Much of the academic discussion on the subject betrays a singular slowness to accept the dramatic standpoint. Even Prof. Murray, the finest interpreter of Euripides, dogmatically pronounces (introd. cited p. lvii) that "there is in the Bacchæ real and heartfelt glorification of Dionysus," simply because of the lyrical exaltation of the Bacchic choruses. But lyrical exaltation was in character here above all other cases; and it was the dramatist's business to present it. To say that "again and again in the lyrics you feel that the Mænads are no longer merely observed and analysed: the poet has entered into them and they into him," is nothing to the purpose. That the words which fall from the Chorus or its Leader are at times "not the words of a raving Bacchante, but of a gentle and deeply musing philosopher," is still nothing to the purpose. The same could be said of Shakespeare's handling of Macbeth. What, in sooth, would the real words of a raving Bacchante be like? If Milton lent dignity to Satan in Puritan England, was Euripides to do less for Dionysos in Macedonia? That he should make Pentheus unsympathetic belongs to the plot. If he had made a noble martyr of the victim as well as an impassive destroyer of the God, he might have had to leave Macedonia more precipitately than he left Athens. Prof. Murray recognizes all the while that "Euripides never palliates things. He leaves this savage story as savage as he found it"; that he presents a "triumphant and hateful Dionysus," who gives "a helpless fatalistic answer, abandoning the moral standpoint," when challenged by the stricken Agavê, whom the God has moved to dismember her own son; and that, in short, "Euripides is, as usual, critical or even hostile to the myth that he celebrates" (as cited, pp. liv-lvi). To set against these solid facts, as does Mr. Sandys (as cited, pp. lxxiii-iv), some passages in the choruses (ll. 395, 388, 427, 1002), and in a speech of Dionysos (1002), enouncing normal platitudes about the wisdom of thinking like other people and living a quiet life, is to strain very uncritically the elastic dramatic material. So far from being "not entirely in keeping" with the likely sentiments of a chorus of Asiatic women, the first-cited passages--telling that cleverness is not wisdom, and that true wisdom acquiesces in the opinions of ordinary people--are just the kind of mock-modest ineptitudes always current among the complacent ignorant; and the sage language ascribed to the heartless God is simply a presentment of deity in the fashion in which all Greeks expected to have it presented.