The Bacchae
Euripides · -405
Dionysus arrives in Thebes and the city's rational king tries to suppress his cult. The god's revenge is total and grotesque. Euripides wrote it in exile near the end of his life, and it's his most disturbing work: a play about what happens when a society denies the irrational.
The case against
Key pages of the ending are literally missing; Agave's lament over her son's body survives only in fragments and editors' patches. The violence happens offstage in messenger speeches, so the horror arrives secondhand. And the play refuses to say whether Dionysus is justice or atrocity; you leave holding the verdict yourself.
Drama · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
