Parodos

The chorus, alone on stage now that the god has gone, deliver the long entrance song called the parodos. It is one of the great surviving examples of Bacchic lyric. They begin with their journey: from Asia, from the rising of the dawn, they have come for Bromius, glorying in his name. They warn whoever watches them pass to step aside or hide indoors; the heart that defies the god should keep its silence. They sing the beatitude of the man who has drunk from the living fountain and stood near to god — whose sins are lifted like a fallen pall as he worships on the mountain.

The middle of the song is the god's birth story, retold in their voice: the mother lying in anguish, the lightning that took her, the father who cut his own flesh open to hide the unborn child and closed him in with bitter gold. When the perfect hour came a horned god was found, crowned with serpents — and so the maenads twine serpents around the wands they carry, and the songs of serpents sound through the mazes of their hair.

The final strophes are pure ecstasy — the god descending in fire, milk and wine streaming on the mountain, the maenad like a colt running by a river when the heart in her sings. The song ends with the women arrayed on stage and the air of Thebes still empty around them. The next entrance follows: Tiresias, the old blind prophet, walking slowly to the palace door in the same fawn-skin the chorus is wearing, leaning on a staff, asking for Cadmus. The play has shifted from the god's east to the god's home.