692'We have lent our ears to your long rigmarole,' says Pentheus, 'so that anger might use up its strength by delay. 694Servants, seize him headlong, and send his body, racked with dreadful tortures, down to Stygian night.' 696At once Tyrrhenian Acoetes is dragged off and shut up in a solid building; 697and while the cruel instruments of the ordered death, iron and fire, are being prepared, the story goes that the doors opened of their own accord, and that the chains slipped from his arms of their own accord with no one loosing them. 701Echion's son persists. 701Now he no longer orders others to go, but goes himself to where Cithaeron, chosen for the performance of the rites, was resounding with songs and the clear voices of the Bacchants.
704As a spirited horse snorts when the war-trumpeter has given the signal on the sounding bronze, and takes on a love of battle, so the air, struck by long wailing, roused Pentheus, and at the shout he heard his anger grew white-hot again. 708About the middle of the mountain, with woods girding its edges, there is a plain clear of trees, visible from every side. 710Here, as he watches the rites with profane eyes, the first to see him, the first to be stirred to run in mad career, the first to wound her own Pentheus with a hurled thyrsus, was his mother. 713'Io, my two sisters,' she cried, 'come here!
714That boar which wanders, hugest of all, in our fields, that boar I must strike.' 715The whole raging crowd rushes upon one man; 716they all gather and pursue him in his fear, in fear now, now speaking less violent words, now condemning himself, now confessing he had sinned. 719Yet, wounded, he said, 'Help me, aunt Autonoe! 720Let Actaeon's shade move your heart.' 721She does not know who Actaeon is, and tore off the right arm of the man praying: the other was torn away by Ino's wrenching. 723The unhappy man has no arms to stretch out to his mother, but showing the maimed wounds where his limbs had been torn away, 'Look, mother!' 725he says.
725At the sight Agave howled, tossed her neck and shook her hair through the air, and clasping the torn-off head in her bloody fingers she cries, 'Io, comrades, this victory is our work!' 729No faster does the wind snatch from a tall tree the leaves touched by autumn's cold and now barely clinging, than the man's limbs were torn apart by those unspeakable hands. 732Warned by such examples, the Ismenian women throng the new rites, offer incense, and worship at the holy altars.