Essay: Mortality and the Inevitable Finish – Euripides’ The Bacchae

I consider my own mortality quite often. There is a lyric in the musical Hamilton that reads, “I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory. When is it going to get me? In my sleep, several feet ahead of me?” I remember first hearing this lyric and feeling that it was the only words outside of my own thoughts I had connected with in a long while. Over the past few years, I have been forced to reckon with my own mortality more than I feel useful. I have witnessed much personal death throughout this past couple of years, and I have not always known what to do with the death I have experienced. What do I do with the grief, the sorrow, the loss, or the transience?
I constantly feel the impending doom that is my impermanence. I know death is a part of life – I am very painfully aware of this fact. I know that I will someday die, but what is it that I will leave behind? Will I leave anything behind? I am a filmmaker, a photographer, a musician – I have projects that I am very proud of. But the question still rings in my ears: Have I done anything valuable? And what does the world consider valuable? Is their value the same as mine? I find that I do not know how to shake these questions from my attentions, nor do I know the answers.
I grew up in a Christian community, believing that if you were baptized into Christ and maintained the Bible’s standards, then you were ‘saved’ – and being ‘saved’ means heaven, an eternal life after death. However, after one of my best friends passed away recently, I began to question mortality, as well as death as a whole. I had constant questions ringing in my ears, questions such as: How strict are the guidelines for eternal life? Does God have mercy on the dead after they have ascended from Earth? How often does God have mercy on souls? These thoughts consumed my waking days. Through exploration of mortality, what also disbursed me was the concept of life and how fragile life is that it can be embezzled at any moment in time. Some people seem invincible – they take life with a grain of salt. Others covet what this life has to offer them and capture of all opportunities. Ambition is not a bad thing, but I often find myself asking: At what point does ambition become futility? If our bodies are destined for burial – whether by fire, water, or earth – is there a visceral function of worldly ambition? At what point do aspirations and desires become folly? At what point does mortality limit us from dreaming, from pursuing our future?
Further, I find that I live in a society confused by death. A society in which so many religions and beliefs about what happens to the human body and spirit after death coexist. To the Greek gods, mortals were lowly beings compared to the gods’ vast potency. Mortals’ lives were almost embarrassing, like that of Achilles – but from a mortal’s perspective, we feel that our lives matter. We have a moral compass fighting against the notion that our lives are meaningless. Further, other communities celebrate immortality, the presence of gods in human forms or ghostly beings. In these cultures, immortality is praised and exalted – does this mean that mortality is considered a weakness? Is the natural course of a human life heedless in the face of immortality? However, immortality is only found in fantasy, in fiction, in works of art – immortality, this eternal strength, is nowhere to be found in our very absolute world.
We believe death to be a phenomenon of the body, but I believe it to be simply an occupation of the mind – that of the minds who writhe in mourning. The existentialists say it is the end, the fundamentalists say it is the beginning when in reality it is much like a single resident or family moving out of a residence or a town. Yet, it is still incredibly important to consider our own mortality. The thought of dodging our mortal twine can make all of us a little fastidious. But circumventing the idea of death exclusively means disregarding the part, it can play in formulating our actions. Some thoughts of death strengthen our beliefs and other forms of contemplation make us reassess them. The only antidote to death is immortality. When faced with the idea of death, we cling to things we imagine will hand us immortality, literal or otherwise. The confidence of genuine immortality can be established in religion’s assurances of heaven or reincarnation. More often, though, it is the prospect of figurative immortality that tranquilizes the ever-beating, death-fearing hearts – the idea that people are a part of something that will outlive them – their culture, their country, their family, their work. When pondering death, we adhere more extremely to the institutions we are a part of and the beliefs we hold dear.
In Euripides’ The Bacchae, we find a captivating and abnormal representation of the nature of humanity, and a cautionary to those who might be on the path to their own destruction. The main argument of the play is the clash between two fundamental characters, Pentheus and Dionysus. Pentheus, king of the Greek city of Thebes, abstains from trusting that Dionysus, god of wine and sexual love, is actually the god he says he is. This is Pentheus’ demise. Dionysus chooses to castigate the willful young king by compelling the women of the city into a murderous turmoil, including Pentheus’ own mother. In an intense and violent scene, she leads the other women in tearing him limb from limb, too deranged to see that it is her own son being murdered. However, the story that prefaces this is full of happenstances that show where Pentheus went wrong. To avoid a catastrophic finish according to Euripides, one must acknowledge their own limits and be conscious of the finiteness of human life, on top of obeying the gods. Pentheus did none of these. Euripides uses The Bacchae as a receptacle to bring wisdom to people who do not want to meet the same finish that the king of Thebes did. And of course, we ask ourselves: Is the wisdom Euripides offers still pertinent today?
At the beginning of the play, Pentheus starts to talk with Dionysus and quickly becomes enraged by what his would-be prisoner has to say. Though the god has taken the shape of a mortal here, he tells Pentheus that Dionysus, and all the authority that supplements a god, is there with him. “Where is he?” asks Pentheus, “I can’t see anything.” This only demonstrates Pentheus’ ignorance. He assumes that if there is a god with this stranger, he must be able to see it, rather than trusting that the god might have the power to make himself indiscernible or masked, as was the actual case. “You do not know the limits of your strength. You do now know what you do. You do not know who you are,” Dionysus says (lines 542-544). Pentheus’ reply is a thought-provoking one. He ripostes, “I am Pentheus, the son of Echion and Agave” (line 545). He is, indeed, Pentheus, the son of Echion and the son of Agave. Yet, the answer he gives is the incorrect one. Why?
When Dionysus tells Pentheus that he does not know who he is, he does not mean it literally. Of course, Pentheus knows who he is, who his parents were, where he came from, and so on. Dionysus’ declaration has a much deeper insinuation than that. What he means is that Pentheus does not have an awareness of who he is as a mortal, a human being, one who is accountable to dynamisms grander than him. Though Dionysus executed miracles inside Pentheus’ own home, freeing the partygoers the king had jailed, dogged Pentheus still refuses to see Dionysus for the god he is. “I am the stronger here!” Pentheus proclaims in vain. As we see later, Pentheus yields to the power of the god’s influence and goes to the mountain where the Dionysus-worshipers are dancing. The only thing Pentheus proclaims when he tries to counterattack the power of a god is his own mortality.
Ultimately, Pentheus was a foolish man. “Humility, a sense of reverence before the sons of heaven – of all the prizes that a mortal man might win, these, I say, are the wisest; these are best,” advises the messenger who brings the heartbreaking news of Pentheus’ death back to the city (lines 1200-1203). This is where the young king of Thebes went wrong: he did not accept his human limits and held no reverence for the sons of heaven. The Bacchae proves that if we are to be wise, we must be conscious of our own mortality, of just how brief our flare is. Pentheus brought about his own premature death because he was too confident in his power and his beliefs to consider that he might face a being with the ability to take all of it away from him.
Today, most of us do not empathize with the ancient Greeks’ beliefs about gods, yet Euripides’ message of wisdom perchance still has some validity. Whether you believe in God or gods, fate, karma, or even just the forces of nature, you are imprudent to not recognize that there are authorities in this world larger than you. If one begins to suppose that they are above the influence of these forces, they may be persuaded into overlooking the reality of their own human limitations.  We are unlikely to come across a mortal embodiment of a god, yet Euripides begs us to consider the frailty of our own mortality. It does not to do to dwell on whatever human power we may consider important. Even Teiresias pleads with Pentheus to “not be so certain that power is what matters in the life of a man” (lines 333-334). It does not do to dwell on the now – we must be wise in our thinking and consider the short time we may have left. We must have the wisdom to recognize that we do not dictate how long our time is on earth, that our lives are ephemeral at best, and all that we want to achieve in our lives must be done with our own awaiting finality in mind.
Guan Hanqing’s Snow In Midsummer packs a lot of virtue, values, and beliefs into a relatively short amount of pages. Through the life and death of Dou E, Hanqing presents a clear perspective on mortality: simply, mortality is a burden. Further, whatever may come after death should be more heavily considered than the life we currently live. With mortality come pain and sorrow and loss. It is almost impossible to wander through life unscathed, and Dou E is ripped to pieces in Snow In Midsummer. Dou E experiences much death and loss in a short amount of time – Dou E, who as a seven-year-old girl is given by her father, a poor Confucian scholar, to the widow Cai as payment for a debt. Ten years later, Dou E marries Cai’s son but soon finds herself a widow. When the man she later rejects in loyalty to her husband accuses her of murder, Dou E maintains her innocence; but to spare her mother-in-law a beating, she falsely confesses to the crime and is sentenced to death.
Through Dou E’s hardships, Hanqing makes a statement that mortality is onerous. Dou E laments, “My heart is full of grief, I have suffered for so many years! Unending sorrow which I cannot banish, unceasing reasons for fresh misery” (lines 105-106, 110-111). Our mortal lives are a heavy load to carry – we often carry more pain than we would like. Our mortal lives treat us in ways that we neither deserve nor respect, but we keep living anyway. Death and spiritual immortality are welcome releases to the strenuous efforts and adversities of our waking days. Perhaps, the afterlife will offer Dou E more justice than the world ever did. Since Confucians do not typically hold beliefs about the individual salvation or damnation of persons beyond this life, perhaps death is the only welcome escape from mortality, and therefore, should be considered more deeply when weighed against thoughts of our current life. If the human spirit does not run the risk of damnation, immortality in the form of afterlife appears grand. Dou E begs, “Ah, when shall I escape from my misery?” and it seems that death was the answer (line 104). Mortality is futile and arduous, while the end of a human life, of human suffering, is relieving. Perhaps our mortal focus should be on our spirit’s immortality after death.
What Hanqing does not consider, however, is the role that joy in life plays. Often, much like Dou E’s story, we recount the worst circumstances in life. We dwell on the past, on the painful, and on the uncomfortable chapters of our lives. We do little to remember the good – our brain is hardwired to notice what is not right, or off, or a mismatch between what we want and what we perceive we are getting in our world. While many religions consider death a welcome release to the privations of this world, there is something to be said for those that consider the releases offered in this world too – the release that is happiness and gratefulness for what we do have instead of what we do not. In Snow In Midsummer, the fundamental belief is that the afterlife is naturally superior to a worldly life, and this immortal afterlife should be thought about affectionately.
Additionally, Dou E’s death does not result in her disappearance from the earth her relatives were left to inhabit. Dou E revisits her father as a ghost; her spirit lives on in her ghostly form as well as her father’s promise to take revenge for her death. What happens to human beings after they die is less important to Confucian thinkers than how the living fulfill their obligations to the dead, their obligations to appease their immortal spirits. Dou E’s mortality was not the final say in her life – her spirit, and life, were carried on with the promise of her father to avenge her soul. While morality is burdensome, it is also not final. Death may offer a welcome release from the encumbrances of this worldly life, but the spirit we carry as mortals pursues the living after our death. Our mortality causes grief for the living, the ones left behind when a loved one has passed on. The weight of mortality is never-ending – we are hampered by our own mortality and fraught even more by the mortality of those who have passed before us. Again, perhaps dwelling on our spirit’s immortality in death is the remedy to the never-ending grief that is mortality.
Hanqing also returns to a more Christian perspective on mortality when Dou E claims that “all mortal men must die when their time is up…every death has its cause…for our span of life is predestined” (lines 86, 90, 93). This assumes that Dou E believes in a power greater than herself – she is not in control of her fate or life or justice here on earth. Her misery is pre-planned by the Heavens – and if her misery is predestined and the end of her life is predestined, Dou E can welcome this end to her misery – her predestination is a gift from the Heavens. The Heavens painfully gifted her with grief, but they also granted her relief. While her death was unjustified, it was greeted with open arms – Dou E finally receives the relief from the wretched life she so aptly wanted to escape. Dou E found relief in thinking of the release that was her death. Mortality is too oppressive – she will find justice in the afterlife.
In its allegorical depictions of Fellowship, Goods, and Good Deeds on stage, Everyman repeatedly demonstrates that our awareness of social and moral concepts comes out of the common exchanges of everyday life. Yet, those interactions are tested by the appearance of Death, whose presence radically changes how Everyman and the other characters interact and how they understand their relationships to one another. Everyman is caught unawares by calls of mortality and judgment. The fact that Everyman is surprised when Death comes calling for him goes to show how me-centered people can be. The people then, and even today, were so absorbed in the business and pleasure of earthly life that he or she may not remember the inevitability of death and the certainty of divine judgment. In order to recognize death, Everyman must recognize the extent to which he is separate (and separable) from the world in which he lives. A vital moment of the play transpires when the protagonist Everyman learns that, in the presence of the embodiment of his own mortality, he has misunderstood the significance of most aspects of his daily existence.
Everyman deals with the temptations that threaten to divert the virtuous mind at the hour of death: heresy, despair, rage, spiritual pride, and an attachment to things of the world. This last temptation, the occupation of outwards things and temporal, resonates strongly throughout Everyman. Everyman stands as the representative of a broader humanity that must come to terms with the inevitability of death and the impermanence of earthly life. Memento mori (remember that you must die) was a regular theme in the sermons of vagabond preachers beginning in the thirteenth century, especially amongst Europeans who lost a third of their population to the Black Death in the mid-1300s (Norton 572). Everyman calls us to properly discern what is transitory and what is eternal. It calls us to consider our mortality deeply – to not take our life for granted or with a grain of salt. Unlike Everyman, we do not want to be caught off-guard by death, but rather ponder and embrace our mortality and truly consider what will be meaningful to us in the next life, not just the present one.
When Death informs him that he must bring before God an account of his good and bad deeds, Everyman, petrified, turns to his earthly friends, pleading them to accompany him. Fellowship, Kindred, Cousin, and Goods each reject him in turn with unwavering spite. Cousin, for instance, offers the excuse of having a cramp in her toe. Everyman’s overwhelming desire to have others escort him to the grave only stresses his isolation; he finds that his friendships with Fellowship, Kindred, Cousin, and Goods have parameters that were not ostensible before Death’s presence. Correspondingly, in the presence of Death, the ideas that those characters represent take on new connotations. Here, Everyman assumes that everyone will meet the grave alone. The day you face death will be a lonesome day – you cannot bring anything or anyone with you – death is an isolating journey, a spiritual one that we must make ourselves. But does that mean that our mortality, our mortal lives as a whole are to be spent alone? No, this is not the case. Rather, we must consider our friends and family even more important during our earthly life, because we must help each other prepare to meet that lonely end. As his friends refuse him, Everyman’s understanding of his relationship to the members of his community is brutally altered; he can no longer take them for granted but must relearn his relationship to them. In this play, to recognize death fully is to recognize that one is both a part of one’s community and therefore responsible to it, yet also isolated from that community and therefore alone answerable for one’s actions.
The theological Doctor who delivers the epilogue underscores the play’s moral lesson: “And he that hath his account whole and sound, high in heaven he shall be crowned” (lines 916-917). He reminds the audience that this play about dying right is, equally, in the end, about the importance of living right. Our life, our mortality is futile – Everyman seeks to impress upon its audience an awareness of life’s impermanence, and ability to discern the eternal in the midst of the transitory, and a commitment to live life as if every day might be one’s last. Mortality is to be thought about long before you meet death and cease to exist. Although Everyman is founded deeply in robust Christian ideals, it still appeals to the masses to consider the life they inhabit, to consider the air you breathe, to consider that you must someday meet death the same way every other mortal meets death. Mortality is inevitable, and we must be aware of it before it knocks us off our feet. But this begs the question: Is mortality an idea to fear or an idea to revere? If we must think about mortality, in what way must we consider it? Everyman persuades us to consider our own frailty, but the play also persuades us to fear an untimely visit from Death. However, we shall only fear this visit have we not lived a righteous and worthy life. Then again, who deems our life worthy or righteous? What is considered a life worth living? If we are in the dark as to what a righteous life truly is, this leads us back to fearing the inevitable, fearing an encounter with death, or fearing that our life has not had meaning.
As a college student, I am often chided into living for the moment, seizing the day, or making the most of every opportunity, etc. – voice a cliché phrase, and I have heard it. Yes, I want to enjoy the moments I am given, but I often find it hard to enjoy the moments I am given knowing that they will someday be taken away – I am not sure when these moments will be taken away from me. So, I ask myself: Do I let this catch-22 limit me or do I let it propel me forward? I think about legacy and where my mortality will get me. Who will tell my story when I am gone? Who will get to outlive me? Who will grow old while my spirit stands still, frozen in time by death? I find it difficult to achieve the balance between living in the moment and protecting my legacy, questioning my mortality, and thinking about my own demise.
There are so many opportunities that life offers me, and there are so many events and instances in life that I strive to enjoy – and while the enjoyment and the happiness often last a for a good amount of time, my mind constantly brings me back to my own mortality. My mind and my heart bring me back down to earth – they force me to consider the fragility of my own life. I enjoy the happy times in life, but often the weight of the rest of the world swallows that happiness more quickly than I would like. I have considered my own limits as a human; I have considered being aware of death before it takes me; I have considered the fear of an untimely meeting with death, but I had not considered the burden of mortality before. While life can absolutely be burdensome, it was morbid to think about death as a release rather than a natural pattern of life. The fear of death haunts me, but the fear of living a life controlled by burden haunts me even more.
I agree that as a human, I must know my own limits. I agree that mortality and life can be burdensome. I agree that my own mortality must be considered to fully comprehend the extent to which the eternal matters more than the temporal. However, I also believe that life is to be enjoyed. I do not believe that life was created or to be spent in morbid sorrow. Yes, it helps to be aware of the extent of your own mortality – humility, in Euripides’ eyes, is the best prize – but there is also an extent to which we, as humans, just need to live. There is a desire for us to take life as it is, with us knowing full well that we cannot control it, but appreciating what we have been given. Death does not discriminate between the sinners and the saints, it just takes – but we keep living anyway. Perhaps we should not abide by our earthly treasures, but perhaps we should not ignore them either.
So, do I let my mortality control me? Do I let the thoughts of my own imminent demise control me? Do I let the fear of death guide my life? Do I let the burden of life push me to beg for a release as morose as death? I believed that it was wise to mull over these questions in my thoughts again and again and again, but every time I approach my personal responses to these questions, I find myself not wanting to actually consider the possible answers. I find myself wanting again to purely enjoy this life.  I find myself wanting to consider that, yes, I do have a finite amount of time to live; that yes, I am mortal; that yes, I do want to leave a legacy, but also I find myself wanting to simply live. I often hear the quote from Oscar Wilde that reads: “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” Maybe constantly discerning your human limits, constantly considering mortality to be a burden, constantly fearing your imminent death is just ‘existing.’ Imaginably, ‘living’ is finding a balance between acknowledging your human limits, your burdens, your fear of mortality, and loving the life you have been given. Perhaps, I have been thinking about death and my own mortality too much – perhaps, I have forgotten to live.