Meantime, Pentheus has assumed his disguise, and comes forth tricked
up with false hair and the dress of a Bacchanal; but still with some
misgivings at the thought of going thus attired through the streets
of Thebes, and with many laughable readjustments of the unwonted
articles of clothing. And with the woman's dress, his madness is
closing faster round him; just before, in the palace, terrified at
the noise of the earthquake, he had drawn sword upon a mere fantastic
appearance, and pierced only the empty air. Now he begins to see the
sun double, and Thebes with all its towers repeated, while his
conductor seems to him transformed into a wild beast; and now and
then, we come upon some touches of a curious psychology, so that we
might almost seem to be reading a modern poet. As if Euripides had
been aware of a not unknown symptom of incipient madness (it is said)
in which the patient, losing the sense of resistance, while lifting
small objects imagines himself to be raising enormous weights,
Pentheus, as he lifts the thyrsus, fancies he could lift Cithaeron
with all the Bacchanals upon it. At all this the laughter of course
will pass round the theatre; while those who really pierce into the
purpose of the poet, shudder, as they see the victim thus grotesquely
clad going to his doom, [76] already foreseen in the ominous chant of
the chorus--and as it were his grave-clothes, in the dress which
makes him ridiculous.
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