v. Whenever wine gleams at a women's feast, I say there's nothing healthy in those mysteries.

viii. That girlish stranger who's introduced this new plague and fouled our beds - I want him.

xv. Pentheus' Hubris

xxxvi. Oriental mentality is lower than ours.

xxxvi. Darkness corrupts women to impurity.

xxxix. The more scandalous the things you tell about the Bacchae, though, the more the man who gave the women those ideas is going to suffer.

xl. "We are being hunted by these men!"

xl. And women turned men to flight. No, not without some God's presence.

xli. We march against the Bacchae! It is too much to suffer this from women.

xli. I'll sacrifice Women's blood as they deserve

xlii. I want him to be the laughingstock of Thebes, led through the streets, consumed as a woman.

lxxix. Let all Thebes see the single person man enough to dare all this

cxxiii. And your mother, and her sisters - pitiful.

The Patriarchy

Written in 406 B.C., The Bacchae thematizes the struggle to preserve the Athenian patriarchal value system. Indeed, the maintenance of gender difference and the preservation of patriarchal rule is the dramatic text; thus a patriarchal agenda is not only embedded within The Bacchae but ultimately comprises the text itself. The Bacchae essentially explores the repercussions of women rejecting their conventional gender-determined roles within a patriarchal society, instead embracing a lifestyle which they find empowering and meaningful. The Bacchae have taken it upon themselves to break with the social order, rather than abiding by patriarchally sanctioned periods of Saturnalian behavior. As the Chorus explains, the bacchants have rejected the realm of domesticity in favor of what they perceive to be a liberating Dionysiac existence; they are "that mob of women, who rebelled against the shuttle and loom answering the urge of Dionysus."

The bacchants rebellion is figured in The Bacchae as being contingent not only upon madness but upon male desire as well. That is to say, the Bacchae initiate their break from patriarchally-determined society not under the influence of an unspecified madness, but rather a possession induced by Dionysus. Hence their transgressive actions are divested of agency, as the Bacchae serve merely as tools of male desire, pawns in Dionysus's vengeful scheme.