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Pen'theus, an early king of Thebes, having ascended Cithaeron to witness the orgies of the Bacchanals, was torn in pieces by his own mother and aunts, to whom Bacchus made him appear as a wild beast. On this same mountain range also occurred the exposure of OEd'ipus, the hero of the most famous tragedy of Sophocles. Near the Corinthian Gulf was Mount Hel'icon, sacred to Apollo and the Muses.
But then, with an elasticity truly astounding in a man of his great age, the master has momentarily regained the poetry of his youthful prime, and with it a measure of that Giorgionesque fragrance which was evaporating already at the close of the early time, when the Bacchanals were brought forth.
The innumerable artists of the Renaissance remained in hesitation; tried to court both the antique and the modern, to unite the Pagan and the Christian some, like Ghirlandajo, in cold indifference to all but mere artistic science, encrusting marble bacchanals into the walls of the Virgin's paternal house, bringing together, unthinkingly, antique-draped women carrying baskets, and noble Strozzi and Ruccellai ladies with gloved hands folded over their gold brocaded skirts; others, with cheerful and childlike pleasure in both antique and modern, like Benozzo, crowding together half-naked youths and nymphs treading the grapes and scaling the trellise with Florentine magnificos in plaited skirts and starched collars, among the pines, and porticos, the sprawling children, barking dogs, peacocks sunning themselves, and partridges picking up grain, of his Pisan frescoes; yet others using the antique as mere pageant shows, allegorical mummeries, destined to amuse some Duke of Ferrara or Marquis of Mantua, together with the hurdle races of Jews, hags, and riderless donkeys.
At half-past eleven, the prisoner of his word entered under the Schloss partico, having vowed to himself on the way, that he would satisfy the formulas to gain release by a deferential bow to the great personages, and straightway slip out into the heavenly starlight, thence down among the jolly Parisian and Viennese Bacchanals.
"And when you see 'em enter so as to make quite sure of the game, go up to Frances Baudoin's room " "Under the cloak of asking where the little humpbacked workwoman lives the sister of that gay girl, the Queen of the Bacchanals." "Yes and you must try and find out her address also from her humpbacked sister, if possible for it is very important.
But desire, astonishment, rage, and wine cut the legs from under him. He staggered once and a second time, seized the naked arm of one of the bacchanals, and began to inquire, with blinking eyes, what had happened. She, taking a goblet of wine, gave it to him with a smile in her mist-covered eyes. "Drink!" said she. Vinicius drank, and fell to the floor.
The band had scarcely departed for some other haunt of slumber and weariness, when the notes of singing floated up that prolific alley, like the sweet tenor voice of one bewailing the prohibitory movement; and for an hour or more a succession of young bacchanals, who were evidently wandering about in search of the Maine Law, lifted up their voices in song.
The last clasp of hands had been given and received, when, far away on the hills east and northeast, the quick eye of Sergius caught the gleam of a rapidly moving torch: then another and another and another seemed to flame out in the night, like stars when the moon has failed, until the whole range of heights blazed with fires that flashed and danced and crossed and recrossed each other in mad confusion, as if all the thronging bacchanals of Greece had assembled for one frenzied orgy.
By his master's orders Bias had tried to find her again, but, in spite of honest search, in vain. Just now he had met, as Althea's maid, the little Syrian Margula, who had been in her company, and raced along in the procession of bacchanals in his, Bias's, arms.
Diogenes is said to have asked whether the robber Pataecion was better off in the other world than the hero Epaminondas, because the former had been initiated, and the latter had not. But Orphism, though liable to degradation, purified and elevated the old Bacchic rites. As Miss Harrison says, the Bacchanals hoped to attain unity with God by intoxication, the Orphics by abstinence.
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