The picture of the women as they finally have taken possession of Cithæron is painted for Pentheus by a shepherd. Upon this passage and a few others in the play rests Mr. Symonds’s discriminating statement that “the ‘Bacchæ,’ like the ‘Birds,’ proves what otherwise we might have hardly known, that there lacked not Greeks for whom the ‘Tempest’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ would have been intelligible.” And for this magic not only Euripides’s brilliant fancy but also Mount Cithæron itself is responsible. “Our herded kine were moving in the dawn Up to the peaks, the grayest, coldest time, When the first rays steal earthward, and the rime Yields, when I saw three bands of them. The one Autonoë led, one Ino, one thine own Mother, Agave. There beneath the trees Sleeping they lay, like wild things flung at ease In the forest; one half sinking on a bed Of deep pine greenery; one with careless head Amid the fallen oak leaves; all most cold In purity—not as thy tale was told Of wine-cups and wild music and the chase For love amid the forest’s loneliness.” The lowing kine awake them and they gird on their dappled fawn-skins:— “Then they pressed Wreathed ivy round their brows, and oaken sprays And flowering bryony. And one would raise Her wand and smite the rock, and straight a jet Of quick bright water came. Another set Her thyrsus in the bosomed earth, and there Was red wine that the god sent up to her, A darkling fountain. And if any lips Sought whiter draughts, with dipping finger-tips They pressed the sod, and gushing from the ground Came springs of milk. And reed-wands ivy-crowned Ran with sweet honey, drop by drop.” The curse laid upon Cadmus destroyed all his daughters, and among his grandchildren not only Pentheus but also Actæon who, because he saw Artemis at her bath in one of Cithæron’s still pools, was torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs. Cadmus’s only son, Polydorus, and his son’s son, Labdacus, were strangely spared. Then once more Nemesis rose to the pursuit. The son of Labdacus was Laius, who was unwittingly murdered by his son, Œdipus, and the doom of Œdipus is the subject of the “Œdipus Tyrannus.”