Pentheus

Pentheus belongs to the second generation of the Theban royal house. Apollodorus's Library says Cadmus married his daughter Agave to Echion, and that Pentheus was their son. In Euripides's Bacchae, Agave calls Echion "the sown man", one of the warriors who rose from the serpent's teeth. The sowing of those teeth is told in Cadmus and the Dragon. Apollodorus says Pentheus succeeded Cadmus as king, and in the Bacchae Cadmus himself says he gave him control of the land. That makes Pentheus a cousin of Dionysus, whose mother Semele was Agave's sister. The chorus of the Bacchae holds his descent against him. They call him earth-born, a fierce monster like a bloody giant, hostile to the gods.

The Bacchae opens with Dionysus arriving in Thebes in mortal form. His prologue says Pentheus fights against the gods, drives him from sacrifices and leaves him out of prayers. Pentheus comes home to find the women gone to the mountains. He calls the rites a pretext for wine and sex, jails the women he can catch, and threatens to behead the long-haired stranger who leads them. Tiresias and Cadmus, both dressed for the rites, urge him to accept the god. He orders the prophet's seat of augury torn down instead. He then has the disguised god arrested. The stranger walks free, the palace is shaken, and fire flares on Semele's tomb.

A herdsman reports what the Theban women do on Mount Cithaeron. They strike water, wine and milk from the ground and tear cattle apart with their bare hands. Pentheus calls out his army. The stranger offers another way: dress as a woman and watch in secret. Pentheus hesitates from shame, then agrees. Alone with the chorus, Dionysus says he will first drive the king out of his wits. He dresses him in a long robe and headband and puts a thyrsus in his hand. On the mountain the god bends a pine to the earth, seats Pentheus at its top and lets it rise. Then a voice calls on the maenads to punish the man who mocked the rites.

The women uproot the tree, and Pentheus falls. The messenger says Agave, as priestess, begins the slaughter. Pentheus tears off his headband and begs her to recognize her son. Possessed by the god, she does not. With her sisters Ino and Autonoe she tears him apart. Agave carries his head back to Thebes fixed on her thyrsus, believing it a lion's. Cadmus brings in the scattered body and slowly talks her back to her senses, until she sees whose head she holds. He mourns Pentheus as the hope of the house. Dionysus then appears, Agave goes into exile, and the god tells Cadmus that he and Harmonia will become serpents.

Ovid's Metamorphoses tells the story with different details. Pentheus mocks the blind Tiresias, who warns him he will be torn apart and his blood will stain his mother and her sisters unless he honours the new god. Pentheus calls on the Thebans to fight and orders the god's leader brought in chains. He cites Acrisius, who shut the gates of Argos against the god. Cadmus and Athamas try to restrain him, and their efforts only feed his rage. His servants bring back not the god but a follower, Acoetes. The captive tells how the god turned his own ship's crew into dolphins. Pentheus orders him tortured, but the chains fall away and the prison doors open by themselves.

Ovid's Pentheus then goes to Cithaeron himself, with no disguise and no guide. He stands on an open, treeless plain in the middle of the mountain. His mother sees him first, takes him for a boar and wounds him with her thyrsus. He begs his aunt Autonoe for mercy, in memory of her son Actaeon. She tears off his right arm, and Ino wrenches off the other. Agave holds up his head and cries victory. Ovid says the women of Thebes afterwards honour the new rites.

Theocritus's twenty-sixth Idyll gives a short version. Ino, Autonoe and Agave lead three bands of maenads and build altars to Semele and Dionysus. Pentheus watches from a high cliff, hidden in a lentisk bush. Autonoe sees him first, and the frenzied sisters chase him down. The poem ends by calling their act a deed not to be blamed, done at the god's behest. Apollodorus says only that Pentheus came to spy and that Agave, maddened, took him for a wild beast. Pausanias records a tradition at Corinth. The Pythian priestess told the Corinthians to find the tree Pentheus had climbed and worship it equally with the god. From it they made two wooden images of Dionysus, which Pausanias saw in their market-place, gilded except for their red-painted faces.