A Performance in Sight Lines: The Bacchae and Complexities of Viewership

GABBY ODDENINO

“Here: I am come to Thebes: I, Dionysus, son of Zeus and son of Cadmus’ daughter:” thus opens the Bacchae, with, perhaps, the clearest declaration within the play.1 In a text so wrapped up in deception, disguise, and willful misunderstanding, the upfrontness of these opening lines is striking. The audience is being addressed by Dionysus. Dionysus is the son of Zeus. He is in Thebes. The frankness of these statements lets the undertone of each piece of information pulse with questions. Why is he in Thebes? What is the story of his parentage? Why are we watching? And that is the chief question of the Bacchae. It is a play of great horror and violence, unsettling even thousands of years removed from its cultural milieu. So why do we watch? And why does the play encourage us to question this? Motifs on sight and seeing reappear through the text, running like a great connecting line through the various tragic acts of violence and shame. This paper seeks to explore the motif of “seeing” in the Bacchae, using analysis of the theatrical conventions evoked, the metanarrative established through the motif, and a close reading of the text. To discuss how “sight” within the Bacchae functions, what “sight’ means must first be defined. In the introduction of Gaze, Vision, and Visuality in Ancient Greek Literature by Anna Novokhatko and Alexandros Kampakoglou, three separate definitions are discussed: “vision,” “visuality,” and “gaze.” This paper adheres most closely to “gaze,” defined in the text as “not the mere act of looking, but a socially-determined, complex interactive relationship of agents and viewers, which is characteristic of a particular set of social circumstances.”2 Something being “witnessed” or “seen'' necessitatesthat there is either anunderstanding or a misunderstanding taking place which will further the themes and plot of the Bacchae. These moments by virtue of the medium either have an effect on, or originate from, the audience. When looking at different examples of this within the text it becomes more complex — there are times where the “sight” of something exists wholly within the text or wholly with the audience’s reaction, and of course mixes between the two. Part of what makes the motif of “sight” within the Bacchae interesting is how it exists on multiple levels of understanding, perception, and engagement with the audience. The text of the Bacchae begins with Dionysus outlining his plans to “show all mortals that [he is] god” and teach the city “what comes of its resistance to [his] rights.”3 This desire to show is the driving force of the dramatic action — all subsequent events stem from this initial endeavor by Dionysus to be seen for what he truly is by the city that spurns him. The desire for truth through sight set up in this opening reappears throughout the rising action of the play, most obviously continuing with Pentheus and his mission to go and see what the women are doing on the mountain. While it ends badly, it stems from Pentheus’ earnest desire to protect his city. He sees the rites as “Bacchic wickedness” and “an unhealthy cult,” with Dionysus in disguise as a “foreigner . . . [performing] outrageous wickedness”4 against his city. Even at the tragic conclusion, sight takes center stage, with Agave holding Pentheus’ severed head, unseeing, she wants to “hang it on [Cadmus’] house” to show the world how his “daughters are the best by far, the best of all humanity.”5 Pride is a major motivator (and destructor) of true sight. Those who engage in sight through worship, however, are often not only spared but elevated in the narrative. The chorus and the audience both are engaged in viewership as worship, shielding them from the effects of pride within a tragedy. Brilliantly, both Pentheus and Agave’s desires here are in fact the same as Dionysus’ — they all want to bring honour to their family. Dionysus explicitly states in his opening monologue that one of his reasons for

1 Euripides, “The Bacchae,” in The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, trans. Emily Wilson, ed. Mary R. Lefkowitz and James S. Romm (New York: The Modern Library, 2017), 743. 2 Alexandros Kampakoglou, and Anna Novokhatko, Gaze, Vision, and Visuality in Ancient Greek Literature, Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes Ser, V. 54 (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), xvi. 3 Eur. “The Bacchae,” 744. 4 Euripides, 751. 5 Euripides, 780.

wanting to be recognized as a son of Zeus is because he “must save the honour of [his] mother.”6 Family pride, honour, justice — these are all presented from the first as ways in which being seen is not only important, but necessary. Being seen allows for understanding, for recognition, and for acceptance, which all in turn allow for these characters to fully exist. Not being allowed to see is a punishment, one that Pentheus himself tries to inflict upon Dionysus’ human persona, commanding that he be “shut in the stable with the horses,” able to “see only darkness.”7 Both being seen and seeing are power struggles. The characters in the play are powerful both through others' perception of them and through their perception of the world. Their roles are defined by how others see them, with Pentheus needing to be seen as a good king to be a good king, Agave needing to be seen as a good daughter to be an honourable member of the family, and Dionysus, perhaps most importantly, needing to be seen as a god to be a god. Being seen and seeing is a necessity of existence within the Bacchae, but for all the positive emotions and results it can inspire, their reverse can also be (and often is) invoked. Pentheus’ walk up the mountain, done in pursuit of good recognition, is an exercise in humiliation, framed by his declaring “I feel ashamed” at the start of this march.8 This shame is expounded by the fear of being seen (recognized) and then mocked. He offers the disguised Dionysus “Anything, just don’t let the maenads mock me.”9 The outside gaze compounds the feelings of shame and emasculation that already exist for Pentheus as inherent in the act. Pentheus’ negative relationship with sight continues through this scene, with his madness induced visions of “two suns, Thebes itself . . . looking double . . . You’ve changed into a bull — or were you always?”10 Finally, the maenads upon seeing him brutally kill him on Dionysus’ orders, using him as “their poor target.”11 Pentheus cannot access truth in sight — he refuses to understand or acknowledge Dionysus and thereby is forced to undergo only the negative results of being witnessed (humiliation, rejection, estrangement). This does not mean, however, that seeing things truly equals positive results. Truth can easily be made painful to the viewer, with disguise offering protection from the harshness of reality. Agave’s delusion falling away so that she can see her ruin, that she is holding her “own Pentheus’ head” and not a lion’s, causes horror and grief, the final revelation before the departure of the family from Thebes to exile.12 And of course, while the inability of any characters in the play to see Dionysus for what he is, both on a physical level and on a religious level, is the catalyst of the tragedy, when they do finally face this realization after having passed the point of no return, it becomes terribly tragic. This initial mistake, confronted by the existence of Dionysus as disguised, either by his own volition or through the nature of his birth during the action of the play, sets off the events of the play in this language of disguise. The portrayal of Dionysus from the onset is very theatrical — the very beginning of the show is him describing the role he is about to take on, setting up a play within a play and himself as both actor and arbiter. Helen Foley posits that “both honoring and comprehending the god are essentially theatrical acts, an exploration of the nature of illusion, transformation and symbol.”13 The audience, engaged in the viewing of the play (an act of worship for Dionysus) and being offered from the beginning the ability to comprehend him in both his role as god and as god-in-disguise, by this notion is then also engaged as actors within this doubled play through their passive act of viewing. When Dionysus tells us that he “took mortal shape, transformed to human nature” at the top of the play,14 this is him letting the audience in on the secret, just as they were in on the fact that it was Athenian citizens portraying each of these roles. This seems to be a nod to that theatrical practice, a known entity taking on a fictitious role. The introduction of the chorus immediately after cements this play within a play metanarrative. They sing praises to Dionysus, yet this is a part of a performance. Is this hymn to be taken by the audience as in earnest? Is it another plot device? What is the intended message? Dionysus moves

6 Euripides, “The Bacchae,” 744. 7 Euripides, 759. 8 Euripides, 768. 9 Euripides, 768. 10 Euripides, 771. 11 Euripides, 776. 12 Euripides, 781. 13 Helene P. Foley, “The Masque of Dionysus,” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-2014) 110 (1980), 108. 14 Euripides, “The Bacchae,” 744-5.

between the roles of god and man throughout the drama, using the theatrical conventions of his domain as the tools by which he achieves his goals. By introducing theatricality so early, the lines between text and meta text become blurred. The audience can’t know whether to interpret something as a function of the theatrical medium or as an important piece of text, and thereby must afford the same weight given to the dramatic action to conventional things, like masks and disguises, that would normally be simply accepted. A salient example of this conscious theatricality is in the use of masks. In C.W. Marshall’s article “Some Fifth-Century Masking Conventions,'' one of the points made on the use of masks in a theatrical production is that “yoking the use of masks to the venue itself helps to maintain a focus on how the audience perceives the masks, which is more important than how the masks actually looked when we try to understand the plays better.”15 The early establishment of accepted theatrical conventions as part of the on-stage world of the Bacchae calls for the masks, as a standard of tragic theatre, not to blend in, but instead to stand out. The audience, from the first scene in the play with Dionysus beginning his show with chorus and costume, know that theatricality itself is just as much a character to analyze as any other.16 Dionysus says from the first that he is playing a role, at the very least donning a metaphorical mask even if in practice the actor did not change masks. Presentation and depiction of the masks themselves also aid in their heightened theatricality. The constantly smiling mask, and its oddness in a tragic play,17 helps to force the audience to make conscious interpretations of the presence of theatrical conventions. This type of visual play with audience interpretation continues through the show, with Pentheus’ disguise as a woman and the mask representing Pentheus’ disembodied head both pushing the boundaries of what is typical. We see Pentheus preparing for his role in the play within a play on stage. We see the results of horrific violence through a theatrical prop. Dionysus is the pinnacle of this engagement with masking conventions and audience perception, as he cycles through various layers of honesty in his disguise and form. As Foley writes, “We can thus accept Dionysus' appearance in the epiphany as true to what we have come to understand about the god only if we consciously see the god's face as a mask, that is a theatrical or symbolic rather than a direct or "real" manifestation of the many-faceted divinity.”18 That Dionysus, by the requirements of theatrical convention is never truly “unmasked” becomes not just an accepted fact, but through this dialogue crafted around the perception of these conventions is turned into a perfect encapsulation of his character. The presence of the chorus within the story also works as a conscious use of theatrical devices that emphasizes the presence of a “gaze.” Dionysus invokes the chorus at the start of the play, calling them to come “take up [their] tambourine — which [Dionysus] invented . . . beat your rhythms all around this palace . . . let the whole town see.”19 This is the opening of Dionysus’ play within a play — to quote Foley, “Dionysus makes the chorus his players and his destruction of Pentheus a "play," replete with set, costume and spectators.”20 The town is his audience, Pentheus his player, the myriad of disguises and falsehoods his costumes. The chorus provides the backdrop for this play, while also being very obviously a part of the real play going on, the one the audience signed up to watch. The audience is again seeing the two layers of events and validating them through their vision. The chorus goes into the backstory that Dionysus has already provided in the form of a hymn, describing Dionysus’ birth and parentage. Those within the inner play need this — they are not privy to the existence of the real introductory speech. Meanwhile the audience confirms that the play within the play is happening, as they are the only ones who are separate enough from the action to be able to confirm that it is a performance, while also being the only ones involved enough in the process and the theatrical act of attending the festival of Dionysus in the first place that they can understand the implications of watching a play within a play. Richard P. Martin refers to watching choral performances as “giving witness,”21 providing outside validation of their holiness. As the audience provides validation to the chorus within the play, they provide validation to themselves that this is a holy act.

15 C.W. Marshall, “Some Fifth-Century Masking Conventions,” G&R 46 (1999), 190. 16 Euripides, “The Bacchae,” 745. 17 Foley, “The Masque of Dionysus,” 108. 18 Foley, 132. 19 Euripides, “The Bacchae,” 745. 20. Foley, “The Masque of Dionysus,” 110. 21 Richard P. Martin, “Outer Limits, Choral Space”, in Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth, And Ritual In Greek Art And Literature: Essays In Honour of Froma Zeitlin, ed. Kraus, Goldhill, Foley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 48.

That the chorus’ singing is also chiefly a form of worship allows them to confirm and validate Dionysus’ self-perception and the audience’s perception of him. The Chorus is told to “Call and shout and whoop, as sonorous flutes ring out the holy music, a sound of holy joy,”22 evoking the wild ecstasy of Dionysus. They remark on the “blasphemy” of Pentheus,23 encouraging proper worship. They provide eyes in scenes like that of Pentheus’ fall,24 necessary both for the process of humiliating Pentheus and so that the external audience can see the effects of the gaze upon him. The chorus serves again, both an internal and external purpose. They regulate and judge the worship of characters within the play, as an ever watching presence representative of the divinity that, as Foley puts it, “Pentheus can neither see nor control.”25 By making them such visible representatives of Dionysus, the text is further alienating Pentheus, giving him a whole visible group of people that his lack of clear sight prevents him from understanding. The chorus’ internal regulation of worship and Dionysiac festival serves as a confirmation of the external worship and viewership being conducted by the audience. The audience can recognize the chorus as the best representation of themselves as a whole within the play — the large group of people who can both recognize Dionysus for who he is, and in that recognition are praising him. The chorus and audience are connected in that for both, the purpose of their presence is to watch and judge. By framing the story around these theatrical devices being part of the reality of the show, the audience engages with them in a heightened manner, focusing not only on them as part of the performance, but the performance as part of the story. This breaks the rules, breaks the illusion that the theatricality is real to the audience by making it real within the play itself. The existence of theatricality within the Bacchae breaks apart the suspension of disbelief and asks the audience to disbelieve what they are seeing. The props become simultaneously what they represent and what they are. The characters have the ability to be, at any one point, the actor, the character the actor is playing, the character the character is playing, and the narrative device they exist as. Yet, while the audience is by virtue of viewing the play being forced to analyze it, they are also meant to feel emotions from the dramatic action thereby doubling the intensity of the production. In David Konstan’s discussion of Aristotle and opsis, he writes that Aristotle in the Poetics was “associating opsis with a certain kind of shock effect rather than with the emotions of pity and fear proper. At least to the extent that visual effects are productive of this alternate response, it is not appropriate to exploit them in tragedy.”26 The Bacchae’s use of these visual aspects of theatricality might seem at first to fall into the category of the “shock effect” — the disguise Pentheus wears is shocking, the violence of the maenads is shocking, the use of the mask as a representation of Pentheus’ head is shocking. And this makes sense! Horror is an intrinsic part of the Bacchae, motivating the characters to action and the audience to continue watching. But the dissolution of the barrier between the form and content of the play also dissolves the barrier that is formed through shock and horror. Instead of making the audience feel alienated from the action by horrifying them, these visual aspects horrify them because the audience is invested in the tragic emotion evoked. Opsis “can also provide, or at least support, a suitably tragic pleasure.”27 In the Bacchae it certainly does so — for example, we feel pathos towards Agave largely because we get to watch her experience the realization facilitated by the mask prop. These visual aspects of theatricality work because they operate both on the tragic level of the audience watching the events happen and pitying those who undergo them, and the horror of being told “you’re a part of this too” and knowing that the mask is in fact, both a mask without a head, and a head without a body. Operating as both horrific and pitiable, the visual elements work as a way to increase the complexity of the tragic praxis that elicits pity and fear from the audience. Not only does the use of props show the audience just how much they are integrated into the world of the performance, but it also serves to emphasize what being seen can do. Pentheus is fully objectified after his death, his body is reduced to his dismembered head, the mask Agave holds. The prop of Pentheus’ head is a key example in the argument that visuality in the Bacchae produces both “shock and horror” and “pity and fear.”

22 Euripides, “The Bacchae,” 748. 23 Euripides, 755. 24 Euripides, 768. 25 Foley, “The Masque of Dionysus,” 111. 26 David Konstan, “Propping Up Greek Tragedy: The Right Use of Opsis,” Performance in Greek and Roman Theatre, eds. George Harrison, and Liapes Vaios,(Leiden: Brill, 2013), 64. 27 Konstan, “Propping Up Greek Tragedy,” 65.

The mask is inhuman and inorganic and yet being presented as part of a human body. As Peter Meineck argues, masks draw the audience’s attention to themselves.28 The disembodied mask-head of Pentheus is already the emotional focal point of the scene, and it becomes the visual focal point. The audience has a physical object to place the despair and grief of Agave on, the resigned and saddened acceptance of Cadmus, the glee and righteousnessof Dionysus. Pentheus has now been fully brought low, going from being perceived and presented as a good and powerful king, to being humiliated as a woman, and finally to being an object, less even than an animal.

Pentheus, in his humiliation, exists both to the fictionalized Thebes and to the audience as the scapegoat. Dionysus blames the whole city for not worshiping him, but Pentheus suffers to restore balance. The act of violence exhibited upon Pentheus allows for the city to restore the relationship between the god and the city. The humiliation and killing of Pentheus is very visible, with Dionysus telling Pentheus that the town and maenads “will watch [him] like a show.”29 That this is all a narrative taking place within the larger narrative of the Dionysia festival again places emphasis on the fact that Pentheus is the unwilling star. In his discussion of the Bacchae and festival in Violence and the Sacred, Rene Girard writes that “Festivals are based on the assumption that there is a direct link between the sacrificial crisis and its resolution” and that the strength of festivals is that they are “reenacting, in fact, the moment when the fear of falling into interminable violence is most intense and the community is therefore most closely drawn together.”30 The audience and the city of Thebes being witness to this allows for restoration to happen and increases the theatricality of it. If we accept Pentheus as a scapegoat, then this is another part of the play within a play that Dionysus is performing. This show of sacrifice and of punishment also pushes the horror — Pentheus is turned into a religious object, no longer a man or a king but a physical example of the sins of his city, reflecting his objectification after his death as a literal prop, the mask Agave holds. This forced inclusion of the audience through their viewing of the play is also in full force when the Bacchae depicts deviance. The themes of deviance are rife throughout the play — women are on the mountain acting and interacting in ways that defy accepted social standards, men are made to dress and act as women, a god disguises himself as a man. Interestingly, despite Aristotle’s assertion the tragedy portrays characters who are better than the audience, the Bacchae is all about showing characters brought down a level. Gods become mortal, men become women, women become animals. Dionysus’ retort to Pentheus’ accusations of his corruption of the city, that “people act badly in the daylight, too,” highlights the fear of this deviance.31 While Pentheus goes on about how the rituals done at night are “dirty tricks,”32 Dionysus figures out the real fear — that it is less about the execution of these deviant activities than the fact that are no longer hidden, that the city of Thebes must confront that it too can be corrupted, and indeed already has been. Pentheus, despite being willing to “pay a pile of gold” to witness the women’s activities on the mountain, is motivated by fear of them and how their “shocking actions catch like fire.”33 The concern that if others see what these women are doing, if Pentheus does not, like the good king he tries so hard to be, protect his city from the sight of these acts, they will spread “to the shame of Greece.”34 Shame is the emotion most closely connected to both witnessing deviance and being seen as deviant. Pentheus wields accusations of deviance as weapons, calling the disguised Dionysus the “girly foreigner” while ordering his arrest.35 Froma Zeitlin argues that in tragic theater “the self that is really at stake is to be identified with the male, while the woman is assigned the role of the radical other,”36 which fits into the use of deviance as a source of shame in the play. Pentheus continues his insult of Dionysus by weaponizing accusations of feminine

28 Peter Meineck, “The Neuroscience of the Tragic Mask,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 19, no. 1 (2011), 113-158. 29 Euripides, “The Bacchae,” 772. 30 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London: Continuum, 2013), 129, 128. 31 Euripides, “The Bacchae,” 758. 32 Euripides, 768. 33 Euripides, 768, 767. 34 Euripides, 767. 35 Euripides, 774. 36 Froma I. Zeitlin, Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 66.

identity, saying that his “hair is too long, unsuitable for wrestling: it ripples down [his] cheek so alluringly. [His] skin is white, [he] must take care of it.”37 As Zeitlin posits though, the feminine which is humiliating and fearsome for Pentheus is a way for Dionysus to exert power.38 Dionysus is unaffected by Pentheus’ posturing — there is nothing unnatural about this for Dionysus and thereby nothing to be feared or shamed by. He uses Pentheus’ shame to then in turn hurt him, convincing him that the only way to stop the worst deviance of the maenad rituals is to dress in women’s clothes with “a flowing wig,” “floor length dress,” and a “deerskin cape and thyrsus wand.”39 Pentheus having to walk through the city dressed as such coincides with the loss of his sanity, his fear of being mocked giving way only to the strange and terrible vision Dionysus inflicts upon him, a clear downward spiral. This progression from being the figure capable of weaponizing accusations of femininity to giving into femininity and eventually being killed, half mad, while dressed as a woman, is easy for the audience to trace. There is never any hope of relief for Pentheus once he puts on the costume of a woman, the medium does not allow it. The audience has been made explicitly apart of the pageant Dionysus is conducting — since their gaze is not a foreign force washing over the events of the play but instead an active participant, Pentheus by voicing his shame, tells the audience what to feel towards him in this costume, and thereby ensures that he is shamed. Zeitlin goes on to argue that there is a connection between the feminine and theater, that Euripides’ plays have a “general emphasis on interior states of mind as well as on the private emotional life of the individual, most often located in the feminine situation.”40 Accepting Zeitlin’s theory adds another layer of perception to the scene of Pentheus’ humiliation. The audience (and the chorus, and Dionysus) can all see both the trappings of theatricality in the play and the performance of femininity, which is in itself yet another aspect of theatricality. Pentheus’ being dressed as a woman signifies both his humiliation on one level, and his engagement with Euripidean emotional life on another. As he proceeds up the mountain, Dionysus calls out that he was “so keen to see, so keen to get things you should never ask for . . . dressed as a woman, a frenzied maenad, the mirror image of your aunt and mother.”41 Pentheus is both representing the folly of his own desire to see, and the outside view looking in at the state of the women worshiping Dionysus. Pentheus’ fall also engages the audience's viewership and sight in a historiographical sense. Death and destruction were in no way foreign to the Greeks, especially not when the Bacchae was first performed in 405 B.C.E., after years of war among the various Greek city states. For the audience, seeing these common emotions acted out both in such a heightened scene and with a physical object to direct their emotions towards would have allowed for a catharsis of emotion — in scenes such as the one with Pentheus’ head, the audience is made just as much a part of the Theban royal family as Agave. The opening of the play and Dionysus’ theatricality blursthe lines between reality and fiction. Having the audience first be implicated as a part of the crowd allowing the great acts of violence of the maenads to be committed (again, look to Dionysus’ fourth wall breaking “they’ll watch you like a show”), and then having them grieve over the horrifying prop of Pentheus’ with the Theban royal family and then have to leave the world of the play (and, depending on when the play was performed, possibly the theater) just as the Theban royal family must go into exile evokes great empathy for the events and characters of Dionysus’ production.42 As many among both the audience and the actors were likely to have lost family members to violence in recent years themselves, would not watching this play where the loss of a family member lead to both a loss of home (a relevant fear as the Athenian empire declined)and where this was framed as an act of worship and penance have inspired an emotional reaction? The pathos of such an experience must have run deep, especially as this play extends beyond the stage. How many may have pictured their fallen family and friends as Pentheus, dead for trying to defend his city from a chaotic, otherworldly force? Would they have recognized themselves in the sight of Agave wailing for what she had done, for the loss of her son? That the pathos of this is so pronounced allows Euripides to get around some of the restrictions on his text as set by the very theatrical convention he controls so masterfully for most of the play. Pentheus is said to

37 Euripides, “The Bacchae,” 757. 38 Zeitlin, Playing the Other, 64. 39 Euripides, “The Bacchae,” 768. 40 Zeitlin, Playing the Other, 81. 41 Euripides, “The Bacchae,” 771. 42 Euripides, 773.

“exit,”43 heading towards the mountain and his doom, instead of being torn apart on stage. While it was not custom to portray suchviolence on stage,44 Euripides makes it clear in the chorus’ description and Agave’s tragic realization. That it happens off-stage, whether intentionally or unintentionally, has another effect on the audience’s viewership in that the violent act of taking away a beloved family member happening away from any place where there is someone who would have the power to stop it might have struck home in a time of war. This makes the audience’s engagement in watching the events that are shown all the more heightened because they must both imagine the violence for themselves and process the personal emotions they are assigning to the events of the play. Over and over, in the metatext, text, and subtext, the Bacchae attempts to prove that seeing and being seen are two of the most powerful acts. There is an art to seeing — in the theatrical world of Dionysus, denial of recognition can destroy a being. It has the power to move gods, and Dionysus' own desire, the most human thing about him, is driven by this denial. Being seen, though at first seeming passive, is in fact a performance. It’s not enough for a person to see, because they could see incorrectly. Or worse, they could correctly perceive the viewed object, in a way that highlights its flaws. When Pentheus is shown mad visions, when Dionysus destroys a household for acknowledgement, when Agave sees that it is her son’s head she holds, when the Theban royal family leaves their home in shame, when the Maenads see and destroy Pentheus — these are the strongest moments of drama, and they are all motivated by sight. The audience is so ingrained into the text of the show, asserting the power of sight once again. Would any of this matter if it wasn’t being witnessed? What would be the point of Dionysus putting on such a performance, if we weren't there to watch it? Sight is not only the power behind the play, but the very reason for its existence.

43 Euripides, “The Bacchae,” 773. 44 R. Sri. Pathmanathan, "Death in Greek Tragedy," Greece & Rome 12, no. 1 (1965), 2.

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