The Golden Mean Read Online Free PDF

appreciative (less discriminating) audience. He died that winter from the cold.
    Plot: Angry that his godhead is denied by the Theban royal house, Dionysus decides to take his revenge on the priggish young King Pentheus. Pentheus has Dionysus imprisoned. The god, in turn, offers to help him spy on the revels of his female followers, the Bacchantes. Pentheus, both fascinated and repulsed by the wild behaviour of these women, agrees to allow himself to be disguised as one of them to infiltrate their revels on Mount Kithairon. The disguise fails, and Pentheus is ripped to pieces by the Bacchantes, including his own mother, Agave. She returns to Thebes with his head, believing she has killed a mountain lion, and only slowly recovers from her possessed state to realize what she’s done. The royal family is destroyed, killed or exiled by the god. The play took first prize at the competition in Athens the following year, after Euripides’s death.
    We all love the Bacchae.
    The actors huddle together downstage, except for the man playing the god, who stands on an apple crate so he can look down on the mortals. He’s not very tall. For the performance they could dress him in a robe long enough to hide the crate. That’s a good idea.
    “Pentheus, my son … my baby …,” the actor playing Agave says. “You lay in my arms so often, so helpless, and now again you need my loving care. My dear, sweet child … I killed you—No! I will not say that, I was not there!” an actor says. “I was … in some other place. It was Dionysus. Dionysus took me, Dionysus used me, and Dionysus murdered you.”
    “No,” the actor playing the god replies. “Accept the guilt, accuse yourselves.”
    “Dionysus, listen to us,” the actor playing Agave’s father, Kadmos, says. “We have been wrong.”
    After a moment’s hesitation, the director calls, “Now you understand.”
    “Now you understand, but now is too late. When you should have seen, you were blind,” the actor playing the god says.
    “We know that. But you are like a tide that turns and drowns us.”
    “Because I was born with dominion over you and you dispossessed me. And I don’t—”
    The director interrupts, calling, “Kadmos!”
    “Then you should not be like us, your subjects. You should have no passions,” the old man upstage says reprovingly.
    “And I don’t,” the actor repeats, and when no one interrupts him, continues, “But these are the laws, the—the laws of life. I cannot change them.”
    “The laws of life,” the director calls.
    “The laws of life,” the actor repeats.
    “It is decided, Father,” the actor playing the woman, Agave, says. “We must go, and take our grief with us.”
    There’s some business with a sheet of cloth, allowing the actor playing Dionysus to slip offstage, unseen by the audience, leaving the crate behind. I amend my idea to stilts.
    When the actor playing Agave takes a deep breath and says nothing, the director calls, “Help me. Take me to my sisters. They will share my exile and the years of sorrow. Take me where I cannot see Mount Kithairon, where branches wound with ivy cannot remind me of what has happened. Let someone else be possessed. I have withered. Fuck me, but I have withered.”
    Afterwards, over wine backstage, the director shakes his head and says, “Amateurs.”
    “You won’t get professionals here,” I say.
    He’s an Athenian, this Carolus, with a drinker’s genial blob of a nose and a husky, hectoring way of running the world. I speak dialect with the actors but not with him. His diction is high and elegant and a bit prissy, but he’s learning, slowly. “Fuck me”—I taught him that.
    The actor playing the woman, Agave, at a livelier table across the room, makes a leggy chestnut mare.
    “That one looks the part, at least,” I say.
    “He does indeed,” Carolus says. “That may have been my mistake.”
    At the actors’ table there’s much merry jostling of chairs to make room