Let us listen and watch the strange masks coming and going,
for a while, [60] as far as may be as we should do with a modern
play. What are its charms? What is still alive, impressive, and
really poetical for us, in the dim old Greek play?
The scene is laid at Thebes, where the memory of Semele, the mother
of Dionysus, is still under a cloud. Her own sisters, sinning
against natural affection, pitiless over her pathetic death and
finding in it only a judgment upon the impiety with which, having
shamed herself with some mortal lover, she had thrown the blame of
her sin upon Zeus, have, so far, triumphed over her. The true and
glorious version of her story lives only in the subdued memory of the
two aged men, Teiresias the prophet, and her father Cadmus, apt now
to let things go loosely by, who has delegated his royal power to
Pentheus, the son of one of those sisters--a hot-headed and impious
youth. So things had passed at Thebes; and now a strange
circumstance has happened. An odd sickness has fallen upon the
women: Dionysus has sent the sting of his enthusiasm upon them, and
has pushed it to a sort of madness, a madness which imitates the true
Thiasus.
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