Reimagining the Prophet: Teiresias as Comedian and Sophist in Euripides’ Bacchae

Abstract

This article analyses the role of the prophet Teiresias in the Bacchae of Euripides in the particular context of sophistic influence. It views the originality of the prophet’s depiction as reflective of Euripides’ creative self-consciousness within an agonistic genre that relied on the malleability of ancient myth, particularly towards the end of tragedy’s “golden era”. Our particular aim is to present the prophet independently of the Sophoсlean background against which Teiresias is often viewed, and as a more complex figure than a (not especially satisfactory) radicalization of his earlier incarnations. The prophet in Bacchae is a liminal figure poised between tragedy and comedy, man and god, male and female, tradition and innovation. As such he parallels many of the “doublings” characteristic of Dionysus himself. The analysis re-examines the extent and nature of the comedy in the early Teiresias–Cadmus–Pentheus scene (170–369) in the context of the most recent scholarship. It then offers a close examination of the so-called sophistic speech by the prophet (266–327) within the framework of contemporary attitudes to sophism and how this has unfairly influenced scholarly perception of Teiresias’s authority as a dramatic character. The argument aims to establish Teiresias’s incarnation as both fifth-century intellectual and representative of traditional values. He thus reflects the tension between old and new in the integration of Dionysiac religion in mythical Thebes.