SOURCE: Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, "Bacchae and Ion: Tragedy and Religion," in The Masks of Tragedy: Essays on Six Greek Dramas, University of Texas Press, 1963, pp. 103-52.

In the following essay, Rosenmeyer questions whether Bacchae and Ion are "religious tragedies in the proper sense of the word" and concludes that the plays express very different attitudes about the relationship between gods and men.

Appear, in the shape of a bull or a many
  headed
 serpent, or lion breathing fire!
 Come, Bacchus, and with laughing face
 coil the deadly rope around the huntsman
 of the Bacchae, to be trodden under by the
       women's stampede!

Thus the chorus, immediately before the messenger enters to describe the death of Pentheus (1017). The invocation is significant on many counts; for the moment we are concerned with the god's laugh. "With laughing face" or "with laughing mask," the Greek may mean either. The expectation is...