The messenger, Agave, the judgement
The second messenger's report from the mountain. Agave at the gate carrying her son's head, calling it a lion. Cadmus walking her, sentence by sentence, back to the truth. The god in the air, naming the future.
Summary
The second messenger delivers the longest speech in the play. He climbed the mountain with Pentheus and the priest. They lay hidden in a green dell, watching the women at work. Pentheus could not see well enough; he asked to be lifted higher. The priest touched the crown of a great pine and bent it to the ground with strength not mortal, set the king in its branches, and let it back up. A voice came from empty air — the priest was gone, and the voice was the god's: behold, women, I bring you the man who spites both me and you. The women tore the pine from the ground; Pentheus fell, pulled off the wig, begged his mother to recognise him. She did not.
Agave enters carrying the head. She is, by every visible measure, happy. She calls on the chorus to bless her hunt. The leader cannot answer. Cadmus arrives with a bier — he has gathered what could be gathered of his grandson's body. He does not tell her. He asks her questions. Lift your eyes to the sky. Who was your husband. What son did you bear him. Look at what you are holding. The madness drains. The head is no longer a lion's.
Dionysus appears above the house in his divine form. There is a missing page here; his speech begins mid-sentence. He pronounces the future: Cadmus turned into a serpent; Agave exiled from Thebes forever. The god is unmoved. You mocked me, who am God; this is your wage. He rises on the cloud and disappears. The chorus close with the lines that close five surviving Euripidean tragedies. There are many shapes of mystery, and many things god brings to pass past hope or fear. The end men looked for does not come, and a path is opened where no man thought.
- 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...