Virgil and Parnassus

Pentheus, king of thebes by descent from Cadmus and Harmonia, resisted the encroachment into his dominion of a new god, Dionysus, and his worship but the citizens, led by his mother Agave, were much attracted to this new deity and his cult. They abandoned the city to celebrate the novel rites in the countryside and on the mountains. Pentheus, still resisting but curious, followed the Bacchants and climbed a tree to observe in secret the strange and intrusive rituals. There he was discovered and torn limb from limb by an enraged band of Bacchants led by Agave. Flaunting the head, she returned to the city where the madness fell from her eyes and she became aware of the enormity of what she had done. She and the entire royal family were condemned to leave Thebes and wander as outcasts, while the city was left leaderless and decapitated.

The story of Pentheus serves as an analogy for the reception of Virgil in Germany during the eighteenth century. By then Virgil had been the sovereign of the poetic kingdom by long tenure and honorable descent; Parnassus, the haunt of the Muses, was, in one version of the myth, where the fateful confrontation between Pentheus and the new god of ecstasy and sponsor of a novel kind of poetry had taken place. The record of the dethronement of Virgil, the old lord of the poetic kingdom, and all it meant for the Germans of the time can be considered in three ways.