Dal testo alla scena. Per una interpretazione delle Baccanti di Euripide

The paper proposes a new reading of Euripides’ Bacchae, focusing attention on the Chorus of bacchants and to the personages of Dionysus and Pentheus. The A. remarks that the usual confusion between the two different groups of bacchants, the Lydian ones in the orchestra and the Theban ones on the Cytheron Mountain, hinders the understanding of the theme of ‘initiation’ in the whole plot and obscures the original Euripidean interpretation of the Dionysian myth. Pentheus’ story in Bacchae is an Euripidean reading of the ancient myth after the Orphic-Dionysia mysticism, attested in his tragedy Cretans, in the golden label of Hipponium and in the Derveni Papyrus, but unspeakable to no-initiated. Under this light, the A. shows the passages where Pentheus is recognizable as the ‘double’ of Dionysus, and argues that the shrewd identification of the two indirectly indicates the final destiny of the Theban king, after the sparagmos. The disguise of all the heroic personages, first of all Dionysus, the god who wears a human mask, introduces to metatheatre, which has an important role in the play, and lets us to intend it as a probable mean to divulgate in a mediate way, through theatre, the mystic ‘inexpressible’.