of his birth;
and wherever he went he taught the people of the country to worship
him as a god, and showed them strange rites. Far away he roamed, to
the regions where the Ganges rolls his mighty stream into the Indian
Sea, and where the Nile brings every year rich gifts from the southern
mountains. And in all the lands to which he came he made the women
gather round him and honor him with wild cries and screams and
marvelous customs such as they had never known before. As he went
onwards the face of the land was changed. The women grouped themselves
in companies far away from the sight of men, and, high up on the
barren hills or down in the narrow valleys, with wild movements and
fierce shoutings, paid honor to Dionysos, the lord of the wine-cup and
the feast. At length, through the Thracian highlands and the soft
plains of Thessaly, Dionysos came back to Thebes, where he had been
born amid the roar of the thunder and the blaze of the fiery
lightning. Kadmos, the King, who had built the city, was now old and
weak, and he had made Pentheus, the child of his daughter Agave, King
in his stead. So Pentheus sought to rule the people well, as his
father Kadmos had done, and to train them in the old laws, that they
might be quiet in the days of peace, and orderly and brave in war.

[Illustration: VULCAN (_or Hephaistos_).]

Thus it came to pass that when Dionysos came near to Thebes, and
commanded all the people to receive the new rites, which he sought to
teach them, it grieved Pentheus at the heart; and when he saw how the
women seemed smitten with madness, and that they wandered away in
groups to desert places, where they lurked for many days and nights,
far from the sight of men, he mourned for the evils which his kinsman,
Dionysos, was bringing upon the land. So King Pentheus made a law that
none should follow these new customs, and that the women should stay
quietly doing their own work in their homes. But when they heard this,
they were all full of fury, for Dionysos had deceived them by his
treacherous words, and even Kadmos himself, in his weakness and old
age, had been led astray by them. In crowds they thronged around the
house of Pentheus, raising loud shouts in honor of Dionysos, and
besought him to follow the new way, but he would not hearken to them.

Thus it was for many days; and when all the city was shaken by the
madness of the new worship, Pentheus thought that he would see with
his own eyes the str