“Oh, cleanse thee in the wands’ waving pride!
Yea, all men shall dance with us and pray,
When Bromios his companions shall guide
Hillward, ever hillward, where they stay,
The flock of the Believing,
The maids from loom and weaving
By the magic of his breath borne away.”
The picture of the women as they finally have taken possession of Cithæron is painted for Pentheus by a shepherd. Upon this passage and a few others in the play rests Mr. Symonds’s discriminating statement that “the ‘Bacchæ,’ like the ‘Birds,’ proves what otherwise we might have hardly known, that there lacked not Greeks for whom the ‘Tempest’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ would have been intelligible.” And for this magic not only Euripides’s brilliant fancy but also Mount Cithæron itself is responsible.
“Our herded kine were moving in the dawn
Up to the peaks, the grayest, coldest time,