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Writer's pictureTeam Dramaturg

The Daughters of Cadmus: Agave and Pentheus

Updated: Oct 6, 2019


The Short Version: Oedipus’ (and potentially Jocasta’s) ancestor is ritually dismembered on Mount Cithaeron by a group of women that include his own mother. Dionysus is responsible.



Ino’s story isn’t the last we see of Dionysus in Thebes, and his fate happens to intersect with the last daughter of Cadmus: Agave. Agave was married to one of the Spartoi, the men who sprang up from the earth, Echion, and with him had borne a son: Pentheus. Possibly doomed from the start due to the fact that his name literally means ‘grief’ or ‘suffering’, Pentheus was young, proud, controlling—

And King. Cadmus was an old man by this point, no longer fit for the duties of ruling the city he had raised from the earth, and so had handed over the crown to his all-too-willing grandson. Pentheus might have been a good king someday, with a little time and experience to weather him, round off those sharp edges, but time was something Cadmus’ grandson did not have.

News had been spreading of a new god, a wine-god, a madness-god, a god who sent women from their homes in a frenzy and brought celebration and bloodshed with him wherever he went. He was coming to Thebes, the rumors said, with a retinue of women he’d plucked from foreign parts. He said he was Semele’s son.

“Ridiculous,” said Cadmus’ daughters and Pentheus. “Semele lied, she said it was Zeus’ baby so Father wouldn’t throw her out! Whoever this ‘new god’ is, he’s no son of Zeus or of our sister. Some Eastern conjurer looking to prey on our women, no doubt.”

Pentheus banned the worship of the new god from the city. No Theban was to be heard uttering his name, burning offerings in his honor, and certainly not sneaking off to the wilds to celebrate whatever wild rituals he asked of them.

The god Dionysus, Pentheus’ cousin, Semele’s son, heard this. He saw the city of his birth, his mother’s own family, mocking her, rejecting him, dishonoring them both. And he was angry. He had been planning to return to Thebes after traveling the rest of the world, “Lydia where the earth bears gold…Phrygia, then the expanse of sunstruck Persia, walled Bactria and the dread land of the Medes, then across Arabia and fair Asia” (Bacchae, 13-17), a homecoming at long last. He would be welcomed by his family, worshipped, honored, loved by the family of the mother he never knew.

But, since apparently he had been very wrong about that, he had to make alternate plans. Pentheus was the problem, Pentheus would have to be the solution as well. But how to get his attention?

As it happens, ‘getting Pentheus’ attention’ took the form of every single woman in Thebes going mad, forsaking their homes, and, as a unit, fleeing to Mount Cithaeron to worship Dionysus in secret rituals at the god’s rather forceful behest. And ‘every single woman’ happened to include Pentheus’ mother Agave, a fact about which the young king of Thebes was not at all pleased. He had heard tell of a mysterious stranger at the head of this army of invading women, a man who dressed in women’s clothing and preached a strange gospel.

“Arrest him,” commanded Pentheus. “Him and the rest of his little cult following.” Accounts vary on the next events, but the most famous retelling is contained in Euripides’ Bacchae, wherein Pentheus is tempted up to Mount Cithaeron to spy upon the Theban Maenads by Dionysus himself. Disguised as one of them and dressed in women’s clothing, the angry god leads his cousin to his death on the mountainside---

At his own mother’s hands. Pentheus is violently, ritually dismembered by the Theban women, Agave first among them, not a mile from where Actaeon met the same fate by the teeth and claws of hounds. Agave walks those same hunting-trails back into Thebes with her son’s head clutched in her hands, still reeling from the madness Dionysus planted in her.

Cadmus discovers his daughter entering the city and manages to talk her down from her madness. As she laments over the torn-asunder corpse of her son, her hands still drenched in his blood, Dionysus appears once more, not bothering with the shell of a mortal form he had worn earlier. The god, fully revealed, lashes out one last time at the family that rejected him and banishes Cadmus and Agave from their own home, driving them into exile with a divine decree. Agave cannot stay, he says, polluted as she is with the murder of a kinsman. His punishment delivered, his victory achieved and his godhood thoroughly asserted, Dionysus (who is now, technically, the King of Thebes, in accordance with the line of succession) departs.

Fresco from the wall of the Casa dei Vettii in Pompeii, 1st century AD.

But it is Cadmus who receives the strangest fate. Reasons why Cadmus suffers as he does vary from telling to telling, but one thing remains consistent. Cadmus, Prince of Sidon, son of Agenor, Founder of Thebes, is transformed into a snake at the end of his life, a final balancing of the scales for the Sower of Dragon’s Teeth. To build his greatest achievement, a serpent was slain. Now, to pay back whatever cosmic forces allowed Thebes to stand, Cadmus himself (and in some tellings, Harmonia his wife as well) becomes the serpent in turn.


-Emma

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