1But Alcithoe, daughter of Minyas, does not think that the god's rites should be accepted; still rash, she denies that Bacchus is the offspring of Jupiter, and she has her sisters as partners in her impiety. 4The priest had ordered them to celebrate the festival, maidservants and their mistresses freed from their tasks, to cover their breasts with skins, to loosen the ribbons from their hair, to take garlands on their locks and leafy thyrsi in their hands, and he had prophesied that the anger of the slighted deity would be savage. 9They obey, mothers and young wives alike, and lay aside their webs and work-baskets and unfinished spinning, and offer incense, and call on Bacchus, Bromius and Lyaeus, the fire-born, the twice-begotten, the only one with two mothers: to these are added Nyseus and unshorn Thyoneus, and with Lenaeus the genial planter of the grape, and Nyctelius and father Eleleus and Iacchus and Euhan, and the very many other names besides that you bear, Liber, among the Greek peoples.
17For yours is youth unwasted, you are the eternal boy, you are seen as the loveliest in high heaven; when you stand without your horns, yours is a girlish head. 20The East is conquered by you, as far as where dusky India is washed by the remote Ganges: you, venerable one, slaughter the sacrilegious Pentheus and axe-bearing Lycurgus, you send the Tyrrhenian bodies into the sea, you press down the necks of your yoked lynxes, splendid with painted reins; 25Bacchants and satyrs follow, and the old man who, drunk, props his tottering limbs on a fennel staff and clings none too firmly to his sway-backed little donkey. 28Wherever you go, the shouts of young men ring out, and with them women's voices, and drums struck by palms, and hollow bronze, and the boxwood flute with its long bore.
31'Be with us, appeased and gentle,' the Theban women pray, and they observe the rites as ordered. 32Only the daughters of Minyas, indoors, disturbing the festival with untimely Minerva, either draw out wool, or twirl the threads with their thumbs, or keep close to the loom and press their maids with work. 36One of them, drawing out the thread with nimble thumb, says: 'While the others are idle and throng to these invented rites, let us too, whom Pallas, a better goddess, keeps here, lighten the useful work of our hands with varied talk, and by turns let us tell something for all to share to our idle ears, which will not let the time seem long.' 42The sisters approve what she says and bid her tell her tale first.
43She ponders what to tell out of many (for she knew a great many), and is undecided whether to tell of you, Babylonian,