Sorrow, son of Unrejoicing: Euripides' Bacchae and Linguistic Archaeology

 In approaching the end of Euripides' Bacchae, a parallelism that has struck me is the mother-son pairs on either side of the conflict of the play. Dionysus is the son of Semele, daughter of Cadmus; Pentheus is the son of Agaue (sic), daughter of Cadmus. Pentheus' name means "the one who sorrows," a connection explicitly made within the text of the play. The context and conflict of the play is the arrival of the Bacchic rite to Thebes and its hostile reception, so names which have meaning are conspicuous and may be names of roles assumed in the rites. Within the Bacchic rites, whoever assumes the role of Bacchus becomes Bacchus in a sense, so it is reasonable to assume that the principal opponent would have a similarly dual role. On the maternal side, Semele is associated with a number of earth goddesses such as Rhea and Doso (Demeter) and happens to match the name of the Thracian Earth Goddess Zmele (because Thracian was a satem language, whereas Greek was a centum language - see Russian 'zemlya' 'land' for a more familiar cognate), so Agaue's name and role should also be significant.  Agaue murders her son Pentheus under the influence of the god, but her name also has meaning. Agaue may well be derived from the root 'gawe-', 'rejoicing', which lies at the sourche of Latin 'gaudium', 'joy'. The Greek verb 'gauroomai' occurs in the text in the discussion of Agaue's behavior. 'Gauroomai' can be broken down as follows: '-omai' is the first person singular present middle ending and can be safely excised. This leaves 'gauro-', which is an adjective. If the component which makes it an adjective is removed, i.e. -ro-, all that is left is 'gau', the part shared with the name Agaue. The -e of Agaue is just the feminine ending, so the important part for analysis is Agau-, which is -gau- with a negative prefix A-. The name Agaue, therefore, means 'The Woman Who Does Not Rejoice', which is a thematically (and dramatically?) appropriate name of the mother of The Man Who Sorrows, Agaue changes from rejoicing when she is entranced to not rejoicing when she recognizes what she has done.