In Greek mythology, Pentheus (Ancient Greek Πενθεύς) was a king of Thebes, son of Echion — wisest of the Spartoi — and of Agave, daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia. He succeeded his grandfather Cadmus, banned the cult of Dionysus, and was torn apart on Mount Cithaeron by his mother and aunts in a Bacchic frenzy. Much of the surviving narrative comes from Euripides's tragedy The Bacchae; Ovid retells the myth in Metamorphoses Book III.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Pentheus" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Mythological biography
Cadmus abdicated in old age in favor of his grandson Pentheus. The new king banned the worship of Dionysus — son of his aunt Semele — and forbade Theban women to join the rites. Dionysus drove Agave, Ino, Autonoë, and the other women of Thebes into a Bacchic frenzy on Mount Cithaeron. Pentheus imprisoned the god, mistaking him for a mortal follower, but the chains fell away and the prison doors opened.
Disguised as a woman, Pentheus was lured by Dionysus to spy on the rites. The daughters of Cadmus saw him in a tree, took him for a wild animal, pulled him down, and tore him limb from limb (sparagmos). Some accounts make Agave the first to strike, tearing off his arm and then his head; she carried the head on a stick back to Thebes and recognized it only when she met Cadmus. Officials afterward exiled the women. Pentheus was succeeded by his uncle Polydorus.
Before or after his death his wife bore Menoeceus, father of Creon and Jocasta and grandfather of Oedipus. Ovid's Metamorphoses diverges in details: Tiresias warns Pentheus to welcome Bacchus; the king dismisses him, demands Bacchus's arrest, and instead hears Acoetes' tale of the Tyrrhenian sailors turned into dolphins. Chains again fail; Pentheus rushes into a Bacchanalia, is mistaken for a boar, and is torn apart, his mother the first to spear him. In Oppian, Dionysus turns the maenads into leopards and Pentheus into a bull, making the Bacchae's metaphors literal.
II.Reception
According to Plutarch, after Marcus Licinius Crassus fell at Carrhae in 53 BC his severed head was sent to the Parthian king Orodes II and used as a stage prop standing in for Pentheus's head in a performance of Euripides's Bacchae.
The figure continues to appear in modern adaptations of the Bacchae, including a Meitei-language staging that refigures Pentheus as a vulnerable community under pressure from a globalizing force embodied by Dionysus.