Following the sad story of Echo and Narcissus, Ovid’s last myth in book 3 of his Metamorphoses returns to the Theban cycle and another prophecy from the blind seer Tiresias, leading to a grizzly murder. This opens with a two-line summary, where we’re told that one man scorned the gods and Tiresias: Pentheus, son of Echion, one of the founding Thebans born from the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus earlier in this book.

Pentheus mocks the seer for his blindness, in return for which Tiresias warns him that he would be better off blind. He then foretells that a new god, Bacchus, son of Semele, will soon arrive. If Pentheus refuses to worship him, then he’ll be torn apart limb from limb by his own mother and aunts.

As foreseen by Tiresias, Bacchus and his cult arrive shortly. Although everyone else is immediately engaged in his celebration and worship, Pentheus pours scorn on the new god and those rites. He warns that the city of Thebes could fall to an unarmed boy while its citizens engage in their Bacchic festivities.

Pentheus next orders his men to bring him Bacchus, but they return only with one of his followers. This captive is invited to tell his story before being put to death. Acoetes then describes his upbringing and career as a ship’s captain. On one journey, he put his ship in to Chios, where his crew found a young boy who seemed to be partly drunk and dazed. Against his better judgement, his crew brought the boy aboard the ship.

When the boy was fully awake he asked to be taken to Naxos, the same island on which Ariadne was abandoned by Theseus. Acoetes set course for that island, but the crew kept steering away from it. The ship then came to a grinding halt in the middle of the Mediterranean, and ivy grew rapidly over its oars, sails, and rigging. The crew, apart from the captain, leapt overboard, and were transformed into dolphins, leaving just Acoetes, whom Bacchus told to sail on to Naxos, where the captain joined the god’s cult.

Pentheus then orders Acoetes to be tortured until he dies. But while he awaits his death in a cell, the doors suddenly fly open, his shackles fall away, and he escapes unharmed. Pentheus decides to deal with this himself, and heads for Mount Cithaeron, where the Bacchic revels are taking place. He finds the worshippers in a clearing on the wooded slopes.

Among a background of ruins, perhaps painted by Clemente Spera in his final years, a broad assortment of largely naked people are immersed in their revelry and feasting in Alessandro Magnasco’s unusual Bacchanale (c 1720-30), also shown in detail below.

Several of the figures have clothing that appears blurred by their vigorous movement, others are splayed out on the ground in their inebriation, or struggling to ride animals. In the centre of this detail is Pan, half man and half goat.

Charles Gleyre’s Dance of the Bacchantes from 1849 is part of a re-interpretation of the rites, and follows the only modern European painting I have been able to identify that shows the death of Pentheus. Sadly, I’ve been unable to locate a usable image of that earlier work by Gleyre.

In 1896, Lovis Corinth revisited this theme in his Bacchanale.

As Pentheus gazes at the forbidden sight of the ‘mysteries’, he is seen. His own mother and her sisters mistake him for a boar, and immediately attack. He invokes the name of Actaeon in a desperate bid to stop the throng of bacchantes who attack him, and tries to run away, but it’s futile. His arms are torn off, then his head. Ovid ends the story with the lesson that the women of Thebes will honour Bacchus in those rites, and cannot be stopped.

This Attic red-figure lid for a cosmetics bowl, from about 450-425 BCE, shows Pentheus about to be torn apart, limb from limb, by Agave and Ino, his mother and aunt.

This fresco found in the ruins of one of the houses in Pompeii shows a similar scene, here with his mother and an aunt preparing to rip his arms off, another woman behind him about to throw a large rock, and two others wielding their thyrsi like clubs.

The only other paintings showing this sinister side of the cult as applied to Pentheus are those of the death of Orpheus.

Émile Lévy’s Death of Orpheus (1866) catches the moment before the first wound is inflicted: Orpheus has just been knocked to the ground, and looks stunned. Two bacchantes kneel by his side, one clasping his neck, the other about to bring the vicious blade of her ceremonial sickle down to cleave his neck open.

Orpheus was the great legendary musician, who shunned the worship of gods other than that of the sun. Early one morning, when he went to the oracle of Bacchus at Mount Pangaion to salute the rising sun, a group of bacchantes were enraged by his refusal to honour their god, and tore him to pieces.

There’s an interesting link to the history of Rome, when the cult of Bacchus and its ‘mysteries’ became a source of concern to its government. Around 186 BCE, nearly two centuries before Ovid’s prime, attempts were made to control or stop those practices. They don’t seem to have eliminated Bacchic cults or revels, but absorbed them better into society, perhaps the solution that Pentheus should have sought.