"The Bacchae"

This play was a project assigned in a scene design course. Powell (2001) points out that one of the thematic motifs for our understandings of this play concerns the issue of dominance versus submission (http://www.csun.edu/~hcfll004/eur-bacc.html). Dodds (1960) writes:
These considerations suggest that Pentheus may be a figure compounded … of historical and ritual elements--at once the god's historical adversary and his ritual victim.....If Pentheus is to be the god's victim, he must become the god's vehicle (that is the Dionysiac theory of sacrifice): Dionysus must enter into him and madden him, not by drink or drugs or hypnotism, as modern rationalism too glibly suggests, but by a supernatural invasion of the man's personality....Also, before the victim is torn, it must be consecrated by a rite of investiture: as the calf on Tenedos wore the god's buskin, so Pentheus must wear the god's mitra. (Dodds, 1960, pp. 831-855, as cited in Powell, 2001,
http://www.csun.edu/~hcfll004/e-bacch.html)

Kirk (1970) says:
Dionysus has allowed himself to be hunted down and insulted; he uses his divine powers to escape and gradually makes his captor into a ready victim for his instruments, the 'deadly herd', Agave's 'coursing hounds'. Pentheus' temporal authority is progressively revealed as impotence in relation to the unfolding power of the god; and since king and god are in direct conflict it follows that the victim will become the aggressor, the hunted the hunter, and vice versa. (Kirk, 1970, p. 14, as cited in Powell, 2001, http://www.csun.edu/~hcfll004/e-bacch.html)

Both Pentheus and Dionysus want to become the god's vehicle so that they can exert their mundane power by virtue of and in relation to the unfolding divine power of the god. In doing this, they can dominate people's mind and own their submission. Pentheus and Dionysus are somewhat a form of propaganda to me. It may seem strange to suggest that propaganda has relevance to this play. When most people think about propaganda, they think of the enormous campaigns that were waged by Hitler and Stalin in the 1930s.
It is essential in a democratic society that people learn how to think and learn how to make up their minds. They learn how to think independently and they must learn how to think together. People come to some conclusions, but at the same time, they also have to recognize the right of other people who possess and come to opposite conclusions. So the art of democracy, as many point out, is the art of thinking.

In Bacchae, themes of political deception, revenge, and offenses are a form of propaganda, which is disguised by myths of the god. Propaganda is the method and content of the ritual of the follower's worship of Dionysus. Pentheus hates Dionysos and his worshippers because they represent a different world and value. We can see from their first speeches, Dionysus and Pentheus want to assure people's identification with them in terms of how they think and what they should think about. Pentheus and Dionysos are essentially autocrats and become incorrigible to each other. Their incorrigibility of each other's propositions of the world creates a tragic theme of this play.