Pindar’s song of praise “flitting like a bee from tale to tale” paused often upon the legends of his “mother Thebes.” Among others he tells the story of Heracles’s birth at Thebes and of his speedy slaying, while yet in swaddling clothes, of monstrous snakes that approached his cradle. The most tragic episode of Heracles’s life, his madness and his murder of his children, also occurred at Thebes, according to the version of the legend used by Euripides in his drama of “The Mad Heracles.” But this play is of little poetic importance in comparison with the plays that deal with the curse-haunted house of Cadmus. Neither Euripides nor Sophocles, in their single extant experiments with the tragedy of Heracles, display the sympathetic genius which has given permanent value to the stories of Pentheus and Œdipus. The two plays, however, which rest upon these legends are famous for antipodal reasons. The “Œdipus Tyrannus” of Sophocles was selected by Aristotle as the most perfect specimen, in technical construction, of the Greek drama, and is treasured now as the model of what is most restrained, most profound yet clear, most “Hellenic” in Greek literature. The “Bacchæ” of Euripides, on the other hand, is more “un-Hellenic” than any play or poem that has come down to us, more resplendent in fancy, more wild in theme, more incomprehensible in purpose. Pentheus was the son of Agave and the grandson and successor of Cadmus. But his fame was born of his futile conflict with another daughter’s greater son. Semele, loved by Zeus and at her own request visited by him in the full panoply of his splendour, had been consumed in the lightning’s fire, and her child Dionysus had been snatched from her womb by its divine father and hidden within his own thigh to issue in time as the strangest of all the gods. Popularly known as the “god of wine,” he was in reality a Lord of Many Voices, a Spirit of Guiding Fire, a Mountain Bull, a Snake of a Hundred Heads, a Master of the Voices of the Night, a Lover of Peace, a Giver of Good Gifts, a God, a Beast, a Mystery. His worship, originating among the gloomy Thracians and the mystical yet sensuous Orientals, was late in winning its place in cultivated Athens. Only with very great difficulty can we discover the threads of belief which made out of the newcomer a gracious lord of the vintage, a dispeller of care and teacher of mirth, a prophet, a guide in all the arts of civilization and, more mysteriously still, a suffering god, both redeemer and redeemed, a companion at Eleusis of Demeter and Persephone. Because, however, of the persistent clarity of the Greek imagination, the god now and again emerges from amid the chaos of functions and attributes in a concrete form of beauty. In the Homeric Hymn written in his praise he is a youth with dark hair and dark and smiling eyes standing on a headland that juts above the unharvested sea, while the ocean winds blow about his shoulders a purple robe. To Euripides he is—