This is a follow-up to my previous post about how certain characteristics of human speech (rhythms, turn-taking) might have evolved from other primates’ sonic communication. I have been reading some Greek plays recently – I am teaching a paper called ‘Tragedy’ this term. It struck me that the stichomythia – rapidly alternating units of speech in dialogue – must be both a high example of turn-taking and its dirty secret. All too often any assumptions one might have about orderly, cooperative time-sharing are overturned by the conflict-filled, uncompromising exchanges we see in tragedies.
      In Euripides play The Bacchae this is taken to an interesting extreme. Pentheus, the young sceptical king, has several exchanges with Dionysus, the disguised new god who is causing frenzied revels that disrupt the city. Here the issue is not a bestial failure to keep to human norms, but a divine refusal. The power of Dionysus transcends human practices and he plays along only to engineer and magnify his triumph. In the long quotation I put here, there are vestiges of turn-taking communication, but really Pentheus is powerless. With his mind clouded by the God, he is about to humiliate himself by wearing drag to spy on the god’s followers, an escapade that will end with him being murdered by his own mother.

*

PENTHEUS
What! I’m not going up there as a man?
I’ve got to change myself into a woman?
DIONYSUS
If they see you as a man, they’ll kill you.
PENTHEUS
Right again. You always have the answer.
DIONYSUS
Dionysus taught me all these things.
PENTHEUS
How can I best follow your suggestion?
DIONYSUS
I’ll go inside your house and dress you up.
PENTHEUS
What? Dress up in a female outfit?
I can’t do that—I’d be ashamed to.
DIONYSUS
You’re still keen to see the , aren’t you?
PENTHEUS
What sort of clothing do you recommend?
How should I cover up my body?
DIONYSUS
I’ll fix up a long hair piece for your head.
PENTHEUS: All right.
What’s the next piece of my outfit?
DIONYSUS
A dress down to your feet—then a headband,
to fit just here, around your forehead.
PENTHEUS
What else? What other things will you provide?
DIONYSUS
A to hold and a dappled fawn skin.
PENTHEUS
No. I can’t dress up in women’s clothes!
DIONYSUS
But if you go fighting with these Bacchae,
you’ll cause bloodshed.
PENTHEUS
Yes, that’s true.
So first, we must go up and spy on them.

Before reading the article by Ghazanfar and Takahashi cited in the earlier post I thought of this as a chilling demonstration of the absoluteness of divine power, but I didn’t think of that on a formal level, in the way that speech is exchanged. Now I see Pentheus as vainly trying not just to uphold the laws but also to undertake a recognisable sort of interactive speaking; the God does not even allow him that.