s strength in its tediousness. Servants! drag him
headlong, and send to Stygian night his body, racked with dreadful
tortures." At once the Etrurian Acoetes, dragged away, is shut up in a
strong prison; and while the cruel instruments of the death that is
ordered, and the iron and the fire are being made ready, the report is
that the doors opened of their own accord, and that the chains, of their
own accord, slipped from off his arms, no one loosening them.

The son of Echion persists: and now he does not command others to go,
but goes himself to where Cithaeron,[96] chosen for the celebration of
these sacred rites, was resounding with singing, and the shrill voices
of the votaries of Bacchus. Just as the high-mettled steed neighs, when
the warlike trumpeter gives the alarm with the sounding brass, and
conceives a desire for battle, so did the sky, struck with the
long-drawn howlings, excite Pentheus, and his wrath was rekindled on
hearing the clamor. There was, about the middle of the mountain, the
woods skirting its extremity, a plain free from trees, {and} visible on
every side. Here his mother was the first to see him looking on the
sacred rites with profane eyes; she first was moved by a frantic
impulse, {and} she first wounded her {son}, Pentheus, by hurling her
thyrsus, {and} cried out, "Ho! come, my two sisters;[97] that boar
which, of enormous size, is roaming amid our fields, that boar I must
strike." All the raging multitude rushes upon him alone; all collect
together, and all follow him, now trembling, now uttering words less
atrocious {than before}, now blaming himself, now confessing that he has
offended.

However, on being wounded, he says, "Give me thy aid, Autonoe, my aunt;
let the ghost of Actaeon[98] influence thy feelings." She knows not what
Actaeon {means}, and tears away his right hand as he is praying; the
other is dragged off by the violence of Ino. The wretched {man} has
{now} no arms to extend to his mother; but showing his maimed body, with
the limbs torn off, he says, "Look at this, my mother!" At the sight
Agave howls aloud, and tosses her neck, and shakes her locks in the air;
and seizing his head, torn off, with her blood-stained fingers, she
cries out, "Ho! my companions, this victory is our work!"

The wind does not more speedily bear off, from a lofty tree, the leaves
nipped by the cold of autumn, and now adhering with difficulty, than
were the limbs of the man, torn asunder by their