Dionysus's prologue
A god disguised as a man, alone in front of the palace where his mother died, telling the audience exactly what he is going to do — and why.
Summary
Dionysus walks on alone before the palace at Thebes, in the loose robes and long curls of an eastern priest of his own cult. The audience is the only one who knows he is the god. He names himself in the second line: son of Zeus and the Theban princess Semele, brought to term in his father's thigh after his mother was destroyed by Zeus's lightning. He points to the smoking ruin of her chamber, still flickering twenty years on, and says her sisters — his aunts, the daughters of Cadmus — have spent those twenty years denying he is divine. They told the city Semele had lain with a mortal and named Zeus to cover the shame. The god has come back to settle that.
The settling has begun. He has driven every woman of Thebes — Agave, Autonoe, Ino, every wife and daughter from cottage and hall — onto Mount Cithaeron in frenzy. The young king Pentheus, who has inherited the throne from Cadmus, is making war on the new cult: he has banned the offerings, refuses the god's name in prayer, has sent his guards for the foreign priest leading the rites. The god, in disguise as that priest, is waiting for him. He says plainly he will reveal himself through Pentheus, and that Pentheus will pay on his own head.
He calls his chorus. Fifteen women in long white robes and ivy crowns enter from offstage — the Lydian band he brought west with him, carrying timbrel and thyrsus. The god tells them to gather Thebes to their song around Pentheus's hall, and walks off to the mountain. The play has been running ten minutes. The audience has been told everything that is going to happen and has watched the god who will make it happen leave the stage on his own feet.
- Scene 1The god alone in front of the palace where his mother died, in disguise as his own priest, telling the audience the whole plan....
- Scene 2The chorus of eastern women, alone after the god has gone, sing the long entrance song. They tell their journey from Asia, the...
- Scene 3Tiresias calls Cadmus out, dressed for the mountain. The two old men greet each other with affection and a slightly comic bravado...
- Scene 4The chorus's first long ode. They open in horror at Pentheus's blasphemy and ask the goddess of holiness if she has heard. They...
- Scene 5The guards return leading the foreign priest, and the captain has news he cannot explain: the women Pentheus arrested earlier have...
- Scene 6The chorus invoke Dirce and beg the god, wherever he is, to lift his wand against the tyrant. From inside the palace a voice cuts...
- Scene 7Pentheus comes out raging; the priest is calmly at the door. A herdsman runs in from the mountain and delivers the first long...
- Scene 8The most quoted song in the play. The chorus on the long dances on the mountain, on the feet of a fawn fleeing through loveliness...
- Scene 9The priest calls Pentheus out. The king emerges already half-mad: he sees double suns, double Thebes, the priest as a horned bull....
- Scene 10The chorus drop the composure of the earlier odes. They invoke the hounds of the maddened mind to drive the women to find...
- Scene 11The second messenger gives the longest speech in the play: the bent pine, the call from the sky, the dismemberment. Agave arrives...