Disturbing the Sanctity of Ritual

Justice is living with the city inside yourself. In ancient Athens, the city was the community, and the community was the self. To act in accordance with justice was to act in accordance with the city, to consider needs other than your own, to avenge those who could not fight for themselves, to make laws of your own in the pursuit of virtue. In The Bacchae of Euripedes, Pentheus, ruler of Thebes, did nothing of the sort. Pentheus let his curiosity overtake his reason. Pentheus wanted more than he could have.

At the beginning of the tale, Dionysus returns to Thebes, drunk on wine and the desire to punish the insolent city-state for refusing to allow people to worship him. Pentheus is the culprit of such blasphemy, and Dionysus makes it his mission to both assert authority over Thebes and torture this grandson of Cadmus. When Pentheus arrests the mynaeds for their drunken cavorting, Dionysus allows himself to be arrested and taken with the others in disguise. A man of true hubris, Pentheus believes he has caught the seemingly delicate stranger. Soon after, a cowherd arrives and describes what these mynaeds are capable of. The women were resting blissfully in the forest, feasting on honey and milk and wine, dancing and playing music. But when they saw the cowherd, a man, someone who was not welcome, they flew into a murderous rage and chased after him. Though the cowherd escaped, the herd of cattle was captured and torn apart by the mynaeds.

Pentheus is overtaken by an inexplicable desire to see these women, to infringe upon their practices in pursuit of his own entertainment: “‘Wouldn’t you like to see them on the mountain? … ‘Yes, I’d give gold to see that’” (Euripedes 49). Having had a taste of such enjoyment, Pentheus wants more. Subject to the whims of Dionysus’ devious desires, he is willing to wear “a long dress, and a net for the long curls” (51). Even when he gets close enough to view these women, it’s not enough. He says to Dionysus, “‘Stranger… From where we are—I can’t make them out, the imposter Maenads. If I could climb a high pine on the cliff, I could see their shameless orgies’” (86). The mynaeds soon spot Pentheus, his mother Agave among them, though they do not recognize him for who he is. All they see is pure, unadulterated rage. Agave “was foaming at the mouth / Her eyes were rolling, wild; she was mad, utterly possessed by Bacchus” (70). The powerful women work to destroy Pentheus beyond recognition:

She took him by the arm… then she planted a foot against his ribs and tore his arm off… the rest of them, the whole horde od them, were swarming over him and everything by then was one horrifying scream” (70).

Pentheus wanted to be something more than human. He disturbed the sanctity of ritual. Consuming his desires in excess, he stuffed himself until his body no longer belonged to him. For that reason, he has committed the sin of gluttony; he must be sent to the third circle of hell.

To “understand that we are mortal is to live without insufferable pain,” but Pentheus failed to understand (64). It is only fitting then, that he should suffer eternally in Dante’s version of hell. Here, ““... the rain falls eternally, accursed, ponderous, cold… Thick knobs of hail, snow, water foul as ink pour down forever through the gloomy air and soak into the ground to make it stink” (Dante 55). Ciacco laments, “‘I am flattened by the rain,’” but Pentheus and others like him must be flattened in the wake of their attempt to grow larger than life (59). Just as his body was torn to shreds by the Mynaeds, Cerberus will use his paw-hands “clawed like hooks to snatch and skin and shred [his] soul to bits (55).

Pentheus’ gluttony serves as a cautionary tale to those that do not know their human limits. As he learned from Dionysus, and as Dante continues to learn from Virgil, one must revere the gods. If city is community, and community is god, there is only one true definition of justice: living with god inside yourself.