Euripides Bacchae

Produced posthumously (Euripides died in 406/7BCE).

The conceit: a new god has come (back) to town to introduce his worship: the king resists: the god's mother was insulted (people said she was just covering up a tryst by claiming that Zeus impregnated her). Zeus long ago set down fate about these matters (1349).

Bacchus: the eternally foreign god (although attested as early as Minoan/Mycenaean times).
 The essence of Dionysiac religion: accept the god, passively. No ethical message, no rational considerations, no questioning. Faith free of any resistance from rationality or any other source of resistance.
 How to play the character Pentheus? Insane (caused by the god)? Rational, all too rational? Overbearing, testosterone crazy male soldier wannabe who thinks he is better than others just because he is a man and king? Deeply repressed (think of his seeming joy at cross-dressing as a maenad: he so fears female sexuality that he imagines it as a force which he needs to control to keep women from promiscuous orgiastic sex(221ff))? As the unwitting scapegoat for his community?

Chorus of Maenads
Different from maenads on Mt. Kithairon: those maenads are really being punished, whereas the chorus are more sensible worshippers (albeit still a bit bloodthirsty).

Language does not mean what it means: lines 960 ff.

The sanity of insanity. The irrationality of arrogant rationality. Line 997.
Losing one's mind to find truth.
Incompatible with rationality.
Self-control was a Greek virtue: knowing one's place and keeping to it: this is a play about letting go in order to find one's place. Paradox: the initiation and religious experience must resolve the paradox, probably not in a rationally formulable way.

Anti-intellectualism
Wisdom is beyond humans: be content with ordinary life, obey the law, and keep ordinary virtue: 395, 429, 890ff, 1005ff., 1149-52
The above can also be read as democratic.
Innovation is suspect.
Too much reason can lead astray: stick to traditional ways.

The logic of divinity? 1345-51.
In another Euripidean play, Heracles says "A god, if he is a god, needs none of that: and these stories the poets tell are horrible" (Heracles Furens 1345-6)

Overall