I myself will go off to the folds of Kithairon, where the Bacchae are, and will join in their khoroi. 55 My sacred band, you women who have left Tmolos, the bulwark of Lydia, whom I have brought from among the barbarians as assistants and companions for myself, raise up your kettle-drums, the native instruments of the polis of the Phrygians, the invention of mother Rhea and myself, 60 and going about the palace of Pentheus beat them, so that Kadmos’ polis might see. For these reasons I have assumed a mortal form, altering my shape into the nature of a man. But if ever the polis of Thebes should in anger seek to drive the Bacchae down from the mountains with arms, I, leading on my Maenads, will join battle with them.

And when I have arranged the situation here to my satisfaction I will move on to another land, 50 revealing myself. For which reasons I will show him and all the Thebans that I am a god.

Kadmos then gave his office and his tyranny to Pentheus, his daughter’s son, 45 who fights against the gods in my person and drives me away from treaties, never making mention of me in his prayers. It is necessary that this polis learn, even though it should not wish to, 40 that it is not an initiate into my Bacchic rites, and that I plead the case of my mother, Semele, in making myself manifest to mortals as a daimōn, whom she bore to Zeus. All the female offspring of the house of Kadmos, 35 as many as are women, I have made to leave the house with madness, and they, mingled with the sons of Kadmos, sit on roofless rocks beneath green pines. Therefore have I driven them from the house with frenzy, and they dwell in the mountains, out of their phrenes and I have given them the compulsion to wear the outfit of my mysteries. For my mother’s sisters-the very ones for whom it was least becoming-claimed that I was not the child of Zeus, but that Semele had conceived a child from a mortal father and then blamed her sexual misconduct on Zeus, 30 Kadmos’ plot, for which reason they claim that Zeus killed her, because she had told a false tale about her marriage. 20 In Hellenic territory I have come here to Thebes first, having already established my khoroi and mysteries in those other lands so that I might be a daimōn manifest among mortals, and have raised my cry here, fitting a fawn-skin to my body and 25 taking a thyrsos in my hand, a dart of ivy.

I have left the rich lands of the Lydians and Phrygians, the sunny plains of the Persians, and 15 the walls of Bactria, passing over the harsh land of the Medes, and fertile Arabia, and all of Asia which lies along the coast of the sea, its beautifully-towered cities replete with a mixture of Hellenes and barbarians.

The bacchae