Euripides also writes, "There's a brute wildness in the fennel-wands—Reverence it well." ("The Bacchae and Other Plays", trans. by Philip Vellacott, Penguin, 1954.) Plato writes in "Phaedo":  I conceive that the founders of the mysteries had a real meaning and were not mere triflers when they intimated in a figure long ago that he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below will live in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods. For "many," as they say in the mysteries, "are the thyrsus bearers, but few are the mystics,"--meaning, as I interpret the words, the true philosophers. In Part II of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "Faust", Mephistopheles tries to catch a Lamia, only to find out that she is an illusion:  Well, then, a tall one I will catch.../And now a thyrsus-pole I snatch!/Only a pine-cone as its head. (7775-7777) Robert Browning mentions the thyrsus in passing in "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St Praxed's Church", as the dying bishop confuses Christian piety with classical extravagance. Ovid talks about Bacchus carrying a thyrsus and his followers doing the same in his Metamorphoses Book III, which is a retelling of The Bacchae. The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,/Those Pans and nymphs ye wot of, and perchance/Some tripod, thrysus, with a vase or so, (56-58)