Homer is somewhat mysterious as to the end of Lycurgus—‘Not long in life was he.’ Sophocles[932] is more explicit, both as to his nationality and his doom. He is a Thracian king, son of Dryas, and he was ‘rock-entombed.’ When Antigone is going to her death the chorus sing how in like fashion others had been forced to bend beneath the yoke of the gods, Danae, Lycurgus, the sons of Phineus, Oreithyia—three of them Thracians; and of Lycurgus they tell: ‘He was bound by Dionysos, rock-entombed, Dryas’ son, Edonian king; swiftly bloomed His dire wrath and drooped. So was he wrought To know his blindness and what god he sought With gibes mad-tongued. Yea and he set his hand To stay the god-inspired band, To quell his women and his joyous fire And rouse the fluting Muses into ire.’ The loss of the Lycurgus trilogy of Aeschylus is hard to bear. One scene at least must have been something like a forecast of the _Bacchae_ of Euripides. The dialogue between Lycurgus and the stranger-god captured and brought into his presence, is parodied by Aristophanes in the _Thesmophoriazusae_ and the scholiast[933] tells us that the words: ‘Whence does the womanish creature come?’ occurred in the _Edonians_. Neither Homer nor Sophocles knew anything of the murder of the children. Who first piled up this fresh horror we do not know. Vase-paintings of the rather late red-figured style (middle of the fifth century B.C.) are our first sources. The punishment of sin was to the primitive mind always incomplete unless the offender was cut off with his whole family root and branch, and the murder of the children may have been an echo of the story of the mad Heracles. It is finely conceived on a red-figured krater[934]. On the obverse is the mad Lycurgus with his children dead and dying. He swings a double axe (βουπλήξ). The ‘ox-feller’ of Homer is probably a double axe, not a goad. It is the typical weapon of the Thracian, and with it the Thracian women regularly on vases slay Orpheus (p. 463). Through the air down upon Lycurgus swoops a winged demon of madness, probably Lyssa herself, and smites at the king with her pointed goad. To the left, behind a hill, a Maenad smites her timbrel in token of the presence of the god. On the reverse of the vase we have the peace of Dionysos who made all this madness. The god has sent his angel against Lycurgus, but no turmoil troubles him or his. About him his thiasos of Maenads and Satyrs seem to watch the scene, alert and interested but in perfect quiet.