The Bacchae — who's who

The god of the title. Born in Thebes — his mother was the Theban princess Semele, struck by Zeus's lightning while pregnant; the unborn child was sewn into Zeus's thigh and brought to term there. He has come back to the city of his birth disguised as a mortal priest of his own cult, with a chorus of eastern women, to demand the recognition his mother's family has refused him. He delivers the prologue himself, naming the plan; allows himself to be arrested; walks out of the prison unbound; and arranges, with surgical patience, the destruction of the king who refused him.

The young king. Son of Agave and Echion, grandson of the founding king Cadmus. He has inherited the throne and is determined to govern. He returns from a journey at the start of the play to find the women of his city on the mountain in Bacchic frenzy and the prophet and his own grandfather in fawn-skins; his rage is immediate. He arrests the foreign priest, threatens execution, and accuses the cult of being a cover for orgy and lust. He is destroyed in scenes 7 to 11 — the seduction, the dressing, the climb, the killing — without the god raising a hand against him.

The aged founder of Thebes — the man who sowed the dragon's teeth and grew the soldiers from whom Pentheus's father Echion descended. He is also Semele's father and so the god's grandfather. He has accepted Dionysus, partly from genuine piety and partly because the cult exalts his line, and arrives in scene 3 already in fawn-skins beside Tiresias. He warns Pentheus, in vain, of what he can see coming. He returns at the end of the play with the gathered pieces of his grandson's body and walks Agave, sentence by sentence, back to the recognition of what she has done.

Pentheus's mother. Sister of Semele, the god's mother. She is among the women of Thebes driven onto the mountain in divine frenzy and leads one of the three bands described by the first messenger. She does not appear on stage until the final scene, when she descends triumphant, still possessed, carrying what she believes is the head of a mountain lion she has killed with her bare hands. The head is her son's. Cadmus's questioning brings her back to herself in real time. She is sent into exile.

The ancient blind seer of Thebes. He arrives in scene 3 already in fawn-skin and ivy, ready to dance for the new god despite his age, and invites Cadmus to come with him to the mountain. His long speech to Pentheus in the same scene is the play's most sustained philosophical defence of Dionysus — the god as the wet element in nature, the necessary counterpart to dry rationality, a force a city cannot exclude without paying for the exclusion. Pentheus ignores every word. Tiresias and Cadmus walk off together at the end of the scene to make their way to the mountain on foot.

The captain Pentheus sends to arrest the foreign priest. He returns in scene 5 leading the disguised Dionysus in chains and is visibly unnerved: the prisoner came without resistance, smiled while being bound, and the women previously arrested have all walked free of their cells with the doors still locked behind them. He half-apologises to the prisoner in front of his king. The play uses him as the first sign that the god's authority is operating at a level the kingdom's force cannot reach.

A herdsman from the mountain, sent down to report what the women are doing. His speech in scene 7 is one of the longest in Greek tragedy and contains some of its strangest imagery: the women sleeping in chaste calm under the pines; one striking a rock with her wand and producing water, another producing wine, another milk; nursing wolf-cubs; and then, when the herdsmen tried to seize them, tearing live cattle apart with their bare hands and routing armed villagers with nothing but their wands. He urges Pentheus to receive the god. Pentheus orders his army to march.

One of the small party that climbed Cithaeron with Pentheus and the foreign priest. He returns alone in scene 11, pale and shaken, to deliver the second long messenger speech: the bending of the pine, the king set in the branches, the god's voice from the sky calling the women to see and destroy their hidden spy, and the dismemberment that followed at the hands of Pentheus's mother and aunts. The speech is, with the first messenger's, the longest in Greek tragedy. He delivers it and leaves before Agave arrives.

Fifteen women from Lydia and Phrygia who have followed the god westward across Asia and arrived with him at Thebes. They steal onstage at dawn behind his prologue and remain on stage for the rest of the play. Their five great choral odes — on the joy of the rites, on the slow certain justice of the gods, on the simple wise life, on the spy in the pine — are among the most sung-over passages in Greek tragedy. They are the only figures in the play who never lose composure. By the end they are openly praying for Pentheus's destruction; by the very end they accept what has happened and sing the play out with the famous final lines on the unexpectedness of what the gods bring to pass.