PEN.  And wilt thou compel me to be effeminate?

BAC.  Ay, with such effeminacy.

PEN.  I lay mine hands to worthy things.

BAC.  You are terrible, terrible:  and you go to terrible sufferings; so that you shall find a renown reaching to heaven.  Spread out, O Agave, your hands, and ye, her sister, daughters of Cadmus!  I lead this young man to a mighty contest; and the conqueror shall be I and Bacchus!  The rest the matter itself will show.

CHOR.  Go, ye fleet hounds of madness, go to the mountain where the daughters of Cadmus hold their company; drive them raving against the frantic spy on the Maenads,—­him in woman’s attire.  First shall his mother from some smooth rock or paling, behold him in ambush; and she will cry out to the Maenads:  Who is this of the Cadmeans who has come to the mountain, the mountain, as a spy on us, who are on the mountain?  Io Bacchae!  Who brought him forth? for he was not born of the blood of women:  but, as to his race, he is either born of some lion, or of the Libyan Gorgons.  Let manifest justice go forth, let it go with sword in hand, slaying the godless, lawless, unjust, earth-born offspring of Echion through the throat; who, with wicked mind and unjust rage about your orgies, O Bacchus, and those of thy mother,[53] with raving heart and mad disposition proceeds as about to overcome an invincible deity by force.  To possess without pretext a wise understanding in respect to the Gods, and [a disposition] befitting mortals, is a life ever free from grief.  I joyfully hunt after wisdom, if apart from envy, but the other conduct is evidently ever great throughout life, directing one rightly the livelong day, to reverence things honorable.[54] Appear as a bull, or a many-headed dragon, or a fiery lion, to be seen.  Go, O Bacchus! cast a snare around the hunter of the Bacchae, with a smiling face falling upon the deadly crowd of the Maenads.

MESS.  O house, which wast formerly prosperous in Greece! house of the Sidonian old man, who sowed in the land the earth-born harvest of the dragon; how I lament for you, though a slave.  But still the [calamities] of their masters are a grief to good servants.

CHOR.  But what is the matter?  Tellest thou any news from the Bacchae?

MESS.  Pentheus is dead, the son of his father Echion.

CHOR.  O, king Bacchus! truly you appear a great God!

MESS.  How sayest thou?  Why do you say this?  Do you, O woman, delight at my master being unfortunate?

CHOR.  I, a foreigner, celebrate it in foreign strains; for no longer do I crouch in fear under my fetters.

MESS.  But do you think Thebes thus void of men?

CHOR.  Bacchus, Bacchus, not Thebes, has my allegiance.

MESS.  You, indeed may be pardoned; still, O woman, it is not right to rejoice at the misfortunes which have been brought to pass.

CHOR.  Tell me, say, by what fate is the wicked man doing wicked things dead, O man?