Extract

Slow but sure moves the might of the gods.

A god arrives at the city that denied his birth, wearing a soft smile and a crown of ivy, and the earth trembles beneath his feet. Euripides wrote this play near the end of his life, staging it around 405 BC, and it remains the most terrifying drama of antiquity, a work in which the divine does not comfort but dismembers. Dionysus has come to Thebes to punish King Pentheus, whose rigid rationality cannot accommodate the ecstatic, and the punishment is total. Pentheus is lured to the mountainside in women's clothing to spy on the maenads and is torn apart by his own mother in her frenzy. The play asks what happens to a civilization that denies the irrational, and answers with blood on a mother's hands.