The followers of Dionysos..







This world is portrayed as a broken machine
A war between good and evil

Passion tempered by common sense
Informed by all that is rational and just

Dionysos
Will not be spoken of...

In words that make sense.
*

Euripides made it clear

Pentheus- King of all sadness...
Decrees solid virtue, and temperance

Cannot give the god the respect that is his due.

Thinks it a game to dress in women's clothes...
To spy on religious rites as if they were sport

Delusion and pure horror, 
Dionysos...

As Pentheus falls from his hiding place

Pain, his eternity.
*

"But she, the while, with foaming mouth and wildly rolling eyes, bereft of reason as she was, heeded him not; for the god possessed her.

And she caught his left hand in her grip, and planting her foot upon her victim's trunk she tore the shoulder from its socket, not of her own strength, but the god made it an easy task to her hands; and Ino set to work upon the other side, rending the flesh with Autonoe and all the eager host of Bacchanals; and one united cry arose, the victim's groans while yet he breathed, and their triumphant shouts. 

One would make an arm her prey, another a foot with the sandal on it; and his ribs were stripped of flesh by their rending nails; and each one with blood-dabbled hands was tossing Pentheus' limbs about. 

Scattered lies his corpse, part beneath the rugged rocks, and part amid the deep dark woods, no easy task to find; but his poor head hath his mother made her own, and fixing it upon the point of a thyrsus, as it had been a mountain lion's, she bears it through the midst of Cithaeron, having left her sisters with the Maenads at their rites. 

And she is entering these walls exulting in her hunting fraught with woe, calling on the Bacchic god her fellow-hunter who had helped her to triumph in a chase, where her only prize was tears". 




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