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Whose Laughter does Pentheus Fear? (Eur. Ba. 842)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Matt Neuburg
Matt Neuburg
Affiliation:
Colgate University
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Extract

The Aldine editor, no doubt put off in part by the expressionhad the text printed as given by P (the sole witness for this part of the play), but punctuated with commas after and , so that could go withAccording to Elmsley, it was Musgrave who removed the comma after, adducing T. 276 to show taking a dative. But, continues Elmsley, the simple in this and other examples is taking a dative of the thing, never of the person. Accordingly he prints Pierson′s easy emendationproposed independently by Reiske and printed almost simultaneously with Elmsley by Matthiae. The resulting reading has sufficiently satisfied all editors from then until the present day; there is not one, as far as I am aware, who does not print it. In our century the line has not been the object of any controversy.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , May 1987 , pp. 227 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1987

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References

1 Elmsley, P.,Euripidis Bacchae(Leipzig, 1822), ad loc.Google Scholar; I was not able to see the earlier edition (Oxford, 1821), but the second is the editio auctior anywayGoogle Scholar

2 Jacobs,Animadversiones in Euripidis tragoedias(Gotha,1790), according to the citation in C. KopfFs new Teubner edition (Leipzig, 1982); Elmsley, however, quotes the conjecture as coming from Jacobs' Exercitationes criticae in scriptores veteres (Leipzig, 1796). I have seen neither.Google Scholar

3 Wecklein,Ausgewahlte Tragodien des Euripides(Leipzig,1879);alsoGoogle ScholarPrinz Wecklein,Euripidis Fabulae(Leipzig,1898)Google Scholar

4 The author had suspected the line some years before learning of Wecklein′s and Jacobs' earlier suspicions.Google Scholar

5 For a good list of these, see now Segal, C., ‘The Bacchae as Metatragedy’, in Burian, P., Directions in Euripidean Criticism (Durham, 1985),156–73;Google ScholaralsoSeidensticker B.,‘Comic Elements in Euripides' Bacchae’,AJPh 99 (1978), 303–20.Google Scholar

6 Note especially 352–3,tov, which Dionysos is echoing here; also 235 and 453ff.Google Scholar

7 Cf.Winnington-Ingram, R. P.,Euripides and Dionysos(Cambridge, 1948), p. 118: ‘It was the purpose of Dionysos to make Pentheus ridiculous and he achieves it.’ But for this to work, Pentheus must fear such ridicule (else the punishment is no punishment), and from those to whom he will in fact appear ridiculous - the Thebans, as Dionysos saysGoogle Scholar

8 The classic argument for this, using the principles of comparative anthropology of the day, is A. G. Bather, ‘The Problem of the Bacchae’, JHS14 (1894), 244–63; also GalliniC., ‘II travestismo rituale di Penteo’, SMSR 34 (1963), 211–28, and Halliday, W. R., ‘A Note on Herodotus VI.83, and the Hybristika’, ABSA 16 (1909–10), 212–19. Bather lists the second item of the ritual (after the transvestism) as, ‘He is led through the middle of the town to be the laughing-stock of all Thebes’, and calls such ritual mockery too familiar to need further discussion; there is no laughter in the later parts of his reconstructed ritual.Google Scholar

9 Burkert, W.,Greek Religion(Cambridge, Mass.,1985), pp. 104f. and 287: ‘During the procession to Eleusis grotesquely masked figures sat at a critical narrow pass near the bridge… and insulted the passers-by. At Dionysian festivals wagons drove through the streets carrying masked figures who shouted abuse at everyone they passed in a proverbially coarse manner.’Google Scholar

10 Ibid., pp. 82ff

11 For a parallel alteration compare 503, where an accusativeguaranteed by E Frogs 103 (and possibly P. Ant. 24), has been replaced withGoogle Scholar

12 Cf. Seidensticker, op. cit. (n. 5), p. 317: '[Detailed analysis would] show the gruesome and witty finesse with which Dionysos exposes Pentheus to the laughter of the audience.' This is whyEuripides does not bother to portray the laughter of the Thebans directly: he has Dionysos makePentheus ridiculous before the audience, who are made to function as a stand-in for the Thebans.This accords nicely with Segal's theory of the scene as meta-theatrical (above, n. 5).

13 In favour of the dative, perhaps, is that it might have given rise to our text early, and ccidentally, rather than by perverse interference: BAKXHIF (or possibly, even better, BAKXHF) → BAKXAE. It also avoids the ambiguity of an accusative whichmight have been heard as the subject, not the object, of the infinitive (though on the other handthe very ambiguity of the posited accusative helps, as I have said, to explain its corruption). Andthe ye is not inappropriate, for it points up Pentheus' horror at the impending reversal - is he, he wonders, to be mocked as the very thing he has himself mocked all along?

14 A. C. Moorhouse, The Syntax of Sophocles (Leiden, 1982), p. 36

15 Moorhouse, loc. cit., gives a number of examples from Sophocles, including Acua, arevui, etc. By New Testament times virtually any verb of emotion could be used transitively; see F. Blassand A. Debrunner, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament, tr. and rev. R. W. Funk (Chicago,1961), §148, where examples include evSoKdv 'be pleased at'.

16 The succeeding line, 843, is a notorious problem, but not germane to the matter at hand - unless one takes it as evidence for wholesale dislocation of lines in this region of the text, since in this case arguments from logical context and dramatic structure become inapplicable.I assume that the state of 843 is sufficiently well explained by the loss of at most a line, or morelikely two half-lines as suggested by Jackson (cited by Dodds ad loc).