The arrest and the interrogation
The foreign priest brought in chains — and the king who interrogates him without realising what is standing in front of him.
Summary
The guards return leading the priest. The captain steps forward to report. The chase was easy; the prisoner did not flinch, did not run, held both hands out without resistance. He laughed while being bound. The captain has worse news. The women Pentheus had arrested earlier and locked in the city dungeon have all walked free — the chains fell from them, the bars slid back, and they are now back on the mountain dancing. He adds, half against himself, that this is no ordinary man.
Pentheus turns on the prisoner. The interrogation that follows is the centre of the first half of the play. He mocks the priest's appearance — a girlish face for women's eyes, long curls that mean he has never wrestled, a white skin that has never seen the sun. The priest answers each question quietly. He is from Lydia, near the bright hill of Tmolus. The rites came to him from Dionysus himself, son of Zeus and Semele. The god appeared to him face to face, gave the emblems, taught the worship. The priest, never raising his voice, replies that to blinded eyes wise words seem like nothing.
Pentheus pronounces sentence. He orders the priest's curl cut off; the soldiers do it. He takes the wand. He orders the prisoner chained where the horses are tied — let him stare into the darkness in the manger — and the women who follow him sold across the seas or set to the loom. The priest, allowing it, warns the king plainly: the one Pentheus is denying is now in his prison, and will come after him for recompense. Pentheus does not hear the warning. The guards lead the priest away. The chorus is alone again.
- 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...