The Myth of Pentheus and Dionysus

At a Glance

• Central figures: Pentheus, king of Thebes and grandson of Cadmus; Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy, son of Zeus and the mortal Semele; and Agaue, Pentheus’s mother and a devotee of the Bacchic rites.
• Setting: Thebes and the mountains outside it, in the mythological age when Dionysus first came to spread his cult in Greece; the story is best known from Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae.
• The turn: Dionysus tricks Pentheus into dressing as a woman and climbing into the mountains to spy on the Bacchae, delivering him directly into their hands.
• The outcome: The Bacchae, driven to divine madness, mistake Pentheus for a wild animal and tear him apart; his own mother Agaue carries his head back to Thebes, not yet knowing whose it is.
• The legacy: Agaue’s recognition of what she has done - and the complete destruction of Pentheus’s house - stands as the consequence that endures from Thebes’s refusal to receive Dionysus as a god.

Pentheus was king of Thebes, grandson of Cadmus who had sown the dragon’s teeth and raised the city from the earth. He had inherited both the throne and a certain stiff-spined certainty about the proper order of things. When word reached him that a new god had arrived in Thebes - a young man, foreign-seeming, with long hair and a following of women who had left their homes and gone shrieking into the mountains - Pentheus did not send offerings. He sent soldiers.

The god was Dionysus, child of Zeus and the Theban princess Semele. His birth had been extraordinary even by Olympian standards: Semele, tricked by Hera, had asked Zeus to reveal himself in his true form, and the lightning killed her where she stood. Zeus pulled the unborn child from her body and sewed him into his own thigh until the time came. From that strange gestation Dionysus arrived in the world, twice-born, carrying in himself both the mortal blood of Semele and something older and wilder than any Olympian. He had come to Thebes because it was his mother’s city, and because the city had not yet acknowledged him.

The God in Chains

Pentheus had Dionysus brought before him in chains. The god had taken on a mortal form - a young priest, serene, hair dark, eyes the color of wine - and Pentheus looked him up and down with the contempt of a man who has already decided what he is seeing. The Bacchae, Pentheus declared, were women engaging in drunkenness and indecency in the hills; their supposed god was a fraud; the whole business would be ended. Tiresias the blind prophet came to warn him. Cadmus, his own grandfather, came to warn him. Pentheus listened to neither.

The god said little. He was escorted to a cell beneath the palace.

The chains fell off. The cell door opened on its own. Dionysus walked back into the courtyard and found Pentheus there, furious, reorganizing his guard. The god stood in the sunlight and waited for the king to notice him.

This is the moment, in Euripides’ telling, where Thebes begins to come apart. Not the death in the mountains - that comes later. The undoing begins here, when Pentheus stares at a man who has just escaped his prison without effort and chooses, again, not to believe.

The Bacchae in the Mountains

Outside the walls, the women of Thebes were doing things that troubled the shepherds who watched them. Agaue was among them - Pentheus’s own mother, Cadmus’s daughter, a woman who in ordinary life would have presided over the household with appropriate dignity. Here she was in the hills with her hair down, moving with the others in the rites of Dionysus. The god’s madness, mania, had come upon them, and under it they were not themselves in any way Pentheus would have recognized.

The Bacchae, the maenads, could nurse wild animals as if they were infants. They struck their thyrsus staffs against rock and water sprang out. They pulled animals apart with their bare hands and were not marked by the blood. Shepherds who tried to seize them found themselves driven off by the women without weapons. The god’s power ran through them like a current, and it did not distinguish between a shepherd who had wandered too close and a lion that had crossed their path.

Pentheus heard reports of all this and grew angrier. He spoke of marching an army into the mountains.

Women’s Dress and a High Pine

Dionysus came to him again - still calm, still apparently mortal - and proposed something else. If Pentheus wanted to see the Bacchae, truly see them and understand what he was dealing with, he should go in disguise. A dress. The robes of a woman. He could observe from a distance without being detected.

Something shifted in Pentheus then. Whether it was the god’s power working on his mind or some suppressed fascination in the man himself, he agreed. He let Dionysus dress him. He stood still while the god adjusted his hair and settled the robes around his shoulders and tilted his head to examine the effect. The man who had declared all this foreign madness beneath contempt stood dressed as a Bacchant and let the god lead him out of the city.

They went into the mountains. Dionysus settled Pentheus in the high branches of a tall pine where he could see down into the valley where the women danced. He pointed him out to the Bacchae.

There, Dionysus said. There he is.

Agaue’s Kill

The madness showed them a lion. That is the tradition: the god altered what they saw, so that when the Bacchae looked up at the pine and saw the figure crouching in the branches, they saw a great predator, a beast that had been watching them, and they moved on it with the certainty of hunters who have sighted their quarry.

Pentheus fell from the tree when they pulled at the branches. He hit the ground and the madness was still on them. Agaue reached him first. Her son looked up at her and spoke - the accounts vary on what he said, whether he called her name or begged or simply looked at her - and she did not know him. She took his head.

She carried it back down the mountain holding it by the hair, believing she had done something magnificent. She walked through the streets of Thebes with it raised. She called for Cadmus, her father, and asked him to come see what his daughter had hunted.

Cadmus came. He had heard what had happened in the mountains. He looked at what his daughter was holding and he did not answer her immediately. He asked her, carefully, whose hands those were. Whose shoulders. What animal, exactly, she believed she was carrying.

The mania lifted as he spoke. Agaue looked. She understood.

The Ruins of Cadmus’s House

There is nothing after that point that functions as a resolution. Dionysus appeared and pronounced sentence: Cadmus and his wife Harmonia would be transformed and driven from Thebes; Agaue and her sisters, who had doubted Semele’s story of divine conception and helped set this chain in motion, would go into exile. The city that had refused to receive the god had paid the price the god demanded, and the price was total.

Pentheus died in pieces in a mountain valley, unrecognized by his own mother. Thebes, the city Cadmus had raised from sown teeth and dragon’s blood, stood intact but hollowed. Cadmus, the founder, went into the east and became something other than a man. Agaue went into exile with the knowledge of what her hands had done.

Dionysus moved on to the next city.