Dionysus arrives in Thebes to establish his worship; King Pentheus resists; the god drives the women of Thebes mad, and Pentheus's own mother tears him apart. Euripides wrote this at the end of his life, in exile in Macedonia, and it was performed posthumously. The play is about religion, about rationality, about what happens when we deny the irrational forces within us. Dionysus is both liberator and destroyer; the maenads dance with joy before they kill. The tragedy has no comfortable moral. The god wins because the god is real.