Pentheus

• 1. Introduction

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  Pentheus, king of Thebes in Greek mythology, met his end at the hands of his own mother. She carried his severed head on a stick back to the city, convinced she had killed a wild animal. Only when she met her father Cadmus did the recognition come. The story raises a question that has occupied audiences for thousands of years. What does it cost to refuse to acknowledge a force that cannot be imprisoned or controlled? Most of what survives of Pentheus comes through Euripides' tragic play The Bacchae. Other ancient writers reshaped the myth in their own ways. Both Dionysus and the blind seer Tiresias, the sources record, made a point of saying what the name Pentheus actually meant.

• 2. A Name Marked for Grief

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  Tiresias and Dionysus both treated the name Pentheus as a kind of forecast. It comes from the Greek word penthos, meaning sorrow or grief, particularly the grief caused by losing someone you love. The name seemed to have written his fate before he made a single choice.

  His grandfather Cadmus had founded the city of Thebes and taken the goddess Harmonia as his wife. His mother Agave was Cadmus's daughter. His father Echion was the wisest of the Spartoi, the warriors who sprang from the earth when Cadmus sowed the teeth of a slain dragon. His sister was Epeiros. When Cadmus grew old, he abdicated and passed the throne to Pentheus. Mount Cithaeron, the mountain above the city, would soon earn a place in everything that followed.

• 3. The Ban and Its Consequences

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  Dionysus was the son of Semele, who was Pentheus's aunt, making the god his cousin by blood. Pentheus banned his worship regardless. He forbade the women of Cadmeia from taking part in the god's rites. Dionysus responded by driving Pentheus's mother Agave, and his aunts Ino and Autonoë, into a Bacchic frenzy. Every woman in Thebes joined them and rushed up to Mount Cithaeron.

  Pentheus, rather than treating this as a warning, had Dionysus arrested. He believed the man was nothing more than a mortal follower of the cult. The chains fell off. The jail doors opened on their own.

• 4. The Lure and the Tree

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  Pentheus agreed to wear a woman's disguise and go spy on the worshippers outside the city. Dionysus had offered him this route. The king's own expectation of what he would find made him willing. He expected to witness sexual activity among those who had gathered. He climbed a tree to watch from above.

  The daughters of Cadmus spotted him in the tree. They did not recognize their king or their kinsman. They took him for a wild animal. The ritual that followed is known as the sparagmos, an act of tearing apart. They pulled him down and dismembered him with their hands.

  Agave, some accounts say, was the first to attack. She tore off her son's arm and then his head. Agave mounted the head on a stick and walked back to Thebes, believing she had made a successful hunt. When she met Cadmus, the recognition came. Pentheus was succeeded on the throne by his uncle Polydorus.

• 5. Other Tellers, Other Endings

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  Ovid took up the story in Book III of the Metamorphoses, departing from Euripides at several points. Tiresias delivers a direct warning to King Pentheus: "Your blood shall be poured out and defile the woods and your mother and her sisters." Pentheus dismisses him. As what Ovid calls "the dementia and the delirium of the new god" spreads through Thebes, Pentheus demands the arrest of Bacchus. His guards bring back the wrong man: a sailor named Acoetes of Maeonia.

  Acoetes confirms the divinity of Bacchus and tells what happened to his crew. They had tried to kidnap the young god, and Bacchus turned them into dolphins. When the guards attempt to shackle Acoetes, the chains fall off. In a rage, Pentheus charges through the woods himself and runs directly into a Bacchanalia. The worshippers, in their frenzy, take him for a boar. His mother is the first to spear him. The group then tears his flesh apart with their hands.

  The poet Oppian approached the story differently still. In his version, Dionysus's female followers asked the god to transform them into leopards. He granted the request and simultaneously transformed Pentheus into a bull. The leopards attacked and killed him. The myth proved durable enough to reach a Roman battlefield more than four centuries after Euripides wrote it.

• 6. A Head Across Centuries

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  Marcus Licinius Crassus, the Roman general and statesman, was defeated and killed at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC. The ancient historian Plutarch records that his severed head was sent to the Parthian emperor Orodes II. It was then used as a prop in a production of Euripides' The Bacchae, standing in for the head of Pentheus. A Roman military defeat had become the material for staging a Greek myth.

  In more recent times, a classical play in the Meitei language, also called Bacchae, carried the story forward with a different framing. In this version, Pentheus is not an individual king but a small community whose chances of survival are highly unpredictable and doubtful. The threat comes from developed countries, which the play casts in the role of Dionysus. Pentheus's family line extended further than most accounts follow: his son Menoeceus became the father of Creon and Jocasta, making Pentheus the great-grandfather of Oedipus.