cxxv
Dionysus appears, as himself, above.
DIONYSUS
I am Dionysus. I am Bacchus.
Bromius and Iacchus.
Dithyrambus and Evius.
I am the son of Zeus.
I have come to the country of the Thebans,
where Semele, the daughter of King Cadmus,
bore me in a blaze of lightning.
When I arrived in Thebes, there was blasphemy.
"He was born of mortals," they were saying.
Slander. Irreverence. Impiety.
I offered these people everything.
How did they repay my generosity?
With malice, ingratitude, and lies.
Now I shall recite your future for you.
First, your future will be suffering.
Then your future will be suffering again.
Banishment and slavery and pain.
You will be driven from this city.
You will be hounded into other lands.
Captives in a war.
Chains. Slavery. Toil.
Your lives will wear away like sand.
Behold our Pentheus. He found the death
he deserved: torn to pieces.
You beheld him. You beheld his lies.
His impudence. You beheld him
when he tried to chain me and abused me
and tried - and dared to try -
to punish me.
I am Dionysus! Behold me!
The hands that should have been the last
to do this to him were the very hands
that did it. Why? Because he did
what he should not have done.
And now your doom, Agave, is this:
for you and your sisters - exile.
You must expiate your crime.
You are polluted, you cannot stay
in the precincts of these graves.
And Cadmus: there are ordeals for you.
You will be transfigured into a snake.
And Harmonia, the daughter of Ares, whom you won
as a wife despite your being mortal,
she, too, will be a beast, a snake.
Then both of you, drawn by oxen in a cart,
will, according to the oracle of Zeus,
lead an innumerable barbarian horde
to lay waste cities, to ravage and destroy.
And when the shrine of Apollo is sacked,
the hordes will turn, and the turning,
and the coming back, will be tragic.
Ares, in the end, will save you and save
Harmonia and bring your lives
into the country of the blessed.
This is the decree of Dionysus,
the son not of a human but of Zeus.
If you had understood your mortal natures
when you refused to understand them,
the son of Zeus would have been your ally.
You would now be in blessedness.
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