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Rh more clearly? Would it not have been wiser to do as my friend Sophocles has ever done, and view both gods and social relations with the eyes of the vulgar?" Unimpaired as his mental force must have been for him to write such a tragedy as "The Bacchanals," his bodily strength may have been touched by years. We are not told whether either of his wives accompanied him to Pella; if neither of them were with him, there was the less occasion for philosophy. Whatever the cause may have been, there is more faith than doubt or speculation to be found in this tragedy.

The action of "The Bacchanals" is laid in a remote age, and there is an Oriental quite as much as a Greek savour in the poetry. Cadmus, who has ceded the Theban sceptre to his grandson Pentheus, was by birth a Phœnician, not a Bœotian. He lived before the Greek Argo had rushed through the blue Symplegades to the Colchian strand. He is beyond recorded time; he "antiquates" common "antiquity." His intercourse with the gods has been intimate but not happy. Jupiter had taken a fancy to his sister Europa, and to one of his daughters—and by her, Semele, he is, though long unaware of it, grandfather to Bacchus.

When the play opens, all Thebes—its male population, at least—is perplexed in the extreme. The women are all gone mad: they are off to the mountains, and many of them have taken their children with them; for their customary suits they have donned fawn-skins; they brandish poles wreathed with ivy: shouting and singing, dancing and leaping, they scour the plains,