollo stands for; to the conventional view
of the noble simplicity and calm grandeur of the Greek world, a serene
Apollonian world, Nietzsche opposed the dark, awesome aspects of the
Dionysian spirit which struck this world as titanic and barbaric through its
excesses and ecstasies. However the Greeks felt that the beautiful world of
illusion rested upon a base of suffering and knowledge and that they
ultimately needed both gods for their survival.
As E.R. Dodds argues it in The Greeks and the Irrational, Apollo and
Dionysus represent a timeless polarity: “Apollo promised security.
Understand your station as man; do as the Father tells you; and you will be
safe tomorrow.” Dionysus offered freedom: “Forget the difference, and you
will find the identity… He was essentially a god of joy… And his joys were
accessible to all, including even the slaves…. Apollo moved only in the best
society, from the days when he was Hector’s patron to the days when he
canonized Aristocractic athletes, but Dionysus was at all periods … a god of
the people” (Dodds: 76).
Spears is right when he considers that as a symbolic dyad Apollo and
Dionysus can be used to describe any time, any period and that English
literary history can be plausibly put in terms of their alternating reigns. The
Middle Ages were Apollonian in their scholasticism and emphasis on a well-
ordered, predictable unchanging universe and human society while the
crusades, the inquisition, and the witch-hunting, were the Apollonian
enforcements of law and order. The Renaissance was Dionysian in its
essential aspects – the revolt against scholasticism, the insatiable thirst for
breaking the many barriers which limited the human self, the questioning of
th
the laws of the universe. It was followed by an Apollonian 18 century which
conformed to the principles of order and decorum, replaced in its turn by the
age of revolt, the Romantic Age that brought the withdrawal from the public to
the personal, the questioning of values in both public and private life, a
rebellion against all kinds of injustice and a passionately advocated union
with mother nature, The Victorian Age which valued moral virtues and
propriety was mostly Apollonian while the twentieth century started as
Dionysian and ended with a delicate balance between the two.In 1896, Henry
James wrote to A. C. Benson: “I have the imagination of disaster-and see life
as ferocious and sinister”( Pelican Guide:13).
It was a premonition of the appearance of the irrational Dionysian
forces that were to shatter the entire world; what did appear was Dionysus
Omadios, the bestial deity, the eater of raw flesh, the flesh which so
abundantly covered the fields of a continent ravaged by two world-wars.
After the First World War which for many marked the end of a major
era, the gap between generations grew wider and the advent of the new era
of Technology brought about a fundamental change in outlook moving from

the awed contemplation of the technical marvels to the gloomy visions of
Doomsday and Armageddon. What was common for the majority of writers
and artists was the break with the past felt like disinheritance or’Fall’ with the
sense of loss as its main myth.
The Dionysus whom Spears chose as the emblem of the modern and
post-modern City is just one among the many manifestations of the god;
maybe the most appropriate is Dionysus Morichos, Lord of the Dark, who
evokes in Spears’s words, "the sense of dark, underground forces
mysteriously stirring, from Freud’s Unconscious to Marx’s masses, from
Lawrence’s Dark Gods to the sleeping giant of Finnegan’s Wake" (Spears:
40).
Dionysus does not figure explicitly in Freud’s The Interpretation of
Dreams but he is the appropriate symbol for the Unconscious, that part of the
human psyche, which is not subject to reason and where sophrosyne is
doomed. The founding fathers of modernism, Nietzsche and Freud
proclaimed the disappearance of God as the ultimate father image. To them
Spears adds Marx who "showed… the limits of individual freedom and
rationality and the inadequacy of Apollonian moral wisdom" (Spears: 41).
The Apollonian tradition, with its emphasis on the normal and the
rational was confronted with a Dionysian wave of revolt which, in its turn,
gave free expression to the irrational and the abnormal. While Apollo
represents the lucid, aristocratic, self-conscious individual, Dionysus claims
the collective and the ‘Other’ – the feminine / androgynous / transsexual, in
an orgy of the senses, passions and intoxication. Modern man finds himself
torn between these two contradictory drives, each equally lethal if not
counter-balanced by its opposite.
Many writers were aware of the never-ending game of opposites
embodied in the Apollonian – Dionysian dichotomy and of the danger of the
absolute victory of one or the other. In The Magic Mountain and Dr. Faustus
Thomas Mann argued that in politics, art and morality, both Apollonian and
Dionysian interpretations are necessary, and that to abandon either is to
invite disaster. W.B.Yeats, who was familiar with Nietzsche’s The Birth of
Tragedy and with W.Pater’s Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire
and Dew, was also attracted by the interplay of these antagonistic drives. In a
letter to John Quinn, quoted by Spears, Yeats wrote: "I have always felt that
the soul has two movements primarily: one to transcend form, and the other
to create form. Nietzsche to whom you have been the first to introduce me,
calls these the Dionysian and the Apollonian, respectively. I think I have to
some extent got weary of that wild God Dionysus, and I am hoping that the
Far-Darter will come in his place" (Spears : 48).
Yeats’ allegiance to the Apollonian values will be later replaced by a
celebration of Dionysus. In The Resurrection (1926) much like Nietzsche in
The Will to Power where Dionysus is contrasted with ‘the Crucified One’,
Yeats presents Christianity as inferior to the pagan world of Dionysus, a
"staring virgin" standing where "holly Dionysus died". In Mauberley Ezra
Pound also laments the victory of Christ over Dionysus "phallic and
ambrosial". This reminds us of Plutarch’s legend according to which in the
first century A.D., during the reign of Tiberius, a group of sailors who were
passing the island of Paxi, heard a mysterious voice crying: "Great Pan is
dead! Great Pan is dead! Christian legend later suggested that Pan had died
on the very day when Christ had mounted the cross.
Spears associates the Dionysian spirit with the City, a symbol of
modernity used extensively by poets and novelists alike from Eliot to Auden
and from Joyce to Murdoch. For many the City represents civilization, order,
collective responsibility, in Auden’s words “to set in order: that’s the task/
Both Eros and Apollo ask”; but others, who felt they were witnessing the end
of an era and of the values that had governed Western civilization for many
centuries, substituted the old civitas with the symbol of the Falling City, the
falling towers, la tour abolie, an expression of the disruptive Dionysian
spirit. It is a haunting symbol; the post-moderns – or whatever we like to call
ourselves – have literally witnessed the fall of the towers. What this fall will
bring we are not yet sure; to equate Dionysus with terrorism would be
misleading but irrational forces may be unleashed and civilization as we
understand it may be doomed, "Jerusalem / Athens Alexandria / falling
towers", but then, what falls shall rise again
With the ‘boom’ of the industry of entertainment after World War II, a
host of writers started producing what was in demand, while other more
serious artists and critics had to defend themselves against this mass-
phenomenon and created their own elitist group with the result that they
became more and more incomprehensible to the public at large; this
development is purely Apollonian and it manifests itself in the many ‘isms’
advanced by modern as well as post-modern literary criticism. However,
others veered towards open, provisional, indeterminate forms, sometimes
playful, sometimes ironical – the anti-traditional vein.
Spears rightly remarked that "the largest generalization that can be
made is that there are two primary impulses in modern literature, both always
present but one or the other dominating. The first is the drive to aestheticism,
toward the purification of form, its refinement and exploration, the
development of those features that are most distinctive. The illusion becomes
more convincing and self-sufficient; there is a tendency for the art-world to
become separate and independent from life. This is countered by the
opposing impulse, to break through art, destroy any possibility of escape to
illusion, to insist that the immediate experience, the heightening of life is the
important thing" (Spears: 62).
In his comprehensive study of post-modernism, The Postmodern Turn,
I. Hassan considers the myth of the dismemberment of Orpheus and the
"undying struggle between Apollo and Dionysus" as appropriate symbols for
the disaffection with our civilization which has lead literature to its own
disruptive forms – neo-picaresque, grotesque, gothic "antiforms of outrage
and apocalypse" (Hassan: 17).
Having analyzed Civilization and Its Discontents in which Freud shows
that civilization requires more and more repression and Life Against Death in
which Brown argues that all sublimation entails a certain degree of negation
of the life instincts, I. Hassan concludes that "repression begets civilization,
civilization begets more repression, more repression begets abstraction, and
abstraction begets death" (Hassan: 18).
Therefore, if we allow for the fact that Apollo has failed, and that the
civilization that he sponsored has become abstract and totalitarian, then the
way out seems to be the construction of a Dionysian ego as an agent of
revolt against authority and abstraction as well as a bringer of change. On
the other hand, the powers of Dionysus may burst into an uncontrollable and
violent way like a gigantic wave sweeping aside not only the fragments and
remains lying on the shore but gnawing at the shore itself, not cleansing but
destroying. Therefore, we cannot discard the Apollonian totally because the
shore must still be there to support the tides or winds of change.
I. Hassan’s interpretation of the myth of Orpheus is that Orpheus was

"the victim of an inexorable clash between the Dionysian principle,
represented by the Maenads,and the Apollonian ideal which he, as poet,
venerated… The myth of Orpheus may be a parable of the artist at certain
times. The powers of Dionysus, which civilization must repress, threaten at
these times to errupt with a vengeance. In the process energy may
overwhelm order; language may turn into a howl, a cackle, a terrible silence;
form may be mangled as ruthlessly as the poor body of Orpheus was"
(Hassan: 13).
Reading Hassan’s postmodernist rubrics we find out, under the
heading urbanism - anarchy, fragmentation, prison riots, urban crime –
Dionysus has entered the City; dehumanization – antielitism,
antiauthoritarianism, diffusion of the ego-Dionysus has rebelled; primitivism –
energy, spontaneity, "the post-existential ethos, psychedelics (Leary), the
Dionysian ego (Brown), Pranksters (Kesey), madness (Laing), animism and
magic (Castaneda) " (Hassan: 42) – Dionysus is leading the revel; eroticism
– the new sexuality, perversity, a new androgyny – Dionysus is playing;
antinomianism – counter-Western ways, mysticism, witchcraft, the occult
apocalyptism – Dionysus becomes Morichos, the lord of darkness ;
experimentalism – open, discontinuous, improvisational, anti-formalism, "an
end to traditional aesthetics focused on the ‘beauty’ or uniqueness of the art
work" (Hassan: 44) – Dionysus defies Apollo.
Dionysus, a god of transgression, ubiquity and ambiguity, has been
resurrected but, as M. Spariosu remarked, his resurrection may undermine
and deconstruct discourse to its uttermost limit (Spariosu: 346).
Both Spears and Hassan define modernism and post-modernism in
terms of continuity and discontinuity; Spears identifies four basic forms of
discontinuity – metaphorical, aesthetic, rhetorical and temporal, while Hassan
makes an analogy between the two perspectives and the Apollonian –
Dionysian principle; "The Apollonian view, rangy and abstract, discerns only
historical conjunctions; the Dionysian feeling, sensuous though nearly
purblind, touches only the disjunctive movement. Thus postmodernism, by
invoking two divinities at once, engages a double view. Sameness and
difference, unity and rupture, filiation and revolt, all must be honoured if we
are to attend to history, apprehend (perceive, understand) change as a
spatial, mental structure and as a temporal, physical process, both as pattern
and unique event" (Hassan: 88).
Therefore the struggle between Apollo and Dionysus must not cease
and if we find ourselves lost in this modern / post-modern strange Fun-House
which is both our inner and our outer Universe, we should remember that
there is a way out as long as the head of Orpheus, even if dismembered,
continues to sing.

II. Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre/Myth
II. Modern/Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek

Theatre/Myth
II.1. The Voyage of Dionysus towards Multiculturalism: from

Euripides’ Dionysus Xenos to Wole Soyinka’s Black
Dionysus
Dionysus was resurrected for the modern world by Nietzsche in The Birth of
Tragedy, in which he contrasted the conventional and serene Apollonian
world of ancient Greece with the dark and terrifying aspects of the Dionysian
spirit in order to argue that the very essence of Greek tragedy was the
expression of these two interacting artistic impulses. Postmodern drama and
theatre hailed Dionysus Lyaios, the Liberator, as an agent of change and
revolt against authority and abstraction. The universalizing quality of classical
Greek tragedy has prompted many postmodern playwrights all over the world
to use it as a vehicle for their own responses to contemporary social and
political issues.
In her article Mapping Dionysus in New Global Spaces,
Multiculturalism and Ancient Greek Tragedy, Marianne McDonald remarks :
“Until this century Greek tragedy was mainly a phenomenon of the West, but
it has now found its way into the East and we have, for example, Chinese,
Japanese, African and Indian re-workings of the ancient canon
“(McDonald:145 in (Dis)Placing Classical Greek Theatre). The fact that
Euripides’ play’ The Bacchae has known many revisions in contemporary
theatre illustrates this postmodern phenomenon and we can exemplify by
mentioning Derek Mahon’s The Bacchae, Tadashi Suzuki’s Bacchae, Caryl
Churchill’s and David Lan’s A Mouthful of Birds, Richard Schechner’s
Dionysus in 69, and Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A
Communion Rite.
In order to understand better the fascination that Dionysus holds for
the postmodern stage we should go back to the ancient myth and re-discover
the beginnings of Dionysus’ voyage.
In Greek mythology, Dionysus is a god of paradox and duality born of
the joining of divinity and humanity; he belongs both to Olympus and to the
Earth and is closely associated with the Underworld. Dionysus is a god of life
and death, blasting and blessing at the same time and his rites combine
ecstasy and horror, vitality and destruction, joy and madness, sensuality and
cruelty.
Dionysus mythobiography connects the god with travel and the
trieteric festivals of his epiphany are related to the ritual of his departure and
absence.
The legend says that Hera struck Dionysus with madness and drove
him forth through Egypt, Syria, Asia and Phrygia, a wandering god who came
back to Thebes in order to reveal his divinity and conquer immortality for
himself and for his mother, Semele.
Euripides’ The Bacchae illustrates the mythical moment of the making
of a god and brings together the motifs of resistance, persecution and
triumph associated with Dionysus.
Above all Dionysus is a xenos, an outsider within the Hellenic world,
Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre
an itinerant god who comes from outside the community, a stranger who
brings with him the Dionysian revelry and its wild, intoxicating rituals. He has
traveled in distant countries and now he has finally reached his homeland:
“Dionysus: Lo! I am come to this land of Thebes, Dionysus, the son of

Zeus, of whom on a day Semele, the daughter of Cadmus, was
delivered by a flash of lightning…Lydia’s glebes, where gold abounds,
and Phrygia have I left behind; o’er Persia’s sun-baked plains, by
Bactria’s walled towns and Media’s wintry clime have I advanced
through Arabia, land of promise…and this is the first city in Hellas I have
reached” (Euripides: 1).
This god, as Yoko Onizuka Chase says in her article Modern Poetics of
Dionysus, “had gone through the maturation process having been pursued,
escaping in disguises as a girl or an animal, dismembered and restored,
driven to madness by Hera, learning and mastering the art of casting and
purging mania, finally disseminating wine (which Teiresias calls balm), and
teaching the life-affirming rites of dance and music” (Chase: 27 in
(Dis)Placing Classical Greek Theatre).
Throughout his mythobiography, Dionysus is characterized by his
bisexuality, revealed in his name Dionysus Gynnis, the ‘womanly one’, or the
‘womanly stranger’, and by the fact that he is always surrounded by women.
Dionysus has also a double, a feminine projection in the young priest
Dionysus with long blond hair and feminine attire, and it is in this image that
the god enters the house of King Cadmus in Thebes.
Both Cadmus and Teiresias, the blind seer, acknowledge Dionysus but
Pentheus, who had left his kingdom for a while, is horrified on return to find
out that the women of the city had left their houses to worship in ‘revel-rout’
this foreign god.
“Pentheus: They say there came a stranger hither, a trickster and a

sorcerer, from Lydia’s land, with golden hair and perfumed locks, the
flush of wine upon his face, and in his eyes each grace that Aphrodite
gives…”(Euripides: 4).
Teiresias warns Pentheus: “this new deity, whom thou deridest, will rise to
power I cannot say how great, throughout Hellas” (Euripides: 5).
Pentheus ignores the warning and swears to ‘hunt down’ this ‘girl-
faced stranger’, bind him and his followers in fetters of iron, and put an end to
his outrageous rites. Pentheus despises the god’s apparent femininity and
vulnerability forgetting that Dionysus’ thyrsus, although covered with leaves,
is also the sharp spear of the hunter and so, Dionysus assumes the power of
the Great Hunter Zagreus and Pentheus becomes his prey. Driven by fury
but also by curiosity, Pentheus goes to mount Cithaeron where the
Bacchanals are celebrating their rites and there he is he is hunted down and
torn to pieces by his own mother, Agave, who in her trance thinks he is a wild
boar. In Euripides’ play Dionysus has thus ended his sport with Pentheus.
Wole Soyinka’s play is a communal feast, a tumultuous celebration of
life, emphasizing cultural coincidences through which Greek/Western and
Yoruba/African mythologies are united in an attempt to bridge these
apparently disconnected worlds.
In his article Soyinka’s Bacchae, African Gods, and Postmodern Mirrors,
Mark Pizzato remarks: ” Soyinka returns to the roots of both European and
African(Yoruba) theatre, combining Dionysian and Ogunian rites of
communal passage, to involve a postmodern, postcolonial audience in the
ancient sacrificial offering” (Pizzato:3).
What Soyinka’s play emphasizes is the need for a willing sacrifice and
the renewal that comes through ritual death, in which ritual is understood as
a way of freeing those oppressed by tyranny; the fact that Soyinka uses a
chorus of slaves, worshippers of Dionysus, and that the background is lined
by the bodies of crucified slaves symbolizing the past in Western myth and
the ancestral community in Yoruba myth, is relevant for the political
dimension that the playwright has added to his re-write.
Soyinka’s Black Dionysus has as his model Ogun, the god of war, iron
and fire in Yoruba mythology, whom the playwright considers being
Dionysus’ elder brother; like the ancient Greek god whose duality meant life
and death, Dionysus- Ogun brings together the ancestral community of the
dead, the community of the living and that of the unborn. However, Soyinka’s
Dionysus is more the Liberator (Lyaios) than the Hunter (Zagreus), he is the
life-affirming, nourishing god through whom we are all reborn.
Soyinka describes the essence of Dionysus-Ogun as being the will to
pass through violent fragmentation and rebirth just like Dionysus Trigonos,
the thrice born god, who dies only to be reborn as shown in the myth of
Zagreus. However, Soyinka’s Dionysus transcends the rage of Euripides’
vengeful Dionysus by embracing divine alienation and fragmentation for the
sake of communal rejuvenation.
Dionysus’ words in the beginning of the play parallel those in Euripides
in a highly poetical way and to the list of lands to which he has traveled, he
adds Ethiopia, thus bringing Europe, Asia and Africa together:
“Dionysus: A seed of Zeus was sown in Semele my mother earth, here

on this spot. It has burgeoned through the cragged rocks of far
Afghanistan, burst the banks of fertile Tmolus, sprung oases through the
red-eyed sands of Arabia, flowered in hill and gorge of dark Ethiopia. It
pounds in the blood and breasts of my wild-haired women…through
Phrygia and the isles of Crete. It beats on the walls of Thebes, bringing
vengeance on all who deny my holy origin and call my mother slut”
(Soyinka: 2).
Pizzato remarks that “Soyinka’s Dionysus arrives in Thebes already

dismembered: alienated from his membership ties to homeland and human
family, a ‘scapegoat of a god’ as he calls himself-rather than Euripides’
triumphant avenger”(Pizzato:59).
The similarities between the two gods are obvious: both claim the
‘Collective’ and the ‘Other’, both have traveled far, both acknowledge their
duality as the essence of their godhead and both are determined to assert
their divinity in Thebes. However, in Soyinka’s revision of the Bacchae,
Dionysus appears less interested in having his revenge on Pentheus and
more inclined to re-unite the community through his rites.
As already mentioned, Soyinka adds the chorus of the slaves to that of
the Bacchae of the original play and this fact gives a new dimension to his
play; both the Bacchae and the slaves belong to ‘Otherness’, the former
because they are foreigners, xenoi, and the latter because they are at the
margin of society. The Dionysian revel becomes a revolt against authority
and tyranny which is meant to free the slaves from their ‘scapegoat’ roles by
subverting and inverting the victim’s identity.

In both plays Dionysus plays the trickster god and lures his victim,
Pentheus, outside the city walls to mount Cithaeron where the bacchantes
indulge in their revels while waiting for the last rite; the two Pentheuses
become infected with the Dionysian drive within themselves, accept the offer
of role-playing, clad themselves in fawn-skins, take the thyrsi, and go to meet
their deaths.
In Soyinka’s play Dionysus tells Pentheus:
“Come with me to the mountains. See for yourself

Watch the Maenads, unseen. There are risks
A king must take for his own people.
Pentheus:’Yes, yes, this is true” (Soyinka: 69).
In the final twist of the play, Dionysus casts Pentheus in his own role and
then he disappears from stage:
“Dionysus: Yes, you alone

Make sacrifices for your people, you alone
The role belongs to a king. Like those gods, who yearly
Must be rent to spring anew, that also
Is the fate of heroes” (Soyinka: 78).
Like in Euripides’ play, Pentheus is brutally torn apart by his mother Agave
and by the Bacchantes, but the end is entirely different because it projects
the symbolical death and rebirth of Pentheus/Dionysus. Agave triumphantly
shows Pentheus’ head impaled on a thyrsus to the crowd; from the orifices of
the head red jets spring, it is the wine of Dionysus, and all the characters
drink in a final, all embracing ‘communion rite’, as now, through the ritual, the
One/Pentheus has become the Other/Dionysus.
As Pizzato remarks in his study, “Soyinka’s revision of ancient
violence in The Bacchae offers valuable sacrificial connections, not only
between vastly different cultures, or to the past worlds of the dead within
them, but also to the Other of the living in the present theatre of communal
psyche- and to the unborn in the global village of the future” (Pizzato: 70).
My own conclusion is that since there have been so many revisions of
the myth of Dionysus so far, we may assume that Dionysus’ travel towards
multiculturalism has not ended yet, and that the post-post modern era will
probably know his whereabouts and maybe accompany him in his future
voyages.
II.2. The Apollonian and Dionysian Clash of Wills and Values

in Peter Shaffer’s Equus and The Gift of the Gorgon
The diversity of Peter Shaffer’s dramatic achievements, his theatrical
inventiveness, verbal dexterity and ability to weave compelling stories have
brought him an international reputation as one of the most original
contemporary British playwrights. Whether his stories are about the conquest
of the Inca Empire or the death of Mozart, or whether they illustrate the need
for worship or the search for immortality, they all have at their core the
archetypal clash between Apollonian self-control and Dionysian self-
expression. While Apollo represents the lucid, aristocratic, self-conscious
individual, Dionysus claims the collective and the Other, the
feminine/androgynous/transsexual, in an orgy of passion and intoxication.
Modern/postmodern individuals find themselves torn between these two
contradictory drives, each equally lethal, if not counter-balanced by its
opposite.
Shaffer expressed his life-long fascination with the duality of human nature
in an interview with Brian Connell entitled The Two Sides of Theatre’s
Agonised Perfectionist in which he declared:
“There is in me a continuous tension between what I suppose I could

call the Apollonian and the Dionysian sides of interpreting life,
between, say, Dysart and Alan Strang [Equus]. I don’t really see it in
those dry intellectual terms…I just feel in myself that there is a
constant debate going on between the violence of instinct on the one
hand and the desire in my mind for order and restraint.” (Cooke and
Page: 84).
The archetypal clash between Apollonian and Dionysian characters is

central to Shaffer’s work, at variable overtones in its representation and
configuration. Initially, the characters align themselves either with the
Apollonian or with the Dionysian camp and they seem to inhabit separate
universes. However, the conflict between what Shaffer calls “the two kinds of
Right,” gradually moves within the individual himself. In her illuminating study
Peter Shaffer Theatre and Drama, M. MacMurraugh-Kavanagh remarks that
Apollonian characters are generally aware of their own Dionysian nature and
they feel the tension between the conflicting forces within themselves,
whereas their Dionysian counterparts do not, and that ultimately, they will
both face failure because they let themselves be driven to extremes.
As symbols of behavioural patterns, the Apollonians are pragmatic and
efficient, they adhere to the established social norms and rules, they value
respectability and they are accepted by the community. The Dionysians, who
are imaginative and creative, reject conventional standards and trust their
own impulses and instincts, however, their transgression of normality brings
condemnation from society and they are usually severely sanctioned by it.
The Dionysian experience is vital and to repress it inevitably leads to a
frozen, dry existence as the Apollonians find out; on the other hand, if taken
to extremity, the Dionysian way of life implies destruction and self-
destruction.
The two plays chosen for analysis in this study, Equus and The Gift of the
Gorgon, illustrate the dangers implied by both ways. While the argument in
the former is that repression of the Dionysian impulses by the Apollonian
normality is castrating, the latter brings to the foreground the threat posed by
uncontrolled Dionysian drives within the individuals who cannot and will not
acknowledge the Apollonian values.
Equus offers an explicit illustration of the clash of wills and values between
Apollonian and Dionysian archetypes in terms of an attempt to unite an
existential and sexual search for identity with the individual’s need for an
unconventional kind of worship in a society that denies it. To a certain extent
the play is influenced by the Jungian theories of the archetypes and the
collective unconscious, and Shaffer himself declared his admiration for Jung
in an interview for Vogue, in February, 1975:
“Jung, when talking about neurosis said, ‘neurosis is an escape from

legitimate pain’. Until I read that, I hadn’t quite been aware that there
was such a thing as legitimate pain. I think Jung is one of the

greatest minds of the twentieth century….Jung is so intensely
grounded in myth…” ( Cooke and Page:49-50)
As the play opens, Alan, “a lean boy of seventeen, in sweater and jeans,”
(Shaffer:209) is fondling a horse and the horse, in turn, is nuzzling his neck.
Dr. Martin Dysart, the narrator-protagonist of Equus, addresses the audience
in an attempt to explain the crisis he finds himself in and which has been
prompted by his highly disturbed patient. In this opening scene of Act I,
Dysart confesses that he is not troubled by the boy but by the horse and by
his own doubts and unanswerable questions. Dysart’s monologue reveals
what will be clearly stated at the end of the play, the tension he feels between
his Apollonian mind and his Dionysian spirit or, in Freudian terms, the
irreconcilable conflict between his ego and his id:
“The thing is, I’m desperate. You see, I’m wearing that horse’s head
myself. That’s the feeling. All reined up in old language and old
assumptions, straining to jump clean-footed on to a whole new track
of being I only suspect is there. I can’t see it, because my educated,
average head is being held at the wrong angle. I can’t jump because
the bit forbids it, and my own basic force-my horsepower, if you like-is
too little.” (ibid.:210)
Following the prologue, Dysart conjures past events: a few months earlier,
Hesther Salomon, a magistrate of children’s court, begged him to accept a
young boy as his patient. His shocking crime, the blinding of six horses,
made the medical community reject him and Dysart is the only hope for the
boy. Dysart reluctantly accepts to treat “one more adolescent freak, the usual
unusual,” (ibid.:213) only to realize shortly after that he is becoming more and
more fascinated by the frail and utterly confused young man.
From the very beginning, Dysart’s Apollonian characteristics are clearly
marked: he is a respected professional concerned with converting the
irrational into the rational, eloquent and self-controlled, aware of his mission
as a healer. However, Dysart begins to doubt the efficiency of the Apollonian
cure as he becomes more and more aware of the fact that Apollo
Apotropaios, the god of medicine, is also Apollo Hecatebolos, the god of
death. Furthermore, as Apollo Delphic or Apollo Loxias, the Greek god was
the omniscient divine counselor who reigned over the world of dreams and
premonitions, the cryptic character of had to be interpreted, and Dysart’s
profession is based on Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.
When Dysart achieves his first breakthrough with Alan and the boy starts
talking to him, it becomes obvious that Alan’s confusion over religion and his
search for identity are related to his rejection of his parents’ contradictory
values. Caught between the stifling atmosphere of his home and the
dreariness of the Electrical and Kitchenware shop where he now works,
between his father’s “receive my meaning” and his mother’s “God sees you,
Alan,” the adolescent creates his own unconventional worship in which
Equus, the horse-god, replaces Christ.
The beginning of Act II shows Dysart aware of the fact that the boy’s
obsession has become his own. He now hears Equus’ voice calling him “out
of the black cave of the Psyche,” (ibid.:267) asking Dysart to account for him.
Dysart admits that he has often been stared at by such unsettling images
coming from the archetypal unconscious of which Equus is the symbol. He
also knows that Equus will not go gently back into the shadows of the spirit:
“when Equus leaves—if he leaves at all—it will be with your intestines in his
teeth.” (ibid.:299)
Dysart is reluctant to cure Alan and take from the boy what makes him
unique, his unconventional worship. He sees his own life as barren and
devoid of meaning and understands that his refuge into an aesthetic but
passive worship of Ancient Greece cannot compare in any way with Alan’s
passionate cult for his horse-god. He tells Hesther who firmly believes that
the boy should be restored to normalcy: “But that boy has known a passion
more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. And let me tell you
something: I envy it!” (ibid.:274)
Dysart knows that without worship you shrink and that he has shrunk his
own life just sitting opposite a woman he hasn’t kissed for years while
dreaming about the plains of Argos in his comfortable armchair. After having
understood Alan’s primitive, yet powerful way of worshiping, he comments
ironically and bitterly on his sterile attempt at recapturing the sense of wonder
that Greek civilization holds:
“I tell everyone Margaret’s the puritan, I’m the pagan. Three weeks in
the Peloponese, every bed booked in advance, every meal paid for
by the vouchers…Such a fantastic surrender to the primitive. And I
use that word endlessly: primitive. Oh, the primitive world! I say. What
instinctual truths were lost in it! And while I sit there…that freaky boy
tries to conjure the reality! I sit looking at pages of centaurs trampling
the soil of Argos—and outside my window he is trying to become one
in a Hampshire field!” (ibid.:275)
The fact is that, while looking into the “black cave of the Psyche” and
perceiving its potentially lethal but also liberating Dionysian impulses, Dysart
begins to understand that beyond his Apollonian professional and social
doubts he craves the Dionysian experience that Alan has enjoyed. However,
he also realizes that the Dionysian way is destructive and self-destructive as
Alan’s case conspicuously proves.
In his efforts to name the beast, Dysart finds out that the beast is not always
the archetypal foe lurking in the darkness of the unconscious, it may be
hiding in the surrounding world of castrating normality that has robbed people
of their instinctual need for worship. Dysart has honestly assisted many
children, he has talked away terrors and relieved many agonies but he also
knows that
“The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes—all right. It is also the
dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills—like a God. It
is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made lethal.”
(ibid.:257)
At the end of the play Dysart resumes his role as Apollo Apotropaios and
decides he will cure Alan, although he is aware of the price they both will pay:
“I’ll heal the rash on his body. I’ll erase the welts cut into his mind by flying
manes.”(ibid.:299) He will give Alan the Normal world, no flying manes, a
scooter will suffice, no field of “Ha Ha,” but normal places for approved
worship, in a word, everything that will turn Alan into an adult ghost with a
dead stare like himself.
On a symbolical/ mythical level, Alan’s crime is not a defiance of the
Apollonian world but a self-destructive act that leads to the disintegration of

the Dionysian world. The confrontation between the Apollonian Healer and
the Dionysian Centaur ends with the apparent victory of the Apollonian
protagonist, however, since “the sharp chain” that Dysart feels in his mouth
will never come out, it becomes clear that the conflict has been internalized
and that Dysart will remain caught, as M. MacMurraugh-Kavanagh remarks,
“between Apollonian and Dionysian visions of Right.” (MacMurraugh-
Kavangh:113)
The Gift of the Gorgon deals with the confrontation between the ethical
issues of revenge and justice in the ancient and the modern world, a
confrontation built upon the clash between Apollonian and Dionysian ways of
interpreting life and with goddess Athena and Perseus conjured from Greek
mythology and brought literally on stage.
The protagonists, Dionysian Edward Damson and his Apollonian wife,
Helen, assume in turn their present and mythical identities, establishing a
symbolical connection between the two apparently unconnected worlds.
While in Equus it is the myth of the centaur that provides the link between the
present and the past, in The Gift of the Gorgon myth operates as a
framework for the entire play and the ancient story of Agamemnon and the
myth of Perseus become the starting point of the debate on the violence of
human instinct and the morality of revenge.
The action of the play takes place in Edward Damson’s villa on the Greek
island of Thera, and, in recall, England during the years 1974 to 1993. The
play opens in an atmosphere of mourning for the death of Edward Damson, a
famous playwright who retired to the island after the failure of his last play.
His death is attributed to an unhappy accident: while drunk, he slipped over
the cliff of lava behind his house. His widow, Helen, receives several letters
from a young American academic who wishes to write a book about
Damson’s life and career. The young man, Philip, is the playwright’s own son
who has been denied any relationship with his father because of the latter’s
refusal to acknowledge him. Quite unexpectedly, Philip comes on the island
and Helen is forced to listen to his plea. Eventually she agrees to let him
write his book, but only on one condition, that he should tell everything, no
matter what he finds out.
The scenes from the Time Present quickly alternate with those from the
Time Past to flesh out the story of a love-and-hate relationship. The two
protagonists, Edward, a young ambitious playwright, son of a Russian
immigrant father and a Welsh mother, and Helen, daughter of an eminent
professor of Greek culture, herself a promising academic, symbolically writing
a dissertation about goddess Athena, are unequivocally aligned with the
Apollonian and Dionysian camps.
During their first meeting, Edward and Helen vehemently express their
divergent point of views on the issue of revenge and retribution. Edward
confesses that he attended a lecture on Agamemnon presented by Helen’s
father who, in his opinion, “turned Aeschylus into anesthesia,”(Shaffer:19)
because he failed to acknowledge Clytemnestra’s rightness in chopping her
husband. Next he brings goddess Athena into discussion and argues that
she was the most aggressive of all Greek gods while Helen retorts that
Athena’s role was to keep order and peace. With all these divergent opinions,
they fall in love and after a short trip to Greece they get married. Helen
abandons her studies and career to find a job so that Edward can write his
plays but it soon becomes obvious that Edward suffers from “a kind of active
paralysis,” (ibid.:35) that is the impossibility of finishing one single play. He
needs her moral force and balanced judgment and he begs her for help by
sending her a mythological script, which becomes the first in their private
correspondence no one ever knew about.
The first scene of this script is set in the temple of Athena where Edward-
Perseus invokes: “Athena Hellenica! Athena Scolastica! Athena Superlativa!
Inspirer of the Fearful! Sustainer of the Scared!”(ibid.:40) When Helen-
Athena appears wearing a mask which denotes immense serenity, Edward-
Perseus asks her to help him fulfill his vow and kill the snake-haired Gorgon
who lives “on the Island of Immobility,”(ibid.:41) in other words, to help him
overcome his personal Gorgon, that is, his active paralysis.
Athena, who is a mediator and a helper, offers Perseus four gifts: the Shoes
of Swiftness to be lost to earth, the Cap of Darkness to be lost to sight, the
Sickle of Adamant to cut the Gorgon’s head and last, the Shield of Showing
in which truth can be seen by reflection. However, goddess Athena warns
Perseus that from the Gorgon’s veins two bloods will flow, one that cures and
one that kills, but her warning goes unnoticed.
th
Edward finishes his first play, Icons, set in 8 century A.D. Byzantium, a
drama about the age-old fight between the Iconoclasts and their opponents.
Driven by his need for violent expression, Edward wants to show on stage
the blinding of Constantine VI, because he believes that Constantine
deserved his blinding just as Agamemnon deserved his chopping, and that
desecrators of art and beauty like Constantine and Cromwell should be
punished and killed. Helen reminds him of the Apollonian creed metron
ariston, measure is everything, and begs him to rewrite the scene. He listens
to her with the result that the play proves a roaring success and establishes
his reputation overnight. Fame and wealth bring not only happiness but
something else too, as if, in Helen’s words, a light had been switched on,
“one of these they use to make plants grow quickly…Only what was growing
in him was alarming, the wrong side of confidence,”(ibid.:52) that is, the other
blood of the Gorgon.
Edward’s second play, Prerogative, about Cromwell, is even more violent.
He thinks that a playwright’s duty is to appall and tear his audience out of
moral catalepsy but the artistic means he chooses are wrong. Edward wants
his audience to rejoice in Cromwell’s death by having the actors parade
Cromwell’s head on stage, then tear the head to pieces and throw them
exultantly to the audience. Extreme Edward, at his most extreme, assumes
the role of Dionysus Omestes, the blood-thirsty render of men whose ritual
implied the dismemberment of the victim. Once again Helen convinces
Edward to give up this ghastly scene and the play becomes another hit.
Shocked by a terrorist bomb attack at a War Memorial in Northern Ireland,
Edward decides to write a play entitled I.R.E. about the rightness of revenge.
He justifies his choice by telling Helen that the ancient Greeks thought that
revenge was righteous for a dreadful crime and that the execution of a
murderer is the sanative way of gaining peace, “the hallowed, health-giving
peace of Clytemnestra, slaughtering her husband in that bath. Setting at rest
the spirit of her screaming daughter.”(ibid.:59)
In his last play, whose title I.R.E. refers to both Dies Ire and to I.R.A., the
woman whose little daughter is killed by an explosion during a terrorist bomb
attack in a London toy-shop, tracks down the man responsible for the
tragedy, makes him her captive and finally kills him. The last scene of the
play shows the woman dancing “The Holy Dance of Satisfaction”, the rightful
stamping of Clytemnestra. However, the audience does not experience the
catharsis that Edward has imagined and the play proves a failure.
On the island where they retire, Helen understands that their marriage is
doomed and that Edward will never recover from the poisonous blood of the
Gorgon, so she decides to write her own mythological scene. In it, Athena
tells Perseus that the only thing she asked in return for everything she had
offered was one gift, just one, the gift of the Gorgon’s head to set it in her
shield and keep from harming him because, in her words, “the man who
keeps the Gorgon—becomes the Gorgon!”(ibid.:84) Athena makes Edward
see his island of immobility: the rejection of his own son whom he despises
for being an academic and a drama critic, the rejection of his wife whom he
has turned into a “womb of stone” by denying her motherhood, and the
rejection of his career and she concludes: “Perseus Unaided—you will never
fly again.” (ibid.:85)
After reading this scene, Edward humbly begs Helen to restore him, cleanse
him and wash him as in a ritual in order to wipe away all the wrongs. She
accepts, and in the darkness of the bathroom he makes her wash his body
with the blade of his mat-knife hidden in the soap. When she realizes the
horror, Edward tells her:
“I have taken for you the revenge you need. This is my gift to you: the
Sacred Gift of Vengeance. I have made you the instrument of my
atonement. Be appeased. This is the blood that cures…So I give up
the Gorgon.” (ibid.;88)
Bleeding, he crawls to the edge of the lava cliff near their garden and flings
himself into the abyss.
Time Past switches to Time Present. Philip has found out everything but he
does not want to write the book anymore; Helen realizes that the book would
be her own dance of rightful stamping and she decides to forgive Edward.
The end of the play shows Helen standing downstage, her eyes closed in
relief. And yet, behind her, the figure of Edward, wearing a death mask on his
face, starts dancing his terrible dance. As his stamping becomes louder and
more savage, Helen desperately shouts at him: “I forgive! I forgive! I forgive!
... FORGIVE!” (ibid.:94)
The Apollonian and Dionysian clash of wills and values in this play is
illustrated in the debate about the morality of revenge and the role of the
theatre. Dionysian Edward believes in the punishing of transgressors beyond
the pale of pardon and, as a playwright, he wants the theatre to assume the
forms and attitudes of Greek theatre and become an arena where the
purgation of violent instincts could be effected by direct confrontation and
involvement. He also wants his plays to force the audience out of the moral
catalepsy induced by “avoidance” and repressed instincts and bring on stage
pure revenge which, in his opinion, is pure justice. Apollonian Helen rejects
the ethics of revenge because violence breeds more violence, as shown in
the myth of Agamemnon. However, the archaic call to bloodshed, which is
the Gorgon’s poisonous blood, infects Edward’s excessive self and drives
him towards self-destruction. Although tempted to have her revenge, Helen
does not succumb to the demands of retribution and irrationality and she
finally forgives her husband.
At the end of the two plays under discussion, both Apollonians and
Dionysians face defeat: Dysart remains the prisoner of his own limits while
still craving the Dionysian experience of his alter-ego Alan, Helen will carry
on the burden of her Apollonian lucidity and, in Aeschylean terms, she will
forever suffer into truth, Alan ends up a ghost and Edward reaches the
extremity of self-denial by committing suicide.
Dysart and Helen, who perform the roles of Apollo Apotropaios and Apollo
Arhegetes, try to help and heal their Dionysian counterparts but they both fail
because they ultimately cannot reconcile themselves with their opponents.
Alan and Edward are both destructive and self-destructive, the victims of their
own violent impulses and desires, and their wild, passionate natures point to
the darker side of Dionysus Melanaigos and Dionysus Morichos. Alan
destroys his mythical world and by doing this he condemns himself to
spiritual death. Edward Damson chooses to die in order to purge his guilt and
to regain his lost divinity, that is, the immortality of his art; by doing this he
becomes the very image of Orpheus whose head, even if dismembered,
continues to sing.
The Dionysian experience is expressive of vital needs while the Apollonian
vision ensures order and survival but if taken to extremes they are both lethal
and this is the argument of Shaffer’s dramas. Underlying this argument there
is the suggestion that, as long as duality does not become dualism, chances
are that Self and Other, like Apollo and Dionysus who made peace at Delphi
a very long time ago, can ultimately co-exist and give the Individual and the
World their total dimension.
II.3 The Symbiotic Apollonian-Dionysian Brothers and the

Clash of Cultural Values in Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God
Brown and Sam Shepard’s True West
For the ancients as well as for the modern/postmodern world, Apollo
and Dionysus embody the psychological conflict between the intellect and the
hunger for release of the darker, instinctual drives within every one of us. In
the two plays under discussion the conflict is conducted through opposing
individuals who occupy two defined and apparently absolute positions. As a
rule, the Apollonians stand for the conscious forces of logic, order and control
and are preoccupied with their place in society; the Dionysians embody the
contrasting unconscious forces of instinct and passion and they rely on direct
experience. However as the plays progress, the fundamental differences
between characters erode and the clash between rival impulses takes over
the Apollonian individuals who begin to develop a feeling of admiration for
their opponents, with the result that, as MacMurraugh-Kavannagh remarks,
“the victor often comes to occupy the vanquished position which attests to
the symbiosis between oppositional forces“(MacMurraugh-Kavanagh:102).
In O’Neill’s play, The Great God Brown, the Apollonian/Dionysian
duality is clearly marked from the beginning in the description of the two main
characters, William Brown and Dion Anthony; in the prologue we are told that
“Billy Brown is a handsome, tall and athletic boy of nearly eighteen. He is
blond and blue-eyed, with a likeable smile and a frank, good-humoured face,
its expression already indicating a disciplined restraint. His manner has the
easy self-assurance of a normal intelligence”O’Neill:473). Everything in this
presentation alludes to Apollo’s characteristics: physical beauty, restraint,
normality; we should remember that Apollo’s creed is “metron ariston” and
“meden agan” , that is, “the right measure” and “nothing in excess” and that
he is the god of self-restraint whose supreme values are law and order.
Apollo stands for normalcy, for the average, and that’s why O’Neill chose the
common name William Brown for his Apollonian character.
On the other hand, Dion’s first name is a direct reference to Dionysus. He is
described as follows: “He is about the same height as young Brown but lean
and wiry, without repose, continually in restless nervous movement. His face
is masked. The mask is a fixed forcing of his own face- dark, spiritual, poetic,
passionately supersensitive, helplessly unprotected in its childlike, religious
faith in life- into the expression of a mocking, reckless, defiant, gayly scoffing
and sensual young Pan”(O’Neill:475). As a Dionysian, Dion is the
embodiment of the creative artist who cannot accommodate himself to the
societal rules that Apollonian Billy stands for.
Both young men love Margaret but she rejects Billy because she is
attracted by Dion’s sensitive, artistic and wild nature and so she marries him.
Scene I take us seven years later; the setting is the shabby sitting room of
the Dion Anthony family. Dion is older and his face has grown more strained
and tortured. The mask, which hangs on his breast, is also older, more
defiant and bitter and it shows the ravages of dissipation. We find out that
Dion left college when his father died and sold his shares in the company that
Billy’s father and his father had set up a long time ago. He and Margaret
have spent whatever money they had and moreover Dion has forgotten
about painting and indulges in drinking and playing cards. Billy, who has
never married, has become a successful architect and businessman.
Margaret, the loving, supporting wife, asks Billy to give Dion a job and Dion
agrees because” one must do something to pass away the time, while one is
waiting-for one’s next incarnation” (O’Neill: 495), a reply which points again to
the Dionysian re-births.
Act II takes places in Cybel’s Parlor, seven years later. Dion’s face is now
that of a martyr and the mask is terribly ravaged by time and self- torture. We
find out that Dion designed the plans of a cathedral for which Billy got the
appraisal. He accuses Billy of stealing his ideas as well as Cybel, his
mistress. Cybel, who incarnates the great Goddess Mother and whom Dion
calls Miss Earth, replies;” But you like him, too! You’re brothers, I guess,
somehow.”(O’Neill: 500). Some moments later in the next scene there is the
final confrontation between Dion and Billy; with bitterness Dion sketches their
relationship since they were just little boys:” One day when I was four years
old, a boy sneaked up behind when I was drawing a picture in the sand he
couldn’t draw and hit me on the head with a stick and kicked out my picture
and laughed when I cried....Everyone called me cry-baby, so I became silent
for life and designed a mask of the Bad Boy Pan....And that other boy,
secretly he felt ashamed but he couldn’t acknowledge it; so from that day he
instinctively developed into the good boy, the good friend, the good man,
William Brown!”(O’Neill:506-507).
Dion dies and Billy takes his mask and puts it on his face in a desperate
attempt to assume Dion’s personality and role. By doing this he becomes a
resurrected Dion and he will die as Dion, shot by the sheriff’s men at the end
of the play and thus his craving to be the Other leads to self-effacement and
self-destruction.
In Sam Shepard’s True West the symbiotic hostile brothers, Lee and
Austin, are forever entwined but forever battling against each other in a
desperate attempt to assert their selves. A vivid metaphor of this battle is
offered by Wesley, a character in The Curse of the Starving Classes in his
tale about the eagle that swoops down and lifts a cat into the sky: “they fight,
they fight like crazy in the middle of the sky. The cat’s tearing his chest out
and the eagle’s trying to drop him, but the cat won’t let go because he knows
if he falls he’ll die” (Shepard: 182).
The play opens with Lee’s arrival after a long period of time spent in
the Mojave Desert and his insolent intrusion upon his brother’s privacy.
Austin, who has left his family somewhere in the north, stays in their mother’s
house in order to “concentrate” and get inspiration for a script he is writing for
a Hollywood producer. The quarrel between the brothers starts over Austin’s
car which Lee wants to use for some little thefts in the neighborhood. At first
the verbal attacks look like a ritual game of bullying played between the older
and the younger brother but gradually tension builds up as the gestures and
voices become more and more threatening. Lee mocks at Austin’s “art” and
accuses him of being no more than a victim of his cultural imprisonment, a
mere seller of dreams and illusions; Lee has a temporary advantage over his
brother and his attempt at dispossessing Austin of his things and territory
seems successful.
The turning point in the play occurs when Lee sells the Hollywood
producer his own idea of a script about the true west, a story rooted in his life
experience which parallels in a symbolical way the conflict between the two
brothers; it is a story about two men chasing each other through and endless
black prairie and “the one who’s chasing doesn’t known where the other is
taking him. And the one who’s being chased doesn’t know where he’s going.”
(Shepard: 27).
When Lee claims that his story reveals the true west Austin retorts
that “there’s no such thing as the west anymore. It’s a dead issue! The myths
are used up” (Shepard: 30), however Austin’s own identity as a contriver of
illusions lies in manipulating popular myths.
By turns comic and threatening, Act II explores the dissolution of
identity as the two brothers begin to swap roles. Lee starts writing his script,
typing it with one finger and trying hard to concentrate while Austin, drunk
and singing, wants to make a little tour in the neighborhood to steal a toaster
and then leave for the desert. The next scene shows them both drunk: Lee
smashes the typewriter and burns his script while Austin is polishing a heap
of toasters he has just stolen. Lee admits that he has always considered
what it would be like to be Austin while Austin declares that he has always
wished to go out there in the desert and be like Lee. It is obvious that Austin
envies Lee’s freedom and non-conformism and that Lee craves Austin’s
secure position. An illusory reconciliation takes place: Austin accepts to
write Lee’s script if Lee takes him to the desert. When the script is finished
Lee does no longer want to keep his promise, therefore Austin attacks his
brother viciously in an attempt to murder him and thus preserve his own self.
The final frozen image of the play is that of the two brothers preparing to
continue their fight, predator and prey at the same time. It seems that they
prepare to enact the script about True West they have been fighting over,
against the background of a desert landscape and the menacing howling of
the coyotes heard in the distance.
Metaphorically Austin and Lee represent the two sides of the modern
divided self. In his own commentary on the play Shepard stated that “we’re
split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal, it’s
not so cute. Not some little thing we can get over. It’s something we’ve got to
live with.” (in Surdulescu : 104).
The motif of opposing and conflicting personalities can be interpreted
as the Apollonian-Dionysian duality of the human nature: on the one hand,
the need for order and restraint which is Apollonian, and on the other hand,
the irrational surge of the dark and destructive impulses, which is Dionysian.
Austin stands for the Apollonian self, respectable, conventional and adhering
to the existing social and cultural norms. His world is disrupted by the
intrusion of his wild, incontrollable and un-conventional Dionysian
counterpart, Lee. Both recognize the limits of their roles and personalities

and the fact that the merging of selves into a whole personality is an illusion,
and therefore the reconciliation is impossible and the deadly game of
opposites will be resumed.
The Dionysian experience is expressive of vital needs, while the
Apollonian vision ensures order and survival but, if taken to extremes, they
both imply destruction and self-destruction, and this is the argument of this
paper. The Apollonian protagonists attempt to define themselves in
relationship to their Dionysian opponents in terms of the meaning of
existence itself, while the Dionysians feel no such need because they seem
to be better accommodated with their own visions and belief systems.
The relationship between the four characters presented is defined by
symbiosis since One cannot exist without the Other, yet it proves disastrous
because ultimately there can be no reconciliation.
II. 4. Medea’s Journey towards Postmodernism- the Remake

of the Theatrical Myth
The practice of interculturalism has brought into focus our relationship
with ancient Greek drama in an endeavour to establish in what ways classical
tragedy can be related to our times and interests. Many modern/postmodern
playwrights have been tempted to express their own dilemmas, hopes and
fears by re-writing Greek myth and tragedy and appropriating them so as to
convey their messages about national, cultural and political identity.
Euripides’s play ‘Medea’ has known many re-works in contemporary
theatre and, consequently, Medea herself has evolved from the status of a
sorceress/murderess to that of a landmark in postmodern feminist
discourse/drama.
The ancient legend of the Colchian princess who, blinded by her
passion and devoured by her consuming jealousy, took revenge upon her
unfaithful husband by murdering their children has endured for centuries. The
outlines of the story as told by Euripides are well-known. Jason and his
Argonauts arrive in Colchis where they hope to find and take the Golden
Fleece. To get it they must perform the tasks imposed by King Aeetes: to
tame the brazen-footed bulls, to fight the earth-warriors, and to put to sleep
the sleepless dragon, the guardian of the Fleece. The king’s daughter,
Medea, is seized by an overwhelming passion for the beautiful stranger who
has come to claim the Fleece and, although she is conscious that she is
betraying her father and her people, she decides to help Jason. As a result
Jason is victorious and sails homewards with Medea as his wife. At home
Jason finds out that his uncle Pelias has taken the throne so he leaves for
Corinth where he and Medea are welcomed by King Creon. In Corinth Jason
betrays Medea and marries Glauke, the king’s daughter. Medea finds herself
reduced to a humiliating position: a foreigner in a new country with no
relatives, no husband and no protection. Enraged by Jason’s betrayal,
Medea swears revenge. To punish him Medea uses her magic powers and
kills Glauke with the help of a poisoned veil sent to her by her children and
then she murders her two sons. When Jason arrives and tries to force the
gates of the palace, Medea flies away in a chariot drawn by two dragons,
taking her dead children with her. Jason is left to mourn and fear his future
ignoble death predicted by Medea.
Euripides’s Medea does what no other Greek woman would dare to,
except Clytemnestra. The position of both women is similar to a certain point:
they embody the old matriarchal/chthonic forces which oppose, each for a
different reason, patriarchal justice/behaviour. In Euripides’s play Medea is
literally the foreigner, the barbarian, the Other, and consequently she is
associated with the occult rituals and dangerous practices of Hecate. Her role
as outsider and sorceress is relevant in the framing of her rebellion. Medea’s
assertion of self is unnatural since it places itself outside the boundaries of
accepted female behaviour. Women’s role in ancient Greece was to sacrifice
their self for the good of their fathers/husbands/sons and they were not
supposed to question this role assigned to them by society. Medea’s situation
in the play is juxtaposed with that of the women’s chorus and while the
women-the communal voice- sympathize with her abandonment, they remind
her that she must bear her misfortune with dignity. This communal voice of
the civilized, democratic polis, of which Medea is however no part, is
surprisingly counterbalanced by Euripides’s own position towards the unfair
treatment of women in his time. Thus, in Medea’s monologue he describes
the fate of ordinary woman: first of all she must have a dowry in order to
marry and when she marries she will become the servant of the man,
anticipating his wishes, adapting to his demands, never complaining, and
forced to remain forever in the background.
Perhaps this is the reason why the play was not successful; the
Athenians were not prepared to welcome on stage a heroine who betrayed
her father and took revenge upon her husband, however, Medea’s journey
towards postmodernism had already started.
Some centuries later, Ovid re-told Medea’s story from a different
perspective. In Metamorphoses, Medea is a sorceress who uses her herbs
and spells to help Jason, to rejuvenate his father, and to kill Pelias. While the
description of her magic rituals is done in five pages, the tragedy itself covers
only two paragraphs which summarize Jason’s betrayal and Medea’s
revenge.
However, in addition to these widely known versions of the Medea
myth, there are other ancient texts which offer an alternative story. Thus in
his article on Christa Wolf’s Medea, Barnard Turner observes that before
Euripides, Pindar had described Medea as very forceful and capable of
giving Jason the counsel that he needed but he had made no reference to
her infanticidal inclinations and that “it is as such, and as a potent figure
whose potions can help the lovelorn, that she appears in Theocritus’ later
tragicomic Simaitha Idyll (II.16). Much later and against the murderous
presentation of Ovid, who quickly covers the murder of the sons in one line
(MetamorphosesVII.396), and Seneca, who gives her the memorable
description scelerum artifex (734), there is the record of the traveler
Pausanias, whose researches in Corinth- where of course above all she
would have cause to be loathed- lead him to state that the Corinthians
themselves stoned Medea’s children to death after they had delivered the
poisoned robe…Such divergent presentations undermine the absolute
authority of Euripides which of course he might not have claimed for himself,
and confirm Pausanias’ opinion at the beginning of his Guide: ‘Most people
have no historical knowledge, and so they tell and believe untruths, including
whatever they picked up as children from tragedies and oratorios’ “ (
(Dis)Placing Classical Greek Theatre :203-204).
Many postmodern playwrights have questioned Euripides’s and Ovid’s
versions and consequently have offered their readers and audience new,
more challenging Medeas.
Heiner Muler, one of the designers of a German postmodern theatre
aesthetic, has dislodged and replaced classical Greek theatre in order to

accommodate his views of the world seen as a wasteland. Muler declared
that he turned to adapting or rewriting ancient texts because of censorship in
East Germany during the 60s when he felt he simply couldn’t write a play
about Stalinism or about socialist society; instead, he took Greek tragedies
out of their context and turned them into locally relevant paradigms.
Despoiled Shore Medeamaterial Landscape with Argonauts is one of
Muler’s most pessimistic plays, a vision of an old wasteland engrafted on
postwar communist East Berlin. The play is a composite, tripartite text; the
first, Despoiled Shore, and the last, Landscape with Argonauts, are made of
open-verse lines, with no named characters, a collective ‘I ’, and overlapping
images of ancient and modern destructions. Despoiled Shore re-configures
East Berlin and amalgamates its pollution and depletion with the blood of the
women of Colchis and the remnants of the Argonauts. Landscape with
Argonauts is a long inner monologue spoken in a collective first person voice,
sometimes Muler’s, sometimes Jason’s. Muler’s Jason stands for the
conqueror, the colonizer who looted the Golden Fleece and took away
Medea’s identity and emplotted her in his own history.
The central part of the play, Medeamaterial, is mainly a monologue by
the betrayed Medea. Out of Euripides’s play, Muler reworked the scene
where Medea speaks of her past happiness spent among her family and
friends and of her present desire for revenge. Medea’s monologue becomes
an agonized scream of outrage against betrayal at both personal and
historical level, the scream of the wounded, colonized barbarian, part of a
vanquished nation, used, wasted and discarded: “…your slave/Everything in
me your tool everything from me/ For you I killed and gave birth/ I your bitch
your whore I/ in memory of your victory/ Over my land and people that was
my betrayal/…I own the images of massacre/ The screams of the tortured
are mine/ Since I left Colchis my homeland/ To follow your blooded
tracks”((Dis)Placing Classical Greek Theatre:173).
However, Muler’s Medea becomes herself an emblem of the
apocalyptic wasteland to which she has contributed with her own betrayals –
of her land, of her children, of her motherhood.
German playwright Christa Wolf’s play Medea: Stimmen/ Voices,
based on Pausanias’s tale, is made of a sequence of interrelated, yet
fragmentary monologues. Medea is still the foreigner, but a healer not a
sorceress, who finds herself caught in a web of political intrigues at the court
of Creon. Jason is married to Glauke, however, his marriage does not
provide the motive for Medea’s actions since Medea herself has a lover,
Oistros, and she sympathizes with Glauke who becomes a victim not of
Medea’s veil but of intricate court politics.
In Wolf’s play, Medea’s children are stoned to death by an irate crowd,
as in Pausanias, because the women of Corinth rise against Medea and
blame her for bringing a plague upon the city, although Medea has helped to
cure the afflicted.
The contrast between barbaric/foreign Colchis and ‘civilized’
Corinth/Thessaly parallels, in fact, the political discrimination of Auslanders in
Wolf’s reunited Germany.
The most daring remake of the Medea myth in postmodern feminist drama is
Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s Medea. In their version of the myth, Medea,
whose only right was to motherhood not selfhood in the ancient stories,
undermines the patriarchal ‘true nature of woman’- submissiveness and self-
sacrifice- by questioning the most enduring myth in all civilizations, that of the
‘mother’. Medea’s denial reaches the extremity of self denial-motherhood for
personhood. Medea sees the murder of her children as the only way out to
preserve her own identity in a world that confines her to a pre-determined
role. She will challenge this world and become the ‘monstrous Other ’if only
to empower future women: “Kill I must my sons, thus I will be remembered by
all as an unnatural mother and jealous madwoman. But better to be
remembered as a ferocious beast than forgotten like a docile goat that one
can milk and then despise and sell at market without so much from its mouth
as a bleat…Outside people will shout ’Monster, and bitch and evil unnatural
mother’. And I will say to myself, weeping (half voice) Die, die to give birth to
a woman! (high voice) Die! To give birth to a woman” ((Dis) Placing Classical
Greek Theatre: 436).
Whether we, as readers /audience, accept or not the multiple re-
makes of the Medea’s myth, or whether we believe or not that the voice of
authority belongs to the present or to the past, is ultimately of no importance;
Medea will still be driving her dragon-drawn chariot into a post-
postmodernist, feminist or not, future.
II. 5. Home as Hades: Patterns of Exile, Self-exile and Self-

entrapment in Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending
In his comprehensive study of post-modernism, The Postmodern Turn,
literary critic and theoretician Ihab Hassan says that Orpheus was “the victim
of an inexorable clash between the Dionysian principle, represented by the
Maenads, and the Apollonian ideal which he, as poet, venerated...The myth
of Orpheus maybe a parable of the artist at certain times”(Hassan:13).
Along the centuries the myth of Orpheus has evolved and acquired
new connotations and/or interpretations. For the Greeks Orpheus was more
a religious figure than a lover, the initiator of the Orphic rites and rituals and
so, Pindar and Apollonius mentioned him for his magic music as revelation of
a fundamental truth and an initiation through mysteries, Ovid told the well-
known and tragic love-story of Orpheus and Eurydice, mediaeval literature
incorporated the Orphic myth within Christian religion, the Renaissance saw
him as the consummate artist and for the Romantics his katabasa or descent
into Hades was an adventure into the depths of the soul while he himself
was considered the demiurgic poet who recreates the universe , the moderns
and postmoderns viewed his failure as an acknowledgement of la condition
humaine, its revolt and its limits.
In mythology Orpheus was the son of the Thracian king Oeagrus and
of the Muse Calliope, a disciple of Apollo, sometimes called Krysaor-the poet
with the golden lyre- one of Apollo's names. The main biographical episode
of legendary Orpheus and his beloved Eurydice is told by Ovid in his
Metamorphoses. Orpheus falls in love with Eurydice and summons Hymen,
clad in his saffron robes, to attend to their union; but Hymen's expression is
gloomy and the torch he carries does not burn… “the outcome was even
worse than the omens foretold”(Ovid: 225). While wandering in the meadows
with the naiads, Eurydice is bitten by a snake and dies. Stricken with grief,
Orpheus decides to descend through the gate of Taenarus to the Styx and go
to the realm of the shades to beg the gods of the underworld to restore
Eurydice back to life. He addresses Persephone accompanying his words
with the music of his lyre, asking her to “weave again Eurydice's destiny,
brought too swiftly to a close” (Ovid: 226). As he sings his words “the
bloodless ghosts were in tears: Tantalus made no effort to reach the waters
that ever shrank away, Ixion's wheel stood still in wonder, the vultures
ceased to gnaw Tityus' liver, the daughters of Danaus rested from their
pitchers, and Sisyphus sat idle on his rock” (Ovid: 226).
Moved by his plea, the gods grant Orpheus his request but on one
condition, that he should not look back until he has emerged from the valleys
of Avornus. Orpheus gladly agrees, but just as they almost reach the surface
of the earth, anxious in case Eurydice's strength is failing, he looks behind
and she slips back into the depth, now dying a second time. Orpheus tries to
enter the underworld once more, but he is denied a second chance and
returns to the world of men, bearing his sorrow. In deep grief, he rejects the
love of women, although “there were many who were fired with a desire to
marry the poet…and many were indignant to find themselves repulsed”(Ovid:
227). Orpheus preferred the company of young men and it is said that he
was the first to introduce this custom among the people of Thrace. His
rejection of women so enraged the Bacchantes, the followers of Dionysus,
that seized with maniac fury, they first killed the birds and snakes and other
wild animals and then rushed to the destruction of the poet. The savage
horde of women tore Orpheus apart scattering his limbs and then threw his
head and lyre into the waters of the Hebrus... “wonderful to relate, as they
floated down in midstream, the lyre uttered a plaintive melody and the lifeless
tongue made a piteous murmur, while the river banks lamented in
reply”(Ovid: 247). Orpheus passes beneath the earth, finds Eurydice and, as
Ovid says, “There they stroll together, side by side: or sometimes Orpheus
follows, while his wife goes before, sometimes he leads the way and looks
back, as he can do safely now, at his Eurydice”(Ovid:247).
In Orpheus Descending, Tennessee Williams chose the name Val
Xavier for his modern version of a pagan/Christian Orpheus. The name
Xavier/Saviour/Soter sends us back to the Orphic rituals whose ascetic
practises were meant to purify the soul and open the way to immortality; the
Orphic doctrine was known by the first Christians who had Orpheus's effigy
painted on the walls of the Catacombs as an anticipatory figure of Christ, the
Saviour.
Val Xavier is a self-exiled outcast, a wandering guitar player who, tired of his
dissipated life and transient love affairs, is now in search of a Home... but the
home he finds in a small southern town ridden by bigotry and racial violence
and where he lets himself be trapped, becomes his Hades. Val Xavier and
the three Eurydices of the play, Lady Torrance, Vee Talbott and Carol
Cutrere, live all in their private hells/Hadeses.
Lady's hell began when she was young and lived with her father,
Romano, an Italian immigrant. Her father made some money during the
prohibition years and built his own Eden/Elysian fields on a strip of deserted
land, a place for people to drink, make love and be happy. He was tolerated
by the community until one day when he made a terrible mistake: he sold
drinks to some ‘niggers’. The Group, as they called themselves, the
honourable male members of this racially prejudiced community, led by Jabe
Torrance, set his property on fire and the old man was burnt to death.
Lady, pregnant with David Cutrere's child, abandoned by her lover
who chose to marry well, made an abortion and then married Jabe, not
knowing he was responsible for her father's ruin and death...and this is
Lady's first death and descent into hell.
Val arrives in town in his snake-skin jacket and carrying his guitar
inscribed with ‘autographs of musicians dead and living’. Vee Talbott, the
sheriff’s wife introduces him to Lady who hires him for the shop, now that her
husband is terminally ill. The place itself, with its dark walls and dusty
windows, offers an image of disturbing emptiness with sinister forebodings.
In Scene 1, Carol, herself an outcast, exiled from town by her family
for her outrageous behaviour, comes to Lady's shop. While answering the
Temple sisters' caustic remarks, an odd character appears: the black wizard
Pleasant (Caron?). The sisters are horrified by his appearance but Carol
asks the old man to utter for her the death cry of the Choctaw tribe. While
Carol and Pleasant start howling, Val enters. The barking sounds that signal
death are the first hint at Val's tragic end.
The play is dominated by dog imagery: the baying is heard on several
occasions, one of the songs played by Val is Dog Howl Blues, the sheriff's
aid is called Dog and the sheriff himself is Cerberus.
“Lady: The chain-gang dogs are chasing some run-away convict...

Val: Run boy! Run fast, brother! If they catch you, you will never run
again! That's for sure...[The baying of the dogs changes, becomes
almost a single, savage note] – Uh-huh- the dogs've got him...[Pause]
They're tearing him to pieces! [Pause. Baying continues. A shot is fired.
The baying dies out. The wind sings loud in the dusk]” (Williams: 60).
The other symbol is the legless blue bird, “a kind of bird that don't have legs
so it can light on nothing but has to stay all its life on its wings in the
sky”(Williams:38) and who stands for Val's rootlessness, loneliness, longing
for freedom and his exile into his art. In Val's words “We're all of us
sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins for life”(Williams:42).
To escape loneliness Val is willing to re-integrate into a normal life, however,
for the townspeople he is a xenos, an outcast, a foreigner not to be trusted or
easily accepted. His sexuality is what first draws Carol and Lady, but both
discover that underneath lies genuine goodness and tenderness, however
the men in town feel threatened by his sexual appeal, and the pretext to
chase him is found by sheriff Talbott when he catches Val talking to his wife,
Vee. Cerberus watches well over his Hades so that no one can get in or get
out.
As Orpheus tries to bring Eurydice back to life, so does Val
symbolically resurrect dead souls. To Carol, who is described as a trapped
animal, without hope but also without fear, he gives self-confidence as he
perfectly understands what it is to be an outcast. Vee, who is trapped in her
marriage, finds her refuge in her ‘visions’ and paintings, and again Val
supports her as he understands what it is to be an artist in need of
communication and self-expression. To Lady he gives his love and his self,
as he knows what it is to be lonely and desperate. Val has journeyed for a
long time to find a home and now he is willing to put an end to his former life
of vagrant artist, however, although he feels he can be redeemed by love and
his unborn child, he cannot become one of the savage tribe that rules the
town.
In the classical myth, the gods of the underworld warn Orpheus not to
turn to see Eurydice; in Williams's play, the Sheriff orders Val to leave the
town before sunrise. Val remains....he has found out that Lady is pregnant.
But Torrance/Hades, an embodiment of death and meanness, in Williams's
words, will not let her go: he shoots her mortally and blames Val for robbing
him and killing her. Lady/Eurydice dies her second death and Val/Orpheus
runs. Carol and the black wizard appear as in the first scene, the wizard with
Val's snakeskin jacket in his hands. While agonizing cries are heard in the
distance, Carol takes the jacket and says: “Wild things leave skins behind

them, they leave clean skins and teeth with white bones behind them, and
these are tokens passed from one to another, so that the fugitive kind can
always follow their kind”(Williams: 97).
Like his mythical correspondent who fell prey to the savagery of the
enraged Bacchantes and was dismembered, Val Xavier is torn to pieces by
Jabe's men and their dogs. While mythical Orpheus's head, even if
dismembered continues to sing, Val's guitar is heard no more...and there is
no promise of an after-life with his beloved Eurydice.

Bibliography and Exam Requirements
Bibliography
o *** Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Brockhampton press, London,

1995
o *** Dictionary of Mythology, Wordsworth Editions, Ltd., 1991
o Aeschylus, The Oresteia, Introductory Essay, Notes and Glossary by R.
Fagles and W.B.Stanford, Penguin Books, 1988
o Banu,G., Le Kabuki, Musical, Revue du Theatre, No.5, Paris,1982
o Bingsby, C.W.E., Modern American Drama, CUP, 1992
o Bonnard,A., Civilizatia greaca, Ed. Stiintifica, Bucuresti,1967
o Brown, N.O. Life Against Death, London, Routledge&Kegan Paul Ltd.,
London,1960
o Bulfinch,Th., The Golden Age of Myth and Legend, Wordsworth
Reference, Wordsworth, 1993
o Cooke, V. and M. Page, eds. File on Shaffer. London and New York:
Methuen, 1987
o Detienne, M., Dionysus Slain, The John Hopkins University Press,
Baltimore and London, 1979
o Deutsch, H. A Psychoanalytic Study of the Myth of Dionysus and
Apollo. New York: International University Press, Inc., 1969.
o Dodds, E.R., The Greeks and the Irrational, University of California
Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles,California, 1966
o Dumezil,G., Cele patru puteri ale lui Apollo si alte eseuri, Univers
enciclopedic, Bucuresti,1999
o Eliade, M., Istoria credintelor si ideilor religioase, Univers enciclopedic,
Bucuresti, 1992
o Euripides, The Bacchantes
http://classics.unit.edu//Euripides/bacchan.html
o Ferrari,A., Dictionar de mitologie greaca si romana, Polirom, Iasi, 2003
o Ford,B.,(ed) The Pelican Guide to English Literature, Penguin, 1980
o Freud, S., The Interpretations of Dreams, Pelican Books, 1991
o Hassan,I., The Postmodern Turn. Essays in Postmodern Theory and
Culture, Ohio State University Press, 1987
o Hodgson, T., Modern Drama from Ibsen to Fugard, B.T. Batsford,
London, 1992
o MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, M. Peter Shaffer, Theatre and Drama.
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, Palgrave, 1998.
o Moncrieff,H., Ascott,R., Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece, Random
House Value Publishing,Inc., 1995
o Nietzsche,F., The Birth of Tragedy& The Genealogy of Morals, Anchor
Books, Doubleday, 1956
o O’Neill, E., Complete Plays, 1920-1931, The Library of America,
Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, 1988
o Otto,W., Dionysus, Myth and Cult, Indiana University Press,
Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1965
o Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated with an Introduction by Mary M. Innes,
Penguin Books, 1955
o Pater,W., A Study of Dionysus: the Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew,
www.gutenberg.org.
o Patsalidis,S., Sakellaridou, E.(eds), (Dis)Placing Classical Greek
Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre

Theatre, University Studio Press, Thessaloniki, 2003
o Piatkowschi, A., Jocurile cu satyri in antichitatea greco-romana,
Polirom, Iasi, 1998
o Pizzato,Mark., “ Soyinka’s Bacchae, African Gods, and Postmodern
Mirrors” The Journal of Religion and Theatre vol.2 No 1,Fall 2003
o Robert, F., Religia greaca, Universitas, Teora, 1998
o Rohde, E., Psyche, Meridiane, Bucuresti, 1985
o Shaffer, P., Three Plays: Equus, Shrivings, Five Finger Exercise,
Penguin Books, 1976
o Shaffer, P., The Gift of the Gorgon, Penguin Group, 1993.
o Sharp,D., Jung Lexicon. A Primer of Terms and Concepts, Inner City
Books, Toronto, 1991
o Shepard, S., Plays, Faber and Faber Limited, London, 1997
o Simard, R., Postmodern Drama Contemporary Playwrights in America
and Britain, University Press of America, 1984
o Sorel, R., Orfeu si orfismul, Universitas-Teora, Bucuresti, 1995
o Soyinka,Wole.,The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communal Rite, London,
Methuen,1973
o Spariosu, M.I., Resurectia lui Dionysus, Univers, Bucuresti, 1997
o Spears, M.K., Dionysus and the City Modernism in Twentieth Century
Poetry, OUP, 1970
o Surdulescu, R., Sam Shepard. The Mythomorphic Vision, Editura
Universitatii din Bucuresti, 1996
o Williams, T., Plays, Library of America, NY, 2000
Exam Requirements
Students are required to discuss the following issues related to the course:
- the multiple roles of Apollo and Dionysus in Greek mythology;

- Apollo and Dionysus as characters in The Oresteia and The
Bacchae;
- the significance of the modern terms Apollonian and Dionysian ;
- how does postmodernity see the clash between the two principles?
- Which are the salient features of the Apollonian and Dionysian
characters in drama?
- Exemplify the clash between Apollonian and Dionysian characters in
a play of your choice
- Other modern/postmodern remakes of classical Greek theatre:
Orpheus, Medea, Electra, Orestes, Oedipus, Antigona

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“Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati

(A Practical Optional Course in English Literature

I. From Apollo and Dionysus to Apollonian and Dionysian 5

II. Modern/Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre/Myth 35

Bibliography and Exam Requirements 55

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 3

I. From Apollo and Dionysus to Apollonian and

I.1. Apollo and Dionysus

Dionysus Trigonos - Dionysus the Thrice-born God

The Conquest of Divinity

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 7

8 Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 9

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 11

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 13

Apollo Alexicacos / Apollo Apotropaios / Apollo the Healer / Apollo

Apollo Musagetas, ”The Master of the Muses” / The God of Music

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 15

Apollo: “I give you proof that all I say is true

Apollo and Dionysus

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 17

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 19

I. 2. Friederich Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 21

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 23

I. 3. Modern and Post-Modern Re/Interpretations

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 25

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 27

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 29

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 31

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 33

34 Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre

II. Modern/Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek

II.1. The Voyage of Dionysus towards Multiculturalism: from

“Dionysus: Lo! I am come to this land of Thebes, Dionysus, the son of

“Pentheus: They say there came a stranger hither, a trickster and a

“Dionysus: A seed of Zeus was sown in Semele my mother earth, here

Pizzato remarks that “Soyinka’s Dionysus arrives in Thebes already

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 37

“Come with me to the mountains. See for yourself

“Dionysus: Yes, you alone

II.2. The Apollonian and Dionysian Clash of Wills and Values

“There is in me a continuous tension between what I suppose I could

The archetypal clash between Apollonian and Dionysian characters is

“Jung, when talking about neurosis said, ‘neurosis is an escape from

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 39

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre 41

II.3 The Symbiotic Apollonian-Dionysian Brothers and the

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II. 4. Medea’s Journey towards Postmodernism- the Remake

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II. 5. Home as Hades: Patterns of Exile, Self-exile and Self-

“Lady: The chain-gang dogs are chasing some run-away convict...

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54 Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre

o *** Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Brockhampton press, London,

Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre

- the multiple roles of Apollo and Dionysus in Greek mythology;

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