‘Sing, Muses, sing to me a story of Olympus and the deathless gods who govern earth, sea and sky.’
So begs Cadmus, once king of Thebes.
Many years have passed since he ruled the city, and he is reluctant to seat the gleaming throne. How many memories are cast, weathered and scored into its bronze. But this is an emergency.
Cadmus’s successor – his grandson, stubborn Pentheus – is missing.
‘What good can come from quarrelling with a god?’ Cadmus had argued with him. But Pentheus merely answered with a scoff, his jaw set – obstinate to the last.
Under the cover of a poacher’s moon, Pentheus snuck out of the city, hooded and cloaked. He was heading for the forest, following the flickering torches held by the revellers of Dionysus, following his mother – Queen Agave.
And now, as the rosy fingers of dawn pry their way into the palace halls, Pentheus still has not returned.
There is a baleful creak. The palace doors are drawn open, and a figure stands upon the threshold. Hair matted. Clothes ripped. Body bruised and bleeding.
It is Queen Agave.
She holds a sodden sack at her side, blood dripping upon the flagstones.
‘We were attacked during the rituals,’ Agave shouts, eyes wild. ‘A monstrous boar met us with a snarl, its tusks set. We would have been killed were it not for Dionysus. He gave us the strength to defend ourselves.’
She is … proud; in her eagerness to explain, she trips over her words. And when the bleeding sack slips from her fingers – a sickening splatter – Agave smiles.
But what of Pentheus, Cadmus asks. Did Agave see her son? Was he harmed in the boar’s attack?
It is not Agave who answers. It is the Muses.
‘The Bacchic rituals are sacred,’ they sing. ‘No man – no king – can disturb them. Especially not one who has denied the divinity of Dionysus, god of wine and wild things.’
The Muses story opens with drum and flute, stamping foot and raucous howl. The sounds of revelry fill the forests about Thebes, lapping against the city walls like waves against the shore.
It is from those battlements that stubborn Pentheus watches in horror. A sickness, that is what he believes has taken hold among the women of his city – matron, daughter, wife, sister, mother. It is no ordinary fever. Its symptoms are vice and depravity, lust and debauchery. It is Dionysus’s bacchanalia.
Pentheus has tried to outlaw it. He has forbidden any worship of the reveller god. He has driven out priests, imposed curfews and set guards upon the gates. He has even recalled his grandfather Cadmus, once king of Thebes, for advice. But it is to no avail. Hidden tunnels, secret paths, old magic – somehow the women of the city continue to escape. They return by dawn dirtied, dishevelled, bloodied – all unwilling, unable even, to speak of Dionysus’s rituals and delights.
And then one morning, Pentheus’s spies his own mother, Queen Agave, among those to return.
It is an outrage too great.
So, in his rage, stubborn Pentheus dares blasphemy: he denies Dionysus’s divinity.
‘No deathless god would provoke such depravity. Only a man,’ Pentheus spits. ‘He is no more a god than I.’
After all, are they not cousins – Pentheus and Dionysus? Do they not share divine blood? Through his grandmother, Harmonia, Pentheus is a descendant of Ares – a trueborn son of Zeus. Dionysus is merely the baseborn consequence of Zeus’s fancies with Semele – Agave’s sister.
‘He is a bastard without a seat upon Olympus, while I sit the throne of Thebes,’ Pentheus rails. ‘I will unmask his rituals and show they are nothing more than mortal deviance.’
His grandfather Cadmus can only plead. Ignored. Unheard.
Pentheus slips from tree to tree, just another shadow flickering in the wake of the bacchants’ torches. There is no sense of urgency among them. They stop to pick the caps of mushrooms or scrape bursts of lichen from the trunks, all the while laughing, dancing. Highborn and lowborn alike.
Eventually they come to a small glade, a pyre burning at its heart. There will be little hiding in its glare, so Pentheus climbs to the canopy of one of the great oaks. From its height, he can watch the whole ritual. Thebes whispers with stories of the sacrifices made to Dionysus, but Pentheus sees no priest who would wield the bronze blade, no animal to be slain, no one who would divide the mortal portion of meat from the deathless portion of bone, and cook it all upon the flame.
He sees only drink and debauchery. He sees only bared flesh and loose hair. Mortal excess.
‘Is it not to your liking, O King?’ A creaking voice, close and quiet.
Pentheus’s eyes are drawn from the delirium below to a delirium beside: a knot in the branch beside him has twisted into a mouth, cracked lips of bark and a green leaf tongue.
‘You would deny my godhood – I, Dionysus, god of wine and wild things. But don’t you see it down there? I am giving the women of Thebes a taste of divinity. To be deathless is to live a life without limit, to embrace excess. So, let me show you the crucial difference between me, an immortal god, and you, Pentheus, a mortal man.’
A deafening crack.
The mouth widens, a creaking grin that splits the branch in two. And Pentheus falls in a rain of splintered wood and falling leaves.
The drums die. The flutes whistle out. All the women are silent.
As Pentheus picks himself up, he locks eyes with the nearest, and it is his mother, Queen Agave. She struggles to focus on him – like he is another shape. Then one of the falling leaves catches a breeze, lingering by her ear with a whisper.
And Agave’s eyes go wide with that most fatal intoxicant – bloodlust.
‘A boar!’ she screams. ‘Kill the boar.’
The Muses can barely bring their story to a close before Queen Agave screams again. She is on her knees, cradling the sack she had dropped upon the palace floor. It is so slick and swollen with blood that she struggles to loosen the ties. She almost rips the fabric apart.
The contents are dirtied, dishevelled, bloodied, but it is no matter – Cadmus, once king of Thebes, still recognises the set of his grandson’s jaw.
Even in death, Pentheus remains stubborn.
Commissioned by HistoryHit for The Ancients podcast
Written by Andrew Hulse