Society is in its late or decadent phase. The ruling hierarchy consists of the senile and the adolescent.

From Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia.  

The Oresteia is Freudian psychodrama. Orestes, young ego, is swamped by the id of the Furies, until superego Apollo puts them in their place. Aeschylus makes an analogy between society and personality. The Bacchae disfigures society’s Apollonian constructions. Dionysus is nature’s raw sex and violence. He is drugs, drink, dance—the dance of death. My generation of the Sixties may be the first since antiquity to have had so direct an experience of Dionysus. The Bacchae is our story, a panorama of intoxication, delusion, and self-destruction. Rock music is the naked power of Dionysus as Bromios, “the Thunderer.” In the Bacchae, Apollonian sky-cult and political authority are bankrupt.   Society is in its late or decadent phase. The ruling hierarchy consists of the senile and the adolescent.   Pentheus is like Homer’s callow suitors, a lost generation of pampered dandies unseasoned by war and adventure. Heir rather than founder, he is bully and braggart. Thebes is a moral vacuum into which Dionysus surges. He is a return of the repressed, the id of Aeschylus’ Furies bursting from bondage.