Oriental mystery cults filtered into Athenian drama as a threatening foreign excess

Evidence

In The Bacchae, perhaps the most Asiatic of all the Attic dramas, Dionysus is explicitly connected with his Asian origins and with the strangely threatening excesses of Oriental mysteries. Pentheus, king of Thebes, is destroyed by his mother, Agave, and her fellow bacchantes. Having defied Dionysus by not recognizing either his power or his divinity, Pentheus is thus horribly punished, and the play ends with a general recognition of the eccentric god’s terrible power. … Modern commentators on The Bacchae have not failed to note the play’s extraordinary range of intellectual and aesthetic effects; but there has been no escaping the additional historical detail that Euripides “was surely affected by the new aspect that the Dionysiac cults must have assumed in the light of the foreign ecstatic religions of Bendis, Cybele, Sabazius, Adonis, and Isis, which were introduced from Asia Minor and the Levant and swept through Piraeus and Athens during the frustrating and increasingly irrational years of the Peloponnesian War.” — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 159

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Immodesty article on cross-cultural moral panics and the Lex Oppia; same pattern of foreign religious/sexual excess as threat to civic rationality.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 159