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How does the ocean rock the boat? How did the razor find my throat?
Don't Mess With Dionysos, Example #152
Πήγασος ἐκ τῶν Ἐλευθερῶν -- αἱ δὲ Ἐλευθεραὶ πόλις εἰσὶ τῆς Βοιωτίας -- λαβὼν τοῦ Διoνύσου τὸ ἄγαλμα ἧκεν εἰς τὴν Ἀττικὴν. οἱ δὲ Ἀττικοὶ οὐκ ἐδέξαντο μετὰ τιμῆς τὸν θεὸν, ἀλλ' οὐκ ἀμισθί γε αὐτοῖς ταῦτα βουλευσαμένοις ἀπέβη. μηνίσαντος γὰρ τοῦ θεοῦ νόσος κατέσκηψεν εἰς τὰ αἰδοῖα τῶν ἀνδρῶν καὶ τὸ δεινὸν ἀνήκεστον ἦν.
(scholia on the Acharnians 243a.4)
From Eleutherai -- Eleutherai is a city in Boiotia -- Pegasos took a statue of Dionysos and came to Attica. And the people of Attica did not welcome the god with honor, but the ones who planned this did not go without payback. Because the god became angry and a sickness attacked the genitals of the men, and this was a terrible and incurable thing.
This is the sort of thing people look at when trying to figure out where Greek tragedy came from: rituals to propitiate Dionysos, the recurring tragic theme of impending disorder, something to do with the property phallus? Et cetera. But mostly, ow. It is left up to scholarship to decide whether -- assuming you're going to reject Dionysos and pay for it, à la Pentheus -- it's better or worse to get your head torn off by your mother or come down with an incurable disease of the unmentionables.
(If the Greek text looks like a mess, go here and set the display for Unicode (UTF-8) with pre-combined accents. If that doesn't work, I'll start doing transliteration.)
Πήγασος ἐκ τῶν Ἐλευθερῶν -- αἱ δὲ Ἐλευθεραὶ πόλις εἰσὶ τῆς Βοιωτίας -- λαβὼν τοῦ Διoνύσου τὸ ἄγαλμα ἧκεν εἰς τὴν Ἀττικὴν. οἱ δὲ Ἀττικοὶ οὐκ ἐδέξαντο μετὰ τιμῆς τὸν θεὸν, ἀλλ' οὐκ ἀμισθί γε αὐτοῖς ταῦτα βουλευσαμένοις ἀπέβη. μηνίσαντος γὰρ τοῦ θεοῦ νόσος κατέσκηψεν εἰς τὰ αἰδοῖα τῶν ἀνδρῶν καὶ τὸ δεινὸν ἀνήκεστον ἦν.
(scholia on the Acharnians 243a.4)
From Eleutherai -- Eleutherai is a city in Boiotia -- Pegasos took a statue of Dionysos and came to Attica. And the people of Attica did not welcome the god with honor, but the ones who planned this did not go without payback. Because the god became angry and a sickness attacked the genitals of the men, and this was a terrible and incurable thing.
This is the sort of thing people look at when trying to figure out where Greek tragedy came from: rituals to propitiate Dionysos, the recurring tragic theme of impending disorder, something to do with the property phallus? Et cetera. But mostly, ow. It is left up to scholarship to decide whether -- assuming you're going to reject Dionysos and pay for it, à la Pentheus -- it's better or worse to get your head torn off by your mother or come down with an incurable disease of the unmentionables.
(If the Greek text looks like a mess, go here and set the display for Unicode (UTF-8) with pre-combined accents. If that doesn't work, I'll start doing transliteration.)
synchronicities
Funny thing: before reading this today I had a flight of fancy about how I would design and direct a version of the play with Dionysos and Pentheus... and how I'd portray Dionysos if I did that.