Short answers, pulled from the story.
Maenads were the female followers of Dionysus and the most significant members of his divine retinue, called the thiasus. The word translates as "raving ones," from the Greek verb meaning to rave and to rage. In mythology they ranged from Dionysus' earliest nurses in Nysa to the women who murdered King Pentheus of Thebes.
"Maenad" translates literally as "raving one," derived from the ancient Greek verb maínomai, meaning to rave, to be mad, to rage, and to be angry. In Roman mythology, the equivalent women were known as Bacchae, Bacchantes, and Bassarids, names tied to the Roman god Bacchus.
Bacchanalia centered on maniacal dancing to loud music and crashing cymbals, with participants called Bacchantes drinking wine and driving one another into ecstasy. The rites climaxed in sparagmos, the tearing apart of a bull with bare hands, followed by omophagia, the eating of raw flesh. Ancient writers understood this as sacramental: celebrants absorbed the god's character and became possessed by Dionysus.
King Pentheus of Thebes refuses to recognize the divinity of his cousin Dionysus, who responds by driving Pentheus' mother Agave insane. In Euripides' play The Bacchae, Dionysus lures Pentheus into the woods, where maenads tear him apart; Agave tears off his head, believing she has taken a lion.
The Tetovo Maenad is a small statuette of a maenad dated to the sixth century BC, discovered in Tetovo, North Macedonia, in 1932. Tetovo adopted the figure as its civic symbol, depicted on the city's coat of arms. In 1996, the image appeared on the reverse of a Macedonian 5000 denar banknote.
Maenads appear on red-figure and black-figure Greek pottery, statues, and jewelry, often shown running through forests and tearing animals apart. Fragments of reliefs showing female worshippers of Dionysus have been found at Corinth. Scholar Mark W. Edwards identified maenads on archaic pottery by their characteristic fawnskin garment, called a nebris, which distinguished them from the nymphs depicted on earlier vessels.