BiblioVault - Books about Dionysus (Greek deity)

Bacchae. Iphigenia at Aulis. Rhesus

Euripides

Harvard University Press, 2002

Three plays by ancient Greece’s third great tragedian.

One of antiquity's greatest poets, Euripides has been prized in every age for the pathos, terror, and intellectual probing of his dramatic creations. The new Loeb Classical Library edition of his plays is in six volumes.

In Bacchae, one of the great masterpieces of the tragic genre, Euripides tells the story of king Pentheus' resistance to the worship of Dionysus and his horrific punishment by the god: dismemberment at the hands of Theban women. Iphigenia at Aulis, also in Volume VI, recounts the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter to Artemis, the price exacted by the goddess for favorable sailing winds. Rhesus dramatizes a pivotal incident in the Trojan War. This play is probably not by Euripides; but it does give a sample of what tragedy was like after the great fifth-century playwrights.

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Crossings

Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy

John Sallis

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Boldly contesting recent scholarship, Sallis argues that
The Birth of Tragedy is a rethinking of art at the
limit of metaphysics. His close reading focuses on the
complexity of the Apollinian/Dionysian dyad and on the
crossing of these basic art impulses in tragedy.

"Sallis effectively calls into question some commonly
accepted and simplistic ideas about Nietzsche's early
thinking and its debt to Schopenhauer, and proposes
alternatives that are worth considering."—Richard
Schacht, Times Literary Supplement

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Dionysos at Large

Marcel Detienne

Harvard University Press, 1989

As the perpetual stranger Dionysos is the embodiment of strangeness. He is nowhere at home, and yet in another sense the world is his home. Detienne evokes the manic activity of Dionysos in myths that connect him with the shedding of blood, the pouring of wine, and the ejaculation of semen.

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Dionysus in Literature

Essays on Literary Madness

Edited by Branimir M. Rieger

University of Wisconsin Press, 1994

In this anthology, outstanding authorities present their assessments of literary madness in a variety of topics and approaches. The entire collection of essays presents intriguing aspects of the Dionysian element in literature.

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Paradise Earned

The Bacchic-Orphic Gold Lamellae of Crete

Yannis Tzifopoulos

Harvard University Press, 2010

This is a study of the twelve small gold lamellae from Crete that were tokens for entrance into a golden afterlife: the deceased who were buried or cremated with them believed that they had 'earned Paradise.' The lamellae are placed within the context of a small corpus of similar texts, and published with extensive commentary on their topography, lettering and engraving, dialect and orthography, meter, chronology, and usage. The texts reveal a hieros logos whose poetics and rituals are not much different from Homeric rhapsodizing and prophetic discourses. Cretan contexts, both literary and archaeological, are also brought to bear on these incised objects and on the burial custom involved. Finally, this work adduces parallels to the texts on the lamellae from the Byzantine period and modern Greece to illuminate the everlasting and persistent human quest for 'earning Paradise.'

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Ritual and Performativity

The Chorus in Old Comedy

Anton Bierl

Harvard University Press, 2009

In this groundbreaking study, Anton Bierl uses recent approaches in literary and cultural studies to investigate the chorus of Old Comedy. After an extensive theoretical introduction that also serves as a general introduction to the dramatic chorus from the comic vantage point, a close reading of Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae shows that ritual is indeed present in both the micro- and macrostructure of Attic comedy, not as a fossilized remnant of the origins of the genre but as part of a still existing performative choral culture. The chorus members do play a role within the dramatic plot, but they simultaneously refer to their own performance in the here and now and to their function as participants in a ritual. Bierl's investigation also includes an unparalleled treatment of the phallic songs preserved by Semos.

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Tales of Dionysus

The Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis

Edited by William Levitan and Stanley Lombardo

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Tales of Dionysus is the first English verse translation of one of the most extraordinary poems of the Greek literary tradition, the Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis. By any standard, the Dionysiaca is a formidable work. It is by far the longest poem surviving from the classical world, a massive mythological epic stretching to over 20,000 lines, written in the tradition of Homer, using Homer’s verse, Homer’s language, his narrative turns and motifs, and invoking his ancient Muses. But it is also the last ancient epic to follow a Homeric model, composed so late in fact that it stands as close in time to the Renaissance as it does to archaic Greece. Like its titular hero, Dionysus, with his fluidity of forms, names, and divine incarnations, the poem itself is continually shifting shape. Out of its formal epic frame spills a tumult of ancient literary types: tragedy, elegy, didactic, panegyric, pastoral idyll, and the novel are all parts of this gigantic enterprise, each genre coming to the fore one after the other.

Tales of Dionysus brings together forty-two translators from a wide range of backgrounds, with different experiences and different potential relationships to the text of Nonnus’ poem. All work in their own styles and with their own individual approaches to the poem, to translation, and to poetic form. This variety turns Tales of Dionysus into a showcase of the multiple possibilities open to classical translation in the contemporary world.

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