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84 field of the marvellous and the supernatural, and builds his drama on the subject of the introduction of a new faith, and the awful punishment of the sceptical Pentheus, who jeers at the worship of Dionysus, and endeavours to put it down by force. His mother, Agave, and his sisters, are driven into Mount Kithæron, where they celebrate the wild orgies of the god with many attendant miracles, Pentheus, who at first attempts to imprison the incarnate god, and then to put down the Bacchanals by force of arms, is deprived of reason by Dionysus. He is then made ridiculous by being dressed as a woman, and led out by the god to the mountain, where he is caught watching the Mænads from the top of a pine-tree on which Dionysus had placed him, and torn to pieces by the women of his own family. The lament of Agave, when she comes in with the bleeding head, which she had mistaken in her frenzy for a lion's, but recognises with returning sense, is now lost. But its main features can be restored from the rhetor Apsines, and from the corresponding passage in the religious drama called Christus Patiens, ascribed to Gregory of Nazianzen. For this play follows the Bacchæ closely, being little more than a cento from it. Hence, Dean Milman, in his admirable translation of the Bacchæ, has inserted the lament from the Christian play. The chorus does not consist of the furious Theban Mænads, but of Asiatic attendants on the god, who sing in splendid hymns the joys and blessings of the new faith. It is of course undramatic, that Pentheus, who is proceeding so violently against the votaries of the new religion, should leave this chorus to sing its dithyrambs in peace; but ordinary possibilities must often be violated for such a stage difficulty as an ever-present chorus.

The general tenor of the play, which perhaps contains the poet's latest reflections on human life, is that of acquiescence in the received faith, or in a well-attested faith, without sceptical doubts and