Tiresias, Cadmus, Pentheus
Two old men in fawn-skins, ready to dance for the new god — and the young king who comes home to find them dressed like fools and reacts with the rage that will destroy him.
Summary
Tiresias arrives at the door in fawn-skin and ivy, leaning on his staff, and calls for Cadmus. Cadmus comes out already dressed for the rites — same fawn-skin, same wand. The two old men greet each other with a slightly comic bravado. They are going to the mountain on foot, no horses, because to take horses would be to mistrust the god. Then they look up: Pentheus is hurrying back from a journey, with his guard, talking before he has fully arrived.
Pentheus has heard the news in the streets. The women of his own city, his sisters and aunts among them, have left their homes for wild rites on the hills. He is sure it is not piety; it is wine, it is sex, it is a foreign charlatan with golden curls who has bewitched the women and lures them into the woods. He has already arrested those he could find. Then he sees his grandfather and the prophet at the door in fawn-skins. He is appalled. He calls Tiresias the prompter of the folly and tells Cadmus to take that crown of ivy off his head.
Tiresias answers with the long speech that is the play's most sustained philosophical defence of Dionysus. Two great powers, he says, are first among men: Demeter the Earth, who feeds the body with dry sustenance, and the power born from Semele, who came after to perfect her work — the liquid in the grape that gives sleep and drowns the day's cares in cool forgetting. Pentheus is conflating wine with lust; chastity lies in the heart, not the wand. Cadmus, more gently, reminds him of Actaeon torn by his own hounds for boasting against Artemis. Pentheus hears none of it. He orders the shrine ripped down and his guards out to find the priest. The old men walk off toward the mountain.
- 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...