Prometheus Bound

42 Pages·2017·4.35 MB·English

Do the maths here:
Roughly 110 years


Great Dionysia

Lenaia

Rural Dionysia


A rough total of 2320

Aeschylus’ Lycourgeia tetralogy (before 456BC),

one of the many that treated the theme of resistance
to the Dionysiac cult

Edonians, Bassarids, Youths & satyr drama

Lycurgus

The Oresteia tetralogy was around 5000 lines

(including its satyr play)

From the Lycourgeia we have around 45 lines

and some testimonia

The Edonians told the story of Lycurgus’ (king of the Edonians, a
people of Thrace) attempt to suppress the worship of Dionysus in
his kingdom, along more or less the same lines as [Apollodorus,]
Library 3.5.1. At the start of the play Dionysus had just arrived in
Thrace with his male and female followers. Lycurgus had both him
and the women bacchants arrested, but they miraculously
escaped, and Dionysus then drove Lycurgus mad, so that he killed
his own son Dryas with an axe, believing that he was cutting a
vine-branch. Lycurgus may well in the end, as in [Apollodorus] and
as in Sophocles, Antigone 955–965, have been imprisoned
perpetually in a rocky chamber on Mount Pangaeum.

It has been attractively conjectured that Orpheus, who was the
central figure of the following play (Bassarids), also figured in this
one, before his apostasy, as a devotee (maybe a priest) of
Dionysus, imprisoned with his master by Lycurgus (cf. fr. 60);

Edonians was extensively imitated by Euripides when he wrote
about the fate of another enemy of Dionysus in The Bacchae, and
the Roman poet Naevius in his Lucurgos seems to have followed it
closely.
It is known from the Cataterisms of pseudo-Eratosthenes
that the play dealt with the death of Orpheus at the hands
of Thracian women, who in this version, unusually, are
devotees of Dionysus, called Bassarids.

“Orpheus,” we are told by ps-Eratosthenes, “after going
down to Hades in quest of his wife and seeing what things
were like there, ceased to honour Dionysus, by whom he
had been glorified, and regarded the Sun (whom he also
called Apollo) as the greatest of the gods; he would rise
before daybreak and await the sunrise on the [Thracian]
mountain called Pangaeum, so as to be the first to see
the Sun. Dionysus was angry at this and sent against him
the Bassarids (as the tragic poet Aeschylus says), who
tore him in pieces and scattered his limbs far and wide;
but the Muses collected them together and buried him at
the place called Leibethra [in Macedonia].”

Cambridge Greek play 2013, dir H. Eastman