Pentheus

Who were Pentheus’ parents?

Pentheus’ mother was Agave, daughter of Cadmus, the founding hero of Thebes. His father was Echion, who was one of the spartoi—a race of men who emerged from the earth when Cadmus first established the kingdom of Thebes.

Why did Pentheus oppose Dionysus?

Pentheus was one of several mythical figures who opposed the cult of Dionysus. Despite being Dionysus’ cousin, Pentheus did not believe he was truly a god—perhaps because Dionysus’ mother was a mortal. In Euripides’ Bacchae, Pentheus sees Dionysus as a dangerous influence on the women of Thebes and thus outlaws his worship. 

By the end of the Bacchae, Dionysus has proven his divinity, but it is too late for Pentheus to repent: he is destroyed by Dionysus’ followers.

The Death of Pentheus

When Dionysus, the son of Zeus and the Theban princess Semele, came to Thebes to introduce his cult, he was given a rude welcome. His aunts (the sisters of his mother Semele) refused to acknowledge him as a god, while the Theban king Pentheus outlawed his worship.

Dionysus responded by driving his aunts and the other women of Thebes into a religious frenzy that took them out of their homes and into the mountains. He then came to Pentheus in disguise and convinced him to spy on these mad worshippers.

But Pentheus was caught by the women, who in their frenzied state mistook him for a wild animal and tore him apart. It was Agave, Pentheus’ own mother, who led the group in the killing. Only later did Agave realize what she had done—but by then Dionysus had already had his revenge.

Pronunciation

Other Names

Hecataeus, the earliest author known to have mentioned the figure of Pentheus, used the name “Tentheus” (Greek Τενθεύς, translit. Tentheús) rather than Pentheus.^[11]

Origins

There is a strong parallel between the myth of Pentheus and that of Lycurgus, a Thracian king who, like Pentheus, opposed the cult of Dionysus.^[15] Both men were punished for denying Dionysus and for suppressing his cult, and in both cases the punishment resulted in some form of madness. As a result, modern scholars have interpreted these myths as an expression of the tension between divine madness and human order.^[16]

Pentheus and Dionysus

The best-known literary account of the myth of Pentheus is Euripides’ Bacchae. According to this tragedy, Dionysus came to Thebes, the home of his mother Semele, to teach his rites to the Theban people. But his divinity was crudely dismissed by his mother’s sisters and by the reigning king, Pentheus.

To teach the people of Thebes a lesson, Dionysus goaded his aunts and the other women of the city into a wild, ecstatic frenzy. In this state, the women went to the mountains to celebrate the new god. This concerned Pentheus, who resolved to suppress the worship of Dionysus in Thebes.

For daring to oppose him, Dionysus devised a terrible punishment for Pentheus. According to Euripides’ play, the god came to Pentheus disguised as a devotee of Dionysus from Lydia. Pentheus, not recognizing the disguised Dionysus but still holding him responsible for the madness that had seized the women of his city, ordered him to be bound and imprisoned.

But Dionysus easily escaped Pentheus’ prison through a series of illusions: he caused Pentheus to bind a bull instead of himself, after which he made it seem like Pentheus’ palace was on fire. He even fashioned a phantom image of himself for Pentheus to pursue.

At last, Dionysus confronted Pentheus and convinced him to disguise himself as a woman in order to spy on the women’s rites in the mountains. Dionysus even helped Pentheus don this disguise and led him to the mountains himself. But the women quickly detected Pentheus and attacked him, mistaking him for a wild animal. With Pentheus’ own mother, Agave, leading the charge, the frenzied women tore Pentheus limb from limb.

Propping Pentheus’ head on her thyrsus (a kind of wand used in Dionysian rites), Agave returned to Thebes, boasting that she was bringing the head of a lion she had slain. Cadmus, however, understood what had happened and gently helped his daughter see her “prize” for what it really was—the head of her own son.

As Agave began to recover her sanity, Dionysus presented himself to the people of Thebes and explained that he had punished the royal family for failing to recognize his divinity. He then meted out further punishments, turning Cadmus and his wife Harmonia into snakes and commanding them to wander through Greece at the head of a barbarian army.^[17]

The myth of Pentheus was relatively consistent across most ancient texts, though some minor variations did exist. In some accounts, Pentheus conceived of the plan to spy on the maenads or Bacchae on his own, without Dionysus’ intervention.^[18] The animal for which Agave mistook Pentheus also varied: sometimes it was a lion, as in Euripides, but other authors had Agave see Pentheus as a boar,^[19] a bull,^[20] or a fawn.^[21]

In one tradition, Pentheus’ transformation was not merely an illusion. Rather, the daughters of Cadmus asked Dionysus to turn them into beasts of prey when Pentheus threatened them. Dionysus readily answered this prayer, turning the women into panthers and Pentheus into a bull. In these new forms, the daughters of Cadmus chased Pentheus down and tore him apart.^[22]

In another story, reported by the first-century BCE poet Parthenius, Pentheus’ mangled body was collected by his sister Epirus, who promptly left Thebes. When she came to the land then known as Chaonia, she buried her brother’s remains in a grove (later, when Epirus died, the land of Chaonia was renamed after her).^[23]