CHORUS

O Dionysus! Dionysus! Thebes

Hath o’er me now no power.

MESSENGER

’Tis pardonable, yet it is not well,

Woman, in others’ miseries to rejoice.

CHORUS

Tell me, then, by what fate died the unjust —

The man, the dark contriver of injustice?

MESSENGER

Therapnæ having left the Theban city,

And passed along Asopus’ winding shore,

We ’gan to climb Cithæron’s upward steep —

Pentheus and I (I waited on my lord),

And he that led us on our quest, the stranger —

And first we crept along a grassy glade,

With silent footsteps, and with silent tongues

Slow moving, as to see, not being seen.

There was a rock-walled glen, watered by a streamlet,

And shadowed o’er with pines; the Mænads there

Sate, all their hands busy with pleasant toil;

And some the leafy thyrsus, that its ivy

Had dropped away, were garlanding anew;

Like fillies some, unharnessed from the yoke;

Chanted alternate all the Bacchic hymn.

Ill-fated Pentheus, as he scarce could see

That womanly troop, spake thus: “Where we stand, stranger,

We see not well the unseemly Mænad dance:

But, mounting on a bank, or a tall tree,

Clearly shall I behold their deeds of shame.”

A wonder then I saw that stranger do.

He seized an ash-tree’s high heaven-reaching stem,

And dragged it down, dragged, dragged to the low earth;

And like a bow it bent. As a curved wheel

Becomes a circle in the turner’s lathe,

The stranger thus that mountain tree bent down

To the earth, a deed of more than mortal strength.

Then seating Pentheus on those ash-tree boughs,

Upward he let it rise, steadily, gently

Through his hands, careful lest it shake him off;

And slowly rose it upright to its height,

Bearing my master seated on its ridge.

There was he seen, rather than saw the Mænads,

More visible he could not be, seated aloft.

The stranger from our view had vanished quite.

Then from the heaven’s a voice, as it should seem

Dionysus, shouted loud, “Behold! I bring,

O maidens, him that you and me, our rites,

Our orgies laughed to scorn; now take your vengeance.”

And as he spake, a light of holy fire

Stood up, and blazed from earth straight up to heaven.

Silent the air, silent the verdant grove

Held its still leaves; no sound of living thing.

They, as their ears just caught the half-heard voice,

Stood up erect, and rolled their wondering eyes.

Again he shouted. But when Cadmus’ daughters

Heard manifest the god’s awakening voice,

Forth rushed they, fleeter than the wingéd dove,

Their nimble feet quick coursing up and down.

Agave first, his mother, then her kin,

The Mænads, down the torrents’ bed, in the grove,

From crag to crag they leaped, mad with the god.

And first with heavy stones they hurled at him,

Climbing a rock in front; the branches some

Of the ash-tree darted; some like javelins

Sent their sharp thyrsi through the sounding air,

Pentheus their mark: but yet they struck him not;