Fourth Stasimon
The chorus drop their composure for the only time in the play. They call on the hounds of madness, on Justice, on the god to come as bull or snake or lion and end this.
Summary
The chorus, alone after Dionysus has gone after Pentheus, sing the shortest and most violent of their odes. The earlier songs have been ecstatic, philosophical, longing. This one is none of those. It opens with hounds — hounds raging and blind, up by the mountain road, spirits of the maddened mind — and calls them to fill the women's eyes with rage at the watcher in woman's guise, the spy on God's possessed. They imagine the moment of discovery. Whose eye will catch him first. Will it be his mother. Will the cry go up that this is no man but a beast.
They call directly for the killing. Hither, for doom and deed; hither with lifted sword, Justice, Wrath of the Lord, come in our visible need. Smite till the throat shall bleed. The refrain comes back hard. They name Pentheus's crime: he has trodden tyrannously, marched in defiance against the god's light and his mother's light, blinded in his own craft, trying to crush by violence things unconquerable. They sing one steadier strophe — knowledge, we are not enemies; the world blows toward beautiful things, until life breaks clean and pure and sings glory to god in the height — and then the killing call returns.
The leader closes the ode with the most direct invocation of the god in the play. Appear, appear, whatever your shape or your name — O Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads, Lion of Burning Flame! O God, Beast, Mystery, come! The mystic maids are hunted. Blast their hunter with your breath. Cast over his head your snare. Laugh aloud, and drag him to his death. The song ends. From the side of the stage a man enters at a run, pale, distraught, gasping for breath. He has come down the mountain. He has news for the city.
- 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...