The Dionysian Rise of a New Cultural Paradigm

What follows is a blogpost I contributed to a now defunct news website so long ago I forget exactly when it was, though I do know it was during the Obama administration. Today, while pulling weeds in my leek bed, I started musing about Euripides and his figure of Dionysus and remembered that I’d written this. I still think it has something to say.

I have been teaching Euripides’s play The Bacchae recently, one of the more disturbing tragedies in a Greek canon rife with disturbing subject matter...