Cadmus’s successor
Pentheus holds the kingdom that belonged to Cadmus. His parents are Agave and Echion, and Apollodorus introduces him through both his birth and his succession: he is a son who has inherited power before he becomes an opponent of Dionysus. The royal position and the family tie cannot be separated from the killing that follows. The woman who tears him apart is his mother; the city whose ruler tries to stop the Bacchic rites is the city he received from Cadmus.
Apollodorus compresses the whole episode into one sentence. Pentheus attempts to stop the proceedings, goes to Cithaeron to spy on the Bacchants, and is dismembered by Agave. The account gives her madness a particular object: she takes him for a wild beast.
Πενθεὺς δὲ γεννηθεὶς ἐξ Ἀγαυῆς Ἐχίονι, παρὰ Κάδμου εἰληφὼς τὴν βασιλείαν, διεκώλυε ταῦτα γίνεσθαι, καὶ παραγενόμενος εἰς Κιθαιρῶνα τῶν Βακχῶν κατάσκοπος ὑπὸ τῆς μητρὸς Ἀγαυῆς κατὰ μανίαν ἐμελίσθη· ἐνόμισε γὰρ αὐτὸν θηρίον εἶναι
“Pentheus, whom Agave bore to Echion, had succeeded Cadmus in the kingdom, and he attempted to put a stop to these proceedings. And coming to Cithaeron to spy on the Bacchanals, he was torn limb from limb by his mother Agave in a fit of madness; for she thought he was a wild beast.” — Apollodorus, Bibliotheke 3.5.2, tr. J. G. Frazer
The journey changes his part in the story. At first he is the king who would prevent the rites; on Cithaeron he is the watcher who has placed himself among the people he wants to watch. Apollodorus does not describe a battle between the king and a god. His resistance ends through the hands of his mother, who cannot recognise the person she kills. The account joins political authority, secret observation and a broken family recognition without pausing between them.
A king dressed for watching
Euripides’s Bacchae gives the approach to that death a different scale. In the exchange at lines 810–835, Dionysus asks whether Pentheus wants to see the women on the mountain. Pentheus is willing to pay a great weight of gold for the sight. He says that seeing their drunkenness would pain him, yet still wants to look; he proposes sitting silently beneath the firs. The desire to observe survives his declared disapproval.
Dionysus offers a way to go, then makes clothing the condition. A man seen among the women might be killed, he tells Pentheus, so the king must dress as a woman. Pentheus questions the change and feels shame at it, but continues to ask how he will be dressed. Dionysus lays out the costume: long hair, a robe reaching the feet, a headband, a thyrsus in the hand and a spotted fawnskin. The things Pentheus puts on to watch the Bacchants are the things that bring his appearance into their world.
By lines 918–922, Pentheus’s own account of what he sees has changed. He sees the sun doubled, Thebes doubled, and horns on the head of the guide before him:
καὶ μὴν ὁρᾶν μοι δύο μὲν ἡλίους δοκῶ, δισσὰς δὲ Θήβας καὶ πόλισμʼ ἑπτάστομον· καὶ ταῦρος ἡμῖν πρόσθεν ἡγεῖσθαι δοκεῖς καὶ σῷ κέρατα κρατὶ προσπεφυκέναι. ἀλλʼ ἦ ποτʼ ἦσθα θήρ; τεταύρωσαι γὰρ οὖν.
“Yea; and mine eye Is bright! Yon sun shines twofold in the sky, Thebes twofold and the Wall of Seven Gates… . And is it a Wild Bull this, that walks and waits Before me? There are horns upon thy brow! What art thou, man or beast? For surely now The Bull is on thee!” — Euripides, Bacchae 918–922, tr. Gilbert Murray
He wanted a hidden position from which to inspect the women. Now the watcher cannot trust the shape of the city or the figure leading him. The two suns and the two cities belong to his reported vision; the bull is how he perceives Dionysus. Pentheus is still asking questions, but they concern what his eyes are showing him rather than how to exercise his rule. The king’s disguise and his altered sight make the movement toward Cithaeron something more than a secret inspection.
The mother who sees a beast
The mistake at the killing is Agave’s. In Apollodorus she sees a wild beast where her son stands, and tears him limb from limb in madness. That brief account leaves her inside the error at its close. Euripides brings recognition onto the stage: at lines 1280–1284, Agave asks what she is carrying in her hands, and Cadmus tells her to examine it. He asks whether it looks like a lion. The answer names the dead man:
οὔκ, ἀλλὰ Πενθέως ἡ τάλαινʼ ἔχω κάρα.
“No; ’tis the head—O God!—of Pentheus, this!” — Euripides, Bacchae 1284, tr. Gilbert Murray
The difference between the accounts lies in what each lets Agave understand. Apollodorus identifies the victim for the reader while explaining that the killer mistakes him for an animal. In Euripides, she must identify him herself. Cadmus’s question turns the held object from an apparent beast into the head of her son, and the recognition becomes part of the catastrophe rather than a fact supplied only by a narrator.
Pentheus’s story runs through these acts of seeing. He goes to the mountain to look at the Bacchants; on the way he reports a doubled world and a bull-shaped guide; his mother sees a beast when she kills him, then recognises Pentheus in what she holds. Royal descent gives him the city, but does not preserve either his authority over the rites or his identity in his mother’s eyes. The name restored at the end belongs to the son she has already lost.