From toils like other men—nor dream, nor past
The foam of Acheron find my peace at last.”[[31]]
Pindar in his radiant vision of the future life beyond the foam of Acheron places Cadmus with Peleus in the company of the mighty dead who dwell at peace forever within the islands of the Blest. The earthly life of both heroes he uses to illustrate to Hieron, lord of Syracuse and Fortune’s favourite, the adage inherited from the men of old: “For every boon to men the gods deal double bane.”
“Blest with life secure was neither Peleus, son of Æacus, nor Cadmus, match of gods. And yet, ’tis said, of mortals all ’t was they who gained the highest bliss. For they could hear the golden-snooded Muses’ song, or on the mountain-side, or midst the seven gates of Thebes, when Cadmus took to wife large-eyed Harmonia and when the other wed the glorious Thetis, maiden child of Nereus. Gods shared with both their banquet, and they both beheld the sons of Cronos seated, kings on thrones of gold, and from them wedding gifts received, and Zeus’s grace requited them for former toil, uplifting high their hearts. Yet in the after-time sharp anguish of his daughters three robbed Cadmus of his share of joy. So too from him, whom as her only son immortal Thetis bare in Phthia unto Peleus, fled his life, by arrow sped in war.”
Pindar’s song of praise “flitting like a bee from tale to tale” paused often upon the legends of his “mother Thebes.” Among others he tells the story of Heracles’s birth at Thebes and of his speedy slaying, while yet in swaddling clothes, of monstrous snakes that approached his cradle. The most tragic episode of Heracles’s life, his madness and his murder of his children, also occurred at Thebes, according to the version of the legend used by Euripides in his drama of “The Mad Heracles.” But this play is of little poetic importance in comparison with the plays that deal with the curse-haunted house of Cadmus. Neither Euripides nor Sophocles, in their single extant experiments with the tragedy of Heracles, display the sympathetic genius which has given permanent value to the stories of Pentheus and Œdipus. The two plays, however, which rest upon these legends are famous for antipodal reasons. The “Œdipus Tyrannus” of Sophocles was selected by Aristotle as the most perfect specimen, in technical construction, of the Greek drama, and is treasured now as the model of what is most restrained, most profound yet clear, most “Hellenic” in Greek literature. The “Bacchæ” of Euripides, on the other hand, is more “un-Hellenic” than any play or poem that has come down to us, more resplendent in fancy, more wild in theme, more incomprehensible in purpose.
Pentheus was the son of Agave and the grandson and successor of Cadmus. But his fame was born of his futile conflict with another daughter’s greater son. Semele, loved by Zeus and at her own request visited by him in the full panoply of his splendour, had been consumed in the lightning’s fire, and her child Dionysus had been snatched from her womb by its divine father and hidden within his own thigh to issue in time as the strangest of all the gods. Popularly known as the “god of wine,” he was in reality a Lord of Many Voices, a Spirit of Guiding Fire, a Mountain Bull, a Snake of a Hundred Heads, a Master of the Voices of the Night, a Lover of Peace, a Giver of Good Gifts, a God, a Beast, a Mystery. His worship, originating among the gloomy Thracians and the mystical yet sensuous Orientals, was late in winning its place in cultivated Athens. Only with very great difficulty can we discover the threads of belief which made out of the newcomer a gracious lord of the vintage, a dispeller of care and teacher of mirth, a prophet, a guide in all the arts of civilization and, more mysteriously still, a suffering god, both redeemer and redeemed, a companion at Eleusis of Demeter and Persephone. Because, however, of the persistent clarity of the Greek imagination, the god now and again emerges from amid the chaos of functions and attributes in a concrete form of beauty. In the Homeric Hymn written in his praise he is a youth with dark hair and dark and smiling eyes standing on a headland that juts above the unharvested sea, while the ocean winds blow about his shoulders a purple robe. To Euripides he is—
“A man of charm and spell, from Lydian seas,
A head all gold and cloudy fragrancies,
A wine-red cheek, and eyes that hold the light
Of the very Cyprian.”