Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
16th International IDEA Conference: Studies in English, Nevşehir, Türkiye, 24 - 27 Nisan 2024, ss.139
According to common belief, modern environmentalism begins with Rachel Carson’s “A Fable for Tomorrow” in Silent Spring (1962), which foregrounds the harmony of humanity with nature. This paper traces the footprints of this everlasting concern in the last of classical Athens’s great tragic dramatists, Euripides’ The Bacchae. One of the acclaimed Greek tragedies, the Bacchae presents the clash between Dionysus and Pentheus, King of Thebes, embodying ecocritic and anthropocentric ideology respectively. Dionysus, also known as Bacchus, is the Greek god of theatre, grape-harvest, winemaking, fertility and vegetation. Dionysus, born twice by the earth, the heaven, and the rain, is the god of nature and stands for both birth and death. The realm of Dionysus is within the wild, isolated nature along with rivers, plains, plants, and beasts. Dionysus is likened to Christ due to the pain he suffered at his birth to bring the truth to mankind. This dying and rising god might also be equated to the characters of the Green Man and the Wild Man of medieval folk drama, epitomising the cycle of birth and death. The Bacchae suggests that those who become one with nature are reborn and reach the secret of the Earth. In the play, yet, King Pentheus rejects Dionysus’s authority, prepares his own final sleep in the hands of his mother, and is exterminated by Dionysus. That is, the conflict between nature and human beings or civilization comes to an end with the triumph of nature. Mankind originated on the earth, as constantly highlighted in the play, returns to earth. Accordingly, this paper aims to depict the clash between human (the walled city) and non-human (the wild nature) world and how nature brings death to those who oppose its domination as portrayed in Euripides’ The Bacchae.