Pentheus

The stiff family of King Pentheus of Thebes gathers around a dinner table, in outrageously camp makeup and costumes, and await the arrival of a meteor that might destroy the earth.

That meteor turns out to be Dionysus, the god who appears in Euripides’s play to punish Pentheus and his relatives for claiming that Dionysus is not the son of Zeus.

Disturbingly, a family servant is also sexually assaulted by Pentheus in close-up onscreen, before happily joining in the romp, as if nothing had happened.

In the living room, known as the Hall of Pentheus, a fresco depicts Hercules as a child, crushing two snakes, in an illustration of an episode from the Greek hero’s life.

Pentheus, the King of Thebes, was the son of Semele’s sister, but he had no idea that the leader of this band of excited, strange-acting women was his own cousin.