Agave (daughter of Cadmus)

In Euripides' play The Bacchae, Theban Maenads murdered King Pentheus after he banned the worship of Dionysus because he denied Dionysus' divinity. Dionysus, Pentheus' cousin, lured Pentheus to the woods—Pentheus wanted to see what he thought were the sexual activities of the women—where the Maenads tore him apart and his corpse was mutilated by his own mother, Agave. Agave and Pentheus' aunt, Autonoe, tore him limb from limb in a Bacchic frenzy.^[4] Thinking that she and the other women had just killed a lion—for Dionysus had driven them mad—Agave carried her son's head on a stick back to Thebes, only realizing the truth when confronted by her father, Cadmus.

This murder also served as Dionysus' vengeance on Agave (and her sisters Ino and Autonoë). Semele, during her pregnancy with Dionysus, was destroyed by the sight of the splendor of Zeus. Her sisters spread the report that she had only endeavored to conceal unmarried sex with a mortal man, by pretending that Zeus was the father of her child, and said that her destruction was a just punishment for her falsehood. This calumny was severely avenged upon Agave. After Dionysus, the son of Semele, had traversed the world, he came to Thebes and sent the Theban women mad, compelling them to celebrate his Dionysiac festivals on Mount Cithaeron. Pentheus, wishing to prevent or stop these riotous proceedings, was persuaded by a disguised Dionysus to go himself to Cithaeron, but was torn to pieces there by his own mother Agave, who in her frenzy believed him to be a wild lion.^[5]

For this transgression, according to Hyginus,^[6] Agave was exiled from Thebes and fled to Illyria to marry King Lycotherses, and then killed him in order to gain the city for her father Cadmus. According to William Smith, Hyginus' account is "manifestly transplaced by Hyginus, and must have belonged to an earlier part of the story of Agave".^[7]

Genealogy

Family tree of the Theban royal house

Gallery

• 
  Pictura loquens; sive Heroicarum tabularum Hadriani Schoonebeeck enarratio et explicatio (1695)
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  Pompeii - Casa dei Vettii - Pentheus.jpg
• 
  The Death of Pentheus

Notes