Undersea Dionysus

 Quite by chance, as we are about to begin reading Bacchae, we find the god beneath the waters of Baiae, Italy:

A copy of a statue of Dionysus, commissioned by Emperor Claudius,
in the Nymphaeum at Baiae. Photograph: Andreas Solaro/AFP

Fish flit around Enrico Gallochio as he gently brushes away a layer of sand to reveal an ornate mosaic floor on which Roman nobility would have hosted non-stop parties in Baiae, an ancient resort in the gulf of Pozzuoli, close to Naples. Four metres below the surface of the water, Gallochio passes more mosaic pavements and the remains of walls that once surrounded a spa.

The mosaics date from the third century and are just a small part of the remains uncovered since Baiae, now a vast undersea archaeological park, began to emerge from its watery grave. The site has become an unlikely tourism destination, even as work continues to uncover more ruins.

“It was incredible,” said archaeologist Gallochio, who manages the undersea park. “In this area alone, we have found 20 rooms. There is still so much to discover, but it is a job that will take years.”

Angela Giuffrida's story in The Guardian continues here.

Earth in view: Ars Amatoria I

Our next few weeks will be devoted to an amor somewhat less all-encompassing than that of Dante's Commedia. We'll be looking at Ovid's Ars Amatoria. As we already have an Ovid blog, posts devoted to that reading will appear there.

So far over there, there's just a note about translations. While the poetic matter might rather quotidian, nothing about Ovid is obvious or dull; he pushes genre rules and stylistic experiments to extremes, and can turn from an excursus upon Roman losers' foot hygiene to a visionary processional of Dionysus on a dime.

Difference in toto: Paradiso 32-33

Top: Birth of Dionysus Below: Triumph of Dionysus

ἢ ὥσπερ Σαπφώ, ὅτι τὸ ἀποθνῄσκειν κακόν·

οἱ θεοὶ γὰρ οὕτω κεκρίκασιν· ἀπέθνησκον γὰρ ἄν.

As Sappho says, death is a great evil

and the gods have judged it so: for they do not die

While reading Paradiso 32 I floated the idea that the two final canti of the Commedia stand in relation to each other, in their poetics as well as in other ways, in much the same manner as the Old Testament to the New:

Canto 32 is unadorned and fails to have an ending because it stands in relation to Paradiso 33 as the Old Covenant to the New. (Wounds of Time)

The thrust of canto 32 is toward the particular and unique. Each unbaptized infant has its own place, and all had been fixed before time began. We are given assorted proper names, individuals, but no clear sense of why these and not others. It displays the seemingly arbitrary predilection that the Old Testament God shows for his chosen people.

As we have seen, Paradiso 33 reaches a crescendo of polymorphic figuration teetering on open-ended linguistic arbitrariness. But there's more.

Canto 33 begins with Bernard's prayer, an act chosen in that moment to pray for Dante's accession to the totality. As when she chose in turn to consent to the wish conveyed by Gabriel, so Mary here chooses to consent to Bernard; Beatrice and all of heaven support the petition.

The freedom of the acts is fundamental: Dante's "wings" carry him upward, his gaze penetrates into the final vision, because they're propelled by the volition of the community of the saved. For one who had lived a life of exile, this vote of communal acceptance brings him into the longed-for fold.

Canto 33 dramatizes inclusion. In contrast, canto 32 has Bernard tracing all the differentiating walls and excluding fissures of divine providence,  the features and fixed destinies of the innocents. It's a discourse chilling enough in its precise fixities to evoke the immobilized denizens beneath the frozen lake of Satan's tears.

The possibility of Canto 33 issues from the Virgin's consent to the divine wish depicted in canto 32. The act of choice links the two canti, and it is choice that enables Dante ultimately to have his desire (il mio disio) moved with the will ('l velle) as the sun and the other stars (Barolini) are moved by l'amor. 

The full assertion of both singularity and totality, I believe, lies behind the charged syntax of the difficult tercet discussed in the previous post about canto 33. The insistence of differentiating oneness is never negated or subsumed -- in fact it betrays a certain trauma, even a frisson of sublime horror, as it beholds the totality:

ma per la vista che s'avvalorava
in me guardando, una sola parvenza,
mutandom' io, a me si travagliava. (112-114)

The vision of a gloria that moves all, yet chooses to allow piu e meno, subtends the Commedia from end to end.

==========

There is no end to what one could say about this poem. I'll append one suggestion that seems relevant. Dante often echoes ancient myths solely in order to differentiate the nature of his world from that of the ancients. 

For example, the figure of wings recurrent in Paradiso both relates to his name -- ali-ghieri -- and to the power of heaven. The classical myth of Ganymede is all about desire and force -- the boy is so beautiful he's rapt by Zeus to serve the table of the gods.

Ganymede's will is negated in his trip to Olympus. He is prey. Dante has wings because we have will.

Yet that will is insufficient to reach the godhead.

When Dante the pilgrim and the alta fantasia of the poet cannot get there, 

ma non eran da ciò le proprie penne:
 se non che la mia mente fu percossa
 da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne.

The fulgore comes from the other, yet its power fulfills the voglia of Dante.

Yet another myth brings us to a defining irony of the Commedia: When Zeus promised Semele her heart's wish, it meant the fulgore of her own destruction. From that insemination came the god of Tragedy, the anti-Apollo, the obliterator of difference.

The true story for this poet has it otherwise: Mary asks nothing of God. Courtly Gabriel asks her consent to bear the Son of God, and after a bit of questioning, she chooses to say yes. The absolutism of mythic power is not here.

Obliterating all trace of its origin, the fulgore grants a wish that Dante's wings couldn't actualize under their own steam. With the same respect for the other that was apparent at the Annunciation, the illimitable power leaves room for the comedic persistence of a certain Florentine, b.1265 - d.1321.

Non Bacco, non Peana: Glimpsing Par. 14

A brief look back at the Sun, and a quick look ahead to Mars.

The main story of the five cantos of the Sun delineates in great detail the solar force of the Church. It composes itself before our eyes as a series of layers, creating a complex image of a chariot of the Sun. Like the actual sun, it nurtures life through heat and light. But these attributes of the Church are not merely physical, nor do they rest upon philosophical first principles. From the first, the cantos of the Sun debunk the power of logic as the arbiter of judgment and basis of wisdom.

Rather than axioms, the true first principles of the Church are individual lives -- specifically, Francis and Dominic -- they are at one point called principi, and are the living embodiments of primal ardor and intellect. They are the wheels of the Church's solar chariot at work in historical time, and their 24 disciples actively extend their powers (even those who preceded them chronologically, apparently).

As the set of five solar cantos concludes, we see even more clearly how pattern recognition, which is basic to knowledge, is both insisted upon and shown to be utterly imperfect as a model or sign of the truth. The necessary imperfection of the sublunar world is the way things are, and nothing the human mind can construct or imagine will offer more than an approximation. The 24-line opening of canto 13 ends with:

poi ch'è tanto di là da nostra usanza,
quanto di là dal mover de la Chiana
si move il ciel che tutti li altri avanza.

Because it is as much beyond our wont,
As swifter than the motion of the Chiana
Moveth the heaven that all the rest outspeeds.

In discussing, we didn't address what immediately comes after this awareness of the sketchiness of our awareness:

Lì si cantò non Bacco, non Peana,
ma tre persone in divina natura,
e in una persona essa e l'umana.

There sang they neither Bacchus, nor Apollo,
  But in the divine nature Persons three,
  And in one person the divine and human.  (13.25-27)

The canto opened, we recall, with numbers -- the 15 stars, the 7, the 2 -- we combined them to get the sum of the disciples of Francis and Dominic. This is arithmetically coherent. But now, here's a new math, in which three persons can be one, which in turn can be two. The austere, rigorous system elucidated by every mathematician from Euclid to Fibonacci is scrambled. Our rational capacity to count is broken.

The Trinity was evoked by Thomas, but here it seems to mark a rupture with everyday reality. Not Apollo, not Dionysus. A song beyond anything the ancients imagined, Revelation outside number, beyond ecstatic dream.

Canto 14 will conclude the enlightenment of the Sun with an account of the resurrection of the body, after which Dante and Beatrice will be translated (translato - used at 14.81 for the only time) to the next realm of Paradiso, to a vast red galaxy that sweeps us into the sublime:

Come distinta da minori e maggi
lumi biancheggia tra ' poli del mondo
Galassia sì, che fa dubbiar ben saggi;

Even as distinct with less and greater lights
Glimmers between the two poles of the world
The Galaxy that maketh wise men doubt . . .

Preparing to go beyond the sun: Par. 13

As the cantos of the Sun come to an end with Paradiso 13-14, the density and richness of the text seem to grow exponentially. There is simply not enough time to get into the close detail that would do justice to canto 13. For now, a few observations that perhaps will help appreciate what seems to be a major transition that takes place between the clarity of the Sun and the distinctly indistinct realm of Mars that begins with canto 14.

First, as many note, the five cantos of the Sun have many instances of the x-shaped crossing (or ring structure) of chiasmus. One can only appreciate this patterning after completing all five cantos, of course. Indeed, one could say that appreciation of chiastic form, especially on the level of larger segments of text, always requires that the reader look back, and remember what has come before, in order to identify the pattern.

For example, the command to imagine, repeated thrice at the opening of canto 13, balances Thomas Aquinas's insistence on being attentive and holding things in memory at the end of canto 11, introduced by three "if"s:

Or, se le mie parole non son fioche,
se la tua audïenza è stata attenta,
se ciò ch'è detto a la mente revoche,

Now if my utterance be not indistinct,
If thine own hearing hath attentive been,
If thou recall to mind what I have said,  (11.133-35)

Thomas is talking about the pilgrim's understanding of his discourse, but the "if"s hold true for the reader as well -- turning the leaves of a book, the reader is taking in the words, which are like seeds. But the work of reading involves more than just taking in -- it involves remembering, reflecting, and attending to patterns to mill and bake and eat the bread of the angels.

So canto 13 beings with a fascinating passage too complex to explore here. But we can note that the reader is now invited to do more than remember; one is to imagine what the poet describes : 15 of the brightest stars from all over the night sky, plus the 7 of the Wain (the Big Dipper), plus two at the mouth of the horn (the Little Dipper) -- moving from a process of selection by brightness to a selection by form to a selection of part of a whole, anchored in the North Star -- all adding up to 24 stars.

The poet is giving the reader an exercise in pattern recognition, a kind of rebus or puzzle that makes us work across different kinds of patterns before reaching a totality of 24, which equals the number of teachers revolving in two wheels around the poet and Beatrice, as well as the number of lines it takes the poet to provide us with the opening movement of canto 13.

The passage of course is more complex -- once we shape the images we've been told to imagine -- we then must imagine those stars turning into two wheeling signs like a doubled crown of Ariadne:

aver fatto di sé due segni in cielo,
qual fece la figliuola di Minoi
allora che sentì di morte il gelo;

To have fashioned of themselves two signs in heaven,
Like unto that which Minos' daughter made,
The moment when she felt the frost of death;

Our envisioning of the key stars in charting the navigation of the seas -- signs used by Ulysses and all mariners -- is metamorphosed into new signs, like those of the girl who helped Theseus navigate his way into and out of the lethal Daedalian labyrinth of Crete.

And, after we've done all this at the poet's behest, we learn that our imagined vision relates to the reality Dante experienced the way the Chiana, a sluggish Tuscan stream, compares to the fastest celestial sphere, the Primum Mobile.

Chiana, we note, contains "chi," and the entire 24-line passage is a chiasmus that begins with the promise that our imagining will give us "who desire to well understand what the poet saw" something verisimilar to the reality, and ends with the deflating assurance that our mental image is about as close to the truth as night is to day.

The irony of making us work so hard for what is very small is undeniable. There's also death here, coming with a cold shock. One could (and should) explore the ramifications of a passage from navigational clues -- constellations -- to circling signs that are "like" the figure made in the sky by the daughter of Minos. Interwoven here are Ulysses and Theseus, two of the ancient questers who, by the light of their culture's wisdom, were successful.

Throughout the Commedia, the pilgrim/poet has been both like and unlike these heros (as well as Aeneas). Are we reminded here of how those questers in fact failed? We recall Ulysses' own tale (in Inf.26) of leaving behind the North Pole, and the vortex that consumed his ship. And Theseus, who owed his conquest of the Minotaur to the clues of Ariadne, left his guide behind, to be claimed by Dionysus, who constellated her crown at her death.

Here that single circle of stars is doubled, yet is still called a sign. It's a new sign, a double dancing "true constellation" that is not visible to sailors on Earth, but to questers who read and remember the visions and histories and allegories of the 24 teachers, grouped according to their leanings toward Francis and Dominic.

We return to the two wheels of the chariot/Church, also the two wheels of the Ark, but now they are likened to a doubled crown put in the sky by Dionysus.

This reference to the God of wine and ecstasy should, as Thomas A. says, be kept in mind. We're about to get a comprehensive lesson from Thomas about creation, which will treat in some detail the imperfections of "wax" that cause diversity and flaws in Nature. It turns out that form, here below the moon anyway, is always compromised, never without contingency and dross:

Se fosse a punto la cera dedutta
 e fosse il cielo in sua virtù supprema,
 la luce del suggel parrebbe tutta; 

ma la natura la dà sempre scema,
 similemente operando a l'artista
 ch'a l'abito de l'arte ha man che trema.

If in perfection tempered were the wax,
  And were the heaven in its supremest virtue,
  The brilliance of the seal would all appear;
But nature gives it evermore deficient,
  In the like manner working as the artist,
  Who has the skill of art and hand that trembles.  (13.73-78)

At this moment in the lesson of the Sun, Thomas acknowledges that Nature is inherently errant, like the hand of a master artist that trembles. (Hollander and others convincingly refer to Ovid's Daedalus building the wings that will enable him to escape from Crete, but at the cost of Icarus: "The father's hands trembled," (Metam. 8.211)). Greek genius always involves loss, just as the forms of Nature always involve dross. The limits of the visible, of image and form, are being driven home in canto 13.

The last lines of canto 13, suggesting the generous capacity even the wisest men have for error, chiastically reflect the opening of canto 11, the insensata cura of mortals and their vain syllogisms. As we leave the Sun, the limits of the Apollonian -- of realizable pattern and hence formal knowledge -- are being demarcated.

The question of how do we go on -- by what signs to navigate once we've crossed beyond the solar light of logic, history, science, philosophy and wisdom -- is taken up in canto 14.

Danae, Lycurgus and the strength of Fate

The next-to-last ode of Sophocles' Antigone immediately precedes the entrance of Tiresias. It speaks of three myths -- we'll look at the first two here.

Danae:

ἔτλα καὶ Δανάας οὐράνιον φῶς 
945ἀλλάξαι δέμας ἐν χαλκοδέτοις αὐλαῖς: 
κρυπτομένα δ᾽ ἐν τυμβήρει θαλάμῳ κατεζεύχθη: 
καίτοι καὶ γενεᾷ τίμιος, ὦ παῖ παῖ, 
950καὶ Ζηνὸς ταμιεύεσκε γονὰς χρυσορύτους.
ἀλλ᾽ ἁ μοιριδία τις δύνασις δεινά: 
οὔτ᾽ ἄν νιν ὄλβος οὔτ᾽ Ἄρης, οὐ πύργος, οὐχ ἁλίκτυποι 
κελαιναὶ νᾶες ἐκφύγοιεν.

[944] So too Danae suffered her beauty to take in exchange for the light of the sky
a brazen chamber; yoked in that hidden tomb and bridal suite;
And yet was she of esteemed lineage, O child,
and held in trust a deposit of the gold-flowing seed of Zeus.
But terrible is the strength of fate:
neither by wealth or by war, by towered city
or dark, sea-beaten ships can one go beyond it.

Lycurgus:

ζεύχθη δ᾽ ὀξύχολος παῖς ὁ Δρύαντος, 
Ἠδωνῶν βασιλεύς, κερτομίοις ὀργαῖς 
ἐκ Διονύσου πετρώδει κατάφαρκτος ἐν δεσμῷ. 
οὕτω τᾶς μανίας δεινὸν ἀποστάζει 
960ἀνθηρόν τε μένος. κεῖνος ἐπέγνω μανίαις 
ψαύων τὸν θεὸν ἐν κερτομίοις γλώσσαις. 

παύεσκε μὲν γὰρ ἐνθέους γυναῖκας εὔιόν τε πῦρ, 
965φιλαύλους τ᾽ ἠρέθιζε Μούσας.

[955] And yoked was Dryas's son -- the Edonian king swift to anger --
Dionysus closed him in rock-like bonds for his heart-cutting rages.
There the fierce and flowering force of his madness trickled away.
Raging terribly, that man came to know
the god whom his heart-cutting tongue had touched.
For he sought to silence the god-driven women and the sacred fire,
And angered the flute-loving Muses.

The first two strophes of this dark ode of inescapable fate engage in a complex symmetry of figures and agency, each mirroring the other in poetic form, and in more detailed ways -- verbal echoes, images, and so forth.

Danae is imprisoned by her father to prevent her impregnation, yet Zeus's golden sperm finds its way. Lycurgus seeks to silence young Dionysus and his Bacchae, but his heart-cutting mockery puts him in rock from which his madness "trickles out."

Both figures are said to be "yoked" (ζεύχθη), or bound, by forces stronger than they -- Danae by her father, King Acrisius, who learned from an oracle that that he'll die at the hands of Danae's son. Lycurgus is overwhelmed by Dionysus, who according to one version was still being nursed when the raging Lycurgus chased him into the sea, where Thetis protected the god.

Can these figures be seen as reflections, distorted perhaps, but nonetheless fractal images of Antigone and Creon? The parallels seem clear: A woman doomed to be barren, cut off from all future life in the form of a child; a king seeking to suppress the resuscitating powers of Dionysus, whom the opening chorus wanted to celebrate in victory dances. But there's more. Danae was buried in the bronze chamber by her father, the king. Indeed this reflection of Creon might be more apposite, since in fact Antigone experiences no revivifying rain.

Both strophes, then, recount stories of human kings attempting to control divine power, and divine power striking back, crushing them. Far from being avoided, Fate is fulfilled.

The language of the ode does still more. At first blush, Danae seems passively to endure a brazen failure to prevent a god's rape; yet she, or her beauteous form, is said to exchange -- ἀλλάξαι -- the light of the sky for the bronze chamber. ἀλλάξαι could also mean "to barter" -- it carried a connotation of commercial exchange. What first seemed the imposition of a cruel father can be read as a daring and savvy kind of transaction. This is subtly reinforced when Danae is described as ταμιεύεσκε, i.e., holding in trust a deposit, deriving from a noun meaning paymaster, treasurer, or controller, which lends a certain businesslike luster to the golden rainfall of Zeus's love.

If the apparent victim of kingly control can turn into a broker in a more complex "twist" of Fate, then the one who thought himself to be king might be nothing more than a pawn in another's game. Fate doesn't unfold like some natural, linear organic development; rather it seems to get uncorked in our efforts to avoid it. Had Acrisius not tried to avoid being killed by his grandchild . . . etc. Remind us of anybody?

The surprising turns of phrase continue with Lycurgus. He's huffing and puffing against the young Dionysus, but ends in rocky bonds while the blooming (ἀνθηρόν, from "flower") force of his madness "trickles out." The bloom of madness trapped in stone reminds us that Lycurgus was actively trying to chop at the grapevines of Bacchus when, depending on which version one chooses, he lethally mutilated his son, his father, or himself. The king who sought to control the god, to uproot his potent vine, is (like) a blooming flower that doesn't merely petrify, but oozes. The passage evokes Niobe in its curious blend of petrifaction and liquefaction.

The first two strophes of the ode thus offer a complex interplay of symmetries and reversals. A young girl yoked by a king; a king yoked by a god; one turns from bronze dungeon to divine rain, while a crazed king turns to stone, which trickles. The ode, already complex, devotes the next two strophes to the blinding of the sons of Phineus. The poetic dimensions of Antigone are too interesting to be ignored -- especially if one views the play as a meditation upon the relation of the political to the noumenal.

How bad was Lycurgus of Thrace?

And Dryas's son, the Edonian king swift to rage, was tamed in recompense for his heart-cutting insults, when, by the will of Dionysus, he was encased in rocky bonds. There the fierce and blooming force of his madness trickled away. [960] That man came to know the god whom in his frenzy he had provoked with mockeries. For he had sought to quell the god-inspired women and the Bacchanalian fire, [965] and he angered the Muses who love the flute. Sophocles, Antigone.

Lycurgus (also Lykurgos, Lykourgos) was the king of the Edoni in Thrace, son of Dryas, the "oak", and father of a son whose name was also Dryas.[1] He banned the cult of Dionysus. When Lycurgus heard that Dionysus was in his kingdom, he imprisoned Dionysus's followers, the Maenads, or drove them and Dionysus out of Thrace with an ox-goad.[2][3] Dionysus fled, taking refuge in the undersea grotto of Thetis the sea nymph.

Bacchus

Lycurgus mistook his son for a mature trunk of ivy, which is holy to Dionysus, and killed him, pruning away his nose and ears, fingers and toes.

Consequently, the land of Thrace dried up in horror. Dionysus decreed that the land would stay dry and barren as long as Lycurgus was left unpunished for his injustice, so his people bound him and flung him to man-eating horses on Mount Pangaeüs.[4]

Lycurgus cut off his own foot when he meant to cut down a vine of ivy. With Lycurgus dead, Dionysus lifted the curse.

Lycurgus tried to rape his mother after imbibing wine. When he discovered what he had done, he attempted to cut down the grapevines, believing the wine to be a bad medicine. Dionysus drove him mad as a punishment, causing him to kill both his wife and his son, and threw him to the panthers on Mount Rhodope.[5]

Pan

The tragedian Aeschylus, in a lost play, depicted Lycurgus as a beer-drinker and hence a natural opponent of the wine god.

In Homer's Iliad, an older source than Aeschylus, Lycurgus's punishment for his disrespect towards the gods, particularly Dionysus, is blindness inflicted by Zeus followed not long after by death.[8] 

According to Sophocles, the frenzied Lycurgus mocked at Dionysus and as punishment was shut in "a prison of stone" until his madness went away.[9]

Satyr

Dryas, the father of King Lycurgus, was killed when his son went insane and mistook him for a mature trunk of ivy, a plant holy to the god Dionysus, whose cult Lycurgus was attempting to extirpate.

ζεύχθη δ᾽ ὀξύχολος παῖς ὁ Δρύαντος,
Ἠδωνῶν βασιλεύς, κερτομίοις ὀργαῖς
ἐκ Διονύσου πετρώδει κατάφαρκτος ἐν δεσμῷ.
οὕτω τᾶς μανίας δεινὸν ἀποστάζει
ἀνθηρόν τε μένος. κεῖνος ἐπέγνω μανίαις
ψαύων τὸν θεὸν ἐν κερτομίοις γλώσσαις.
παύεσκε μὲν γὰρ ἐνθέους γυναῖκας εὔιόν τε πῦρ,
φιλαύλους τ᾽ ἠρέθιζε Μούσας.
(Antigone 955 ff.)

Lycurgus

Antigone 141-154: Mathematics and the Dance

ἑπτὰ λοχαγοὶ γὰρ ἐφ᾽ ἑπτὰ πύλαις 
ταχθέντες ἴσοι πρὸς ἴσους ἔλιπον 
Ζηνὶ τροπαίῳ πάγχαλκα τέλη, 
πλὴν τοῖν στυγεροῖν, ὣ πατρὸς ἑνὸς 
145μητρός τε μιᾶς φύντε καθ᾽ αὑτοῖν 
δικρατεῖς λόγχας στήσαντ᾽ ἔχετον 
κοινοῦ θανάτου μέρος ἄμφω.

[141] For the seven captains, equal number stationed against an equal number at the seven gates, left behind their brazen arms in tribute to Zeus the turner of battle—all but the accursed pair who, born of one father and one mother, set against each other their double-slaying spears, both victorious, and who now share in a common death.

In bold are the specific numerical terms as well as some that involve a mathematical operation like adding or averaging. The language is markedly formal, a spectacle of mirroring symmetries - seven against seven, of course, but also the idea of one generating two who fight and share one death. So there are symmetries of space as well, we could say, of time, (and unity of plot): beginning (1), middle (2), end (1). Common to both the seven and the pair of brothers is the moment of mutual-annihilation -- a fateful act that first showed itself when Cadmus, sowing the dragon's teeth, witnessed the symmetric mutual destruction of all but five of the spartoi.

Mathematical symmetry (equality, ἰσότης) is the root of ratio that allows for laws, alliances, and the balances of nature, Jocasta tells her sons in Euripides' Phoenician Women:

Equality . . . always joins friend to friend, city to city, allies to allies; for Equality is naturally lasting among men; but the less is always in opposition to the greater, [540] and begins the dawn of hatred. For it is Equality that has set up for man measures and divisions of weights, and has determined numbers. Night's sightless eye, and radiant sun proceed upon their yearly course on equal terms, [545] and neither of them is envious when it has to yield.

Even as Jocasta says these lines, her sons are preparing to kill one another. Equality at Thebes seems doomed to yield mutual annihilation.

After this militant display of numbers, the first Ode of the Antigone concludes with the chorus of elders turning to Bacchus and to forgetting:

ἀλλὰ γὰρ ἁ μεγαλώνυμος ἦλθε Νίκα 
τᾷ πολυαρμάτῳ ἀντιχαρεῖσα Θήβᾳ, 
150ἐκ μὲν δὴ πολέμων 
τῶν νῦν θέσθαι λησμοσύναν, 
θεῶν δὲ ναοὺς χοροῖς 
παννυχίοις πάντας ἐπέλθωμεν, ὁ Θήβας δ᾽ ἐλελίχθων 
Βάκχιος ἄρχοι.

[148] But since Victory whose name is glory has come to us, smiling in joy equal to the joy of chariot-rich Thebes, let us make for ourselves forgetfulness (λησμοσύναν) after the recent wars, and visit all the temples of the gods with night-long dance and song. And may Bacchus, who shakes the earth of Thebes, rule our dancing! 

The earth shaking -- ἐλελίχθων -- of Bacchus comes from ἐλελίζω - to whirl round, to cause to vibrate, to turn.  Dionysus here stands counterposed to Ζηνὶ τροπαίῳ -- Zeus turner of battle -- in the preceding strophe.

Where Zeus's tropism powered a decisive victory for Thebes against the Argives, the city-shattering power of Bacchus is bound up with music and rhythm, which the god is said to lead. There is no equality here, just the power of the ruling god, leading mortals to forget the strife of wars, ambition and mathematics as they turn in the dance.