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Conceptions of madness—that mysterious distortion of the human condition—are always shaped by the culture out of which they come. The Greeks, who attributed all extraordinary states to the meddling gods (when Ares breathed valor into one, one was brave; and when Aphrodite spilled her hot wine into one's veins, one was lustful), conceived of madness as a visitation—like a chemical imbalance in the blood—which had nothing to do with the stresses of an individual's life. While a modern believer in the unconscious might think of such “acting-out behavior” as the most unguarded manifestation of true subterranean character, the Greeks perceived it as discontinuous with everyday life and therefore alien. In The Bacchae, the violent eruption is played through like a ritual, without any possible alteration in fixed and ageless steps, synchronized to the droning choruses of citizens, maenads, and Dionysian camp followers; for in Greek tragedy private dramas are always enacted against the backdrop of community opinion. Madness was a withdrawal from the human community, often expressed symbolically in the killing of one's children, which destroyed one's embodiment in the world and cut off the generational link to immortality. That was the abyss into which one peered when crazy—an inability to recognize others for who they were, an inability to distinguish people from animals or even one's own family from the enemy. The deepest fear in The Bacchae surfaces in the scene in which Pentheus clings to the top of a tree, painfully exposed and vulnerable to the pack of ferocious women led by his own mother.