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As we begin the play, Euripides tells usthat Dionysus is angry.He,His divinity is not being fully recognizedand that makes him upset.The Olympians don't like it if we don'tfully recognize their divinity.That leads him to get started, in thisgroup at Thebes making sure that his ownpurview, his own world is going to receiveadmiration reverence from human beings.Dionysus compels the women to celebratehis rights, rights on Mount Cithaeron andthat begins, Pentheus is hostile to this.He doesn't like that this is happening,despite the fact that Cadmus and Tyresiusare both telling him it's okay.You should let this happen, it's a goodthing.Pentheus resists, and that resistance isgoing to prove his undoing.Euripides pushes the limits of tragedy byhaving Dionysus actually appear as a

character on stage.It's not the very first time in all oftragedy this has happened.We saw this with Aeschylus, in fact, withAthena and Apollo. but Dionysus has a, areally earthy kind of role here.He doesn't just sort of show up justembodied.He's a physical character in the playwho's achieving physical ends throughmanipulation and through, kind of, kind ofmind control when it comes to Pentheus.Dionysus causes Pantheus is to bind a bull

instead of him,Right?Pantheus was up to, wants to try to bindBacchus to, to prevent him from gettinginvolved out on, the hillside. But,Dionysus instead binds a bull and at thatpoint his disillusion kind of starts.there's an earthquake, lightning comes hiswhole palace falls down this is just inthe middle of the play, right?Where its working up. and the, the, wehear great conflagration as thingscollapse.

Pentheus is now very much disturbed, he'sreally unsure what's happening.A messenger comes in and talks about allthese women going bazerk out on thehillside.And then, Dionysus starts his kind of mindcontrol, gets inside of Pentheus's head,convinces him it will be a good idea tochange his own gender to go from being amale to becoming at least his outward

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appearance a female and go blend in withthose women out on the hillside.He then sets him up in a tree and has himspy on the rights that he sees.When he does, he is goes from being thespier to being the spiee, he gets seen.And when he does, his mother spots him aspotential quarry for a Dionysian backonedrevelry.They then grab him, rip his head off asthough they have the head of a lion, andtear him up as a living sacrifice in theway Dionysus likes.Argovae then bears the head to theives intriumphs.She thinks she's got a lion.Hooray for her.Cadmus's family then is banished fromThebes by Dionysus.Awful things because of the resistance ofPentheus come to be visited on this tribeat Thebes. Despite the involvement of,again, Cadmus and Pentheus or Cadmus andTiresias, trying to tell Pentheus that

this is going to be the right thing to do.Multiple themes here excuse me,Multiple themes important in the play.I'll just touch on a couple of them.First of all, there is a, Greek, adagethat is so famous, it's inscribed abovethe temple at Delphi, that says, nothingtoo much.Don't do anything to too strong of adegree.Pantheus's resistance to Dionysus'sworship is characterized here as somethingtoo much.

Dionysus is resisting too strongly.He sets himself up on a pedestal as thoughhis judgment is better than everyone elsearound him, even including people likeCadmus and [inaudible].Tiresias. Dionysus then takes this person,Pantheus, who's putting himself up on apedestal,And kind of does that for him by puttinghim up on the branches of a tree in frontof his own revelers.Now, when those revelers, the Bacchans,get an eye of this quarry up in a tree,

they grab and pull him down and rip himapart.His haughtiness then, is redefined as andrefigured as him being up in a tree andnow also becoming vulnerable.Standing out above everybody is going tomake him vulnerable.Another theme that's already kind of builtin to this treatment of a theme of nothingtoo much is the inversion of hunter and

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hunted.This comes up in Cadmus's familyregularly.It's true across the family.Actaeon is torn apart by his hunting dogs.Remember, we talked about, when we'retalking about the lineage of that existsin, among Cadmus's daughters.Ino was hunted down by her crazed husbandlike she's a quarry.Semele is emulated like an animalsacrifice, and then especially here,Pentheus is hunted down by his own motherand ripped apart as though he is a quarry,as though he is a beast.The hunter and hunted slippage that getsworked into this play is likely to be adeep working out of probably just asuggestion. But, I might suggest, a kindof anxiety that any hunting people wouldimagine.Bringing down a large mammal is not alwaysa happy thing.And you've got to imagine that humans

wonder when they do such a thing, is thisthe right kind of thing to do?The story of Dionysius here I think isintroducing us to the story of, andCadmus's family is introducing us to theongoing sense that when humans hunt, theyare doing something that could conceivablybe offensive. could be some kind of awfulthing.We realized that when we go from beinghunter to hunted we see the awfulness ofthe situation that we ourselves areengaged in.

Pentheus is physically dismembered, that'simportant for us to see. This disillusionof self such as we see, saw it inOedipus's play are, is here brought tovery graphic realization.The disillusion of his dismembered selfin, in the face of the utter strength ofthe god, Dionysus.