The distinguishing feature of all Dionysiac worship was the frenzied raving of its votaries. Women especially were mastered by the strange desire to join in the revels, and, since the intellectualized life of Athens was hostile to insane manifestations of religious fervor, Athenian women made frequent pilgrimages to places where the wildness of nature welcomed the wildness in the heart of man. We have already seen them travelling to the uplands of Parnassus. Mount Cithæron was another favourite gathering place. The women in Aristophanes’s “Thesmophoriazusæ” cry aloud:—
“Sing, evoë! and sing again,
Shout for Bacchus the glad refrain.
Cithæron echoes around thee, hark!
And the mountain coverts green and dark,
And a roaring comes floating adown, between,
Through bosky gorge and rocky ravine.”
Perhaps the most adventurous would sometimes make their way to the bleak hills near Pella, the capital of Macedonia, where queen and peasant met in Bacchic excesses. Euripides spent the last years of his life at Pella, and it has been thought that there he conceived the idea of writing a play to portray Dionysus’s triumphal entrance into Thebes against the will of Pentheus. Be this as it may, certainly Thebes and Cithæron are more than a perfunctory mise-en-scène for the “Bacchæ.” In no other Greek play is the reader so conscious of the presence of landscape.
Dionysus comes from the East to defend his mother’s memory and to establish his worship in her city. Pentheus opposes him in spite of the wisdom of Cadmus and the warnings of the soothsayer Tiresias. The god constrains the women of Thebes, including Pentheus’s mother and her sisters, who long ago had tempted the young Semele to her destruction, to follow him to Mount Cithæron. Pentheus is then led to spy upon their revels. They take him for a wild beast and his own mother tears him to pieces. At the end, restored to an agonized reason, she becomes an exile from her home. Cadmus goes to his fate among the Illyrians. Dionysus is rapt from mortal sight in a cloud. It is a disputed question whether Euripides was moved to this portrayal of a cruel godhead by the subtlest impiety, or by a belated desire to be considered orthodox, or by a realization of the savage power that lies at the heart of life and cannot be gainsaid. At any rate he has woven into the plot the pathos of which he is master, in the reiterated suggestions of the tie between parent and child: the young god stirred to triumphant action by the memory of his dead mother; the living mother wildly bringing her son’s head in from the mountain, and calling upon him to come and glory in her lion-hunting; the old father deciding to lead his daughter back from the shadows of madness, even if the path of truth ends in grief and pain. And the whole nexus of religion, pathos, and inherited curse is spread before us in colours of flame.
The play is pervaded by the dances and the songs of the Mænads who have followed Dionysus—