EURIPIDES’ BACCHAE: THE ESCAPE FROM FORMS AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE CITY

In the fourth line of the Bacchae, Dionysus introduces himself: He has changed his morphê (shape) from that of a god into that of a mortal.Footnote ¹ He explains that the Thebans refused to acknowledge him as the son of Zeus. They turned the story of his divine birth into a tawdry tale to conceal the youthful indiscretions of the maiden Semele. Shortly after, he repeats, “I have taken on the form of a mortal (eidos thnêton) and exchanged my morphê for the nature of a man” (Euripides Reference Way1979, 53–4). From these early moments of the play, the god of the theater rejects a defined form for himself. Throughout the tragedy he takes on multiple shapes: man, god, bull. Free from form, he orchestrates the Thebans’ punishment for their failure to acknowledge his divinity.Footnote ²

At the end of Republic 2, Socrates considers the stories about the gods who, as good and beautiful in themselves, would always retain their own shape (morphê, 381c). Dionysus, rejecting such form-defined incarceration, boasts that he can transform himself at will. We should note that the theater—of which Dionysus is the god—allows others to do what Dionysus suggests his divinity enables him to do: to change shape. Nothing on the stage is what it seems. It is not a god who stands before us on the stage, but a man appearing as a god appearing as a man. Later in this article I discuss a man taking on the shape of King Pentheus taking on the form of a woman and perceived by others as a wild animal. The theater turns what is into what is not. Forms slide easily into one another, and the Bacchae in particular is a riot of multiple shapes resisting the imposition of any structure or certainty.

In his prefatory remarks, Dionysus speaks of leaving eastern lands where Greeks and barbarians mix (18) for Hellas where walls and boundaries mark divisions among peoples, foreign and native, old and young, male and female, god and human. To affirm his own divinity, mixing the seed of Zeus with a mortal woman, he will dissolve the boundaries that lie at the heart of Theban society. Under his influence, all the women of the city leave their homes for the “roofless stones” (38) of the forests and fields. Abandoning their confining homes, the women are free, their loose hair streaming down their backs, clothed only in the untanned skin of fawns. The prophet Teiresias and Cadmus, grandfather of King Pentheus, comically reveal Dionysus’ power, which enables them to escape from the form of old men as they, dressed in fawn skins like the women, transform themselves into young men honoring the god. Dionysus, the god of theater, illusion, and wine, enables us to ignore who we are, to escape our form. Old become young. “I will try the dance,” says Teiresias (190). Cadmus delights, “What joy it is to forget one's age” (187–8), to which Teiresias adds, “The god draws no distinction between young and old to tell us which should dance and which should not” (206–7). Forgetful of our assigned form, we can be/do anything. We can be free. Worshiping the god of wine and theater, Teiresias, Cadmus, and the women in the fields can be what they are not. Old men dressed in the garb of women and women with their hair unbound blur, as do the gender boundaries that made them masculine or feminine. Teiresias speaks of those who resist the form-changing powers of the god: “We alone think well; the others badly (kakôs)” (196). By the end of the play, they learn that they may not have “thought well.”

As the old/young men head for the fields dressed in their fawn skins, Teiresias repeats that the god makes no distinction whether one is young or old. He connects the eliding of boundaries and ignoring distinctions of youth and age with being wise in matters concerning the gods (200). Reason, however, requires forms, which define who is old and who is young. Reason identifies particulars out of the common mass of things; it sorts, it categorizes, it counts. Those worshiping the god who blurs boundaries and destroys precision see no need for reason, for counting, for adding and subtracting, for those mental processes, we might note, on which the technical arts depend and by which walls, for example, are constructed and the city comes into being. Reason is divisive and exclusionary. Dionysus’ world accepts all, those from the east and those from Greece, those who are old and those who are young, those who are male and those who are female—all, that is, except those who insist on creating barriers and imposing carefully marked forms (i.e., Pentheus, the young king of Thebes).Footnote ³

Throughout the tragedy Pentheus resists this formless god and tries to imprison the characters in both place and form. On hearing that the women have left their homes, Pentheus plans to bind them in chains and bring them back to the structured world of the city with its boundaries and secure definitions, thereby denying them the freedom they have found outside the city. He explains, “However many I seized, my guards keep safe binding their hands (desmious Footnote ⁴ cheras) in prison” (226–7). Pentheus’ response to the mutability with which Dionysus threatens Thebes is to enclose and circumscribe, reinforcing the ancient hierarchies. Pentheus’ quarry, however, is ultimately not the women, but Dionysus. “Bring him here bound in chains,” Pentheus demands (355–6).

Before making his demand Pentheus sees Cadmus and Teiresias dressed as Bacchants and marvels at the wondrous sight. He challenges, however, the Bacchic illusions, knowing their real form, that they are old men. Only his gray hair, affirming what his dress and dancing steps try to deny, prevents him from chaining Teiresias alongside the women (259). Teiresias responds to Pentheus’ threats by describing the benefits that come from the god of wine: Dionysus offers rest from grief and “the sleep that brings oblivion from the multitude of evils from which men suffer daily” (282). As we watch Dionysus’ theater, we forget who, what, where we are—transported through illusions away from the lives we live. As we drink his wine we forget who we are, the specificity of our forms. We become other than ourselves, just as the women of Thebes become wild animals and the old men become young. Pentheus resists such illusions and, demanding stability, forswears the oblivion of our daily sorrows.Footnote ⁵

In the perversions of this play, Teiresias, exhorting Pentheus to welcome the god and to pour his wine, warns Pentheus that his devotion to reason turns him into someone who suffers from madness (manêi, 326). Teiresias and Cadmus delight in their worship of the form-changing god so that despite their age they dance the dance of young men. Cadmus’ gentle admonitions to listen to the good counsel of Teiresias (330) suggest that, even if this Dionysus is not a god, they should pretend, accept the illusion. Illusions soften ills, and the soft Cadmus resists the harshness that he sees coming from an insistence on reason and the reliance on form. Make life easy for us, he seems to say to Pentheus. Cadmus sees that there can be beauty in deception, katapseudou kalôs (334). In other words, one ought not to search through reason for the true form of divinity—perhaps because there is none. In such a world, one must adapt softly, changing form as grief and pleasure require. With no certain form of a god, anyone can claim to be a godhead. Pentheus should accept this uncertainty and the illusions that attend it. Free from the form of “old man,” gray beards can dance.

Yet, such is Pentheus’ commitment to order, reason, and form (whether that commitment comes from his psychosexual dysfunction, a misguided concern with the welfare of the city, or anger at threats to his power) that he harshly dismisses the well-intentioned Cadmus and Teiresias. “Don't touch me. Go dance with the Bacchants. Don't defile me with your madness,” he says (343–4). And in his callous response, he orders his men to destroy the seat from which Teiresias issues his prophesies, turning all upside down. Dionysus—whom Pentheus now calls that “female formed stranger” (353)—is to be bound in chains (desmion, 355) and stoned to death. Seeing the form of a man beneath the illusion of a god, Pentheus subjects him to chains and death. Teiresias reacts to Pentheus’ insistence on a world of ordered forms where men are men and not women, where mortals are mortal and not gods: Pentheus may have been without his senses before, but now he is completely mad (memênas, 359). The boundary between madness and rationality, like all the boundaries in this play, dissolves. The Chorus of Bacchant women (worshipers of Dionysus who have come with him from Thebes to Asia) follows this particularly tense interchange between Pentheus and Teiresias with an ambiguity-filled ode, noting that cares fade under the wine god's influence. Recalling Teiresias’ words, the Chorus sings of the wine bowl that surrounds men with sleep—or is it the forgetfulness of death?

The servant returning with the chained Dionysus in the shape of the stranger delivers disturbing news: The fetters binding the women have melted away. The god of freedom now rules the city. All efforts to control life in the city, to impose order, have failed. Pentheus looks at the stranger standing before him and admits that this stranger's form is not unattractive (sôm’ ouk amorphos, 453), perhaps using the double negative to suggest resistance to such a conclusion. This feminine beauty attracts: the “flowing locks,” the “pale skin,” the soft body “cultivating Aphrodite” (457–9). No wrestler, you, he says (455). Pentheus, enticed by this androgynous creature, wavering in the certainties that had marked his world, unwillingly attracted by the ambiguities Dionysus introduces, begins his interrogation: Where is he from? Why is he here? And then: “What form (tin idean)” (471) do the orgies have? To know something, one must know its form, its idea, what distinguishes it from other gatherings. By understanding the orgy's form, Pentheus calculates that he will know how to control it.

But the form of those orgies is secret. To observe them, one must enter the world of ambiguity and multiplicity, freed of reason's insistence on precision. Pentheus praises the wise Hellenes who resist the mystic, frenetic dances of the Asiatics, but Dionysus responds, no, the latter are far wiser. Does wisdom, as Pentheus assumes, lie in knowing the constraints of the forms or in the fluidity that Dionysus champions? Socrates emphatically sides with Pentheus in this debate when he constructs his Callipolis, but the reconsideration in Book 10 may open the forms up in a way that takes us beyond the opposition enacted on Dionysus’ stage.

Pentheus initially resists the attraction of this womanly man and orders his servants to seize this stranger, bind him again with chains, and imprison him in the stables. The Bacchant women call on Dionysus to release them from the arrogance of this murderous man, and as they plead for release a powerful earthquake topples Thebes’ castle and the prison. Dionysus who moments before had been bound and led off to the stables reveals his unbound self. “Did he not bind your hands with a noose of chains (desmoisin brochois)”? (614), asks the Chorus. “No,” responds the god of the theater, “he only seemed to bind me (me desmeuein dokôn)” (615). Dionysus delights as he describes the scene to his worshipers: Pentheus found a bull straining against his chains where he thought the stranger was imprisoned. Meanwhile Dionysus sat calmly, unchained, beside the bull. To add to Pentheus’ confusion Dionysus created phantasms at which the disoriented Pentheus vainly struck. Pentheus in his turn reports, “Dreadful things have been experienced. The stranger has fled from me, he who was just compelled with chains (desmois)” (642–3). And when the unbound stranger reappears, Pentheus asks, “How were you able to escape your chains (desma)?” (648). All efforts at restraining this constantly changing god fail.

Things become still more dreadful when the herdsman reports that the women in the fields are nursing fawns and wolf cubs while snakes lick their cheeks. The earth defies the order of nature as well: Scratching it produces streams of milk and a thyrsus's thrust yields wine or honey. This idyllic portrait of a world free of the old forms, however, is shattered when the herdsman and his companions decide to capture Agave, Pentheus’ mother. Instead of capturing Agave, they themselves are attacked by the women. They escape, but watch in horror as the women rend cattle to pieces with their bare hands. The women are like animals. Formerly confined in their homes far from the battlefields, these women under the influence of Dionysus become “warlike enemies” (752), violating the human/animal divide, as well as the male/female dichotomy.

Pentheus’ response to the herdsman's report initially is to call his soldiers and demand his arms (809). But the armed encounter between the wild women and armed men that Pentheus anticipates does not occur. Instead, Dionysus skillfully and somewhat mystically transforms Pentheus into someone who longs to observe rather than act or, more suggestively, into a member of the audience. As such, he will observe how certainties of form dissolve under the power of the theater. Dionysus manipulates the king into imagining that victory over the forces that threaten him and his city will be achieved through sight rather than arms. He changes Pentheus from one proud of his manly form to one putting on women's clothes, hiding his form beneath a peplos of linen in order to watch instead of act. Initially Pentheus resists, asking, “Why? Shall I turn into a woman out of a man?” (822). Although this language feeds well into the psychosexual readings of the play, it also reveals yet again the problematic nature of form. How he appears—not who he is, but who he becomes through the illusion of costume—determines what he can see, what he can know. This actor who deludes us into thinking he is Pentheus continues the delusion by taking on the appearance of a woman. Who is he/she? Plato's Socrates in the Republic has the artist aim to capture the form—the ousia—of a thing, what exists independently of the artist; in contrast, Euripides shows the artist taking control of the form, undermining the suggestion of any reality to the form that the artist may try to capture. The Dionysian artist is free to create the form through illusion, thereby making the audience skeptical that form imposes any limits.

Though Pentheus resists, the seductive Dionysus maintains control: “Are you no longer eager to be an observer (theatês Footnote ⁶ ) of the Bacchants?” (829). Pentheus will see only if he engages the illusions that are Dionysus’ trademark. So Pentheus yields and puts on the vestments of a woman (endunai, 836).Footnote ⁷ Taking on the shape of a woman, now Pentheus ventures forth to enjoy the delights of sight. He becomes a member of the audience in Dionsysus’ awful and tragic script. The greatest delusion is Dionysus’ pretense to aid Pentheus. We know that the disguised stranger is not a friend, whatever shape he may adopt. He is a god bent on vengeance, plotting Pentheus’ destruction. Within two lines of Pentheus’ departure from the stage, Dionysus explains that he will free Pentheus from reason, make him mad with a Dionysian frenzy, and make him pay the penalty of death (848). Had Dionysus not played with Pentheus’ mind, Pentheus would not have put on women's clothes. His form-focused reason would have resisted such a transgression of form. The theater of Dionysus undermines such reason, and the wine that Dionysus hawks fosters a willingness to live in a world of delightful illusions where forms lose their sharp edges, where men can be women and women can live wildly in the fields. Had Pentheus been thinking well (phronôn. . .eu, 851–2), Dionysus acknowledges, he would not have accepted the dress of a woman. Under the influence of the god of wine and the theater, however, “standing outside of reason (ekstêson phrenôn)” (853), Pentheus transforms himself and becomes the object of laughter as he walks through Thebes in the shape of a woman (gunaikomorphon, 855). Earlier, Pentheus had found Cadmus and Teiresias laughable in their Bacchic garb, mocking them from reason's doorstep.

At the end of the speech in which Dionysus exalts in the obliteration of Pentheus’ reason, Dionysus reveals that Pentheus will die at his mother's hands. Then Pentheus will know that Dionysus is the most dreadful (deinotatos) and the most kind to mankind (anthrôposi epiôtatos, 861). Dionysus blends opposites: He is dreadful, awesome, in his capacity to delude the human species, and yet this dreadfulness gives humans the delusions that free them from their sufferings, thereby making Dionysus “most kind to mankind.” This most terrible, most kind god eggs on Pentheus in his longing to see things that are not for him to see. Just as he had called the Theban women from their homes, Dionysus calls to Pentheus: “Come out before the household so that you may be seen by me dressed in the outfit of a Bacchant woman” (914–15). A transformed Pentheus emerges in his peplos, strands of hair coyly escaping his woman's turban. Dionysus marvels at how he has taken on the shape (morphê, 917) of Cadmus’ daughter. And just as Pentheus appears to be other than he is—a woman instead of a man, a mother instead of a son—his sight is doubled. He sees two where he knows there is one: two suns instead of one and a “doubled Thebes (dissas de Thêbas)” (919). Dionysus appears to him as a bull with horns. Confusion reigns as he struggles to see what he saw before he changed shapes, when he had relied on reason. He struggles to recall the forms that gave order to the world in which he had lived, that allowed him to add one and one and get two, not to see two where there is one. “Were you a wild animal before? For now you are indeed a bull,” he says to Dionysus (922). By taking on the appearance of more than one—of a woman, of a daughter, of a mother—he has succumbed to Dionysus’ world and no longer sees clearly. Dionysus explains: It is the presence of the god (i.e., himself) that enables Pentheus to learn how it is necessary to see (i.e., in doubles, in multiples, in shifting forms). This new vision leaves the man of reason confused, unsure of how he himself appears (ti phainomai dêt’, 925). “Am I like Ino or Agave?” he wonders. “I seem to see both, looking at you,” Dionysus responds (927). Governed by the manic frenzy with which the god has imbued him, Pentheus does not resist indeterminacy, submissively allowing Dionysus to rearrange his women's garb.

In a peculiarly disturbing scene Dionsysus primps Pentheus as if attiring him for a wedding or for his entrance on stage or, more forebodingly, as an animal for sacrifice, and Dionysus gloats: “I glory in your changed mind (methestêkas phrenôn)” (944). Pentheus’ madness enables him to imagine that he could lift the mountain of Citheron with all the Bacchants on it. Released from reason, he disdains limits, the boundaries his nature as human and mortal imposes. He fancies himself possessing godlike powers. On stage, at the festival of Dionysus, such feats are possible. Earthquakes can shake the city and castles can topple. Gods can appear. Dionysus calls this mind overtaken by illusion “healthy (hugeis)” (947–8). With his “healthy” mind, Pentheus admits that he must forswear the use of force against the women. His “unhealthy” mind had tried to imprison the god, but chains were no match for Dionysus. Pentheus, drawn into Dionysus’ world, acts now through deception (dolon), secreting himself behind the clothes of a woman, hiding in the pine forests so that he can spy on the Bacchants (955–6). Dionysus, ready with the lies and double entendres that have marked his speech, urges Pentheus on, foreshadowing the dreadful outcome: “I your savior” will lead you forth, but “another shall lead you back” (965–6). At the end of this unnerving scene of deception, transformation, and madness, Pentheus heads to the mountain where the women frolic.

The Chorus describes in detail Agave's response to this “woman attired (gunaikomimô)” (980) spy—how she, blinded to his form, was unable to see Pentheus as her son and wondered who he might be. The Chorus then calls on Justice to avenge the “godless lawless unjust one” (1014–15) and asks Dionysus to reveal himself “in whatever form he chooses”: a bull, a many-headed snake, a fire-snorting lion (1017–19). We may wonder how they will know him if he has such a multitude of forms. What does it mean for one to reveal oneself when one has no form to reveal? Their request highlights the challenge of knowing when there is no form to know—and the forthcoming tragic consequences of the failure to recognize forms.

The messenger, in his appealing simplicity and basic humanity that are in such contrast to the frenzied Bacchants and the form-imposing Pentheus, reports precisely what he has seen, accepting the truth of what he has observed at face value. He tells a harrowing story, and his vivid narrative enables us to see the mass of confusion brought on by Dionysus’ shattering of forms, boundaries, and knowledge. We learn of Pentheus’ eagerness to be a theatês, observing without being observed—of his desire to see more, of how he wanted to climb a tall pine to see better and how Dionysus accommodated him, pulling down the top of the tree and settling Pentheus on it before letting it rise again. Dionysus then disappears while a voice much like his encourages the Bacchants to punish the mocking intruder. The women follow Dionysus’ injunction. When a series of projectiles fail to dislodge Pentheus from atop the tree, the women tear the tree from the ground so that they can, in Agave's words, “grasp the wild animal” (1108). Only to the mind overwhelmed by delusions has Pentheus become that beast, and though Pentheus divests himself of his women's clothes so that his mother might recognize him (nin gnôrisasa, 1116) and see his true form, and though he cries to her, “I, mother, am your son Pentheus. . .do not kill your son” (1118–21), she, in the grip of Bacchus (1124), is not deterred. He is an animal whom she tears to pieces with her own hands. In dreadful detail, the messenger reports the rending of Pentheus’ flesh, his screams, the women's frenzy, all ending with Pentheus’ head held high on Agave's thyrsus.

Covered in the blood of her son Agave appears with his severed head, proud of her kill at the hunt. Under the spell of the god, she does not comprehend whose head she holds. It is the head of the young lion, she says, easy to see (horan, 1175), but only for those whom the form-obscuring god controls. She brags to her father: “Leaving behind the shuttle and loom, I have come to greater things, hunting with my hands the wild beasts” (1236–37); with these words, she hands Cadmus his grandson's head. Cadmus, who previously enjoyed his youthful dancing, guides his daughter away from the illusions imposed by the god toward a recognition of what she has done: “Look straight (skepsai) now; it is little trouble to look on it (eisidein)” (1279). And once she looks straight at what she holds in her bloodied hands, she sees the head of her son, not the wild beast that she, under the influence of Dionysus, thought she had killed. Seeing the true form of her son, she acknowledges her actions, her having torn into pieces—made multiple in the most gruesome sense—what was once one.Footnote ⁸ Had she perceived his form behind the illusions created by the costume of a woman's dress, the great tragedy of the play would have been avoided. Cadmus now insists on a clarity of vision: “Observe (athrêson) it and know it more clearly (saphesteron mathe)” (1281). To know clearly is to see beyond the deceptive changes in shape. With vengeance done, Dionysus no longer deludes. Agave sees clearly: “I see (hora) the greatest anguish” (1282). Too late she learns the power of the god of illusion who freed her to go to the fields, far from the city's houses with their retaining walls and sheltering roofs. Freedom allowed her to escape the confines of the forms of a woman who lived in the city, but her inability to see the true forms of things fostered the tragedy with which she must now live.

Though the final passages of the play have been lost, we hear in what remains the strange (though nothing should seem strange after what has transpired on stage) speech of Dionysus as he continues his pattern of transforming, announcing that Cadmus and his wife shall be changed (metabalôn, 1330) into snakes and that Cadmus will lead a “mixed barbarian army” (1356). With the final sad laments of Agave, we see the cruel culmination of Dionysus’ vengeance. He has punished those who refused to acknowledge his divinity, who could not see two in one, a god born from a mortal woman. He has mocked the certainties that provided structure for the city and its rulers, that insisted on separate forms for gods and humans, for men and women, for animals and humans. As punishment for the city's desire for simplicity and precision, Dionysus staged the wrenching story captured in the messenger's speech. The city was helpless against the god's shattering of confining forms.

But, we must also note that everyone—even Pentheus—found something thrilling in the freedom from forms that enabled them to live in the world of illusions. The women shed their girdles and literally let down their hair; they left the confines of their roofed houses and wandered freely in open fields. Old men forgot their aged bones and danced. Pentheus could become a voyeur observing the “shameful” women. But as they all were released from the constraints under which they had lived, the city disintegrated. Its prison and castle collapsed; its king was torn to pieces by women who nursed fawns and lion cubs instead of their own young. With the dissolution of forms and/or the ability to know them, men became women, old became young, and women became wild animals who stalked their prey barehanded. The vengeful Dionysus destroyed the city that he saw as too fixed on its assertion of form, unwilling to accept the fluid movement of one into another. No wonder the Socrates of the Republic wants no such tragedy in his city. Indeed, one can even wonder whether there is within this play a Euripidean critique of Euripides’ own art, the sort of philosophical rethinking that marks the Platonic dialogues as I suggest later.

The vengeance of Dionysus was terrible, terrible to behold through the speech of the messenger and terrible to contemplate as one leaves the amphitheater. The transformation of women into wild animals and of a king and his queen into snakes evokes a deep horror. However, part of the tragedy is that Euripides suggests how close we are to such transformations, how quickly our desire for freedom may lead to the shedding of encumbering forms and how close the city into which such freedom enters stands to the brink of desolation. Dionysus’ powers bring on the earthquake that shatters the walls of the castle, but it is the human desire for freedom from an imposed form—whether it be Cadmus and Teiresias seeking to shed their age, Agave seeking release from the house within which she lived inside the city's walls, Pentheus longing to see what is forbidden for him to see, or even the audience members who enter this world of illusion when they celebrate the festival of Dionysus—that leads to the devastation of those who guide and live in the city. This is the tragedy of Euripides’ play. The tale of Callipolis presents a city controlled by form, exiling freedom, where sight longs not for the illusions of Dionysus’ stage but for the form itself, what lies behind the illusions available to sight. This city, however, creates its own tragedy while banning tragedies. Does Book 10 start to lead us beyond both tragedies?

CALLIPOLIS: THE IMPOSITION OF FORMS

Asked to defend justice, Socrates founds a city in speech. The founding has many parts, but among the most significant (and notorious) is the education of the young warriors. Founders must pay special attention to the young, because the “beginning” is the most important part of every “action;” at the beginning one is most “malleable (malista. . .plattetai)” and puts on its “stamp (tupos)” (377a–b). Tupos refers to the marking of coins, giving form to a piece of metal and determining its worth. Likewise with the youth: They are to be stamped by their education. So molded, they will take on an unchanging form that determines their worth for the city.

With this preface Socrates begins to censor the poetry that the young will hear, for poetry will shape their souls (plattein tas psuchas, 377c). Socrates criticizes poets for making bad “images (eikazêi)” of what gods and heroes do, “just as a painter who paints something that doesn't resemble [look like, eoikota] the thing whose likeness he wishes to paint” (377e).Footnote ⁹ The artist's task, he suggests, is to capture the true form of the thing through his art. But, in contrast to what will happen in Book 10, this discussion leaves open the unsettling issue of whether the proposed censorship leads to the capturing of or the creation of a form. Socrates finds fault with lies, but only if the lies are not “fine (mê kalôs pseudetai)” (377d). In the construction of Callipolis, he appears comfortable with “fine lies” that may not capture the form of a thing. First he censors the story of Uranus and Cronos, a tale of castration and rebellion that, “even if true,” should not be told to “thoughtless youth” (378a). Is the censorship that follows and that creates a uniform god out of the pantheon of gods the result of avoiding stories that may be true? Are the gods indeed multiple? Is the illusion of uniformity and the absence of change among the gods necessary lest we suffer the tragedies Euripides’ Dionysus brought to Thebes? A striking element of Socrates’ censorship is its elimination of the gods’ multidimensionality and ability to change shape that so marked the Bacchae's Dionysus. Reconfiguring the gods, Socrates makes them uniform, creating one out of many.

After excising the Cronos/Uranus story, Socrates considers more generally conflict among the gods. Of such tales, it would be best “to keep quiet, but if there were some necessity to tell, as few as possible ought to hear them as unspeakable secrets, after making a sacrifice, not of a pig but of some great offering. . .so that it will come to the ears of the smallest number possible” (378a). Thus, no tale of Hephaestos binding Hera or of Hephaestos thrown from Olympus for protecting Hera against Zeus's violence. No conflict means no differences, no different wants, needs, or personalities. And the gods must cause only what is good (379c), never “strife and contention” among gods or humans. Socrates quotes Aeschylus, but we cannot forget Euripides’ play where the god with eerie pleasure fostered the most vicious conflicts: “As for the assertion that a god, who is good, is the cause of evil to anyone, great exertions must be made against anyone saying these things in his own city” (380b).

Socrates then asks this question, which also could have been written with the Bacchae in mind: “Do you suppose the god is a wizard, able treacherously to reveal himself at different times in different ideas, at one time actually himself changing and passing from his own form into many shapes, at another time deceiving us and making us think such things about him. Or is he simple and does he least of all things depart from his own idea?” (380d). Dionysus was not one idea; he was many. Pentheus’ initial unwillingness to acknowledge that multiplicity, his reliance on a reason that said that one cannot be two and two cannot be one, precipitated his tragic downfall. Socrates asks Adeimantus, “Isn't it necessary that, if something steps out of its own idea, it be changed either by itself or something else?. . . Are things that are in the best condition least altered and moved by something else?” (380d–e). Health, strength, and prudence belong to those gods and men that are least subject to change (381a). In the Bacchae freedom from form had allowed change to run rampant. Here, ignoring freedom, change is a feared departure from the perfection of form.

The god of the Bacchae gloried in his variability, with disastrous results for the city. Socrates’ city will exclude it, but does his insistence on the immutable and the concomitant denial of freedom transfer so easily from gods to the city? Socrates insists that “everything that's in fine condition, whether by nature or art or both, admits least transformation by anything else” and because the god is “in every way in the best condition,” he “would least of all have many shapes.” For emphasis, we assume, Socrates repeats himself: “If he is good, he won't transform himself since such transformation could only mean changes into what is worse” (381b). Finally, he concludes, it is impossible “for a god to want to alter himself, but since, as it seems, each of them is as fair and as good as possible, he remains forever simply in his own shape (têi autou morphêi)” (381c). With that Socrates purges stories of gods who take on “every sort of shape and visit cities” (381d). Though Socrates cites Homer, Dionysus’ visit to Thebes looms in the background. Socrates castigates mothers who frighten children with stories of gods (such as Dionysus on Euripides’ stage) wandering at night looking like strangers.

When Adeimantus answers Socrates’ question as to whether gods might be “deceivers and bewitchers” with “perhaps (isôs)” (381e), Socrates is astonished that Adeimantus is not more decisive: “What? Would a god want to lie, either in speech or deed by presenting an illusion?” Adeimantus is not sure, but Socrates, in his mission to prevent the gods from stepping outside of their ideas, insists, “Don't you know. . .that all gods and human beings hate the true lie (alêthôs pseudos)?” (382a). No god would use illusions to bewitch, because “[t]he divine are wholly free from [the] lie (pantêi. . . apseudes).” Dionysus violated all of Socrates’ principles: “The god is altogether simple and true in deed and speech, and doesn't himself change or deceive others by illusions, speeches, or the sending of signs either in waking or dreaming” (382e). At the risk of becoming repetitious, Socrates reiterates what he said moments before: The gods “are neither wizards who transform themselves nor do they mislead us by lies in speech or deed” (383a). In the last line of Book 2 Adeimantus abandons his “perhaps,” concluding: “I am in complete agreement with these models (tupous). . . and would use them as laws” (383c).

Socrates thus establishes the guidelines he follows to educate the young of Callipolis: resistance to multiplicity, to two in one, to transformations of shape. For Socrates change becomes morally and politically harmful. The gods in tales told to the young must be static. Socrates expects no less of the inhabitants of CallipolisFootnote ¹⁰ than he does of his god(s). Near the beginning of Book 3 we learn (with some surprise, I would think) that the young cannot be told tales of their heroes laughing: “For when a man lets himself go and laughs mightily, he also seeks a mighty change to accompany his condition” (388e). The expulsion of laughter and the change of form it entails, however, is only a preface to the expulsion of theater whose god is the fluid Dionysus.

Here enters Socrates’ famous discussion of mimêsis and its connection to multiplicity and transformation.Footnote ¹¹ “When [someone] gives a speech as though he were someone else, won't we say that he then likens his own style as much as possible to that of the man he has announced as the speaker?” And “likening himself to someone else,” either in voice or looks, he “is the same as imitating the man he likens himself to” (393c). Imitation entails changing one's form, precisely what Dionysus practiced in the Bacchae and on the Attic stage. The beginning of the Iliad serves as an illustration of the difference between narration and imitation, but Adeimantus, to show Socrates that he understands Socrates’ words, adds: “That is the way it is with tragedies” (394b). Socrates continues, noting that one kind of poetry “proceeds wholly by imitation—as you say, tragedy and [Socrates adds] comedy” (394c).

The question then is whether tragedy and comedy—depending on changing forms through mimêsis, obscuring the true form (if there is one)—have any place in a city where change has been banished for the gods and the unlaughing warriors. Adeimantus, sensing the direction of the argument, suspects it will not, but Socrates holds back, waiting, he claims, to see where the argument leads (394d). So, he asks this question: Should there be imitators in the city? Reflecting back to the founding of the city, Socrates reminds Adeimantus “that each one would do a fine job in one activity, but not in many” (394e). Through imitation one shape becomes more than one shape. In language that recalls the stamping of a coin from unformed metal, Socrates says, “Human nature, Adeimantus, looks to me to be minted in even smaller coins than this, so that it is unable to make a fine imitation of many things or to do the things of which the imitations are in fact only likenesses” (395b). The young not only must not laugh; they cannot practice the multiplicity that the theater demands, becoming through illusion “slaves, women or men” (395e). They cannot be more than one.

Socrates becomes more specific, suggesting a long list of what is forbidden to imitate. They cannot imitate those overwhelmed by the lesser pleasures or by disease. They must resist molding themselves in the stamp (tupos, 396d) of worse men, and although the good man may narrate, he will avoid imitation. Adeimantus agrees: “That is just the way the model (tupos) of such a speaker must be” (396e). A lesser man may think nothing of imitating before many (presumably audiences at the Dionysian festivals), but the more he imitates a multiplicity of sounds, the more he takes on multiple forms, the more he deviates from the single stamp necessary for the young (397a). Socrates concludes that there are two forms of narration for his city: One form narrates with infrequent imitation, and in the other the narrator imitates, but only good men. Other ways of imitation, needing all modes and rhythms, have no form at all; taking on a multitude of shapes of changes (pantadapas morphas tôn metabalôn, 397c), they are to be excluded.

Having established the distinction between the good and the lesser man, between acceptable imitation of the form of the good man and unacceptable poetry imitating a variety of human forms, animals, sounds, and natural phenomena, the response concerning whom they shall admit into their city is unsurprising: only the unmixed imitator of the good man (ton tou epieikous mimêtên akraton, 397d). There is, however, a tension here: The imitator cannot be “unmixed.” He mixes who he is with whom he is imitating. Thus, unless he can become one with what he is imitating, he remains mixed. The demand Socrates makes for his city cannot be met.Footnote ¹² Or, let me put it this way: The one way to avoid this contradiction is for the imitator of the good man to be the good man (i.e., to have only one form—that of the good man). The imitator cannot be what he imitates without mixing himself with what he imitates. In the next section, the discussion of imitation in Book 10 shows the inadequacies of this early exchange and may explain the return to the problem raised in Book 3.

Bypassing the confusion he created with his commands that the unmixed be mixed, Socrates acknowledges that the “mixed man” pleases the many. We are attracted to a multiplicity of forms, just as Pentheus is drawn to that woman-like male and to the transgressive women cavorting in the fields. We are mesmerized by the illusions of the theater, of the hidden and deceptive multiple forms presented on its stage; however, in the search for the just city with its one man/one job principle, perfection is simplicity, and motion and multiplicity are rejected. In “our regime,” Socrates says, there will be no double man (diplous anêr) and no “manifold one (pollaplos)” (397e). Thus, “if a man who is able by wisdom to become every sort of thing and to imitate all things should come to our city, wishing to make a display of himself and his poems, we would fall before him as a man sacred, wonderful, and pleasing: but we would say that there is no such man among us in the city, nor is it lawful for such a man to be born there” (398a). Should Dionysus come to Callipolis, the founders will show him the worshipful respect Pentheus denied him, but they will dismiss him, saying there is no place for the escape from form in the life of the city. Socrates, disdaining the love of the multicolored as the fancy of women and young children (557c), makes the expulsion of Dionysus look easy. Euripides does not.

REVISITING IMITATION: THE FORMS AND MULTIPLICITY

When after six long books Socrates suddenly revisits imitation in Book 10, he returns to its connection to the multiplicity of form. The curiosity of returning to a topic dealt with extensively in Book 3 has perplexed numerous scholars. Else, for example, dismisses Book 10 as an “afterthought” written well after the Republic was completed and suggests that it is answering those in the Academy who found fault with Plato's banishment of the poets (1972, 7, 36). Havelock calls it an “abrupt hiatus” (1972, 21), and Annas describes it as an “appendix” and, more notoriously, an “excrescence,” written at a “level of philosophical argument and literary skill” that is “much below the rest of the book” (Reference Annas1981, 335).Footnote ¹³ But we must see the return to this topic as continuing and reinforcing the questioning that is part of any Platonic dialogue, a philosophic demand to keep discussion open. We must be wary of reading the dialogue as prescriptive declarative statements à la Popper, rather than as a series of investigations. Naddoff elegantly captures this point by quoting Albert Hirschman's comment that all “dialectical thinkers” have a “propensity for self-subversion,” a “skepticism. . .towards one's own generalizations.” She continues: “The point is not whether his arguments contradict each other but how they increase the contradictions and tensions Plato recognizes as inherent to his philosophical system” (Reference Naddoff2002, 3).

The conclusions of Book 3 would lead to a Callipolis as static and uniform as the gods of Book 2. But Book 3's fear of Dionysus and problematic fascination with the uniform, unchanging, and unmixed immediately encountered difficulties when Socrates introduced the “unmixed” imitation of the good man. The difficulties only increase as the founding continues: The guardians themselves become double (rulers and warriors, 414a); the efforts to obliterate gender differences falter because of “erotic necessities” (458d); sharing of wives and children requires the guardians to deceive by fixing the lotteries meant to determine who generates with whom. In counterpoint to these developments in the founding of Callipolis, with the discussion of the education of the philosopher, the divided line, and eventually the parable of the cave, Socrates also leads his interlocutors to an appreciation of—no, a longing for—the singular form that does not change; to the order entailed in that which “is,” rather than that which “becomes,” moving from one shape to another, mixing and appearing as other than it is. Imitation was rejected because it made the singular multiple, allowing for just that mixing and delusion. Insofar as imitation—as appealing as it might be—allowed one to change shape, to elude and delude, the city lacked an epistemological grounding and existed in a space where one might see—as Dionysus led Pentheus to see—two suns or a double Thebes.

Through the course of the dialogue, Socrates was constantly confronted with the challenge that the singular posed for the construction of the city and the discovery of justice. The epistemological need for knowing the form of each thing so that a mother sees her son and not a wild beast contended with the political necessity that the city has for the multiple. The democracy of Book 8 vividly illustrated the dangers for politics of the escape from form. Like Dionysus, the democratic man resists one form. At one moment he engages in gymnastics, at another is idle; at one moment he drinks and at another “reduces;” sometimes he engages in politics, at other times in money-making: “There is neither order or necessity in his life, but [he calls] this life sweet, free and blessed” (561c–d). The city cannot endure such fluidity without lapsing into tyranny, but neither can it be built on the complete rejection of multiplicity. Book 10's reassessment tries to reimagine the forms not as prisons excluding the multiple, but as tools encompassing multiplicity while preventing the explosion of that multiplicity into the tragic consequences we saw in Euripides’ play.

Reflecting on their conversations about poetry at the beginning of Book 3, Socrates incorrectly recalls that by excluding whatever was imitative they acted especially well (595a), something even “more manifest now that the soul's forms (ta psuchês tês eidê) have each been separated out (chôris)” (595b).Footnote ¹⁴ That he connects the incorrectly remembered excellence of the earlier decision to exclude imitation to the parts of the soul has led most scholars to focus on the moral consequences of poetry—specifically the way in which poetry threatens reason by arousing the soul's nonrational parts—while leaving aside the consequences of imitation as making one more than one. There are, however, at least two significant points about this mis-recollection that should make us linger over the implications of imitation for the city: (1) Socrates connects the excellence of the previous discussion to the eidê (forms, plural) of the soul, in particular “the separating out (chôris)” of the eidê; and (2) he does not move immediately to the emotive power of poetry that interests so many scholars, but begins with the craftsman and painter.Footnote ¹⁵ The investigation of the soul in Book 4 and Book 9 showed—surprisingly, given the soul's role in pre-Socratic literature—souls as multiple. Whereas the gods of Book 2 and the young of Book 3 could only have one unmixed idea, the individual we learn has within himself three eidê: logos, thumos, and epithumia, or the human, lion, and many-headed beast.

Despite the lengthy discussion of imitation previously, Socrates now admits, “I scarcely comprehend what [imitation] wants to be” (595c). Well he might say so, given how he is going to invert his previous understanding. Earlier, imitation entailed mixing forms or hiding one's form so that a son appeared as a lion unrecognizable to his mother, women appeared as wild animals, and a god appeared as a bull. Now, the “forms of the soul” have reintroduced the notion that the singular man is many, and the rejection of imitation can no longer be based on the rejection of multiplicity. The problem with mimêsis becomes not that it makes one many as in Book 3, but that it reduces the many to the singular, denying the capacity to know the whole, the multiplicity of what is represented. Imitation captures only one aspect of the form that encompasses many in a unifying self. We cannot understand the justice of the soul or the city without acknowledging its several parts, without allowing it to be many. Imitation, we learn, flattens the forms, giving them only one side (Saxonhouse Reference Saxonhouse2009, 742), thus precluding true knowledge. The earlier books looked for the “one” in simplicity that led to the denial of imitation and the absence of movement (as in the prescription against laughter), whereas the forms of Book 10 (after the discussion in the intervening books and the partition of the soul) capture the full being of the object or individual, allowing for the many within the unity of the form. The story of Callipolis as a static regime failed. The political, if merely because of “erotic necessities,” cannot be uniform. In other words, the unity of form in Book 10 is not an escape from multiplicity, but enables the multiple to exist within the form. Dionysus the god enabled unlimited transformations that denied limits and boundaries. The development of the argument in Book 10 leads us to eidê that retain the multiple.

To reconstruct his falsely recollected theory of mimêsis Socrates turns to the painter. The painter cannot capture the entirety of the object that he represents two-dimensionally. Each shape the painter portrays is singular; he does not paint the many-sided qualities of what he imitates. Now Socrates faults the artist for not bringing together the multiplicity of the object being represented. The form is now not a singular shape or morphê, but incorporates within itself the multiplicity of what it is to be—let's say, as he does—a couch. Imitation (no longer understood as mixing ourselves with another), whether by the painter or the playwright, obscures that multiplicity. The true couch-maker, the artisan-like god, makes the form of the couch, but as Socrates explains to a rather confused and weary Glaucon, “if he should make only two, again one would come to light the form of which they in turn would both possess, and that, and not the two would be the couch that is” (597c) [emphasis in original]. The form needs to be inclusive of all couches.

The eidos of the couch enables me, however, to know that the couch in my living room of a particular color, size, and softness is a couch, but neither it nor the picture of it incorporates the multiple qualities of all possible couches that exist in the eidos of the couch. The very mortal, limited painter reduces the complexity of the couch, because we see on the painted surface the couch from only one perspective and are unable to appreciate the front and back at the same time. Socrates explains to Glaucon: “Does a couch if you observe it from the side, or from the front, or from anywhere else, differ at all from itself? Or does it not differ at all but only look different. . . . Toward which is painting directed. . .toward imitation of the being as it is or toward its looking as it looks?. . .imitation is. . .far from the truth. . .because it lays hold of a certain part of each thing and that part is itself only a phantom (phainomenon)” (598a–b). My living room couch and even more the picture of that couch may have some of the qualities of being a couch, but they do not have all the qualities of all possible couches. In Book 3 the young needed to cast off large portions of themselves to become the uniform beings that were to populate Callipolis. Now Socrates condemns the crafts for their failure to appreciate and present both the front and the back, the fullness of the object imitated. The forms of Book 10 capturing the ousia of a thing may maintain the boundaries, but they also allow for a range of possibilities within these boundaries. Thus, the couch can be leather or suede, hard or soft, but it cannot be a table. In the Bacchae Dionysus’ wine and his theater obscured the ousia by effacing all boundaries, allowing us only to see the parts or phantoms of things.

Socrates refocuses his discussion from imitation of an object such as a couch to imitation of the couch-maker. A painter's representation of the artisan can only portray “a certain small part” (598b) of the couch-maker, not the ousia of what it is to be a couch-maker. This goes beyond seeing just a side—let's say the front side—of the couch: “The painter. . .will paint for us a shoemaker, a carpenter, and the other craftsmen, although he doesn't understand the arts of any one of them. . .if he is a good painter. . .he would deceive children and foolish human beings into thinking that it is truly a carpenter” (598b–c). The painter, ignorant about the craft of the artisan, cannot present the many-sidedness of being an artisan, just as he cannot present the multiple couches that the form of couch includes. Socrates applies this same critique to tragedy and Homer (598d). Homer portrays the artisan, the doctor, the shipbuilder, but does so without presenting the multitude of information and skills entailed in their work (599c). Homer cannot teach the arts practiced because he does not know the multiple skills involved in any craft. The ousia, the true being, of any artisan must include those skills. Otherwise, like the couch in the vase painting, it is only a phainomenon or surface appearance. To capture the form of the shipbuilder Homer must know the many parts of that art—woodworking, metalworking, sail making, among others. Portraying only part of the artisan, presenting only the phantoms, Homer cannot educate his followers and benefit the cities in which they live.

Book 2 fostered a fear of the consequences of multiple gods changing form on the youth's education. By Book 9, Socrates accommodates the multiple in the search for justice, a multiplicity within a unity—whether of the individual or the city. Dionysus had threatened the city with his constant changing form. Socrates acts now not simply to eliminate Dionysus as he had done in Book 2, but to enrich the eidê, allowing them to incorporate within themselves variety while not dissolving into the chaotic formlessness of the Bacchae. The question changes from making all uniform, and therefore eliminating the practice of imitation that makes one more than one, to how to hold together what is multiple. Though the founders tried to ban imitation and the mixing that went along with it, they kept bumping up against the multiple, in the two genders that could not be made one, not to mention the parts of the city and the soul. As the discussion proceeded, the fallibility of imposing (what may well be a lie) uniform gods and unchanging/unlaughing men became more apparent. In Book 10 Socrates applies what he has learned during the evening of discourse to the inadequate efforts of Books 2 and 3.

Book 10 reminds us that multiplicity is at the heart of the city. The static city that Socrates sought in opposition to the tragedy wrought by Dionysus’ arrival in Thebes cannot escape the inherent multiplicity of the forms at its heart. In Book 10 Socrates begins to explore the source of his earlier failure. Fearful of the chaos brought on by the formless freedom of a Dionysus, he maintains the forms, but gives them a richness, a depth that imitation on stage or in the Homeric poems or by the graphic artist lacks. Illusion allows us to see only one form at a time—the wild beast and not the son, the king of Thebes but not the man in the mask. The eidê of Book 10 ask us to see the female sheltered and the female in the field, the old man but also one who becomes young again with wine, holding the thyrsus and dancing. In Book 10 Socrates gives back to the inhabitants of the city the capacity to act (i.e., the movement denied them when it banished, along with much else, form-changing laughter).

The curious revisiting of imitation still challenges Dionysus’ world of freedom from form, because Socrates still demands the knowledge of form so that we may know who is a son and who is not, who is human and who is not. Yet it nevertheless questions Callipolis’ initial capitulation to an oppressive slavery that the effort to deny changing shapes and movement imposed on its inhabitants. The city cannot survive the complete abandonment of form that Dionysus brought to Thebes, where a son becomes a woman and then a lion, where a wall is not a wall, but neither can it survive the unmoving uniformity of Callipolis. Book 10's reassessment of imitation begins to lead us beyond both perspectives. The forms protect us from the dismemberment of the Bacchae, but they can protect us from tragedy only to the extent that they allow us to be multiple. Pentheus’ resistance to Dionysus leads to the proposals in Book 3 as well as to the tragedy of his dismemberment. The eidê of Book 10 provide a basis for the knowledge of a thing while admitting the manifold that Pentheus was so eager to exclude and control with his mindless and ineffective chains.

The souls of the Myth of Er, choosing their life patterns at the end of their journey through Hades, warn us about observing only the illusory surface without penetrating the form that reveals the whole. They see only one shape. The man who rushes into the life of the tyrant who will eat his children sees only the wealth and power of the pattern he chooses. He does not study deeply the form of tyranny, seeing—like theatergoers—only the momentary shape or phantom of that life. Cadmus insists at the end of the Bacchae that Agave “look straight,” that she not see the lion's head that the Bacchic madness has made her see, but rather recognize the form of the child she has butchered. Escape from tragedy comes from being able to seeing the form behind the illusions, but that escape depends on the acknowledgment that form includes rather than excludes the many. The Republic concludes with the exhortation to live well. This entails choosing the right life. We can do so only to the extent that the lives we choose escape the shallow uniformity of the “stamps” of Book 3 and open up the richness of the forms to which Socrates turns when he revisits his earlier banning of imitation. With Necessity confirming the choices made by the souls before their travels to the world of the living, Socrates may be asking for more stability of form than the modern liberal world is willing to accept. But he does so to protect us from the terrifying escape from form he may have seen enacted on the Attic stage. That Socrates returns to Book 3 suggests the importance of that book and its cognizance of the Dionysian threat to the city, but the dialogue takes us beyond that fear—not to the unbending imposition of form, but to an effort to understand the necessity of the boundaries and the limits forms may impose while embracing, knowing, and seeing the multiplicity within them.

Supplementary materials

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