First Stasimon
The chorus, alone with the audience, sing what they have just heard — and what they think it means.
Summary
Alone on stage now that the king and the old men have gone, the chorus deliver the first of their five great choral odes. They open by addressing Holiness directly — the gold-winged goddess who stoops earthward in pity — and ask whether she has heard what Pentheus said. The accusation is not anger; it is bewilderment. The god they have travelled across the world to honour has been called a fraud, the rites a debauch, the women on the mountain a brothel.
The middle of the ode is the joy of the god. They name his kingdom: in the dancing and the prayer, in the music and the laughter, in the vanishing of care, in the gods' high banquet, in the crowned slumber when pain is dead and hate forgiven. They warn the wise — those who claim more than mortals may — against scorning what they cannot see. Life is a little thing, they say, and the present is already gone, and the dreams the proud cling to do not come. The chorus is not threatening Pentheus. They are describing what he is missing.
The final strophes are a small geography of peace. They sing of Cyprus, Aphrodite's island, set in the soft sea-foam; of Paphos with its rainless meadows; of Olympus, the high still dell where the Muses dwell. There, they say, is grace, and there is the heart's desire. The god they follow is not only the god of wild ecstasy; he is also the feeder of children, the friend of peace, the giver of wine that has no grudge against the great. The song ends. From the side, the guards Pentheus sent into the city return, marching, with a prisoner walking calmly between them.
- 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...