to the sails, with heavy clusters of berries.  A vine, laden with grapes, ran up the mast, and along the sides of the vessel.  The sound of flutes was heard and the odor of fragrant wine spread all around.  The god himself had a chaplet of vine leaves, and bore in his hand a spear wreathed with ivy.  Tigers crouched at his feet, and forms of lynxes and spotted panthers played around him.  The men were seized with terror or madness; some leaped overboard; others preparing to do the same beheld their companions in the water undergoing a change, their bodies becoming flattened and ending in a crooked tail.  One exclaimed, ‘What miracle is this!’ and as he spoke his mouth widened, his nostrils expanded, and scales covered all his body.  Another, endeavoring to pull the oar, felt his hands shrink up and presently to be no longer hands but fins; another, trying to raise his arms to a rope, found he had no arms, and curving his mutilated body, jumped into the sea.  What had been his legs became the two ends of a crescent-shaped tail.  The whole crew became dolphins and swam about the ship, now upon the surface, now under it, scattering the spray, and spouting the water from their broad nostrils.  Of twenty men I alone was left.  Trembling with fear, the god cheered me.  ‘Fear not,’ said he; ‘steer towards Naxos.’  I obeyed, and when we arrived there, I kindled the altars and celebrated the sacred rites of Bacchus.”

Pentheus here exclaimed, “We have wasted time enough on this silly story.  Take him away and have him executed without delay.”  Acetes was led away by the attendants and shut up fast in prison; but while they were getting ready the instruments of execution the prison doors came open of their own accord and the chains fell from his limbs, and when they looked for him he was nowhere to be found.

Pentheus would take no warning, but instead of sending others, determined to go himself to the scene of the solemnities.  The mountain Citheron was all alive with worshippers, and the cries of the Bacchanals resounded on every side.  The noise roused the anger of Pentheus as the sound of a trumpet does the fire of a war-horse.  He penetrated through the wood and reached an open space where the chief scene of the orgies met his eyes.  At the same moment the women saw him; and first among them his own mother, Agave, blinded by the god, cried out, “See there the wild boar, the hugest monster that prowls in these woods!  Come on, sisters!  I will be the first to strike the wild boar.”  The whole band rushed upon him, and while he now talks less arrogantly, now excuses himself, and now confesses his crime and implores pardon, they press upon him and wound him.  In vain he cries to his aunts to protect him from his mother.  Autonoe seized one arm, Ino the other, and between them he was torn to pieces, while his mother shouted, “Victory!  Victory! we have done it; the glory is ours!”

So the worship of Bacchus was established in Greece.