In the end, Dionysos triumphs over his persecutors, who in turn experience their own ordeals at the climactic moment of the god's self-revelation. Part of the uncertainty is visible in the sympathetic characterization of Pentheus, the persecutor of Dionysos, in The Bacchae of Euripides. He is human, all too human. He cannot help becoming curious, ever more morbidly curious, about the god whom he resists so fiercely. His initial sense of unfamiliarity gives way to invasive feelings of familiarity, of maddening closeness.
Repulsion gives way to fatal attraction.
The magnetic force of this attraction is the essence of Dionysos as the god of theatre, as the inner source of tragedy itself. It is the lure of tragedy that draws Pentheus into his own fatal ordeal. The tragic is what causes Pentheus to desire to be tragic. The magnetism of tragedy is what caused tragedy to happen in the first place. Dionysos pull people together to celebrate these wonders by competing with each other in song and dance.