forces, they can be said to have dislocated the cosmos. But as the cosmic agent of balance, Dikê cannot tolerate such dislocation.
Nor, of course, can the individual gods who stand for specific cosmic forces, which is what the plays are all about. Thus in TB Dionysus explains that Thebes, which under Pentheus has suppressed ritual acknowledgment of Dionysus, "must learn in full / This lesson, that my Bacchic worship is a matter / As yet beyond her knowledge and experience" (Bac. 66-8). One reason Dionysus has been slighted is that the daughters of Cadmus have more or less trivialized him.
My mother's sisters said--what they should have been
To say--that I, Dionysus, was not Zeus's son;
That Semele, being with child--they said--by some mortal,
Obeyed her father's prompting, and ascribed to Zeus
The loss of her virginity; and they loudly claimed
That this lie was the sin for which Zeus took her life (Bac. 27-33).
The conspiracy of the sisters to explain away Dionysus's birth in purely human terms counts as an affront to divine engagement with humanity. According to Graves (1.56-57), Semele had also affronted Zeus by demanding to see the lover who had impregnated her "in his true nature and form," then refusing him her bed when he refused. The fact that jealous Hera tricked Semele into making the demand is irrelevant to the fact that Zeus showed himself to Semele as lightning and (of course) destroyed her. From one point of view, Semele's challenge to Zeus as lover can be likened to Agauë's challenge to the existence, let alone the divinity, of Dionysus. Semele wanted a reason from a god; the god's retribution was swift. Agauë would need proof of Dionysus's divinity, and meanwhile she has brought up a son who will not accept a god who lacks the decorum a god "should" have; the god's retribution will be decisive. More generally, the family of Cadmus seem to have put a purely human construction on the embarrassmen...