Euripides, The Bacchae And The Human Soul

Just finished reading the original of The Bacchae which I had read in translation at school. What a masterpiece of perception about the human condition and psyche to be coming down from 408 BC. Euripides wrote it when he had moved from the warmongering atmosphere of Athens to the cool hills of Macedonia - a location which makes an appearance in the play, even perhaps in the rhythm of the verse. The feel and thrust of the narrative and poetry is palpably influenced by his contemplation of nature in the tree-lined hills. To my mind it is not a play, as early critics have claimed, which exhibits his conversion to conventional contemporary religion in Greece as it was evolving. My take is this:
Euripides came to the conclusion in later life that there was a conflict in the human soul between the desire for order and 'decorum' and the desire for pleasure and freedom and this was irresoluble. Civilisation vs 'being at one with Nature'. Aeschylus or Sophocles would have come down on one side or the other. Nobody wins in The Bacchae other than Dionysius who represents some kind of fatalism. But he is no more brutal in his victory than Pentheus, his victim, would have been had his law and order ideology prevailed. There is no 'good' faction. The struggle between the natural world and the civilised, city-state world is a zero game. A fool's game but one where there is no choice but to be involved. The encroachment of the eastern, Dionysian religious cult had already happened by the time Euripides wrote the Bacchae. I think he is saying 'fundamental traditional beliefs are changing. So what - life will go on'. Each side of human nature fears the other but still exists in the same person. There is a suggestion at one stage in the play by the Maenad women that the world of Nature is the truly sane world. But how can this be a reliable view when the the very women who espouse it are portrayed as being in thrall to ecstatic wine-fuelled dancing, ritual and trance. Theirs is a secret, hidden ceremony. But it becomes clear, as it does in the predatory Nature of the food-chain itself, that this way lies violence and bloodshed. I was reminded of Werner Herzog's description of Nature in its unspoiled (Amazonian) wilderness  state as 'an obscenity of murder and fornication'. Even the spirit and sustenance of life relies on death elsewhere. There is no resolution and no redemption by the gods, old, new or non-existent. There is no final answer in Mother Nature herself. Even the stars and the planets are in the process of dying in cosmic time. The background music of the universe and its clustered galaxies is not radiation from the big bang. It's an empty echo chamber. Euripides has taken a timeless theme and clothed it in a timeless form, the Greek drama.