Pentheus - Blog Posts

Melos was a phantom of a country, ruled by a boy of a king. Its roads were paved with flesh, and its walls were painted with the blood of innocents. Instead of bells that rang on the hour, cries of mothers finding the bodies of their lost sons echoed out. Paperboys shouted the end of the war and the reign of the new king to nobody but themselves as the once bustling streets remained empty. In the palace, on the top of the hill, in a throne too big for him, the boy king sat and ruled over the ghosts.

question not related to art (yet):

lately i have been reading the dionysiaca by nonnus and just yesterday i have reached the part in which actaeon's myth is told. nonnus makes acteaeon climb a tree in order to spy on artemis, and i wanted to ask - how popular is this element in this myth? because it is very clear that here nonnus intends to draw as many parallels between actaeon and pentheus as possible (as he should) and if i remember correctly in ovid there are no mentions of actaeon climbing a tree. does someone knows any other classical versions in which this element is present?

thank you in advance

very quick pentheus wearing the necklace of harmonia

redraw of this vase

pentheus with his own head, or agave with the head of pentheus, or dionysus with the head of pentheus - at this point not even I know what this is. thankfully visual arts can be ambiguous and allow free associations! to muddy the waters even more, I leave you with this banger post by @finelythreadedsky

some sketches of agave (and baby pentheus!)

I hope you missed pentheus because I for sure did

sketch for the latest drawing I posted 👁

Dionysus with the head of Pentheus! I couldn’t decide which version to post, so have both of them 🎭

I keep posting about Dionysus and Pentheus but this time you get the other side of the triad of cursed cousins, and that is Actaeon and Pentheus 🦌🦁

sketchy pentheus because sir that’s my emotional support asshole 

Sketches for Pentheus ✨

Thank u @tractym for letting me borrow some inspiration from Ur piece 🥺

@something-indecent-and-dramatic okay I see now that I responded very quickly so I will elaborate a bit more here even in case someone else has the same doubt! 

The drawing is inspired by the moment in the fourth episode of the Bacchae in which Pentheus enters the stage dressed as a woman and the first thing he says is:

(i’m using a translation of T. A. Buckley that I found on the internet here)

about this I want to clarify that the Dionysus=bull one is not an isolated association that only Pentheus makes in a moment of hallucination, but that it is an image that keeps recurring in the whole tragedy (ex. when the bacchae refer to dionysus as to the “bull-horned god” or when Pentheus wants to imprison Dionysus but finds himself trying to imprison a bull) and in general also in some invocations linked to the dionysian cult outside the context of Euripides’ play

overall in the drawing i wanted to depict Dionysus in a moment in which he reveals himself to Pentheus who has finally accepted his divinity, and in this sense in my mind the bull conveys Dionysus’ powers (or at least his powers as we see them at the end of this tragedy) in a better way than a human form does.

i hope this answer has cleared up my choices a bit!! also thank you for the question <3

Pentheus and Dionysus, again 🐍🐂

Pentheus and Dionysus, again 🐍🐂

Sketches for the latest drawing I posted! 

Pentheus and the Stranger from Lydia ☀️🐂☀️