Presently a messenger arrives to announce that Pentheus is dead, and
then another curious narrative sets forth the manner of his death.
Full of wild, coarse, revolting details, of course not without
pathetic touches, and with the loveliness of the serving Maenads, and
of their mountain solitudes--their trees and water--never quite
forgotten, it describes how, venturing as a spy too near the sacred
circle, Pentheus was fallen upon, like a wild beast, by the mystic
huntresses and torn to pieces, his mother being the first to begin
"the sacred rites of slaughter."
And at last Agave herself comes upon the stage, holding aloft the
head of her son, fixed upon the sharp end of the thyrsus, calling
upon the women of the chorus to welcome the revel of the Evian god;
who, accordingly, admit her into the company, professing themselves
her fellow-revellers, the Bacchanals being thus absorbed into the
chorus for the rest of the play. For, indeed, all through it, the
true, though partly suppressed relation of the chorus to the
Bacchanals is this, that the women of the chorus, staid and temperate
for the moment, following Dionysus in his alternations, are but the
paler sisters of his more wild and gloomy votaries--the true
followers of the mystical Dionysus--the real chorus of Zagreus; the
idea that their [77] violent proceedings are the result of madness
only, sent on them as a punishment for their original rejection of
the god, being, as I said, when seen from the deeper motives of the
myth, only a "sophism" of Euripides--a piece of rationalism of which
he avails himself for the purpose of softening down the tradition of
which he has undertaken to be the poet.
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