The Lonely Goatherd Blog And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats - Matthew 25:32
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Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
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All original content on MoreThings.com copyright 2008 Albert Barger or the respective authors
September 22, 2002
Hey, it's Euripides birthday! Euripides was born September 23, 484 BC. He came near the end of the line of great classic Greek playwrights. In his time, he was considered a radical and a heretic. He was considered a non-believer in the official religious reality tunnel of his society, ie Zeus et al- though I've never seen anywhere that he directly admitted as such. He didn't seem to blend into society very well, and chose to spend a good part of his life living in a cave on an island, alone with his books.
His best known play is The Bacchants. It describes the rampage of crazed worshippers of Bacchus, aka Dionysus, the god of wine and passion. Trying to reign them in, Pentheus, the king of Thebes, eventually gets killed in a fit of Dionysian religious ecstasy. His mother ends up parading through the streets with his head on a pole, so far out of her mind in a religious rapture that she didn't know what she was doing.
The play might most profitably be taken as a cautionary tale against the dangers of passion rolling over our human reason. The frenzied ones could be fundamentalist snake handlers, or 1930s Germans caught up in hatred for Jews. They could be overly enthusiastic fans crushing one another at a Who concert in Cincinnati, or some ELF idiots caught up in the thrill they take in smashing research labs.
From whatever direction, the capacity for losing your rational mind in an emotional tide runs deep in our human biology. It behooves us to keep this in mind.
