Pentheus their mark; but yet they struck him not,
His height still baffling all their eager wrath."
At length Agavè cried to her train, "Tear down the tree, and then we'll grasp the beast"—for her too had the god made blind—"that rides thereon." A thousand hands uprooted the tree, and Pentheus fell to the ground, well knowing that his end was near. It was his mother's hand that seized him first. In vain, dashing off his bonnet, he cried,—
"I am thy child, thine own, my mother."
She knew him not, and
"Caught him in her arms, seized his right hand,
And, with her feet set on his shrinking side,
Tore out the shoulder."
"Ino, Autonoe, and all the rest dismembered him; one bore away an arm, one a still sandalled foot: others rent open his sides: none went without some spoil of him whom, possessed by Bacchus, they deemed a lion's cub. With these bloody trophies of their prey they are now marching to Thebes: for my part, I fled at the sight of this dark tragedy."
The procession of the Bacchantes to the "seven-gated city" is ushered in by a choral song:—
"Dance and sing
In Bacchic ring;
Shout, shout the fate, the fate of gloom
Of Pentheus, from the dragon born;
He the woman's garb hath worn,
