Met. The story continues with Pentheus giving orders to his henchmen to capture Bacchus, who is presently brought on stage (. from Lydia, in modern Turkey) to Thebes. Is he a con artist, a manipulative cult leader? The lives of Virgil (70–19 BCE) and Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE) overlap, but only during the latter’s youth. She became frenzied herself, and at once the others too became frenzied.

3.6.7 offers a summary of the tale (with attributions). By not understanding the message implicit in the embedded narrative, namely that Bacchus is a god who demands recognition and respect, Pentheus proves that he belongs among the latter. Pentheus’ character is delineated rather differently. As already noted, Euripides places special emphasis on Pentheus’ obsession with the sexual license he associates with the worship of Bacchus.

(i.e., for bakkhai) is maenads, "women in the throes Pentheus fled in terror and they pursued him, hitching up their robes into their belts, knee-high. There was, in fact, a tradition that presented Dionysus/Bacchus as a vigorous demigod who won a pla, Bacchus/Dionysus, god of wine, mystic ecstasy and theatre, is one of the oldest Greek divinities to leave a trace in our literary record: his name (. ) There are Pentheus’relatives who vainly attempt to bring him to his senses, chief among them his grandfather Cadmus (. ) But soon strange things were seen among them. 35This annotation, while not solving the riddle of Acoetes’ identity in the Metamorphoses account, offers some interesting insights into the metaliterary game of hide-and-seek being played here. purlieu (PERL-yoo). 53 John Henderson offers a valuable observation here: ‘Setting a hymn in a narrative context, which is precisely lacking in the “prayerbook” Homeric Hymn collection, dramatizes the nature of hymns as motivated “in the moment” vehicles for rhetorical intervention. , but he is never explicitly identified as Bacchus-in-disguise, as he is in the earlier text. For Euripides’ treatment, see e. g. There was, in fact, a tradition that presented Dionysus/Bacchus as a vigorous demigod who won a place in heaven through military conquest and the bestowal of benefits upon humankind (e.g.

But we do not get the god himself as a speaking character — at least not at the outset. Ovid calls him advena, and the attributes novus (‘new’) and ignotus (‘unknown’) are programmatic.78. 3Euripides begins his play with Bacchus’ arrival at Thebes and a detailed exposition of his world, carefully elaborated in the prologue (1–63, spoken by the god himself) and the chorus upon their entry onto the stage (64–169, sung by Lydian women). At this moment, Pentheus arrives back in Thebes, having been out of the country for a few days. 3.658–60), 40If Acoetes is indeed Bacchus, then there is an amusing double-entendre in his parenthetical remark that ‘no god is closer than he’ (nec enim praesentior illo | est deus), appended to an appeal to his own godhead for the veracity of his tale. He provides a fairly detailed autobiography, culminating in the narrative of the. 4This is the ‘classic’ account of Pentheus’ demise, but here as elsewhere, Ovid is in literary dialogue with multiple predecessors. In four surviving scripts — Sophocles’, — he unerringly predicts the tragic doom of his royal interlocutors (and perhaps even helps to move events along, since his predictions are typically met with suspicion, denial, or even wrath). 89 Cf. to convert the people there to his worship. 43By not featuring Bacchus (explicitly) as a protagonist in the Pentheusepisode, Ovid captures something important about the god: ‘Dionysus wants to be seen to be a god, to be manifest to mortals as a god, to make himself known, to reveal himself, to be known, recognized, understood… But Dionysus reveals himself by concealing himself, makes himself manifest by hiding himself from the eyes of all those who believe only in what they see’.94 In Ovid’s narrative, Bacchus’ presence is thus pervasive yet elusive: he (as it were) invites you to spot and capture the god in his text! 12Overall, then, in the Metamorphoses, as elsewhere, Tiresias presides over dramas of blindness (literal and mental) and insight, (royal) power and (divinely privileged) knowledge, concealing and revealing, riddling speech and hidden meanings (not least in contexts of sexual deviance).

Paul Roche. They sought to bound him with rude bonds, but these would not hold him, and the ropes fell far away from his hands and feet: and he sat with a smile in his dark eyes. When hunting, Acteon was torn limb from limb by his dogs on orders of the hunting goddess, Artemis, whom he beheld bathing naked.

Fl. But many of Tiresias’ most memorable appearances are in Attic drama, where his special insight into the workings of the universe ensured him a stellar career. This leads to the grim denouement, in which Bacchus distorts the perception of Pentheus’ mother Agave and her sisters, as well as the other Maenads, so that they misrecognize the disguised king as a wild beast which, in accordance with Bacchic rites, they proceed to tear limb from limb with their bare hands.

This deals with the initiation of a young boy into the mysteries of Dionysus, with the father giving the following account of Pentheus’ death and dismemberment: [10] Pentheus observed everything from a high rock, hidden in a mastic bush, a plant that grew in those parts. It's the vine-and-berries part that matters for Dionysus. Aka Bacchus (Bakkhos), Bromios ("Roarer"), "The Bull," Iacchus. From his first reaction to the exodus of Theban women, who quit their homes for the mountains in order to take part in Bacchic rites, to his later rather puerile desire illicitly to catch a glimpse of these same rites, the issues of sexual transgression and the concomitant violation of household stability dominate Pentheus’ imagination. the opening two lines of the set text. In certain respects his version of the horrific event bears closer resemblance to that of a poem included (probably wrongly) in the Theocritean corpus as Idyll 26. Pentheus was astonished and set out for Mount Cithaeron to spy on the rites of Father Liber…. Ovid highlights this principle at the very beginning of the Pentheus episode: Liber adest, festisque fremunt ululatibus agri:turba ruit, mixtaeque viris matresque nurusquevulgusque proceresque ignota ad sacra feruntur.(Met. In the, , by contrast, the god remains an enigmatic and elusive figure for. In Euripides, female (sexual) license is a major concern for Pentheus, and whereas Ovid plays down the importance of gender, his Pentheus too is beholden to a narrow set of martial and masculine values.72. The audience sees the front of the palace of Cadmus; somewhere Pentheus agrees to cross-dress and goes into the palace ruins to put on his outfit, which Dionysus helps him with. In any event, Virgil’s, became an instant ‘classic’ and is treated as such in the. Indeed, a suggestive feature of the set text is that Bacchus, arguably the episode’s most important character, has no explicit narrative presence. bacchanal.

Test. That Pentheus has come to the throne at a very young age is evident in Ovid’s as in Euripides’ account: see Comm. " Note that this is a name for Dionysus in Frogs. There, members of Acoetes’ crew kidnap a beautiful young boy who, according to Acoetes, turned out to be Bacchus (tum denique Bacchus | (Bacchus enim fuerat)…, 3.629–30). . 69 The following is based on Seidensticker (1972) 57–61. Pentheus, young king of Thebes, son of Agave, and cousin of Dionysus. The indiscriminate crowd that initially rushed to worship Bacchus has become a band of Maenads rushing upon Pentheus: ruit omnis in unum | turba furens (3.715–16). Given his ‘ambisextrous’ past, one can see why Jupiter and Juno turned to him as uniquely qualified to settle their ambrosia-induced quarrel over which of the two sexes derives more pleasure from the act of love-making. "Incommunicate" translates abakkheutos, which refers to anyone not yet initiated into the the mysteries (the secret aspects) of Dionysus worship. in which Pentheus was perched], and from the ground they tore it up, while he from his seat aloft came tumbling to the ground with lamentations long and loud; for well he knew his hour was come.

Term for a formally organized group of Dionysus' worshipers. 38Concerning the hymn narrative, Philip Hardie well observes that ‘as a god whose identity is founded on doubling, Bacchus has the space within himself to address a successful hymn to himself… (“Acoetes” speaks)’.88 If Bacchus hymns himself, as it were, then several places in the hymnic narrative, in which he refers to himself, sparkle with Dionysiac wit. The name of the supreme Olympian deity, the sky god and father ‘Zeus’ has cognates in other Indo-European languages.77 Many of the other divinities worshipped by the Greeks seem to have been imported from other cultures. The Bacchae will be enslaved. The defining emotion is wrath (ira). And all at once a vine spread out both ways along the top of the sail with many clusters hanging down from it, and a dark ivy-plant twined about the mast, blossoming with flowers, and with rich berries growing on it; and all the thole pins were covered with garlands. He is disguised as a charismatic young Asian holy man and is accompanied by his women votaries, Scattered lies his corpse, part beneath the rugged rocks, and part amid the deep dark woods, no easy task to find; but his mother has made his poor head her own, and fixing it upon the point of a thyrsus, as if it were a mountain lion’s, she bears it through the midst of Cithaeron, having left her sisters with the Maenads at their rites. Pieria is in a part of northern Greece called Macedonia. But the fact that Acoetes has the same narrative function as the disguised Euripidean god strongly suggests, by intertextual parallelism, that Acoetes is indeed Bacchus.

It has already been noted that Euripides makes fear of female sexual license, perceived as a threat to the patriarchal order of the city-state, one of the primary motivations for Pentheus’ resistance to the new cult. 62 Cf. it is I, your own son Pentheus, the child you bore in Echion’ s halls; have pity on me, mother dear! His exchanges with Pentheus culminate in the key scene in which the god convinces Pentheus to cross-dress as a woman so he can spy on the Maenads on Mount Cithaeron — a grave offense given that their rites were both secret and an exclusively female matter. Meanwhile, Dionysus has cunningly taken on human form, disguised as a priest of his own religion. Ovid also reports in the episode’s concluding verses that all the women of Thebes (designated Ismenides, after a local river) flock to Bacchus’altars to venerate his godhead (3.733–34). 91 Cf. In both Euripides’ play and Ovid’s epic, Pentheus is committed to preserving the status quo and unable to adjust to new situations.