11.

is no respector of persons, but the god (through the choros)
warns against the curious SEEKERS the sensation hunter, the man
the mysteries an immature
of weary intellect who turns to delight (as to a psychic) delight
out of curiosity. No. Blessed are the poor, in spirit, the
Euripidian Dionysius says almost in those words ... "what the
pure and very simple can appreciate, that I consecrate".

Then enter the servants with the bound god. This is the
god, this rather, they say, is the man, who has introduced the
rites of the God. The women whom you imprisoned, have escaped
and are dancing in the fields. Well ... Pentheas is not
impressed. This fellow is not strong enough anyway to get
away from bars and ropes. Bind him more carefully and let me
talk with him a moment. "Who are you anyway?"

Lydia is my country says the god, I have come here by
order of the god Bacchus. These rites says Pentheas, may do
for barbarians and illiterate Asiatics. Don't think you can
make headway with them in Greece. These midnight ceremonies
are all out of order. "Women too ... we must be fair to women",
blusters the county-gentleman. "Even in the day", says the
god, "I have known ugly enough things to happen". "That is no
excuse. You will suffer enough." "You cannot bind me", says
the young priest, "the god will release me". "O you think so",
says Pentheas, "your women shall suffer forced labour and you ...
the god is led away. The Choros cry out in momentary distress.

12.

Where, where is our redeemer?

The god, never far absent, appears, explaining how, with
obvious leger-de-main he has dazzled Pentheas into thinking
a certain bull with which he is struggling is the god-self.
It is easy to blind, to hypnotize this ignorant mortal. The
god, himself appearing to the choros, as the priest of the
god, explains further how he has smitten the house with
flame and it is even now afire, earthquake and fire and
general disaster. The god did this, explains the priest-as-god.
I myself walked out calmly, it is as well not to be too sensa-
tional in these matters.

Then Pentheas re-appears, raging, perceives the priest-as-
god. "Ah, there you are". He is blind already with his pre-
destined madness. He intimates that the priest of the god has
got free only because of this general natural denoument, earth-
quake and so on but the God explains carefully, "you see, I/
would be rescued." "You ... there are other walls, more walls,
towers and prison." "Do not the gods pass over and through
walls?" Pentheas again slashes out at him and the God says,
"wait, here is some news of interest to us all. Wait a few
minutes" while the inevitable messenger announces in set
ritualistic phrase that he has come from Pentheas, addressing
the prince, "ruler of Thebes", hesitating, afraid to tell the
truth, asking permission from his regent, "may I tell these

13.

terrible and dreadful and soul-shaking things?" The king says "go on", intimating that nothing would surprise him and that he is quite prepared to hear the worst.

"I left Citheron blind-brilliant with snow" ... and the messenger continues in swift discursive style to tell of this odd magic of the mountain. There in a glen or glade or little walled-in thicket are the strangest of ceremonies. This picture is one of the poet's masterpieces, a running musical exquisitely formal manner yet into it, through it, is the rush of wind, of branches. No later romantic could have so adequately made the hills pulse, the trees bow and sway, the water murmur, and the leaves fall. The messenger runs through his narrative at passionate lightning pace. One feels (in these formal controlled lines) swiftness of those mad women, the beat and throb of those white bare passionate heels on the drift and mighty rubble of mountain scards, along with the swaying of the enormous pines that are beaten down (by this frenzy of divine human passion) as they are hent by the down-sweep of passionate north-wind from those regions beyond Thrace, semi-mythical even in the en-lightened days of fifth-century Greece. The set formal line does not hinder this tension. There is no break in the pre-cision of metre and of form. But the whole is lighted from within with passion and broken breath, even as the scards of Citheron are broken with patch and runnel and curved wave-

14.

length of cold and inviolate yet pulsing and brilliant sun,
smitten drift. The figures (white and frieze-like in their
gesture) are also moved from within this passion of spirit.

"Where shepherds watched their flocks -" on Cithaeron
this time. They saw, those simple folk, the same always, the
scene of Angels, women who rested in a paradisial-state along
among the soft laurel-scrub, among the stretches of azelia, on
soft beds of the enormous violet-pansy, and perhaps of the high
late-sulphur-anemone. Here they play paradisially among them-
selves; like the innocent voluptuaries of a Botticelli prime-
the women of Thebes, the Bacchantes,
vera, they sang and coiled in grace of movement, by two, by
three, in larger not ant gracefully serious groups. In most
reverent decorative style the poet shows us these young women,
these girls and almost-children along with
these stately Hera-like matrons, led by the mother of Pentheas,
Agave. The other two main groups, young married-women and
young girls have as central figures, Antinoe and Ino. The
perfect arrangement of this scene is in keeping with the poets
early ambitions, with the whole of the Athenian society in
which he moved. Painting and sculpture are welded in perfect
harmony with poetry.

It is Spring. A spring of softest emotion, of gentlest
and most austere grace. Here a figure stands apart, with
russet hair bound tight with set and formal ivy-leaf. Another
wears like some Leonardo in abstraction a set oak-circlet,

15.

perfection binding stiff and formal locks. Another with the
fervent volupuousness of some exquisite page of a Florentine
Cosimo, wears in more flowing delicacy, the white fragrant
flowering froth of white smilax. One bears a wand set wound
in set pattern of leaf. Honey drips from this rod. Another
rod, struck up from the moss of the forests a living-water,
red, like the frail and exquisite mountain cyclamen that pattern
the heavy carpet of delicate grass and leaf.

"The lion shall lie down - " at least in this case it is
the spotted Louveteaux, the young雌 deer. These are the second
circle of women. Those who have already borne children. And
from their breasts they feed these, their new children, they
the mothers now of the untrampled wilderness.

It was all very simple and quiet. Milk, wine and honey
were the sacred, mystical nourishment. There was no dissension,
no uproar of jealousy or hatred. They are all the branches of
the vine, the lovers of that imperishable and never-ending
source of bliss, the god Dionysus. Into this Eden there
appeared as the proverbial serpent, the half-innocent, totally
curious gaze of this herder of cattle, the messenger who
stands before Pentheas, who has been relating the scene.

Alas, the messenger and his companions are perceived. "We
are tracked, trapped by men", cries Agave. The herdmen escape
but their troops are dismembered by the now hell-infuriated

16.

company. Nature, God, ecstacy, perverted into the maddest of infernal orgies.

Having rushed down the mountain and hav'd destroyed two little cities at its base, the women return, where they are finally perceived by the herdsman, repairing their garments, binding their hair. We are told formally that they bathe, and that their serpents wash with their tongues the blood that stains their faces.

And whoever he may be, concludes the messenger, I advise you Pentheas, receive him into this town. For if he can do this, he can do other and worse things. "And besides that, he had given us the grape. Without wine, where were Love? Without Love what were men?"

Pentheas answers alike to the appeal of beauty and the appeal of terror: War. "To the gate Electra. Command the shield-bearers, the horsemen, to the javelin-bearers, to the archers who twang the bow-nerve," that we declare war on the (manifested still as priest) Baochantes." Dionysus, subtly dissuades him. Rather let us go spy on their secrets. That would be a more enlivening affair. Let me dress you up disguised as a woman, for you see what happens when men are discovered. It would be safer to wear a long robe, to have your hair covered with a heavy head-dress or crown of some sort. Pentheas consents; as he enters the palace, Dionysus turns to the choros. You will now see a rite

21.

spying him from the covert,
from the steep ledge of hillock)
hear,
hear,
O Bacchus,
see
who desecrates the hills,
the hills belong to us,
invoke,
invoke
armed Justice
let Dike stand forth manifest,
let her step forth and slay,
slash him across the throat,
this monster,
Gorgon-birth,
Echion-born
and born of earth.

Again we have the slightly didactic reply of the choros to the choros. The antistrophe comments of the facts already beaten and sung with such fervour and ecstacy by the choros. Happiness simply means sanity and spiritual attainment. Try to understand the gods for really they are to be understood; love, love, love beauty and mysterious things. Then the epode with its invocation,

Be a bull
or a multiple dragon,
make yourself into fire
and a lion,
only Bacchus
appear,
cast a snare
round this spy on the Bacchae
smile,
smile
and be near
to avenge the mad troupe of the Maenaeds ...

The messenger then appears hinting woe to the house of

22.

Cadmos, the city of Thebes. Instigated by the choros, he gives another of these long swift picture narratives. He followed his master, Pentheas, and the stranger priest who led him. They came to a rocky place, set with pointed crags, surrounded with pines, by Cithaeron. Here were the Maenaeds, quite happy, making new crowns and re-winding their re-weaving strings of leaves for their rods from which the garlands had been so lately torn. Some were singing wild songs, as gay and estatic as young colts just let out of harness. Pentheas not quite realizing or perceiving the great crowd, suggests climbing higher. He might even climb a tree to get a better view of their doings. He climbs his tree, alas. The "stranger" meanwhile, by some superhuman trick has bent down the tip of a youngish sapling. Up flies the seated Pentheas. The "stranger" disappears, but a voice (that of the god) urges onward the mad women. "Maidens, I have brought the mocker of myself, of you, of my orgies. Take your revenge." Then lightning ... the air hung silent. The wood, the meadow wood copse dropped, stopped dead silent in the wood, in the meadow each leaf hung dead silent. You could hear no animal. The bacchantes wait, look about, half-apprehending. Again the voice calls. It is perfectly clear now. Like wild-pigeons they form and wheel. All the Bacchantes mad with the "breath of god", hurl themselves across

23.

ravines, up precipices. They see Pentheas. They climb high
rocks to get nearer. They hurl rocks, pine-sticks, darting
their thyrses. But nothing reaches him. Out of their
reach, he rests surprised, embarassed. Now with informal
oak-levers they try prodding up the pine-roots. Agave cries,
"just pull the thing down". A thousand taut and fervid women
seize and actually tear up the tree. Pentheas is flung to
the ground. Agave rushes forward as chief in this murder-
rite. Pentheas jerks off his disguising head-dress. "It is
I, mother, your son, Pentheas who you bore in the place of
Echion. Mother pity me". His mother is blind with a frenzy
and with a blind inspired force, dismembers him. Ino assists
in this ghastly ceremony and the Autonoe with the crowds,
finishes off the job. The limbs, the body are scattered.
The head (alone intact), Agave fastens like the head of a slain
lion, on the top of her thyrsis and bears it triumphant down
the mountain. Exhilarated with this death-hunt, she is
approaching, calling on Bacchus, the conqueror.

The messenger steps aside with some formal words of
reverence.

The choros makes a metrical restatement of the last
phrases of the running narrative of the messenger. This is
simply by way of a short "curtain", leaving an artistic interval
to allow of the exit of the messenger and the formal approach

26.

an excellent
trophy -

and captured
most neatly -

you laughed out?

laughed greatly -
as having wrought aptly
great deeds for my country.

Your glorious trophy,
O woman unhappy,
lift it high
(for you hold it,)
to these of your country.

"Show, O unhappy woman, your prize of victory, the
thing you carry with you, to the people gathered here." So
the choros finishes and Agave steps forward, still unconscious.

"Come, O you inhabitants of this city of beautiful turrets,
come look at this whelp, which we the daughters of Cadmos
took without javelins, darts, which the Thessalians hurl from the
leather thong, without nets, but only with the white and
slender hands. Who can boast after this? Why seek the lance
workshop? For we captured this beast simply and tore him to
bits with our bare hands. But where is my old father? Let
him come. Where is Pentheas? Let him take and fasten before
my house. Let him get and set against my house, a ladder
with solid rungs, so that he may nail this lion-head which I
offer here, trophy of the hunt, captured myself, against the
triglyphes."

27.

The old Cadmos comes in now with a gruesome burden. He
has sought through the wood, the slopes of the mountain. He
has seen the other two, Autonoe and Ino, mad, still inflamed
with the maenad-frenzy among the scrub-oaks. He looks for
Agave. She steps forward. "All your daughters are illustrious,
but most I. I am superexcellent. Summon your friends to the
feast. Take from my hands this trophy." "God strikes justly",
the old man cries, "but he strikes too sternly. God all power-
ful, our blood-relation, has destroyed us." "O", cries
Agave, still in her delirious transport, "I pity old people.
Their eyes go dark. But if only my son, that gallant hunter,
who is away hunting with the young Thebians would come." "O"
cries the old man, "if only you could stay always as you now
are, self-hallucinated." Gradually, led on by a series of
Socratic questions, the truth dawns on Agave. "But Pentheas",
she stares wide-awake, at last completely conscious, "why
should he have suffered for my stupidity?"

"He was like you, he did not reverence God. We're all
together, a family, lost." Great Cadmos sees himself the
butt of little boys, the old beggar-cretin of the village.

But the choros. "I suffer with you, Cadmos, but your
child's child however dire for you, has received only his due."

And then the heart-reming denoument which were it not
raised into a mythical dragon-sphere, would be insupportably

28.

dreadful. This God does not forgive. God's Son has been reviled. He has been cast into prison. The prince of the house of Cadmus was preparing to march with an army. "I and my father are one." This is rather the old and terrible tribal diety that visits the sins, alas inexorably, of the fathers upon the children. Dionysus declares his intention. I shall turn you Cadmus and your wife Harmonia, the daughter of Ares, into serpents. Young bullocks shall draw your chariot. You shall be exiled to Asia. Again you shall return to Hellas. But as conquerors. You shall be guilty of impiety, striking against the altars and hearts of Greece. The old man's last lament is, (were we not already transported into a world of half-myth) unnecessarily devastating. "Even after death I shall have no peace. I who am destined to lead an army upon Greece."

So the old king and his wife are disposed of. They become heraldic figures, the cart or car or chariot, the team of bullocks, the dragon. Agave with some semblance of humanity, still appeals to our humanity. "O my father, wish me at your departure, happiness." "O unhappy child, be happy. But it is hard to conceive you thus." And at the last, Agave:

Take me,
my guardians
where I shall look upon
no,
no,