“A man of charm and spell, from Lydian seas, A head all gold and cloudy fragrancies, A wine-red cheek, and eyes that hold the light Of the very Cyprian.” The distinguishing feature of all Dionysiac worship was the frenzied raving of its votaries. Women especially were mastered by the strange desire to join in the revels, and, since the intellectualized life of Athens was hostile to insane manifestations of religious fervor, Athenian women made frequent pilgrimages to places where the wildness of nature welcomed the wildness in the heart of man. We have already seen them travelling to the uplands of Parnassus. Mount Cithæron was another favourite gathering place. The women in Aristophanes’s “Thesmophoriazusæ” cry aloud:— “Sing, evoë! and sing again, Shout for Bacchus the glad refrain. Cithæron echoes around thee, hark! And the mountain coverts green and dark, And a roaring comes floating adown, between, Through bosky gorge and rocky ravine.” Perhaps the most adventurous would sometimes make their way to the bleak hills near Pella, the capital of Macedonia, where queen and peasant met in Bacchic excesses. Euripides spent the last years of his life at Pella, and it has been thought that there he conceived the idea of writing a play to portray Dionysus’s triumphal entrance into Thebes against the will of Pentheus. Be this as it may, certainly Thebes and Cithæron are more than a perfunctory _mise-en-scène_ for the “Bacchæ.” In no other Greek play is the reader so conscious of the presence of landscape.