he Pentheus-Bacchus episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses has not received much scholarly attention of late. A survey of the last thirty years (1967 – 97) of L’Annee Philologique reveals only three articles that address the episode more than tangentially. 1 Many books on the Metamorphoses do not discuss the story at all, or confine themselves to a sentence or two of observation. 2 Franz Bomer’s and W. S. Anderson’s commentaries make conscientious and often imaginative efforts to give the story its due, but the surrounding silence is still puzzling. 3 Perhaps the story’s less-than-beguiling protagonist, the blustering martinet Pentheus, repels interest. Anderson articulates representative distaste for Pentheus when he characterizes him as a petty tyrant. 4 Nonetheless, his keen ear for Ovidian borrowings detects the distorted reflection of the Aeneid and its exemplars of governance in the story Ovid organizes around the Theban king. 5