In 408 B.C., Euripides left Athens for the court of Archelaus, ruler of Macedon. His career had been a long and distinguished one. Though he had won the first prize in the competitions of the tragic festivals surprisingly rarely, his popularity with audiences was great, as one can see from The Frogs of Aristophanes, a comic drama produced in 405. Here the comic hero (none other than Dionysus) reads Euripides with great enthusiasm and assumes that either he or Aeschylus will be the poet to be resurrected from the underworld to give advice to the city in its time of difficulty. (Sophocles is given the same high rank, but is judged to be too serene a character to want to leave the underworld.) The very prominence of Euripides as a target of comic lampooning (sometimes taken as evidence of unpopularity) testifies to his preeminence. Thus there seems to be no reason to believe, with some scholars, that he left Athens out of bitterness and disappointment. Athens was in a depressed and exhausted condition near the end of the long Peloponnesian War, and beset by domestic political tensions. Archelaus' court offered a luxurious way of life and enthusiastic patronage. Many other first-rate artists and poets found the prospect irresistible - among them the tragic poet Agathon and the painter Zeuxis. Archelaus is depicted in an extremely unfriendly light in Plato's Gorgias, where he is made the paradigm of the unjust, ruthless, and unrepentant tyrant. But to artists he was a civilized and lavish supporter.

During his stay in Macedon, Euripides wrote a play called Archelaus, about an ancestor of the king, and a number of other works. At his death in 406 (at the age of around seventy) he left three unproduced plays, which were later staged at Athens by one of his sons. The group, which won the first prize, probably in 405, included two plays that survive: Iphigenia at Aulis and The Bacchae. 

It has sometimes been suggested that the wild landscape of Macedon and its connection with archaic traditions inspired Euripides to turn his thoughts to the theme of Dionysian transcendence and unity with nature. But such biographical suggestions tend to be superficial and unreliable. (Roux compares the effect of Macedonian landscapes on Euripides to the effect of Niagara Falls on Chateaubriand - a comparison that comments on itself, since it is now generally believed that Chateaubriand never saw Niagara Falls.) Dionysian themes were prominent in ancient tragedy: Aeschylus wrote two trilogies on such subjects. And Euripides' own career shows a continuous interest in the themes treated in The Bacchae. An early lost play, The Cretans, dealt with ecstatic religion. Its surviving fragment mentions Zagreus (a form of Dionysus), feasts of raw flesh, Curetes (mythical Cretan divinities associated with stories of Dionysus' youth), and Bacchants. The Hipploytus, produced in 428, is very close to The Bacchae in its portrayal both of the violence of erotic desire and of the impoverished character of a life that attempts to close it off completely. The Helen (412) contains an ode dealing with the mysteries of the Mountain Mother. The Bacchae seems uncharacteristic, calling for some special biographical interpretation, only if one accepts an account of Euripides' career such as one given by Nietzsche, who claimed that until he wrote this one play Euripides had been the poet of the supremacy of the intellect, crisp and optimistic, totally insensitive to the power of irrational forces in human life, and to their beauty. But this interpretation cannot survive a scrutiny of the earlier plays. For even where rational debate is given prominence (as, for example, in The Trojan Women), it is usually shown to be powerless against other darker forces such as love, desire, and greed.

The language of The Bacchae is, however, rather unusual within Euripides' work as we know it. Although the iambics of the dialogue sections show metrical tendencies that link them unmistakably with the other late plays, the style and diction are in many places archaic, solemn, almost Aeschylean in their formality. Gilbert Murray called The Bacchae 'the most formal Greek play known to us.' It's 'severity of form' (Dodds) is in striking tension with its strange and passionate content. Its lyrics have little of the concern with decoration that marks a number of Euripides' later dramas. The use of refrains links them with cult hymns, as do some of the meters selected. In one dialogue section (lines 604-41) the play revives (like several other late plays of Euripides) the trochaic tetrameter, a very old tragic meter, which combines an archaizing effect with rapid light movement, as the god describes the ease with which he has slipped away from Pentheus and confounded human attempts to bind him.