shuts up in prison, and who appears on the stage with his delicate
limbs cruelly bound, but who is finally triumphant; Pentheus, the man
of grief, being torn to pieces by his own mother, in the judicial
madness sent upon her by the god. In this play, Euripides has only
taken one of many versions of the same story, in all of which
Dionysus is victorious, his enemy being torn to pieces by the sacred
women, or by wild horses, or dogs, or the fangs of cold; or the
maenad Ambrosia, whom he is supposed to pursue for purposes of lust,
suddenly becomes a vine, and binds him down to the earth
inextricably, in her serpentine coils.

In all these instances, then, Dionysus punishes his enemies by
repaying them in kind. But a deeper vein of poetry pauses at the
sorrow, and in the conflict does not too soon anticipate the final
triumph. It is Dionysus himself who exhausts these sufferings.
Hence, in many forms--reflexes of all the various phases of his
wintry existence--the image of Dionysus Zagreus, the Hunter--of
Dionysus in winter--storming wildly on the dark Thracian hills, from
which, like Ares and Boreas, he originally descends into [47] Greece;
the thought of the hunter concentrating into itself all men's
forebodings over the departure of the year at its richest, and the
death of all sweet things in the long-continued cold, when the sick
and the old and little children, gazing out morning after morning on
the dun sky, can hardly believe in the return any more of a bright
day. Or he is connected with the fears, the dangers and hardships of
the hunter himself, lost or slain sometimes, far from home, in the
dense woods of the mountains, as he seeks his meat so ardently;
becoming, in his chase, almost akin to the wild beasts--to the wolf,
who comes before us in the name of Lycurgus, one of his bitterest
enemies--and a phase, therefore, of his own personality, in the true