Seminare «una quantità di denti di drago». L’anomalia tebana e il significato politico di un modello tragico

To sow “a lot of dragon’s teeth”. The Theban anomaly and the political meaning of a tragic pattern One of the tragedies that conclude the golden age of the Attic tragedy, the Bacchae by Euripides, was frequently examined by scholars as a work that shows how tragic theatre derives from religious ritual. Among others, Cambridge Ritualists and Karl Kerényi saw in the sacrifice of Pentheus/Dionysus the mise-en-scène of the primary homicide that founds both the ritual sacrifice and the order of tragic representation. The true subject of the tragedy is yet the violence, that finds her religious legitimitation that precedes political system. The sense of the “Theban anomaly” – that goes on in the subsequent events of the Labdacides and of Oedipus – is in this legitimation of violence that founds political system. In the mortal conflict between Pentheus, the regent, and Dionysus, the demigod whose birth is bound to the vicissitudes of the family that reigns in Thebes, comes out the conflict between religion and politics, that reflects the myth of the foundation of the town. Thebes rises from the killing of the dragon due to Cadmus and from the following sowing of the teeth of the dragon, sowing from which rise the Spartoi: violent warriors who, just risen from the earth, kill each other. The violence of the beginning endures in the history of town, from Pentheus to Oedipus. In this way the Bacchae propose a possible interpretation of the connection between religion, violence and politics. This connection does’nt escape Nietzsche’s notice, who, in aphorism 472 (Religion and government) of Human, All-Too-Human, refers, even though by a mere but meaningful allusion, to the background of Euripides’s tragedy.