To Pentheus, in
his invincible ignorance, his essence remains to the last unrevealed,
and even the women of the chorus seem to understand in him, so far,
only the forerunner of their real leader. As he goes away bound,
therefore, they too, threatened also in their turn with slavery,
invoke his greater original to appear and deliver them. In pathetic
cries they reproach Thebes for rejecting them--ti m' anainei, ti me
pheugeis;+ yet they foretell his future greatness; a new Orpheus, he
will more than renew that old miraculous reign over animals and
plants. Their song is full of suggestions of wood and river. It is
as if, for a moment, Dionysus became the suffering vine again; and
the rustle of the leaves and water come through their words to
refresh it. The [70] fountain of Dirce still haunted by the virgins
of Thebes, where the infant god was cooled and washed from the flecks
of his fiery birth, becomes typical of the coolness of all springs,
and is made, by a really poetic licence, the daughter of the distant
Achelous--the earliest born, the father in myth, of all Greek rivers.
A giddy sonorous scene of portents and surprises follows--a distant,
exaggerated, dramatic reflex of that old thundering tumult of the
festival in the vineyard--in which Dionysus reappears, miraculously
set free from his bonds.
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