Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Agave.
The gallery
Death of Pentheus (Attic red-figure kylix)
Unknown (Attic red-figure), c. 480 BC
On this Louvre cup maenads tear Pentheus apart — Agave among the Theban women who, in Euripides, mistake her son for a lion on Cithaeron and bring his head home in triumph.
The Torment of Pentheus (House of the Vettii, Pompeii)
Unknown (Roman), 1st century AD
A Pompeian fresco restages the sparagmos: Pentheus torn by bacchants — the scene whose climax, in the Bacchae, is Agave waking to her son's head in her hands.
The Death of Pentheus (from Ovid's Metamorphoses)
Unknown, 17th–18th century
A Metropolitan Museum plate after Ovid titles the horror plainly: Pentheus torn by his mother and sisters — Agave's madness as a set-piece of the Metamorphoses cycle.
In play
The Bacchae
Euripides
Euripides' last tragedy makes Agave its most terrible recognition: the Cadmeid princess, mad on Cithaeron, returns carrying Pentheus' head and only then sees what Dionysus has done.
Metamorphoses
Ovid
Ovid retells the Theban sparagmos with Agave first among the maenads — the mother who begins the tearing and ends in exile.
Agave (daughter of Cadmus)
Daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, mother of Pentheus — the princess Dionysus drove to kill her own son on Cithaeron.