Dionysus comes from the East to defend his mother’s memory and to establish his worship in her city. Pentheus opposes him in spite of the wisdom of Cadmus and the warnings of the soothsayer Tiresias. The god constrains the women of Thebes, including Pentheus’s mother and her sisters, who long ago had tempted the young Semele to her destruction, to follow him to Mount Cithæron. Pentheus is then led to spy upon their revels. They take him for a wild beast and his own mother tears him to pieces. At the end, restored to an agonized reason, she becomes an exile from her home. Cadmus goes to his fate among the Illyrians. Dionysus is rapt from mortal sight in a cloud. It is a disputed question whether Euripides was moved to this portrayal of a cruel godhead by the subtlest impiety, or by a belated desire to be considered orthodox, or by a realization of the savage power that lies at the heart of life and cannot be gainsaid. At any rate he has woven into the plot the pathos of which he is master, in the reiterated suggestions of the tie between parent and child: the young god stirred to triumphant action by the memory of his dead mother; the living mother wildly bringing her son’s head in from the mountain, and calling upon him to come and glory in her lion-hunting; the old father deciding to lead his daughter back from the shadows of madness, even if the path of truth ends in grief and pain. And the whole nexus of religion, pathos, and inherited curse is spread before us in colours of flame. The play is pervaded by the dances and the songs of the Mænads who have followed Dionysus— “From Asia, from the dayspring that uprises,” and who irresistibly draw to their ranks the matrons and maidens of Thebes:— “All hail, O Thebes, thou nurse of Semele! With Semele’s wild ivy crown thy tresses, Oh, burst in bloom of wreathing bryony, Berries and leaves and flowers; Uplift the dark divine wand, The oak-wand and the pine-wand, And don thy fawn-skin, fringed in purity With fleecy white, like ours. “Oh, cleanse thee in the wands’ waving pride! Yea, all men shall dance with us and pray, When Bromios his companions shall guide Hillward, ever hillward, where they stay, The flock of the Believing, The maids from loom and weaving By the magic of his breath borne away.”