His height still baffled all their eager wrath.

There sat the wretch, helpless in his despair.

The oaken boughs, by lightning as struck off,

Roots torn from the earth, but with no iron wedge,

They hurled, but their wild labours all were vain.

Agave spake, “Come all, and stand around,

And grasp the tree, ye Mænads; soon we will seize

The beast that rides thereon. He will ne’er betray

The mysteries of our god.” A thousand hands

Were on the ash, and tore it from the earth:

And he that sat aloft, down, headlong, down

Fell to the ground, with thousand piteous shrieks,

Pentheus, for well he knew his end was near.

His mother first began the sacrifice,

And fell on him. His bonnet from his hair

He threw, that she might know and so not slay him,

The sad Agave. And he said, her cheek

Fondling, “I am thy child, thine own, my mother!

Pentheus, whom in Echion’s house you bare.

Have mercy on me, mother! For his sins,

Whatever be his sins, kill not thy son.”

She, foaming at the mouth, her rolling eyeballs

Whirling around, in her unreasoning reason,

By Bacchus all possessed, knew, heeded not.

She caught him in her arms, seized his right hand,

And, with her feet set on his shrinking side,

Tore out the shoulder — not with her own strength:

The god made easy that too cruel deed.

And Ino laboured on the other side,

Rending the flesh: Autonoe, all the rest,

Pressed fiercely on, and there was one wild din —

He groaning deep, while he had breath to groan,

They shouting triumph; and one bore an arm,

One a still-sandalled foot; and both his sides

Lay open, rent. Each in her bloody hand

Tossed wildly to and fro lost Pentheus’ limbs.

The trunk lay far aloof, ’neath the rough rocks

Part, part amid the forest’s thick-strewn leaves

Not easy to be found. The wretched head,

Which the mad mother, seizing in her hands

Had on a thyrsus fixed, she bore aloft

All o’er Cithæron, as a mountain lion’s,

Leading her sisters in their Maenad dance.

And she comes vaunting her ill-fated chase

Unto these walls, invoking Bacchus still,

Her fellow-hunter, partner in her prey,

Her triumph — triumph soon to end in tears!

I fled the sight of that dark tragedy,

Hastening, ere yet Agave reached the palace.

Oh! to be reverent, to adore the gods,

This is the noblest, wisest course of man,

Taking dread warning from this dire event.

CHORUS

Dance and sing

In Bacchic ring,

Shout, shout the fate, the fate of gloom,

Of Pentheus, from the dragon born;

He the woman’s garb hath worn,

Following the bull, the harbinger, that led him to his doom.

O ye Theban Bacchanals!

Attune ye now the hymn victorious,

The hymn all glorious,

To the tear, and to the groan!

Oh game of glory!

To bathe the hands besprent and gory,

In the blood of her own son.

But I behold Agave, Pentheus’ mother,