Βάκχες του Ευρυπίδη και 26ο Ειδύλλιο του Θεοκρίτου : αστικά και βουκολικά στοιχεία
Part of : Πλάτων : περιοδικό της Εταιρείας Ελλήνων Φιλολόγων ; Vol.54, No.1, 2004, pages 348-371
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348-371
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The Bacchae are a tragedy that was written during the stay ofEuripidis in Macedonia. The content of Bacchae surprises us becauseEuripides used to be mainly a rationalist poet. However, we should notforget that at the end of the 5th century people had the tendency to goaway from the ideals of that era and, moreover, they were seeking aninversion of the existing situation. Even though the Greek tragedy is tiedup with the life in a town, yet in this specific play numerous bucolicelements are observed.Idyll 26 is a peculiar Idyll in the Corpus of Theocritus. It is not asimple rewriting of Euripides' Bacchae. Theocritus mentions theseverses of the Bacchae that speak for the actual worship and not for thedifficulties that the worship of Dionysus met to expand. The reason isthat 1) at his era the adoration of Dionysus had already beenconsolidated and 2) he wrote the Idyll 26 in view of a performance inThebes, a region that was considered to be the biggest centre ofDionysus' adoration in his era. So, the Hellenistic poet, although dealingwith the fable of the Euripedean Bacchae, creates something new thisfact is achieved by the condensation of the tragic action, the reduction of the number of characters and the focus only on the episode conserningPentheus' death. The common element in both, the Idyll and the play, isthe coexistence of urban and bucolic elements. The actual resemblanceis very interesting. The fact that Euripides has included numerousbucolic elements in his tragedy, whereas Theocritus in this particularIdyll mentions mainly urban elements, is much more interesting. TheIdyll 26, from our point of view, is nothing more than an urban poemwith bucolic surroundings.
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