Those
of the women who still loitered, he has already caused to be shut up
in the common prison; the others, with Ino, Autonoe, and his own
mother, Agave, he will hunt out of the glens; while the stranger is
threatened with various cruel forms of death. But Teiresias and
Cadmus stay to reason with him, and induce him to abide wisely with
them; the prophet fittingly becomes the interpreter of Dionysus, and
explains the true nature of the visitor; his divinity, the completion
or counterpart of that of Demeter; his gift of prophecy; [68] all the
soothing influences he brings with him; above all, his gift of the
medicine of sleep to weary mortals. But the reason of Pentheus is
already sickening, and the judicial madness gathering over it.
Teiresias and Cadmus can but "go pray." So again, not without the
laughter of the audience, supporting each other a little grotesquely
against a fall, they get away at last.
And then, again, as in those quaintly carved and coloured imageries
of the Middle Age--the martyrdom of the youthful Saint Firmin, for
instance, round the choir at Amiens--comes the full contrast, with a
quite medieval simplicity and directness, between the insolence of
the tyrant, now at last in sight of his prey, and the outraged beauty
of the youthful god, meek, surrounded by his enemies, like some fair
wild creature in the snare of the hunter.
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