It premiered posthumously at the Theatre of Dionysus in 405 BC as part of a tetralogy that also included Iphigeneia at Aulis and Alcmaeon in Corinth, and which Euripides' son or nephew is assumed to have directed.

The play opens with Dionysus proclaiming that he has arrived in Thebes with his votaries to avenge the slander, repeated by his aunts, that he is not the son of Zeus.

Disguised as a foreign holy man, the god intends to introduce Dionysian rites into the city, but the Thebans reject his divinity and king Pentheus orders his arrest.

The play ends with the women of Thebes, driven by Dionysus's orgiastic frenzy, tearing Pentheus apart, while his mother Agave bears his head on a thyrsus to her father Cadmus.

[6] The Dionysus in Euripides' tale is a young god, angry that his mortal family, the royal house of Cadmus, has denied him a place of honor as a deity.

Dionysus reveals that he has driven the women of the city mad, including his three aunts, and has led them into the mountains to observe his ritual festivities.

He has disguised himself as a mortal for the time being, but he plans to vindicate his mother by appearing before all of Thebes as a god, the son of Zeus, and establishing his permanent cult of followers.

The two old men start out to join the revelry in the mountains when Cadmus’ petulant young grandson Pentheus, the current king, enters.

He reports that he found women on the mountain behaving strangely: wandering the forest, suckling animals, twining snakes in their hair, and performing miraculous feats.

At this point, Pentheus seems already crazed by the god's power, as he thinks he sees two suns in the sky, and believes he now has the strength to rip up mountains with his bare hands.

Led by Agave, his mother, they forced the trapped Pentheus down from the tree top, ripped off his limbs and his head, and tore his body into pieces.

Agave and her sisters are sent into exile, and Dionysus decrees that Cadmus and his wife Harmonia will be turned into snakes and lead a barbarian horde to plunder the cities of Hellas.

[34] Helene P. Foley, writing of the importance of Dionysus as the central character and his effect on the play's structure, observes: "The poet uses the ritual crisis to explore simultaneously god, man, society, and his own tragic art.

Hans Oranje calls such questions the riddle of the Bacchae, and says that the play concerns itself with “wisdom, cleverness, and soundness of mind.”[37] The extraordinary beauty and passion of the poetic choral descriptions indicate that the author certainly knew what attracted those who followed Dionysus.

[3] Then, at the end of the 19th century the opposite idea began to take hold: it was thought that Euripides was doing with The Bacchae what he had always done, pointing out the inadequacy of the Greek gods and religions.

Winnington-Ingram said of Euripides' handling of the play: "On its poetical and dramatic beauties, he writes with charm and insight; on more complex themes, he shows equal mastery.

The tragedy's influence can be seen in the writings of Henrik Ibsen,[44] as well as Thomas Mann's 1912 novella Death in Venice[45] and Oliver Stone's 2004 film Alexander.

[46] The Renaissance Venetian painter Titian may have illustrated the arrest of Bacchus in his painting "Il Bravo" in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum.