Transcriber's Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
WITH NOTES AND RHYMED CHORAL ODES
The reception accorded to the pocket edition of Dean Plumptre's “Dante” has encouraged the publishers to issue in the same format the Dean's masterly translation of the Tragedies of Æschylos.
In preparing the present issue they have followed the carefully revised text of the second edition, and have included the scholarly and suggestive annotations with which the Dean invariably delighted to enrich his work as a translator.
The seven Plays, which are all that remain of the seventy or eighty with which Æschylos is credited, are presented in their chronological order. Passages in which the reading or the rendering is more or less conjectural, and in which, accordingly, the aid of the commentator is advisable, are marked by an asterisk; and passages which are regarded as spurious by editors of authority have been placed in brackets.
In translating the Choral Odes the Dean used such unrhymed metres—observing the strophic and antistrophic 8arrangement—as seemed to him most analogous in their general rhythmical effect to those of the original. He added in an appendix, however, for the sake of those who preferred the rhymed form with which they were familiar, a rhymed version of the chief Odes of the Oresteian trilogy. Those in the other dramas did not appear to him to be of equal interest, or to lend themselves with equal facility to a like attempt. The Greek text on which the translation is based is, for the most part, that of Mr. Paley's edition of 1861.
A translation was also given of the Fragments which have survived the wreck of the lost plays, so that the work contains all that has been left to us associated with the name of Æschylos.
In the present edition a chronological outline has been substituted for the biographical sketch of the poet, who from his daring enlargement of the scope of the drama, the magnificence of his spectacular effects and the splendour of his genius, was rightly honoured as “the Father of Tragedy.”
| Page | |
|---|---|
| Chronological Outline of the Life of Æschylos | 11 |
| The Persians | 17 |
| The Seven who Fought against Thebes | 65 |
| Prometheus Bound | 113 |
| The Suppliants | 161 |
| Page | |
|---|---|
| Agamemnon | 9 |
| The Libation-Pourers | 87 |
| Eumenides | 137 |
| Fragments | 185 |
| Rhymed Choruses | |
| From Agamemnon | 191 |
| From The Libation-Pourers | 210 |
| From Eumenides | 219 |
| B.C. | |
|---|---|
| 527 | Peisistratos died. |
| 525 | Birth at Eleusis, in Attica, of Æschylos, son of Euphorion. |
| 510 | Expulsion of the Peisistratidæ. Democratic constitution of Cleisthenes. |
| Approximate date of incident in the legend that Æschylos was set to watch grapes as they were ripening for the vintage, and fell asleep; and lo! as he slept Dionysos appeared to him and bade him give himself to write tragedies for the great festival of the god. And when he awoke, he found himself invested with new powers of thought and utterance, and the work was as easy to him as if he had been trained to it for many years (Pausan, Att. i. 21, § 3).[1] | |
| 500 | Birth of Anaxagoras. |
| 499 | Æschylos exhibited his first tragedy, in unsuccessful competition with Pratinas and Chœrilos. |
| 12 | The wooden scaffolding broke beneath the crowd of spectators, and the accident led the Athenians to build their first stone theatre for the Dionysiac festivals. |
| Partly out of annoyance at his defeat, it is said, and partly in a spirit of adventure, Æschylos sailed for Sicily. | |
| 497 | Death of Pythagoras (?). |
| 495 | Birth of Sophocles at Colonos. |
| 491 | Æschylos at Athens. |
| 490 | The Battle of Marathon. Æschylos and his brothers, Kynægeiros and Ameinias, so distinguished themselves, that the Athenians ordered their heroic deeds to be commemorated in a picture. |
| Death of Theognis (?). | |
| 488 | Prize awarded to Simonides for an elegy on Marathon. Æschylos, piqued, it is said, at his failure in the competition, again departed to Sicily. |
| 485 | Xerxes succeeded Dareios. |
| 484 | Æschylos won, in a dramatic contest with Pratinas, Chœrilos, and Phrynichos, the first of a series of thirteen successes. |
| Birth of Herodotos. | |
| 480 | Athens burnt by Xerxes. |
| Æschylos fought at Artemisium and Salamis. At Salamis his brother Ameinias lost his hand, and was awarded the prize of valour. | |
| Sophocles led the Chorus of Victory. | |
| Birth of Euripides. | |
| 13479 | Æschylos at the Battle of Platæa. |
| 477 | Commencement of Athenian supremacy. |
| 473 | Æschylos carried off the first prize with The Persians (the first of the extant plays), which belonged to a tetralogy that included two tragedies, Phineus and Glaucos, and a satyric drama, Prometheus the Fire-stealer. |
| The Persians has the interest of being a contemporary record of the great sea-fight at Salamis by an eye-witness. | |
| 471 | Æschylos appears to have produced this year his next tetralogy, of which The Seven against Thebes survives. |
| The play was directed against the policy of aiming at the supremacy of Athens by attacking other Greek States, and, in brief, maintained the policy of Aristeides as against that of Themistocles. | |
| Birth of Thucydides. | |
| 468 | Sophocles gained his first victory in tragedy with his Triptolemos; Æschylos defeated. |
| Æschylos charged with impiety, on the ground that he had profaned the Mysteries by introducing on the stage rites known only to the initiated; tried and acquitted; departure for Syracuse. | |
| 467 | Æschylos at the court of Hieron at Syracuse, where he is said to have composed dramas on local legends, such as The Women of Ætna. |
| Death of Simonides. | |
| 461 | Ostracism of Kimon; ascendency of Pericles. |
| 14460-59 | Probable date of The Suppliants, if the play be connected with the alliance between Argos and Athens (B.C. 461), and the war with the Persian forces in Egypt, upon which the Athenians had entered as allies of the Libyan Prince Inaros. (B.C. 460.) |
| The date of Prometheus Bound has been referred to B.C. 470 on the strength of a description of Ætna (vv. 370-380), which is supposed to be a reference to the eruption of B.C. 477. Internal evidence, however, seems to warrant the view that The Suppliants and the Prometheus Bound were separated by only a brief interval of time. | |
| 458 | Æschylos in Athens. He found new men and new methods; institutions, held most sacred as the safeguard of Athenian religion, were being criticised and attacked; the Court of Areiopagos was threatened with abolition under pretence of reform. |
| Production of the Oresteian Trilogy (or, rather, tetralogy, as in addition to the Agamemnon, the Libation-pourers, and the Eumenides, there was a satyric drama, Proteus). | |
| This trilogy was a conservative protest, religious, social, and political, which culminated in the assertion of the divine authority of the Areiopagos. | |
| Popular feeling was once more excited against the poet, who left Athens never to return, and settled at Gela, in Sicily, under the patronage of Hieron. | |
| 456 | Death of Æschylos, aged 69. |
| 15 | An oracle foretold that he was to die by a blow from heaven, and according to the legend, an eagle, mistaking the poet's head for a stone as he sat writing, dropped a tortoise on it to break the shell. |
| He was buried at Gela, and his epitaph, ascribed to himself, ran: “Beneath this stone lies Æschylos, son of Euphorion. At fertile Gela he died. Marathon can tell of his tested manhood, and the Persians who there felt his mettle.” | |
| He is said to have produced between seventy and eighty plays, of which only seven survive. |
1. 16Cf., the legend of Caedmon, “the Father of English Song.”
ARGUMENT.—When Xerxes came to the throne of Persia, remembering how his father Dareios had sought to subdue the land of the Hellenes, and seeking to avenge the defeat of Datis and Artaphernes on the field of Marathon, he gathered together a mighty host of all nations under his dominion, and led them against Hellas. And at first he prospered and prevailed, crossed the Hellespont, and defeated the Spartans at Thermopylæ, and took the city of Athens, from which the greater part of its citizens had fled. But at last he and his armament met with utter overthrow at Salamis. Meanwhile Atossa, the mother of Xerxes, with her handmaids and the elders of the Persians, waited anxiously at Susa, where was the palace of the great king, for tidings of her son.
2. 18Note.—Within two years after the battle of Salamis, the feeling of natural exultation was met by Phrynichos in a tragedy bearing the title of The Phœnikians, and having for its subject the defeat of Xerxes. As he had come under the displeasure of the Athenian demos for having brought on the stage the sufferings of their Ionian kinsmen in his Capture of Miletos, he was apparently anxious to regain his popularity by a “sensation” drama of another kind; and his success seems to have prompted Æschylos to a like attempt five years later, B.C. 473. The Tetralogy to which the play belonged, and which gained the first prize on its representation, included the two tragedies (unconnected in subject) of Phineus and Glaucos, and the satyric drama of Prometheus the Fire-stealer.
The play has, therefore, the interest of being strictly a contemporary narrative of the battle of Salamis and its immediate consequences, by one who may himself have been present at it, and whose brother Ameinias (Herod, viii. 93) distinguished himself in it by a special act of heroism. As such, making all allowance for the influence of dramatic exigencies, and the tendency to colour history so as to meet the tastes of patriotic Athenians, it may claim, where it differs from the story told by Herodotos, to be a more trustworthy record. And it has, we must remember, the interest of being the only extant drama of its class, the only tragedy the subject of which is not taken from the cycle of heroic myths, but from the national history of the time. Far below the Oresteian Trilogy as it may seem to us as a work of art, having more the character of a spectacle than a poem, it was, we may well believe, unusually successful at the time, and it is said to have been chosen by Hiero for reproduction in Syracuse after Æschylos had settled there under his patronage.
3. 64“The Faithful,” or “trusty,” seems to have been a special title of honour given to the veteran councillors of the king (Xenoph. Anab. i. 15), just as that of the “Immortals” was chosen for his body-guard (Herod, vii. 83).
4. Susa was pre-eminently the treasury of the Persian kings (Herod, v. 49; Strabo, xv. p. 731), their favourite residence in spring, as Ecbatana in Media was in summer and Babylon in winter.
5. Kissia was properly the name of the district in which Susa stood; but here, and in v. 123, it is treated as if it belonged to a separate city. Throughout the play there is, indeed, a lavish use of Persian barbaric names of persons and places, without a very minute regard to historical accuracy.
6. Here, as in Herodotos and Greek writers generally, the title, “the King,” or “the great King,” was enough. It could be understood only of the Persian. The latter name had been borne by the kings of Assyria (2 Kings xviii. 28). A little later it passed into the fuller, more boastful form of “The King of kings.”
7. The inhabitants of the Delta of the Nile, especially those of the marshy districts near the Heracleotic mouth, were famed as supplying the best and bravest soldiers of any part of Egypt.—Comp. Thucyd. i. 110.
8. The epithet was applied probably by Æschylos to the Lydians properly so called, the barbaric race with whom the Hellenes had little or nothing in common. They, in dress, diet, mode of life, their distaste for the contests of the arena, seemed to the Greeks the very type of effeminacy. The Ionian Greeks, however, were brought under the same influence, and gradually acquired the same character. The suppression of the name of the Ionians in the list of the Persian forces may be noticed as characteristic. The Athenian poet would not bring before an Athenian audience the shame of their Asiatic kinsmen.
9. Tmôlos, sacred as being the mythical birth-place of Dionysos.
10. “Spear-anvils,” sc., meeting the spear of their foes as the anvils would meet it, turning its point, themselves steadfast and immovable.
11. So Herodotos (vii. 74) in his account of the army of Xerxes describes the Mysians as using for their weapons those darts or “javelins” made by hardening the ends in the fire.
12. Helle the daughter of Athamas, from whom the Hellespont took its name. For the description of the pontoons formed by boats, which were moored together with cables and finally covered with faggots, comp. Herod, vii. 36.
13. “Gold-born,” sc., descended from Perseus, the child of Danaë.
14. Syrian, either in the vague sense in which it became almost synonymous with Assyrian, or else showing that Syria, properly so called, retained the fame for chariots which it had had at a period as early as the time of the Hebrew Judges (Judg. v. 3). Herodotos (vii. 140) gives an Oracle of Delphi in which the same epithet appears.
15. The description, though put into the mouth of Persians, is meant to flatter Hellenic pride. The Persians and their army were for the most part light-armed troops only, barbarians equipped with javelins or bows. In the sculptures of Persepolis, as in those of Nineveh and Khorsabad, this mode of warfare is throughout the most conspicuous. They, the Hellenes, were the hoplites, warriors of the spear and the shield, the cuirass and the greaves.
16. A touch of Athenian exultation in their life as seamen. To them the sea was almost a home. They were familiar with it from childhood. To the Persians it was new and untried. They had a new lesson to learn, late in the history of the nation, late in the lives of individual soldiers.
17. The bridge of boats, with the embankment raised upon it, is thought of as a new headland putting out from the one shore and reaching to the other.
18. Stress is laid by the Hellenic poet, as in the Agamemnon (v. 895), and in v. 707 of this play, on the tendency of the East to give to its kings the names and the signs of homage which were due only to the Gods. The Hellenes might deify a dead hero, but not a living sovereign. On different grounds the Jews shrank, as in the stories of Nebuchadnezzar and Dareios (Dan. iii. 6), from all such acts.
19. In the Greek, as in the translation, there is a change of metre, intended apparently to represent the transition from the tone of eager excitement to the ordinary level of discourse.
20. With reference either to the mythos that Asia and Europa were both daughters of Okeanos, or to the historical fact that the Asiatic Ionians and the Dorians of Europe were both of the same Hellenic stock. The contrast between the long flowing robes of the Asiatic women, and the short, scanty kilt-like dress of those of Sparta must be borne in mind if we would see the picture in its completeness.
21. Athenian pride is flattered with the thought that they had resisted while the Ionian Greeks had submitted all too willingly to the yoke of the Barbarian.
22. Lustrations of this kind, besides their general significance in cleansing from defilement, had a special force as charms to turn aside dangers threatened by foreboding dreams. Comp. Aristoph. Frogs, v. 1264; Persius, Sat. ii. 16.
23. The political bearing of the passage as contrasting this characteristic of the despotism of Persia with the strict account to which all Athenian generals were subject, is, of course, unmistakable.
24. The question, which seems to have rankled in the minds of the Athenians, is recorded as an historical fact, and put into the mouth of Dareios by Herodotos (v. 101). He had asked it on hearing that Sardis had been attacked and burnt by them.
25. The words point to the silver mines of Laureion, which had been worked under Peisistratos, and of which this is the first mention in Greek literature.
26. Once more the contrast between the Greek hoplite and the light-armed archers of the invaders is dwelt upon. The next answer of the Chorus dwells upon the deeper contrast, then prominent in the minds of all Athenians, between their democratic freedom and the despotism of Persia. Comp. Herod. v. 78.
27. The system of postal communications by means of couriers which Dareios had organised had made their speed in running proverbial (Herod. vii. 97).
28. With the characteristic contempt of a Greek for other races, Æschylos makes the Persians speak of themselves throughout as 'barbarians,' 'barbaric.'
29.
30. Possibly Salamis itself, as famed for the doves which were reared there as sacred to Aphrodite, but possibly also one of the smaller islands in the Saronic gulf, which the epithet would be enough to designate for an Athenian audience. The “coasts of the Sileni” in v. 305 are identified by scholiasts with Salamis.
31. Perhaps—“And ten of these selected as reserve.”
32. As regards the number of the Persian ships, 1000 of average, and 207 of special swiftness. Æschylos agrees with Herodotos, who gives the total of 1207. The latter, however, reckons the Greek ships not at 310, but 378 (vii. 89, viii. 48).
33. The fact that Athens had actually been taken, and its chief buildings plundered and laid waste, was, of course, not a pleasant one for the poet to dwell on. It could hardly, however, be entirely passed over, and this is the one allusion to it. In the truest sense it was still “unsacked:” it had not lost its most effective defence, its most precious treasure.
34. As the story is told by Herodotos (vii. 75), this was Sikinnos, the slave of Themistocles, and the stratagem was the device of that commander to save the Greeks from the disgrace and ruin of a sauve qui peut flight in all directions.
35. The Greeks never beheaded their criminals, and the punishment is mentioned as being specially characteristic of the barbaric Persians.
36. The Æginetans and Megarians, according to the account preserved by Diodoros (xi. 18), or the Lacedæmonians, according to Herodotos (viii. 65).
37. This may be meant to refer to the achievements of Ameinias of Pallene, who appears in the traditional life of Œschylos as his youngest brother.
38. Sc., in Herod. viii. 60, the strait between Salamis and the mainland.
39. Tunny-fishing has always been prominent in the occupations on the Mediterranean coasts, and the sailors who formed so large a part of every Athenian audience would be familiar with the process here described, of striking or harpooning them. Aristophanes (Wasps, 1087) coins (or uses) the word “to tunny” (θυννάζω) to express the act. Comp. Herod. i. 62.
40. Sc., Psyttaleia, lying between Salamis and the mainland. Pausanias (i. 36-82) describes it in his time as having no artistic shrine or statue, but full everywhere of roughly carved images of Pan, to whom the island was sacred. It lay just opposite the entrance to the Peiræos. The connexion of Pan with Salamis and its adjacent islands seems implied in Sophocles, Aias, 695.
41. The manœuvre was, we learn from Herodotos (viii. 95), the work of Aristeides, the personal friend of Æschylos, and the statesman with whose policy he had most sympathy.
42. The lines are noted as probably a spurious addition, by a weaker hand, to the text, as introducing surplusage, as inconsistent with Herodotos, and as faulty in their metrical structure.
43. So Herodotos (viii. 115) describes them as driven by hunger to eat even grass and leaves.
44. No trace of this passage over the frozen Strymon appears in Herodotos, who leaves the reader to imagine that it was crossed, as before, by a bridge. It is hardly, indeed, consistent with dramatic probability that the courier should have remained to watch the whole retreat of the defeated army; and on this and other grounds, the latter part of the speech has been rejected by some critics as a later addition.
45. The Ionians, not of the Asiatic Ionia, but of Attica.
46. Kychreia, the archaic name of Salamis.
47. The ritual described is Hellenic rather than Persian, and takes its place (Soph. Electr. 836; Eurip. Iphig. Taur. 583; Homer, Il. xxiii. 219) as showing what offerings were employed to soothe or call up the spirits of the dead. Comp. Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxx.
48. The description obviously gives the state dress of the Persian kings. They alone wore the tiara erect. Xen. Kyrop. viii. 3, 13.
49. Either that he has felt the measured tread of the mourners round his tomb, as they went wailing round and round, or that he has heard the rush of armies, and seen the plain tracked by chariot-wheels, and comes, not knowing all these things, to learn what it means.
50. The words point to the widespread belief that when the souls of the dead were permitted to return to the earth, it was with strict limitations as to the time of their leave of absence.
51. Perhaps—“I dread to speak the truth.”
52. According to Herodotos (vii. 225) two brothers of Xerxes fell at Thermopylæ.
53. As Herodotos (viii. 117) tells the story, the bridge had been broken by the tempest before Xerxes reached it.
54. Probably Mardonios and Onomacritos the Athenian soothsayer are referred to, who, according to Herodotos (vii. 6, viii. 99) were the chief instigators of the expedition.
55. Astyages, the father-in-law of Kyaxares and grandfather of Kyros. In this case Æschylos must be supposed to accept Xenophon's statement that Kyaxares succeeded to Astyages. Possibly, however, the Median may be Kyaxares I., the father of Astyages, and so the succession here would harmonise with that of Herodotos. The whole succession must be looked on as embodying the loose, floating notions of the Athenians as to the history of their great enemy, rather than as the result of inquiry.
56. Stress is laid on the violence to which the Asiatic Ionians had succumbed, and their resistance to which distinguished them from the Lydians or Phrygians, whose submission had been voluntary.
57. Mardos. Under this name we recognise the Pseudo-Smerdis of Herodotos (iii. 67), who, by restoring the dominion of the Median Magi, the caste to which he himself belonged, brought shame upon the Persians.
58. Possibly another form of Intaphernes, who appears in Herodotos (iii. 70) as one of the seven conspirators against the Magian Pseudo-Smerdis.
59. The force of 300,000 men left in Greece under Mardonios (Herod. viii. 113), afterwards defeated at Platæa.
60. Comp. the speech of Mardonios urging his plan on Xerxes (Herod. viii. 100).
61. This was of course a popular topic with the Athenians, whose own temples had been outraged. But other sanctuaries also, the temples at Delphi and Abæ, had shared the same fate, and these sins against the Gods of Hellas were naturally connected in the thoughts of the Greeks with the subsequent disasters of the Persians. In Egypt these outrages had an iconoclastic character. In Athens they were a retaliation for the destruction of the temple at Sardis (Herod. v. 102).
62. The reference to the prominent part taken by the Peloponnesian forces in the battle of Platæa is probably due to the political sympathies of the dramatist.
63. The speech of Atossa is rejected by Paley, on internal grounds, as spurious.
64. Apparently an allusion to the oracle given to Crœsos, that he, if he crossed the Halys, should destroy a great kingdom.
65. The name originally given to the Echinades, a group of islands at the mouth of the Acheloös, was applied generically to all islands lying near the mouth of all great rivers, and here, probably, includes Imbros, Thasos, and Samothrakè.
66. The geography is somewhat obscure, but the words seem to refer to the portion of the islands that are named as opposite (in a southerly direction) to the promontory of the Troad.
67. Salamis in Kypros had been colonised by Teukros, the son of Aias, and had received its name in remembrance of the island in the Saronic Gulf.
68. The Mariandynoi, a Paphlagonian tribe, conspicuous for their orgiastic worship of Adonis, had become proverbial for the wildness of their plaintive dirges.
69. The name seems to have been an official title for some Inspector-General of the Army. Comp. Aristoph. Acharn. v. 92.
70. As in the account which Herodotos gives (vii. 60) of the way in which the army of Xerxes was numbered, sc., by enclosing 10,000 men in a given space, and then filling it again and again till the whole army had passed through.
71. Another reading gives—
72. Perhaps referring to the waggon-chariots in which the rider reclines at ease, either protected by a canopy, or, as in the Assyrian sculptures and perhaps in the East generally, overshadowed by a large umbrella which an eunuch holds over him.
ARGUMENT.—When Œdipus king of Thebes discovered that he had unknowingly been the murderer of his father, and had lived in incest with his mother, he blinded himself. And his two sons, Eteocles and Polyneikes, wishing to banish the remembrance of these horrors from the eyes of men, at first kept him in confinement. And he, being wroth with them, prayed that they might divide their inheritance with the sword. And they, in fear lest the prayer should be accomplished, agreed to reign in turn, each for a year, and Eteocles, as the elder of the two, took the first turn. But when at the end of the year Polyneikes came to ask for the kingdom, Eteocles refused to give way, and sent him away empty. So Polyneikes went to Argos and married the daughter of Adrastos the king of that country, and gathered together a great army under six great captains, himself going as the seventh, and led it against Thebes. And so they compassed it about, and at each of the seven gates of the city was stationed one of the divisions of the army.
Note.—The Seven against Thebes appears to have been produced B.C. 472, the year after The Persians.
73. Probably directed against the tendency of the Athenians, as shown in their treatment of Miltiades, and later in that of Thukydides, to punish their unsuccessful generals, “pour encourager les autres.”
74. Teiresias, as in Sophocles (Antig. v. 1005), sitting, though blind, and listening, as the birds flit by him, and the flames burn steadily or fitfully; a various reading gives “apart from sight.”
75. Enyo, the goddess of war, and companion of Ares.
76. Amphiaraos the seer had prophesied that Adrastos alone should return home in safety. On his car, therefore, the other chieftains hung the clasps, or locks of hair, or other memorials which in the event of their death were to be taken to their parents.
77. The Hellenic feeling, such as the Platæans appealed to in the Peloponnesian war (Thuc. iii. 58, 59), that it was noble and right for Hellenes to destroy a city of the barbarians, but that they should spare one belonging to a people of their own stock.
78. The characteristic feature of the Argive soldiers was, that they bore a shield painted white (comp. Sophocles, Antig. v. 114). The leaders alone appear to have embellished this with devices and mottoes.
79. In solemn supplications, the litanies of the ancient world, especially in those to Pallas, the suppliants carried with them in procession the shawl or peplos of the Goddess, and with it enwrapt her statue. To carry boughs of trees in the hands was one of the uniform, probably indispensable, accompaniments of such processions.
80. The words recall our thoughts to the original use of the trident, which became afterwards a symbol of Poseidon, as employed by the sailors of Hellas to spear or harpoon the larger fish of the Archipelago. Comp. Pers. v. 426, where the slaughter of a defeated army is compared to tunny-fishing.
81. Cadmos, probably “the man from the East,” the Phœnikian who had founded Thebes, and sown the dragon's seed, and taught men a Semitic alphabet for the non-Semitic speech of Hellas.
82. Worthy of his name as the Wolf-destroyer, mighty to destroy his foes.
83. Possibly “from battlements attacked.” In the primitive sieges of Greek warfare stones were used as missiles alike by besieged and besiegers.
84. The name of Onca belonged especially to the Theban worship of Pallas, and was said to have been of Phœnikian origin, introduced by Cadmos. There seems, however, to have been a town Onkæ in Bœotia, with which the name was doubtless connected.
85. “Alien,” on account of the difference of dialect between the speech of Argos and that of Bœotia, though both were Hellenic.
86. The vehemence with which Eteocles reproves the wild frenzied wailing of the Chorus may be taken as an element of the higher culture showing itself in Athenian life, which led Solon to restrain such lamentations by special laws (Plutarch, Solon, c. 20). Here, too, we note in Æschylos an echo of the teaching of Epimenides.
87. As now the sailor of the Mediterranean turns to the image of his patron saint, so of old he ran in his distress to the figure of his God upon the prow of his ship (often, as in Acts xxviii. II, that of the Dioscuri), and called to it for deliverance (comp. Jonah i. 8).
88. Eteocles seems to wish for a short, plain prayer for deliverance, instead of the cries and supplications and vain repetitions of the Chorus.
89. The thought thus expressed was, that the Gods, yielding to the mightier law of destiny, or in their wrath at the guilt of men, left the city before its capture. The feeling was all but universal. Its two representative instances are found in Virgil, Æn. 351—
and the narrative given alike by Tacitus (Hist. v. 13), and Josephus (Bell. Jud. vi. 5, 3), that the cry “Let us depart hence,” was heard at midnight through the courts of the Temple, before the destruction of Jerusalem.
90. Sc. Blood must be shed in war. Ares would not be Ares without it. It is better to take it as it comes.
91. Sc., the company of Gods, Pallas, Hera and the others whom the Chorus had invoked.
92. Reference to this custom, which has passed from Pagan temples into Christian churches, is found in the Agamemnon, v. 562. It was connected, of course, with the general practice of offering as ex votos any personal ornaments or clothing as a token of thanksgiving for special mercies.
93. Rivers and streams as the children of Tethys and Okeanos.
94. Here, as in v. 571, Tydeus appears as the real leader of the expedition, who had persuaded Adrastos and the other chiefs to join in it, and Amphiaraos, the prophet, the son of Œcleus, as having all along foreseen its disastrous issue. The account of the expedition in the Œdipus at Colonos (1300-1330) may be compared with this.
95. The legend of the Medusa's head on the shield of Athena shows the practice of thus decorating shields to have been of remote date. In Homer it does not appear as common, and the account given of the shield of Achilles lays stress upon the work of the artist (Hephæstos) who wrought the shield in relief, not, as here, upon painted insignia. They were obviously common in the time of Æschylos.
96. The older families of Thebes boasted that they sprang from the survivors of the Sparti, who, sprung from the Dragon's teeth, waged deadly war against each other, till all but five were slain. The later settlers, who were said to have come with Cadmos, stood to these as the “greater” to the “lesser gentes” at Rome.
97. So in the Antigone of Sophocles (v. 134), Capaneus appears as the special representative of boastful, reckless impiety.
98. Artemis, as one of the special Deities to whom Thebes was consecrated.
99. Apparently an Asiatic invention, to increase the terror of an attack of war-chariots.
100. The phrase and thought were almost proverbial in Athens. Men, as citizens, were thought of as fed at a common table, bound to contribute their gifts to the common stock. When they offered up their lives in battle, they were giving, as Pericles says (Thucyd. ii. 43), their noblest “contribution,” paying in full their subscription to the society of which they were members.
101. Thyiad, another name for the Mænads, the frenzied attendants on Dionysos.
102. Sc., in the legends of Typhon, not he, but Zeus, had proved the conqueror. The warrior, therefore, who chose Typhon for his badge was identifying himself with the losing, not the winning side.
103. The name, as we are told in v. 542, is Parthenopæos, the maiden-faced.
104. The Sphinx, besides its general character as an emblem of terror, had, of course, a special meaning as directed to the Thebans. The warrior who bore it threatened to renew the old days when the monster whom Œdipus had overcome had laid waste their city.
105. Sc., the Sphinx on his shield will not be allowed to enter the city. It will only serve as a mark, attracting men to attack both it and the warrior who bears it.
106. The quarrel between Tydeus and the seer Amphiaraos had been already touched upon.
107. I have used the old English word to express a term of like technical use in Athenian law processes. As the “sumpnour” called witnesses or parties to a suit into court, so Tydeus had summoned the Erinnys to do her work of destruction.
108. Sc., so pronounced his name as to emphasise the significance of its two component parts, as indicating that he who bore it was a man of much contention.
109. The words are obscure, but seem to refer to the badge of Polyneikes, the figure of Justice described in v. 643 as on his shield. How shall that Justice, the seer asks, console Jocasta for her son's death? Another rendering gives,
the “mother” being the country against which Polyneikes wars.
110. The words had a twofold fulfilment (1) in the burial of Amphiaraos, in the Theban soil; and (2) in the honour which accrued to Thebes after his death, through the fame of the oracle at his shrine.
111. The passage cannot be passed over without noticing the old tradition (Plutarch, Aristeid. c. 3), that when the actor uttered these words, he and the whole audience looked to Aristeides, surnamed the Just, as recognising that the words were true of him as they were of no one else. “Best,” instead of “just,” is, however, a very old various reading.
112. If the former reference to Aristeides be admitted, we can scarcely avoid seeing in this passage an allusion to Themistocles, as one with whose reckless and democratic policy it was dangerous for the more conservative leader to associate himself.
113. The far-off city, not of Thebes, but of Hades. In the legend of Thebes, the earth opened and swallowed up Amphiaraos, as in 583.
114. The short spear was usually carried under the shelter of the shield; when brought into action it was, of course, laid bare.
115. Perhaps “since death is at nigh hand.”
116. The Chorus means that if Eteocles would allow himself to be overcome in this contest of his wishes with their prayers the Gods would honour that defeat as if it were indeed a victory. He makes answer that the very thought of being overcome implied in the word “defeat” in anything is one which the true warrior cannot bear.
117. The “Chalyb stranger” is the sword, thought of as taking its name from the Skythian tribe of the Chalybes, between Colchis and Armenia, and passing through the Thrakians into Greece.
118. The two brothers, i.e., are set at one again, but it is not in the bonds of friendship, but in those of death.
119. The image meets us again in Agam. 980. Here the thought is, that a man too prosperous is like a ship too heavily freighted. He must part with a portion of his possession in order to save the rest. Not to part with them leads, when the storm rages, to an enforced abandonment and utter loss.
120. Another reading gives—
121. This seems to have been one form of the legends as to the cause of the curse which Œdipus had launched upon his sons, An alternative rendering is—
122. Sc., when Eteocles fell, Apollo took his place at the seventh gate, and turned the tide of war in favour of the Thebans.
123. I follow in this dialogue the arrangement which Paley adopts from Hermann.
124. There seems an intentional ambiguity. They are “borne on,” but it is as the corpses of the dead are borne to the sepulchre.
125. Not here the curse uttered by Œdipus, but that which rested on him and all his kin. There is possibly an allusion to the curse which Pelops is said to have uttered against Laios when he stole his son Chrysippos. Comp. v. 837.
126. As in v. 763 we read of the brothers as made one in death, so now of the concord which is wrought out by conflict, the concord, i.e., of the grave.
127. The Chorus are called on to change their character, and to pass from the attitude of suppliants, with outstretched arms, to that of mourners at a funeral, beating on their breasts. But, perhaps, the call is addressed to the mourners who are seen approaching with Ismene and Antigone.
128. The thought is drawn from the theoris or pilgrim-ship, which went with snow-white sails, and accompanied by joyful pæans, on a solemn mission from Athens to Delos. In contrast with this type of joy, Æschylos draws the picture of the boat of Charon, which passes over the gloomy pool accompanied by the sighs and gestures of bitter lamentation. So, in the old Attic legend, the ship that annually carried seven youths and maidens to the Minotaur of Crete was conspicuous for its black sails.
129. The “Chalyb,” or iron sword, which the Hellenes had imported from the Skythians. Comp. vv. 70. 86.
130. The lyrical, operative character of Greek tragedies has to be borne in mind as we read passages like that which follows. They were not meant to be read. Uttered in a passionate recitative, accompanied by expressive action, they probably formed a very effective element in the actual representation of the tragedy. We may look on it as the only extant specimen of the kind of wailing which was characteristic of Eastern burials, and which was slowly passing away in Greece under the influence of a higher culture. The early fondness of Æschylos for a finale of this nature is seen also in The Persians, and in a more solemn and subdued form, in the Eumenides. The feeling that there was something barbaric in these untoward displays of grief, showed itself alike in the legislation of Solon, and the eloquence of Pericles.
131. Here, and perhaps throughout, we must think of Antigone as addressing and looking on the corpse of Polyneikes, Ismene on that of Eteocles.
132. Perhaps
133. The speech of the Antigone becomes the starting-point, in the hands of Sophocles, of the noblest of his tragedies. The denial of burial, it will be remembered, was looked on as not merely an indignity and outrage against the feelings of the living, but as depriving the souls of the dead of all rest and peace. As such it was the punishment of parricides and traitors.
134. The words are obscure enough, the point lying, it may be, in their ambiguity. Antigone here, as in the tragedy of Sophocles, pleads that the Gods have pardoned; they still command and love the reverence for the dead, which she is about to show. The herald catches up her words and takes them in another sense, as though all the honour he had met with from the Gods had been defeat, and death, and shame, as the reward of his sacrilege. Another rendering, however, gives—
135. The words are probably a protest against the changeableness of the Athenian demos, as seen especially in their treatment of Aristeides.
ARGUMENT.—In the old time, when Cronos was sovereign of the Gods, Zeus, whom he had begotten, rose up against him, and the Gods were divided in their counsels, some, the Titans chiefly, siding with the father, and some with the son. And Prometheus, the son of Earth or Themis, though one of the Titans, supported Zeus, as did also Okeanos, and by his counsels Zeus obtained the victory, and Cronos was chained in Tartaros, and the Titans buried under mountains, or kept in bonds in Hades. And then Prometheus, seeing the miseries of the race of men, of whom Zeus took little heed, stole the fire which till then had belonged to none but Hephæstos and was used only for the Gods, and gave it to mankind, and taught them many arts whereby their wretchedness was lessened. But Zeus being wroth with Prometheus for this deed, sent Hephæstos, with his two helpers, Strength and Force, to fetter him to a rock on Caucasos.
And in yet another story was the cruelty of the Gods made known. For Zeus loved Io, the daughter of Inachos, 114king of Argos, and she was haunted by visions of the night, telling her of his passion, and she told her father thereof. And Inachos, sending to the God at Delphi, was told to drive Io forth from her home. And Zeus gave her the horns of a cow, and Hera, who hated her because she was dear to Zeus, sent with her a gadfly that stung her, and gave her no rest, and drove her over many lands.
Note.—The play is believed to have been the second of a Trilogy, of which the first was Prometheus the Fire-giver, and the third Prometheus Unbound.
136. The scene seems at first an exception to the early conventional rule, which forbade the introduction of a third actor on the Greek stage. But it has been noticed that (1) Force does not speak, and (2) Prometheus does not speak till Strength and Force have retired, and that it is therefore probable that the whole work of nailing is done on a lay figure or effigy of some kind, and that one of the two who had before taken part in the dialogue then speaks behind it in the character of Prometheus. So the same actor must have appeared in succession as Okeanos, Io, and Hermes.
137. Prometheus (Forethought) is the son of Themis (Right) the second occupant of the Pythian Oracle (Eumen. v. 2). His sympathy with man leads him to impart the gift which raised them out of savage animal life, and for this Zeus, who appears throughout the play as a hard taskmaster, sentences him to fetters. Hephæstos, from whom this fire had been stolen, has a touch of pity for him. Strength, who comes as the servant, not of Hephæstos, but of Zeus himself, acts, as such, with merciless cruelty.
138. The generalised statement refers to Zeus, as having but recently expelled Cronos from his throne in Heaven.
139. Hephæstos, as the great fire-worker, had taught Prometheus to use the fire which he afterwards bestowed on men.
140. Perhaps, “All might is ours except o'er Gods to rule.”
141. The words indicate that the effigy of Prometheus, now nailed to the rock, was, as being that of a Titan, of colossal size.
142. The touch is characteristic as showing that here, as in the Eumenides, Æschylos relied on the horribleness of the masks, as part of the machinery of his plays.
143. The silence of Prometheus up to this point was partly, as has been said, consequent on the conventional laws of the Greek drama, but it is also a touch of supreme insight into the heroic temper. In the presence of his torturers, the Titan will not utter even a groan. When they are gone, he appeals to the sympathy of Nature.
144. The legend is from Hesiod (Theogon., v. 567). The fennel, or narthex, seems to have been a large umbelliferous plant, with a large stem filled with a sort of pith, which was used when dry as tinder. Stalks were carried as wands (the thyrsi) by the men and women who joined in Bacchanalian processions. In modern botany, the name is given to the plant which produces Asafœtida, and the stem of which, from its resinous character, would burn freely, and so connect itself with the Promethean myth. On the other hand, the Narthex Asafœtida is found at present only in Persia, Afghanistan, and the Punjaub.
145. The ocean nymphs, like other divine ones, would be anointed with ambrosial unguents, and the odour would be wafted before them by the rustling of their wings. This too we may think of as part of the “stage effects” of the play.
146. The words are not those of a vague terror only. The sufferer knows that his tormentor is to come to him before long on wings, and therefore the sound as of the flight of birds is full of terrors.
147. By the same stage mechanism the Chorus remains in the air till verse 280, when, at the request of Prometheus, they alight.
148. Here, as throughout the play, the poet puts into the mouth of his dramatis personæ words which must have seemed to the devouter Athenians sacrilegious enough to call for an indictment before the Areiopagos. But the final play of the Trilogy came, we may believe, as the Eumenides did in its turn, as a reconciliation of the conflicting thoughts that rise in men's minds out of the seeming anomalies of the world.
149. The words leave it uncertain whether Themis is identified with Earth, or, as in the Eumenides (v. 2) distinguished from her. The Titans as a class, then, children of Okeanos and Chthôn (another name for Land or Earth), are the kindred rather than the brothers of Prometheus.
150. The generalising words here, as in v. 35, appeal to the Athenian hatred of all that was represented by the words tyrant and tyranny.
151. The state described is that of men who “through fear of death are all their lifetime subject to bondage.” That state, the parent of all superstition, fostered the slavish awe in which Zeus delighted. Prometheus, representing the active intellect of man, bestows new powers, new interests, new hopes, which at last divert them from that fear.
152. The home of Okeanos was in the far west, at the boundary of the great stream surrounding the whole world, from which he took his name.
153. One of the sayings of the Seven Sages, already recognised and quoted as a familiar proverb.
154. See note on Agam. 1602.
155. In the mythos, Okeanos had given his daughter Hesione in marriage to Prometheus after the theft of fire, and thus had identified himself with his transgression.
156. In the Theogony of Hesiod (v. 509), Prometheus and Atlas appear as the sons of two sisters. As other Titans were thought of as buried under volcanoes, so this one was identified with the mountain which had been seen by travellers to Western Africa, or in the seas beyond it, rising like a column to support the vault of heaven. In Herodotos (iv. 174) and all later writers, the name is given to the chain of mountains in Lybia, as being the “pillar of the firmament;” but Humboldt and others identify it with the lonely peak of Teneriffe, as seen by Phœnikian or Hellenic voyagers. Teneriffe, too, like most of the other Titan mountains, was at one time volcanic. Homer (Odyss. i. 53) represents him as holding the pillars which separate heaven from earth; Hesiod (Theogon. v. 517) as himself standing near the Hesperides (this too points to Teneriffe), sustaining the heavens with his head and shoulders.
157. The volcanic character of the whole of Asia Minor, and the liability to earthquakes which has marked nearly every period of its history, led men to connect it also with the traditions of the Titans, some accordingly placing the home of Typhon in Phrygia, some near Sardis, some, as here, in Kilikia. Hesiod (Theogon. v. 820) describes Typhon (or Typhoeus) as a serpent-monster hissing out fire; Pindar (Pyth. i. 30, viii. 21) as lying with his head and breast crushed beneath the weight of Ætna, and his feet extending to Cumæ.
158. The words point probably to an eruption, then fresh in men's memories, which had happened B.C. 476.
159. By some editors this speech from “No, not so,” to “thou know'st how,” is assigned to Okeanos.
160. These are, of course, the Amazons, who were believed to have come through Thrakè from the Tauric Chersonesos, and had left traces of their name and habits in the Attic traditions of Theseus.
161. Beyond the plains of Skythia, and the lake Mæotis (the sea of Azov) there would be the great river Okeanos, which was believed to flow round the earth.
162. Sarmatia has been conjectured instead of Arabia. No Greek author sanctions the extension of the latter name to so remote a region as that north of the Caspian.
163. The Greek leaves the object of the sympathy undefined, but it seems better to refer it to that which Atlas receives from the waste of waters around, and the dark world beneath, than to the pity shown to Prometheus. This has already been dwelt on in line 421.
164. The passage that follows has for modern palæontologists the interest of coinciding with their views as to the progress of human society, and the condition of mankind during what has been called the “Stone” period. Comp. Lucretius, v. 955-984.
165. Comp. Mr. Blakesley's note on Herod. ii. 4, as showing that here there was the greater risk of faulty observation.
166. Another reading gives perhaps a better sense—
167. In Greece, as throughout the East, the ox was used for all agricultural labours, the horse by the noble and the rich, either in war chariots, or stately processions, or in chariot races in the great games.
168. Compare with this the account of the inventions of Palamedes in Sophocles, Fragm. 379.
169. Here we can recognise the knowledge of one who had studied in the schools of Pythagoras, or had at any rate picked up their terminology. A more immediate connexion may perhaps be traced with the influence of Epimenides, who was said to have spent many years in searching out the healing virtues of plants, and to have written books about them.
170. The lines that follow form almost a manual of the art of divination as then practised. The “ominous sounds” include chance words, strange cries, any unexpected utterance that connected itself with men's fears for the future. The flights of birds were watched by the diviner as he faced the north, and so the region on the right hand was that of the sunrise, light, blessedness; on the left there were darkness and gloom and death.
171. So Io was represented, we are told, by Greek sculptors (Herod. ii. 41), as Isis was by those of Egypt. The points of contact between the myth of Io and that of Prometheus, as adopted, or perhaps developed, by Æschylos are—(1) that from her the destined deliverer of the chained Titan is to come; (2) that both were suffering from the cruelty of Zeus; (3) that the wanderings of Io gave scope for the wild tales of far countries on which the imagination of the Athenians fed greedily. But, as the Suppliants may serve to show, the story itself had a strange fascination for him. In the birth of Epaphos, and Io's release from her frenzy, he saw, it may be, a reconciliation of what had seemed hard to reconcile, a solution of the problems of the world, like in kind to that which was shadowed forth in the lost Prometheus Unbound.
172. Argos had been slain by Hermes, and his eyes transferred by Hera to the tail of the peacock, and that bird was henceforth sacred to her.
173. Inachos the father of Io (identified with the Argive river of the same name), was, like all rivers, a son of Okeanos, and therefore brother to the nymphs who had come to see Prometheus.
174. The words used have an almost technical meaning as applied to animals that were consecrated to the service of a God, and set free to wander where they liked. The fate of Io, as at once devoted to Zeus and animalised in form, was thus shadowed forth in the very language of the Oracle.
175. Lerna was the lake near the mouth of the Inachos, close to the sea. Kerchneia may perhaps be identified with the Kenchreæ, the haven of Korinth in later geographies.
176. The wicker huts used by Skythian or Thrakian nomads (the Calmucks of modern geographers) are described by Herodotos (iv. 46) and are still in use.
177. Sc., the N.E. boundary of the Euxine, where spurs of the Caucasos ridge approach the sea.
178. The Chalybes are placed by geographers to the south of Colchis. The description of the text indicates a locality farther to the north.
179. Probably the Araxes, which the Greeks would connect with a word conveying the idea of a torrent dashing on the rocks. The description seems to imply a river flowing into the Euxine from the Caucasos, and the condition is fulfilled by the Hypanis or Kouban.
180. When the Amazons appear in contact with Greek history, they are found in Thrace. But they had come from the coast of Pontos, and near the mouth of the Thermodon (Thermeh). The words of Prometheus point to yet earlier migrations from the East.
181. Here, as in Soph. Antig. (970) the name Salmydessos represents the rockbound, havenless coast from the promontory of Thynias to the entrance of the Bosporos, which had given to the Black Sea its earlier name of Axenos, the “inhospitable.”
182. The track is here in some confusion. From the Amazons south of the Caucasos, Io is to find her way to the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea) and the Kimmerian Bosporos, which flows into the Sea of Azov, and so to return to Asia.
183. Here, as in a hundred other instances, a false etymology has become the parent of a myth. The name Bosporos is probably Asiatic not Greek, and has an entirely different signification.
184. The lines refer to the story that Zeus loved Thetis the daughter of Nereus, and followed her to Caucasos, but abstained from marriage with her because Prometheus warned him that the child born of that union should overthrow his father. Here the future is used of what was still contingent only. In the lost play of the Trilogy the myth was possibly brought to its conclusion and connected with the release of Prometheus.
185. Heracles, whose genealogy was traced through Alcmena, Perseus, Danae, Danaos and seven other names, to Epaphos and Io.
186. Probably the Kimmerian Bosporos. The Tanais or Phasis has, however, been conjectured.
187. The history of the passage in brackets is curious enough to call for a note. They are not in any extant MS., but they are found in a passage quoted by Galen (v. p. 454), as from the Prometheus Bound, and are inserted here by Mr. Paley.
188. Kisthene belongs to the geography of legend, lying somewhere on the shore of the great ocean-river in Lybia or Æthiopia, at the end of the world, a great mountain in the far West, beyond the Hesperides, the dwelling-place, as here, of the Gorgons, the daughters of Phorkys. Those first-named are the Graiæ.
189. Here, like the “wingèd hound” of v. 1043, for the eagles that are the messengers of Zeus.
190. We are carried back again from the fabled West to the fabled East. The Arimaspians, with one eye, and the Grypes or Gryphons (the griffins of mediæval heraldry), quadrupeds with the wings and beaks of eagles, were placed by most writers (Herod. iv. 13, 27) in the north of Europe, in or beyond the terra incognita of Skythia. The mention of the “ford of Pluto” and Æthiopia, however, may possibly imply (if we identify it, as Mr. Paley does, with the Tartessos of Spain, or Bœtis—Guadalquivir) that Æschylos followed another legend which placed them in the West. There is possibly a paronomasia between Pluto, the God of Hades, and Plutos, the ideal God of riches.
191. The name was applied by later writers (Quintus Curtius, iv. 7, 22; Lucretius, vi. 848) to the fountain in the temple of Jupiter Ammon in the great Oasis. The “river Æthiops” may be purely imaginary, but it may also suggest the possibility of some vague knowledge of the Niger, or more probably of the Nile itself in the upper regions of its course. The “Bybline hills” carry the name Byblos, which we only read of as belonging to a town in the Delta, to the Second Cataract.
192. Comp. Sophocles, Trachin., v. 1168.
193. The Adriatic or Ionian Gulf.
194. In the Suppliants, Zeus is said to have soothed her, and restored her to her human consciousness by his “divine breathings.” The thought underlying the legend may be taken either as a distortion of some primitive tradition, or as one of the “unconscious prophecies” of heathenism. The deliverer is not to be born after the common manner of men, and is to have a divine as well as a human parentage.
195. See the argument of the Suppliants, who, as the daughters of Danaos, descended from Epaphos, are here referred to. The passage is noticeable as showing that the theme of that tragedy was already present to the poet's thoughts.
196. Argos. So in the Suppliants, Pelasgos is the mythical king of the Apian land who receives them.
197. Hypermnæstra, who spared Lynceus, and by him became the mother of Abas and a line of Argive kings.
198. Heracles, who came to Caucasos, and with his arrows slew the eagle that devoured Prometheus.
199. The word is simply an interjection of pain, but one so characteristic that I have thought it better to reproduce it than to give any English equivalent.
200. The maxim, “Marry with a woman thine equal,” was ascribed to Pittacos.
201. The Euhemerism of later scholiasts derived the name from a king Adrastos, who was said to have been the first to build a temple to Nemesis, and so the power thus worshipped was called after his name. A better etymology leads us to see in it the idea of the “inevitable” law of retribution working unseen by men, and independently even of the arbitrary will of the Gods, and bringing destruction upon the proud and haughty.
202. Comp. Agam. 162-6.
203. Either a mere epithet of intensity, as in our “thrice blest,” or rising from the supposed fact that every third wave was larger and more impetuous than the others, like fluctus decumanus of the Latins, or from the sequence of three great waves which some have noted as a common phenomenon in storms.
204. Here again we have a strange shadowing forth of the mystery of Atonement, and what we have learnt to call “vicarious” satisfaction. In the later legend, Cheiron, suffering from the agony of his wounds, resigns his immortality, and submits to die in place of the ever-living death to which Prometheus was doomed.
205. It is noticeable that both Æschylos and Sophocles have left us tragedies which end in a thunderstorm as an element of effect. But the contrast between the Prometheus and the Œdipus at Colonos as to the impression left in the one case of serene reconciliation, and in the other of violent antagonism, is hardly less striking than the resemblance in the outward phenomena which are common to the two.
ARGUMENT.—When Io, after many wanderings, had found refuge in Egypt, and having been touched by Zeus, had given birth to Epaphos, it came to pass that he and his descendants ruled over the region of Canôpos, near one of the seven mouths of Neilos. And in the fifth generation there were two brothers, Danaos and Ægyptos, the sons of Belos, and the former had fifty daughters and the latter fifty sons, and Ægyptos sought the daughters of Danaos in marriage for his sons. And they, looking on the marriage as unholy, and hating those who wooed them, took flight and came to Argos, where Pelasgos then ruled as king, as to the land whence Io, from whom they sprang, had come. And thither the sons of Ægyptos followed them in hot pursuit.
Enter Chorus of the Daughters of Danaos,[206] in the dress of Egyptian women, with the boughs of suppliants in their hands, and fillets of white wool twisted round them, chanting as they move in procession to take up their position round the thymele
206. The daughters of Danaos are always represented as fifty in number. It seems probable, however, that the vocal chorus was limited to twelve, the others appearing as mutes.
207. The alluvial deposit of the Delta.
208. Syria is used obviously with a certain geographical vagueness, as including all that we know as Palestine, and the wilderness to the south of it, and so as conterminous with Egypt.
209. Elsewhere in Æschylos (Agam. 33, Fr. 132) we trace allusion to games played with dice. Here we have a reference to one, the details of which are not accurately known to us, but which seems to have been analogous to draughts or chess.
210. See the whole story, given as in prophecy, in the Prometheus, v. 865-880.
211. The invocation is addressed—(1) to the Olympian Gods in the brightness of heaven; (2) to the Chthonian deities in the darkness below the earth; (3) to Zeus, the preserver, as the supreme Lord of both.
212. An Athenian audience would probably recognise in this a description of the swampy meadows near the coast of Lerna. The descendants of Io had come to the very spot where the tragic history of their ancestors had had its origin.
213. The invocation passes on to Epaphos, as a guardian deity able and willing to succour his afflicted children.
214. Philomela. See the tale as given in the notes to Agam. 1113.
215. “Streams,” as flowing through the shady solitude of the groves which the nightingale frequented.
216. “Ionian,” as soft and elegiac, in contrast with the more military character of Dorian music.
217. In the Greek the paronomasia turns upon the supposed etymological connection between θεὸς and τιθήμι. I have here, as elsewhere, attempted an analogous rather than identical jeu de mot.
218. The Greek word which I have translated “bluff” was one not familiar to Attic ears, and was believed to be of Kyrenean origin. Æschylos accordingly puts it into the lips of the daughters of Danaos, as characteristic more or less of the “alien speech” of the land from which they came.
219. So in v. 235 Danaos speaks of the “second Zeus” who sits as Judge in Hades. The feeling to which the Chorus gives utterance is that of—
220. Some mound dedicated to the Gods, with one or more altars and statues of the Gods on it, is on the stage, and the suppliants are told to take up their places there. The Gods of conflict who are named below, Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon, presided generally over the three great games of Greece. Hermes is added to the list.
221. Comp. Libation-Pourers, 1024, Eumen. 44.
222. The Argives are supposed to share the love of brevity which we commonly connect with their neighbours the Laconians.
223. The “mighty bird of Zeus” seems here, from the answer of the Chorus, to mean not the “eagle” but the “sun,” which roused men from their sleep as the cock did, so that “cockcrow” and “sunrise” were synonymous. It is, in any case, striking that Zeus, rather than Apollo, appears as the Sun-God.
224. The words refer to the myth of Apollo's banishment from heaven and servitude under Admetos.
225. In the Acropolis at Athens the impress of a trident was seen on the rock, and was believed to commemorate the time when Poseidon had claimed it as his own by setting up his weapon there. Something of the same kind seems here to be supposed to exist at Argos, where a like legend prevailed.
226. The Hellenic Hermes is distinguished from his Egyptian counterpart, Thoth, as being different in form and accessories.
227. A possible reference to the Egyptian Osiris, as lord or judge of Hades. Comp. v. 145.
228. “Shall I,” the Chorus asks, “speak to you as a private citizen, or as a herald, or as a king?”
229. It would appear from this that the king himself bore the name Pelasgos. In some versions of the story he is so designated.
230. The lines contain a tradition of the wide extent of the old Pelasgic rule, including Thessalia, or the Pelasgic Argos, between the mouths of Peneus and Pindos, Perrhæbia, Dodona, and finally the Apian land or Peloponnesos.
231. The true meaning of the word “Apian,” as applied to the Peloponnesos, seems to have been “distant.” Here the myth is followed which represented it as connected with Apis the son of Telchin (son of Apollo, in the sense of being a physician-prophet), who had freed the land from monsters.
232. The description would seem to indicate—(1) that the daughter of Danaos appeared on the stage as of swarthy complexion; and (2) that Indians, Æthiopians, Kyprians, and Amazons, were all thought of as in this respect alike.
233. The line is conjectural, but some question of this kind is implied in the answer of the Chorus.
234. By sacrificing personal likings to schemes of ambition, men and women contract marriages which increase their power.
235. The Gods of conflict are the pilots of the ship of the State. The altar dedicated to them is as its stern: the garlands and wands of suppliants which adorn it are as the decorations of the vessels.
236. Some editors have seen in this an attempt to enlist the constitutional sympathies of an Athenian audience in favour of the Argive king, who will not act without consulting his assembly. There seems more reason to think that the aim of the dramatist was in precisely the opposite direction, and that the words which follow set forth his admiration for the king who can act, as compared with one who is tied and hampered by restrictions.
237. By an Attic law, analogous in principle to that of the Jews, (Num. xxxvi. 8; 1 Chron. xxiii. 22), heiresses were absolutely bound to marry their next of kin, if he claimed his right. The king at once asserts this as the law which was primâ facie applicable to the case, and declares himself ready to surrender it if the petitioners can show that their own municipal law is on the other side. He will not thrust his country's customs upon foreigners, who can prove that they live under a different rule, but in the absence of evidence must act on the law which he is bound officially to recognise.
238. Sc., the pollution which the statues of the Gods would contract if they carried into execution their threat of suicide.
239. Inachos, the river-God of Argos, and as such contrasted with Neilos.
240. i.e., “Unconsecrate,” marked out by no barriers, accessible to all, and therefore seeming to offer but little prospect of a safe asylum. The place described seems to have been an open piece of turf rather than a grove of trees.
241. Comp. the narrative as given in Prometheus Bound, vv. 660, et seq.
242. Teuthras' fort, or Teuthrania, is described by Strabo (xii. p. 571) as lying between the Hellespont and Mount Sipylos, in Magnesia.
243. Kypros, as dedicated to the worship of Aphrodite, and famous for its wine, and oil, and corn.
244. The question, what caused the mysterious exceptional inundations of the Nile, occupied, as we see from Herodotos (ii. c. 19-27), the minds of the Greeks. Of the four theories which the historian discusses, Æschylos adopts that which referred it to the melting of the snows on the mountains of central Africa.
245. Typhon, the mythical embodiment of the power of evil, was fabled to have wandered over Egypt, seeking the body of Osiris. Isis, to baffle him, placed coffins in all parts of Egypt, all empty but the one which contained the body.
246. The fame of the Nile for the purity of its water, after the earthy matter held in solution had been deposited, seems to have been as great in the earliest periods of its history as it is now.
247. Io was represented as a woman with a heifer's head, and was probably a symbolic representation of the moon, with her crescent horns. Sometimes the transformation is described (as in v. 294) in words which imply a more thorough change.
248. Perhaps—
249. The passage takes its place among the noblest utterances of a faith passing above the popular polytheism to the thought of one sovereign Will ruling and guiding all things, as Will—without effort, in the calmness of a power irresistible.
250. Double, as involving a sin against the laws of hospitality, so far as the suppliants were strangers—a sin against the laws of kindred, so far as they might claim by descent the rights of citizenship.
251. If, as has been conjectured, the tragedy was written with a view to the alliance between Argos and Athens, made in B.C. 461, this choral ode must have been the centre, if not of the dramatic, at all events of the political interest of the play.
252. The image is that of a bird of evil omen, perched upon the roof, and defiling the house, while it uttered its boding cries.
253. The suppliants' boughs, so held as to shade the face from view.
254. The name of Hecate connected Artemis as, on the one side, with the unseen world of Hades, so, on the other, with childbirth, and the purifications that followed on it.
255. The name of Lykeian, originally, perhaps, simply representing Apollo as the God of Light, came afterwards to be associated with the might of destruction (the Wolf-destroyer) and the darts of pestilence and sudden death. The prayer is therefore that he, the Destroyer, may hearken to the suppliants, and spare the people for whom they pray.
256. The “three great laws” were those ascribed to Triptolemos, “to honour parents, to worship the Gods with the fruits of the earth, to hurt neither man nor beast.”
257. The Egyptian ships, like those of many other Eastern countries, had eyes (the eyes of Osiris, as they were called) painted on their bows.
258. A side-thrust, directed by the poet, who had fought at Marathon, against the growing effeminacy of the Athenian youth, many of whom were learning to shrink from all activity and exposure that might spoil their complexions. Comp. Plato, Phædros, p. 239.
259. The saying is somewhat dark, but the meaning seems to be that if the “dogs” of Egypt are strong, the “wolves” of Argos are stronger; that the wheat on which the Hellenes lived gave greater strength to limbs and sinew than the “byblos fruit” on which the Egyptian soldiers and sailors habitually lived. Some writers, however, have seen in the last line, rendered—
a proverb like the English,
260. The words recall the vision of the “seven well-favoured kine and fat-fleshed,” which “came out of the river,” as Pharaoh dreamed (Gen. xli. 1, 2), and which were associated so closely with the fertility which it ordinarily produced through the whole extent of the valley of the Nile.
261. Two dangerous low headlands seem to have been known by this name, one on the coast of Kilikia, the other on that of the Thrakian Chersonese.
262. No traces of ships of this structure are found in Egyptian art; but, if the reading be right, it implies the existence of boats of some kind, so built that they could be steered from either end.
263. Hermes, the guardian deity of heralds, is here described by the epithet which marked him out as being also the patron of detectives. Every stranger arriving in a Greek port had to place himself under a proxenos or patron of some kind. The herald, having no proxenos among the citizens, appeals to his patron deity.
264. The words refer to the custom of nailing decrees, proclamations, treaties, and the like, engraved on metal or marble, upon the walls of temples or public buildings. Traces of the same idea may possibly be found in the promise to Eliakim that he shall be “as a nail in a sure place” (Isa. xxii. 23), in the thanksgiving of Ezra that God had given His people “a nail in his holy place” (Ezra ix. 8).
265. As before, the bread of the Hellenes was praised to the disparagement of the “byblos fruit” of Egypt, so here their wine to that of the Egyptian beer, which was the ordinary drink of the lower classes.
266. The words present a striking parallelism to the erotic imagery of the Song of Solomon: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil our vines, for our vines have tender grapes.” (ii. 15).
267. The Erasinos was supposed to rise in Arcadia, in Mount Stymphalos, to disappear below the earth, and to come to sight again in Argolis.
268. In this final choral ode of the Suppliants, as in that of the Seven against Thebes, we have the phenomenon of the division of the Chorus, hitherto united, into two sections of divergent thought and purpose. Semi-Chorus A. remains steadfast in its purpose of perpetual virginity; Semi-Chorus B. relents, and is ready to accept wedlock.
269. The two names were closely connected in the local worship of Athens, the temples of Aphrodite and Peitho (Suasion) standing at the south-west angle of the Acropolis. If any special purpose is to be traced in the invocation, we may see it in the poet's desire to bring out the nobler, more ethical side of Aphrodite's attributes, in contrast with the growing tendency to look on her as simply the patroness of brutal lust.
270. The play, as acted, formed part of a trilogy, and the next play, the Danaids, probably contained the sequel of the story, the acceptance by the Suppliants of the sons of Ægyptos in marriage, the plot of Danaos for the destruction of the bridegrooms on the wedding-night, and the execution of the deed of blood by all but Hypermnestra.
ARGUMENT.—Ten years had passed since Agamemnon, son of Atreus, king of Mykenæ, had led the Hellenes to Troïa to take vengeance on Alexandros (also known as Paris), son of Priam. For Paris had basely wronged Menelaos, king of Sparta, Agamemnon's brother, in that, being received by him as a guest, he enticed his wife Helena to leave her lord and go with him to Troïa. And now the tenth year had come, and Paris was slain, and the city of the Troïans was taken and destroyed, and Agamemnon and the Hellenes were on their way homeward with the spoil and prisoners they had taken. But meanwhile Clytæmnestra too, Agamemnon's queen, had been unfaithful, and had taken as her paramour Ægisthos, son of that Thyestes whom Atreus, his brother, had made to eat, unknowing, of the flesh of his own children. And now, partly led by her adulterer, and partly seeking to avenge the death of her daughter Iphigeneia, whom Agamemnon had sacrificed to appease the wrath of Artemis, and partly also jealous because he was bringing back Cassandra, the daughter of Priam, as his concubine, she plotted with Ægisthos against her husband's life. 1010But this was done secretly, and she stationed a guard on the roof of the royal palace to give notice when he saw the beacon-fires, by which Agamemnon had promised that he would send tidings that Troïa was taken.
Note.—The unfaithfulness of Clytæmnestra and the murder of Agamemnon had entered into the Homeric cycle of the legends of the house of Atreus. In the Odyssey, however, Ægisthos is the chief agent in this crime (Odyss. iii. 264, iv. 91, 532, xi. 409); and the manner of it differs from that which Æschylos has adopted. Clytæmnestra first appears as slaying both her husband and Cassandra in Pindar (Pyth. xi. 26).
1013Enter Chorus of twelve Argive elders, chanting as they march to take up their position in the centre of the stage. A procession of women bearing torches is seen in the distance
Enter Clytæmnestra from the palace, in robes with stains of blood, followed by soldiers and attendants. The open doors show the corpses of Agamemnon and Cassandra, the former lying in a silvered bath
271. 1086The form of gambling from which the phrase is taken, had clearly become common in Attica among the class to which the watchman was supposed to belong, and had given rise to proverbial phrases like that in the text. The Greeks themselves supposed it to have been invented by the Lydians (Herod. i. 94), or Palamedes, one of the heroes of the tale of Troïa, but it enters also into Egyptian legends (Herod. ii. 122), and its prevalence from remote antiquity in the farther East, as in the Indian story of Nala and Damayanti, makes it probable that it originated there. The game was commonly played, as the phrase shows, with three dice, the highest throw being that which gave three sixes. Æschylos, it may be noted, appears in a lost drama, which bore the title of Palamedes, to have brought the game itself into his plot. It is referred to, as invented by that hero, in a fragment of Sophocles (Fr. 380), and again in the proverb,—
272. Here, also, the watchman takes up another common proverbial phrase, belonging to the same group as that of “kicking against the pricks” in v. 1624. He has his reasons for silence, weighty as would be the tread of an ox to close his lips.
273. The vultures stand, i.e., to the rulers of Heaven, in the same relation as the foreign sojourners in Athens, the Metoics, did to the citizens under whose protection they placed themselves.
274. Alexandros, the other name of Paris, the seducer of Helen.
275. The words, perhaps, refer to the grief of Menelaos, as leading him to neglect the wonted sacrifices to Zeus, but it seems better to see in them a reference to the sin of Paris. He, at least, who had carried off his host's wife, had not offered acceptable sacrifices, had neglected all sacrifices to Zeus Xenios, the God of host and guest. The allusion to the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, which some (Donaldson and Paley) have found here, and the wrath of Clytæmnestra, which Agamemnon will fail to soothe, seems more far-fetched.
276. An allusion, such as the audience would catch and delight in, to the well-known enigma of the Sphinx. See Sophocles (Trans.), p. 1.
277. The Chorus, though too old to take part in the expedition, are yet able to tell both of what passed as the expedition started, and of the terrible fulfilment of the omens which they had seen. The two eagles are, of course, in the symbolism of prophecy, the two chieftains, Menelaos and Agamemnon. The “white feathers” of the one may point to the less heroic character of Menelaos: so in v. 123, they are of “diverse mood.” The hare whom they devour is, in the first instance, Troïa, and so far the omen is good, portending the success of the expedition; but, as Artemis hates the fierceness of the eagles, so there is, in the eyes of the seer, a dark token of danger from her wrath against the Atreidæ. Either their victory will be sullied by cruelty which will bring down vengeance, or else there is some secret sin in the past which must be atoned for by a terrible sacrifice. In the legend followed by Sophocles (Electr. 566), Agamemnon had offended Artemis by slaying a doe sacred to her, as he was hunting. In the manifold meanings of such omens there is, probably, a latent suggestion of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia by the two chieftains, though this was at the time hidden from the seer. The fact that they are seen on the right, not on the left hand, was itself ominous of good.
278. The song of Linos, originally the dirge with which men mourned for the death of Linos, the minstrel-son of Apollo and Urania, brother of Orpheus, who was slain by Heracles—a type, like Thammuz and Adonis, of life prematurely closed and bright hopes never to be fulfilled,—had come to be the representative of all songs of mourning. So Hesiod (in Eustath. on Hom. Il., vii. 569) speaks of the name, as applied to all funeral dirges over poets and minstrels. So Herodotos (ii. 79) compares it, as the type of this kind of music among the Greeks, with what he found in Egypt connected with the name of Maneros, the only son of the first king of Egypt, who died in the bloom of youth. The name had, therefore, as definite a connotation for a Greek audience as the words Miserere or Jubilate would have for us, and ought not, I believe, to disappear from the translation.
279. The comparison of a lion's whelps to dew-drops, bold as the figure is, has something in it analogous to that with which we are more familiar, describing the children, or the army of a king, as the “dew” from “the womb of the morning” (Ps. cx. 3).
280. The sacrifice, i.e., was to be such as could not, according to the customary ritual, form a feast for the worshippers.
281. The dark words look at once before and after, back to the murder of the sons of Thyestes, forward, though of this the seer knew not, to the sacrifice of Iphigeneia. Clytæmnestra is the embodiment of the Vengeance of which the Chorus speaks.
282. As a part of the drama the whole passage that follows is an assertion by the Chorus that in this their trouble they will turn to no other God, invoke no other name, but that of the Supreme Zeus. But it can hardly be doubted that they have a meaning beyond this, and are the utterance by the poet of his own theology. In the second part of the Promethean trilogy (all that we now know of it) he had represented Zeus as ruling in the might of despotic sovereignty, the representative of a Power which men could not resist, but also could not love, inflicting needless sufferings on the sons of men. Now he has grown wiser. The sovereignty of Zeus is accepted as part of the present order of the world; trust in Him brings peace; the pain which He permits is the one only way to wisdom. The stress laid upon the name of Zeus implies a wish to cleave to the religion inherited from the older Hellenes, as contrasted with those with which their intercourse with the East had made the Athenians familiar. Like the voice which came to Epimenides, as he was building a sanctuary to the Muses, bidding him dedicate it not to them but to Zeus (Diog. Laert. i. 10), it represents a faint approximation to a truer, more monotheistic creed than that of the popular mythology.
283. The two mighty ones who have passed away are Uranos and Cronos, the representatives in Greek mythology of the earlier stages of the world's history, (1) mere material creation, (2) an ideal period of harmony, a golden, Saturnian age, preceding the present order of divine government with its mingled good and evil. Comp. Hesiod. Theogon., 459.
284. The Chorus returns, after its deeper speculative thoughts, to its interrupted narrative.
285. The seer saw his augury fulfilled. When he uttered the name of Artemis it was pregnant with all the woe which he had foreboded at the outset.
286. So that the blood may fall upon the altar, as the knife was drawn across the throat.
287. The whole passage should be compared with the magnificent description in Lucretius i. 84-101.
288. Beautiful as a picture, and as motionless and silent also. The art, young as it was, had already reached the stage when it supplied to the poet an ideal standard of perfection. Other allusions to it are found in vv. 774, 1300.
289. The words point to the ritual of Greek feasts, which assigned the first libation to Zeus and the Olympian Gods, the second to the Heroes, the third to Zeus in his special character as Saviour and Preserver; the last was commonly accompanied by a pæan, hymn of praise. The life of Agamemnon is described as one which had good cause to offer many such libations. Iphigeneia had sung many such pæans.
290. The mythical explanation of this title for the Argive territory is found in the Suppl. v. 256, and its real meaning is discussed in a note to that passage.
291. To speak of Morning as the child of Night was, we may well believe, among the earliest parables of nature. In its mythical form it appears in Hesiod (Theogon. 123), but its traces are found wherever, as among Hebrews, Athenians, Germans, men reckoned by nights rather than by days, and spoke of “the evening and the morning” rather than of “day and night.”
292. The God thought of is, as in v. 272, Hephæstos, as being Lord of the Fire, that had brought the tidings.
293. It is not without significance that Clytæmnestra scorns the channel of divine instruction of which the Chorus had spoken with such reverence. The dramatist puts into her mouth the language of those who scoffed at the notion that truth might come to the soul in “visions of the night,” when “deep sleep falleth upon men.” So Sophocles puts like thoughts into the mouth of Jocasta (Œd. King, vv. 709, 858).
294. Omens came from the flight of birds. An omen which was not trustworthy, or belonged to some lower form of divination, might therefore be spoken of as “wingless.” But the word may possibly be intensive, not negative, “swift-winged,” and then refer generically to that form of divination.
295. The description that follows, over and above its general interest, had, probably, for an Athenian audience, that of representing the actual succession of beacon-stations, by which they, in the course of the wars, under Pericles, had actually received intelligence from the coasts of Asia. A glance at the map will show the fitness of the places named—Ida, Lemnos, Athos, Makistos (a mountain in Eubœa), Messapion (on the coast of Bœotia), over the plains of the Asôpos to Kithæron, in the south of the same province, then over Gorgopis, a bay of the Corinthian Gulf, to Ægiplanctos in Megaris, then across to a headland overlooking the Saronic Gulf, to the Arachnæan hill in Argolis. The word “courier-fire” connects itself also with the system of posts or messengers, which the Persian kings seem to have been the first to organise, and which impressed the minds both of Hebrews (Esth. viii. 14) and Greeks (Herod. viii. 98) by their regular transmission of the king's edicts, or of special news.
296. Our ignorance of the details of the Lampadephoria, or “torch-race games,” in honour of the fire-God, Prometheus, makes the allusion to them somewhat obscure. As described by Pausanias (I. xxx. 2), the runners started with lighted torches from the altar of Prometheus in the Academeia and ran towards the city. The first who reached the goal with his torch still burning became the winner. If all the torches were extinguished, then all were losers. As so described, however, there is no succession, no taking the torch from one and passing it on to another, like that described here and in the well-known line of Lucretius (ii. 78),
On the other hand, there are descriptions which show that such a transfer was the chief element of the game. This is, indeed, implied both in this passage and in the comparison between the game and the Persian courier-system in Herod. viii. 98. The two views may be reconciled by supposing (1) that there were sets of runners, vying with each other as such, rather than individually, or (2) that a runner whose speed failed him though his torch kept burning, was allowed to hand it on to another who was more likely to win the race, but whose torch was out. The next line seems meant to indicate where the comparison failed. In the torch-race which Clytæmnestra describes there had been no contest. One and the self-same fire (the idea of succession passing into that of continuity) had started and had reached the goal, and so had won the prize. An alternative rendering would be,—
297. The complete foot-race was always to the column which marked the end of the course, round it, and back again. In getting to Troïa, therefore, but half the race was done.
298. Dramatically the words refer to the practical impiety of evildoers like Paris, with, perhaps, a half-latent allusion to that of Clytæmnestra. But it can hardly be doubted that for the Athenian audience it would have a more special significance, as a protest against the growing scepticism, what in a later age would have been called the Epicureanism, of the age of Pericles. It is the assertion of the belief of Æschylos in the moral government of the world. The very vagueness of the singular, “One there was,” would lead the hearers to think of some teacher like Anaxagoras, whom they suspected of Atheism.
299. The Chorus sees in the overthrow of Troïa, an instance of this righteous retribution. The audience were, perhaps, intended to think also of the punishment which had fallen on the Persians for the sacrilegious acts of their fathers. The “things inviolable” are the sanctities of the ties of marriage and hospitality, both of which Paris had set at nought.
300. Here, and again in v. 612, we have a similitude drawn from the metallurgy of Greek artists. Good bronze, made of copper and tin, takes the green rust which collectors prize, but when rubbed, the brightness reappears. If zinc be substituted for tin, as in our brass, or mixed largely with it, the surface loses its polish, oxidizes and becomes black. It is, however, doubtful whether this combination of metals was at the time in use, and the words may simply refer to different degrees of excellence in bronze properly so called.
301. In a corrupt passage like this, the text of which has been so variously restored and rendered, it may be well to give at least one alternative version:
The words, as so taken, refer to the vision of Helen, described in the lines that follow. Another, for the line “In deepest woe,” &c., ... would give,
302. The art of Pheidias had already made it natural at Athens to speak of kings as decorating their palaces with the life-size busts or statues of those they loved.
303. Here again one may note a protest against the aggressive policy of Pericles, an assertion of the principle that a nation should be content with independence, without aiming at supremacy.
304. Perhaps passively, “Soon suffers trespassers.”
305. As the play opens on the morning of the day on which Troïa was taken, and now we have the arrivals, first, of the herald, and then of Agamemnon, after the capture has been completed, and the spoil divided, and the fleet escaped a storm, an interval of some days must be supposed between the two parts of the play, the imaginary law of the unities notwithstanding.
306. The customary adornment of heralds who brought good news. Comp. Sophocles, Œd. K. v. 83. The custom prevailed for many centuries, and is recognised by Dante, Purg. ii. 70, as usual in his time in Italy.
307. So in the Seven against Thebes (v. 494), smoke is called “the sister of fire.”
308. A probable reference, not only to the story, but to the actual words of Homer, Il. i. 45-52.
309. Specially the Dioscuri, Castor and Polydeukes.
310. Such a position (especially in the case of Zeus or Apollo) was common in the temples both of Greece and Rome, and had a very obvious signification. As the play was performed, the actual hour of the day probably coincided with that required by the dramatic sequence of events, and the statues of the Gods were so placed on the stage as to catch the rays of the morning sun when the herald entered. Hence the allusion to the bright “cheerful glances” would have a visible as well as ethical fitness.
311. It formed part of the guilt of Paris, that, besides his seduction of Helena, he had carried off part of the treasures of Menelaos.
312. The idea of a payment twofold the amount of the wrong done, as a complete satisfaction to the sufferer, was common in the early jurisprudence both of Greeks and Hebrews (Exod. xxii. 4-7). In some cases it was even more, as in the four or fivefold restitution of Exod. xxii. 1. In the grand opening of Isaiah's message of glad tidings the fact that Jerusalem has received “double for all her sins” is made the ground on the strength of which she may now hope for pardon. Comp. also Isa. lxi. 7; Zech. ix. 12.
313. Perhaps—
314. So stress is laid upon this form of hardship, as rising from the climate of Troïa, by Sophocles, Aias, 1206.
315. One may conjecture that here also, as with the passage describing the succession of beacon fires (vv. 281-314), the description would have for an Athenian audience the interest of recalling personal reminiscences of some recent campaign in Thrakè, or on the coasts of Asia.
316. We may, perhaps, think of the herald, as he speaks, placing some representative trophy upon the pegs on the pedestals of the statues of the great Gods of Hellas, whom he had invoked on his entrance.
317. Or,
318. The husband, on his departure, sealed up his special treasures. It was the glory of the faithful wife or the trusty steward to keep these seals unbroken.
319. There is an ambiguity, possibly an intentional one, in the comparison which Clytæmnestra uses. If there was no such art as that of “staining bronze” (or copper) known at the time, the words would be a natural phrase enough to describe what was represented as an impossibility. Later on in the history of art, however, as in the time of Plutarch, a process so described (perhaps analogous to enamelling) is mentioned (De Pyth. Orac. § 2) as common. If we suppose the art to have been a mystery known to the few, but not to the many, in the time of Æschylos, then the words would have for the hearers the point of a double entendre. She seems to the mass to disclaim what yet, to those in the secret she acknowledges.
Another rendering refers “bronze” to the “sword,” and makes the stains those of blood; as though she said, “I am as guiltless of adultery as of murder,” while yet she knew that she had committed the one, and meant to commit the other. The possibility of such a meaning is certainly in the words, and with a sharp-witted audience catching at ænigmas and dark sayings may have added to their suggestiveness. The ambiguous comment of the Chorus shows that they read, as between the lines, the shameful secret which they knew, but of which the Herald was ignorant.
320. The last two lines are by some editors assigned to the Herald.
321. It need hardly be said that it is as difficult to render a paronomasia of this kind as it is to reproduce those, more or less analogous, which we find in the prophets of the Old Testament (comp. especially Micah i.); but it seems better to substitute something which approaches, however imperfectly, to an equivalent than to obscure the reference to the nomen et omen by abandoning the attempt to translate it. “Hell of men, and hell of ships, and hell of towers,” has been the rendering adopted by many previous translators. The Greek fondness for this play on names is seen in Sophocles, Aias, v. 401.
322. Zephyros, Boreas, and the other great winds were represented in the Theogony of Hesiod (v. 134) as the offspring of Astræos and Eôs, and Astræos was a Titan. The west wind was, of course, favourable to Paris as he went with Helen from Greece to Troïa.
323. Here again the translator has to meet the difficulty of a pun. As an alternative we might take—
324. The sons of Priam are thought of as taking part in the celebration of Helen's marriage with Paris, and as, therefore, involving themselves in the guilt and the penalty of his crime.
325. Here, too, it may be well to give an alternative rendering—
Home-reared lions seem to have been common as pets, both among Greeks and Latins (Arist., Hist. Anim. ix. 31; Plutarch, de Cohib. irâ, § 14, p. 822), sometimes, as in Martial's Epigram, ii. 25, with fatal consequences. The text shows the practice to have been common enough in the time of Pericles to supply a similitude.
326. There may, possibly, be a half allusion here to the passage in the Iliad (vv. 154-160), which describes the fascination which the beauty of Helen exercised on the Troïan elders.
327. The poet becomes a prophet, and asserts what it has been given him to know of the righteous government of God. The dominant creed of Greece at the time was, that the Gods were envious of man's prosperity, that this alone, apart from moral evil, was enough to draw down their wrath, and bring a curse upon the prosperous house. So, e.g., Amasis tells Polycrates (Herod. iii. 40) that the unseen Divinity that rules the world is envious, that power and glory are inevitably the precursors of destruction. Comp. also the speech of Artabanos (Herod. vii. 10, 46). Against this, in the tone of one who speaks singlehanded for the truth, Æschylos, through the Chorus, enters his protest.
328. Sc., Agamemnon, by the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, had induced his troops to persevere in an expedition from which, in their inmost hearts, they shrank back with strong dislike. A conjectural reading gives,
329. The tone of ambiguous irony mingles, it will be seen, even here, with the praises of the Chorus.
330. Possibly an allusion to Pandora's box. Here, too, Hope alone was left, but it only came up to where the curve of the rim began, not to its top. The imagery is drawn from the older method of voting, in which (as in Eumenides, v. 678) the votes for condemnation and acquittal were cast into separate urns.
331. The lion, as the symbol of the house of Atreus, still seen in the sculptures of Mykenæ; the horse, in allusion to the stratagem by which Troïa had been taken.
332. At the end of autumn, and therefore at a season when a storm like that described by the herald would be a probable incident enough.
333. So in Sophocles, Philoctetes (v. 1025) taunts Odysseus:—
334. Geryon appears in the myth of Hercules as a monster with three heads and three bodies, ruling over the island Erytheia, in the far West, beyond Hesperia. To destroy him and seize his cattle was one of the “twelve labours,” with which Hesiod (Theogon. vv. 287-294) had already made men familiar.
335. When a man is buried, there is earth above and earth below him. Clytæmnestra having used the words “coverlet,” pauses to make her language accurate to the very letter. She is speaking only of the earth which would have been laid over her husband's corpse, had he died as often as he was reported to have done. She will not utter anything so ominous as an allusion to the depths below him stretching down to Hades.
336. Or—
337. The words touch upon the psychological fact that in dreams, as in other abnormal states of the mind, the usual measures of time disappear, and we seem to pass through the experiences of many years in the slumber of a few minutes.
338. The rhetoric of the passage, with all its multiplied similitudes, fine as it is in itself, receives its dramatic significance by being put into the lips of Clytæmnestra. She “doth protest too much.” A true wife would have been content with fewer words.
339. The last three lines of the speech are of course intentionally ambiguous, carrying one meaning to the ear of Agamemnon, and another to that of the audience.
340. There is obviously a side-thrust, such as an Athenian audience would catch at, at the token of homage which the Persian kings required of their subjects, the prostration at their feet, the earth spread over with costly robes. Of the latter custom we have examples in the history of Jehu (2 Kings ix. 13), in our Lord's entry into Jerusalem (Mark xi. 8), in the usages of modern Persian kings (Malcolm's Persia, i. 580); perhaps also in the true rendering of Ps. xlv. 14. “She shall be brought unto the king on raiment of needle-work.” In the march of Xerxes across the Hellespont myrtle-boughs strown on the bridge of boats took the place of robes (Herod. vii. 54). To the Greek character, with its strong love of independence, such customs were hateful. The case of Pausanias, who offended the national feeling by assuming the outward state of the Persian kings, must have been recalled to the minds of the Athenians, intentionally or otherwise, by such a passage as this.e bridge of boats took the place of robes (Herod. vii. 54). To
341. The “old saying, famed of many men,” which we find in the Trachiniæ of Sophocles (v. 1), and in the counsel of Solon to Crœsos (Herod. i. 32).
342. He who had suffered so much from the wrath of Artemis at Aulis knew what it was to rouse the wrath and jealousy of the Gods.
343. An echo of a line in Hesiod (Works and Days, 763)—
344. Here, too, we may trace a reference to the Oriental custom of recognising the sanctity of a consecrated place by taking the shoes from off the feet, as in Exod. iii. 5, in the services of the Tabernacle and Temple, through all their history (Juven., Sat. vi. 159), in all mosques to the present day. Agamemnon, yielding to the temptress, seeks to make a compromise with his conscience. He will walk upon the tapestry, but will treat it as if it, of right, belonged to the Gods, and were a consecrated thing. It is probably in connection with this incident that Æschylos was said to have been the first to bring actors on the stage in these boots or buskins (Suidas. s. v. άρβύλη).
345. The words of Isaiah (xviii. 5), “when the sour grape is ripening in the flower,” present an almost verbal parallel.
346. The ever-recurring ambiguity of Clytæmnestra's language is again traceable, as is also her fondness for rhetorical similitudes.
347. The Chorus speaks in perplexity. In cannot get rid of its forebodings, and yet it would seem as if the time for the fulfilment of the dark words of Calchas must have passed long since. It actually sees the safe return of the leader of the host, yet still its fears haunt it.
348. Asclepios, whom Zeus smote with his thunderbolt for having restored Hippolytos to life.
349. The Chorus, in spite of their suspicions and forebodings, have given the king no warning. They excuse themselves by the plea of necessity, the sovereign decree of Zeus overruling all man's attempts to withstand it.
350. Cassandra is summoned to an act of worship. The household is gathered, the altar to Zeus Ktesios (the God of the family property, slaves included), standing in the servants' hall, is ready. The new slave must come in and take her place with the others.
351. As in the story which forms the groundwork of the Trachiniæ of Sophocles, vv. 250-280, that Heracles had been sold to Omphale as a slave, in penalty for the murder of Iphitos.
352. Political as well as dramatic. The Eupatrid poet appeals to public opinion against the nouveaux riches, the tanners and lamp-makers, who were already beginning to push themselves forward towards prominence and power. The way was thus prepared in the first play of the Trilogy for what is known to have been the main object of the last. Comp. Arist., Rhet. ii. 32.
353. Here again the translator has the task of finding an English paronomasia which approximates to that of the Greek, between Apollo and ἀπόλλων the destroyer. To Apollo, as the God of paths (Aguieus), an altar stood, column-fashion, before the street-door of every house, and to such an altar, placed by the door of Agamemnon's palace, Cassandra turns, with the twofold play upon the name.
354. This refers, probably, to the death of Hippodameia, the wife of Pelops, who killed herself, in remorse for the death of Chrysippos, or fear of her husband's anger. The horrors of the royal house of Argos pass, one by one, before the vision of the prophetess, and this leads the procession, followed by the spectres of the murdered children of Thyestes.
355. The Chorus, as in their last ode, had made up their minds, though foreboding ill, to let destiny take its course. They do not wish that policy of non-interference to be changed by any too clear vision of the future.
356. The Chorus understands the vision of the clairvoyante as regards the past tragedy of the house of Atreus, but not that which seems to portend another actually imminent.
357. Fresh visions come before the eyes of the seeress. She beholds the company of Erinnyes hovering over the accursed house, and calls on them to continue their work till the new crime has met with its due punishment. The murder which she sees as if already wrought, demands death by stoning.
358. The “yellow” look of fear is thought of as being caused by an actual change in the colour of the blood as it flows through the veins to the heart.
359. Here there is prevision as well as clairvoyance. The deed is not yet done. The sacrifice and the feast are still going on, yet she sees the crime in all its circumstances.
360. As before (v. 115) the black eagle had been the symbol of the warrior-chief, so here the black-horned bull, that being one of the notes of the best breed of cattle. A various reading gives “with her swarthy horn.”
361. What the Chorus had just said as to the fruitlessness of prophetic insight tallied all too well with her own bitter experience.
362. The ecstasy of horror interrupts the tenor of her speech, and the second “thou” is addressed not to the Chorus, but to Agamemnon, whose death Cassandra has just witnessed in her vision.
363. The song of the nightingale, represented by these sounds, was connected with a long legend, specially Attic in its origin. Philomela, daughter of Pandion, king of Attica, suffered outrage at the hands of Tereus, who was married to her sister Procne, and was then changed into a nightingale, destined ever to lament over the fate of Itys her sister's son. The earliest form of the story appears in the Odyssey (xix. 518). Comp. Sophocles, Electr. v. 148.
364. In the marriage-rites of the Greeks of the time of Æschylos, the bride for three days after the wedding wore her veil; then, as now no longer shrinking from her matron life, she laid it aside and looked on her husband with unveiled face.
365. The picture might be drawn by any artist of power, but we may, perhaps, trace a reproduction of one of the grandest passages in the Iliad (iv. 422-426).
366. So in the Eumenides (v. 293), the Erinnyes appear as vampires, drinking the blood of their victims.
367. The death of Myrtilos as the first crime in the long history of the house of Pelops. Comp. Soth. Electr. v. 470. The “defiler” is Thyestes, who seduced Aerope, the wife of Atreus.
368. The horror of the Thyestes banquet again haunts her as the source of all the evils that followed, of the deaths both of Iphigenia and Agamemnon. The “stay-at-home” is Ægisthos.
369. Both words point to the Sindbad-like stories of distant marvels brought back by Greek sailors. The Amphisbæna (double-goer), wriggling itself backward and forward, believed to have a head at each extremity, was looked upon as at once the most subtle and the most venomous of serpents. Skylla, already famous in its mythical form from the story in the Odyssey (xii. 85-100), was probably a “development” of the monstrous cuttle-fish of the straits of Messina.
370. As in Homer (Il. i. 14) so here, the servant of Apollo bears the wand of augury, and fillets or wreaths round head and arms. The divining garments, in like manner, were of white linen.
371. If we adopt this reading, we must think of Cassandra as identifying herself with the woe (Atè) which makes up her life, just as afterwards Clytæmnestra speaks of herself as one with the avenging Demon (Alastor) of the house of Atreus (1473). The alternative reading gives—
372. Perhaps, “in home not mine.”
373. When the victim, instead of shrinking and struggling, went, as with good courage, to the altar, it was noted as a sign of divine impulse. Such a strange, new courage the Chorus notices in Cassandra.
374. Possibly,
375. The implied thoughts of the words is that Priam and his sons, though they had died nobly, were yet miserable, and not happy.
376. The Syrian ritual had, it would seem, become proverbial for its lavish use of frankincense and other spices.
377. The close parallel of Shakespeare's Henry VI., Act. v. sc. 6, is worth quoting—
378. The older reading gives—
379. Her own doom, hard as it was, touches her less than the common lot of human suffering and mutability.
380. So far the dialogue has been sustained by the Coryphæos, or leader of the Chorus. Now each member of it speaks and gives his counsel.
381. The Coryphæos again takes up his part, sums up, and pronounces his decision.
382. i.e., He had had his triumph over her when, forgetful of her mother's feelings, he had sacrificed Iphigeneia. She has now repaid him to the full.
383. The third libation at all feasts was to Zeus, as the Preserver or Guardian Deity. Clytæmnestra boasts that her third blow was as an offering to a God of other kind, to Him who had in his keeping not the living, but the dead.
384. So in the Choëphori (vv. 351, 476), the custom of pouring libations on the burial-place of the dead is recognised as an element of their blessedness or shame in Hades, and Agamemnon is represented as lacking the honour which comes from them till he receives it at the hand of Orestes.
385. Incense was placed on the head of the victim. The Chorus tell Clytæmnestra that she has brought upon her own head the incense, not of praise and admiration, but of hatred and wrath, as though some poison had driven her mad.
386. The species of swan referred to is said to be the Cygnus Musicus. Aristotle (Hist. Anim. ix. 12) describes swans of some kind as having been heard by sailors near the coast of Libya, “singing with a lamentable cry.” Mrs. Somerville (Phys. Geog., c. xxxiii. 3) describes their note as “like that of a violin.” The same fact is reported of the swans of Iceland and other regions of the far North. The strange, tender beauty of the passage in the Phædo of Plato (p. 85, a), which speaks of them as singing when at the point of death, has done more than anything else to make the illustration one of the commonplaces of rhetoric and poetry.
387. The structure of the lyrical dialogue that follows is rather complicated, and different editors have adopted different arrangements. I have followed Paley's.
388. Several lines seem to have dropped out by some accident of transcription.
389. Agamemnon and Menelaos, as descended from Tantalos, the father of Pelops.
390. In each case women, Helen and Clytæmnestra, had been the unconscious instruments of the divine Nemesis, to which the Chorus traces the ruin of the house of Atreus.
391. Or, with another reading,—
392. It is characteristic of the teaching of Æschylos that the Chorus passes from the thought of the agency of any lower Power to the supreme will of Zeus.
393. Or, “Dying, as dies a slave.”
394. Clytæmnestra still harps (though in ambiguous words, which may refer also to the murder of the children of Thyestes) upon the death of Iphigeneia as the crime which it had been her work to avenge.
395. Perhaps, “And that, too, not a slave's.”
396. Here the genealogy is carried one step further to Pleisthenes, the father of Tantalos.
397. Ægisthos, in his version of the story, suppresses the adultery of Thyestes with the wife of Atreus, which led the latter to his horrible revenge.
398. The image is taken from the trireme with its three benches full of rowers. The Chorus is compared to the men on the lowest, Ægisthos and Clytæmnestra to those on the uppermost bench.
399. The earliest occurrence of the proverb with which we are familiar through the history of St. Paul's conversion, Acts ix. 5, xxvi. 14.
400. The trace-horse, as not under the pressure of the collar, was taken as the type of free, those that wore the yoke, of enforced submission.
ARGUMENT.—It came to pass, after Agamemnon had been slain, that Clytæmnestra and Ægisthos ruled in Argos, and all things seemed to go well with them. Orestes, who was heir to Agamemnon, they had sent away to the care of Strophios of Phokis, and there he abode. Electra, his sister, mourned in secret over her father's death, and prayed for vengeance, but no avenger came. And when Orestes grew up to man's estate, he went to ask counsel of the God at Delphi, and the Gods straitly charged him to take vengeance on his father's murderers; and so he started on his journey with his trusty friend Pylades, and arrived at Argos. And it chanced that a little while before he came, the Gods sent Clytæmnestra a fearful dream, that troubled her soul greatly; and in her terror she bade Electra go with her handmaids to pour libations on the tomb of Agamemnon, that so she might appease his soul, and propitiate the Powers that rule over the dark world of the dead.
Enter Orestes and Pylades from the left; Orestes advances to the mound, and, as he speaks, lays on it a lock of his hair.
Enter Orestes, Pylades, and followers from the palace. His attendants bear the robe in which Agamemnon had been murdered
401. Hermes is invoked, (1) as the watcher over the souls of the dead in Hades, and therefore the natural patron of the murdered Agamemnon; (2) as exercising an authority delegated by Zeus, and therefore capable of being, like Zeus himself, the deliverer and helper of suppliants. So Electra, further on, invokes Hermes in the same character. The line may, however, be rendered,
The three opening lines are noticeable, as having been chosen by Aristophanes as the special object for his satirical criticism (Frogs, 1126-1176), abounding in a good score of ambiguities and tautologies.
402. The words point to the two symbolic aspects of one and the same practice. In both there are some points of analogy with the earlier and later forms of the Nazarite vow among the Jews. (1) As being part of the body, and yet separable from it without mutilation, it became the representative of the whole man, and as such was the sign of a votive dedication. As early as Homer, it was the custom of youths to keep one long, flowing lock as consecrated, and when they reached manhood, they cut it off, and offered it to the river-god of their country, throwing it into the stream, as that to which, directly and indirectly, they owed their nurture. Here the offering is made to Inachos, as the hero-founder of Argos, identified with the river that bore his name. (2) They shaved their head, wholly or in part, as a token as a token of grief, and then, because true grief for the dead was an acceptable and propitiatory offering, this became the natural offering for suppliants who offered their prayers at the tombs of the departed. So in the Aias of Sophocles (v. 1174) Teucros calls on Eurysakes to approach the corpse of his father, holding in his hand locks of his own hair, his mother's, and that of Teucros. In the offering which Achilles makes over the grave of Patroclos of the hair which he had cherished for the river-god of his fatherland, Spercheios, we have the union of the two customs. Homer. Il. xxiii. 141-151.
403. After the widespread fashion of the East, the handmaids of Clytæmnestra (originally Troïan captives) had to rend their clothes, beat their breasts, and lacerate their faces till the blood came. The higher civilisation of Solon's laws had forbidden these wild, barbarous forms of grief at Athens. Plutarch, Solon, p. 164.
404. Purposely, perhaps, obscure. They seem to say that the old reverence for Agamemnon has passed away, and instead of it there is only a slavish fear for Ægisthos. For the more acute, however, they imply that those who have cause to fear are Ægisthos and Clytæmnestra themselves.
405. The words, in their generalising sententiousness, refer specially to the twofold crime of Ægisthos as an adulterer and murderer. Then, in the Epode, the Chorus justify themselves for their seeming inconsistency in thus abhorring the guilt, and yet acting as instruments of the guilty in their attempts to escape punishment.
406. The mourners speak, of course, of Agamemnon and Orestes, not of Ægisthos and Clytæmnestra.
407. A mixture of meal, honey, and oil formed the half-liquid substance commonly used for these funereal libations. The “garlands” may be wreaths of flowers or fillets, or the word may be used figuratively for the libation itself, as crowning the mound in which Agamemnon lay.
408. The words point to a strange Athenian custom. When a house was cleansed of that which defiled it, morally or physically, the filth was carried in an earthen vessel to a place where three ways met, and the worshipper flung the vessel behind him, and walked away without turning to look at it. To Electra's mind, the libation which her mother sends is equally unclean, and should be treated in the same way. So in Hom. Il. i. 314, the Argives purify themselves, and then cast the lustral water they have used into the sea. Lev. vi. 11, gives us an analogous usage. Comp. also Theocritos, Idyll xxiv., vv. 22-97.
409. Partly it is the youth of Electra that seeks counsel from those who had more experience; partly she shrinks from the responsibility of being the first to utter the formula of execration.
410. The word “escort” has a special reference to the function of Hermes in the unseen world. As he was wont to act as guide to the souls of the dead in their downward journey, so now Electra prays that he may lead the blessings she asks for upward from the dark depths of Earth.
411. The Skythian bow, long and elastic, bending either way, like those of the Arabians (Herod. vii. 69). The connection of Ares with the wild, fierce tribes of Thrakia and Skythia meets us again and again in the literature of Greece. He was the only God to whom they built temples (ibid. iv. 59). They sacrificed human victims to an iron sword as his more appropriate symbol (iv. 62). The use of iron for weapons of war came to the Greeks from them (Seven ag. Th. 729; Prom. 714).
412. It may be worth while to compare the method adopted by the three dramatists of Greece in bringing about the recognition of the brother by the sister. (1) Here the lock of hair, in its peculiar colour and texture resembling her own, followed by the likeness of his footsteps to hers, prepares the way first for vague anticipations, and then the robe she had made for him, leads to her acceptance of Orestes on his own discovery of himself. To this it has been objected, by Euripides in the first instance (Electra, vv. 462-500), that the evidence of the colour of the hair is weak, that a young man's foot must have been larger than a maiden's, and that he could not have worn as a man the garment she had made for him as a child. It might be replied, perhaps, that there are such things as hereditary resemblances extending to the colour of the hair and the arch of the instep, and that the robe may either have been shown instead of worn, or, being worn, have been adapted for the larger growth. (2) In the Electra of Sophocles the lock of hair alone convinces Chrysothemis that her brother is near at hand (v. 900), while Electra herself requires the further evidence of Agamemnon's seal (v. 1223). In Euripides (v. 527), all proof fails till Orestes shows a scar on his brow, which his sister remembers.
413. The saying is probably one of the widespread proverbs which imply parables. The idea is obviously that with which we are familiar in the Gospel “grain of mustard seed.” Here, as in the “kicking against the pricks” of Acts ix. 5, xxvi. 14, and Agam. v. 1604, we are carried back to a period which lies beyond the range of history as that in which men took note of the analogies and embodied them in forms like this.
414. So in the Odyssey (xix. 228), Odysseus appears as wearing a woollen cloak, on which are embroidered the figures of a fawn and a dog.
415. An obvious reproduction of the words of Andromache (Il. vi. 429).
416. The words seem to imply that burning alive was known among the Greeks as a punishment for the most atrocious crimes. The “oozing pitch,” if we adopt that rendering, apparently describes something like the “tunica molesta” of Juvenal. (Sat. viii. 235.) Hesychios (s. v. Κωνῆσαι) mentions the practice as alluded to in a lost play of Æschylos.
417. The words are both doubtful and obscure. Taking the reading which I have adopted, they seem to mean that while men in general had means of propitiating the Erinnyes and other Powers for the guilt of unavenged bloodshed, Orestes and Electra had no such way of escape open to them. If they, the next of kin, failed to do their work, they would be exposed to the full storm of wrath. But a conjectural emendation of one word gives us,
418. Either that old age would come prematurely, or that the hair itself would share the leprous whiteness of the flesh.
419. The words, as taken in the text, refer to Orestes seeing even in sleep the spectral forms of the Erinnyes. By some editors the verse is placed after v. 276, and the lines then read thus:—
So taken, the last line refers to Agamemnon, who, though in the darkness of Hades, sees the penalties which will fail upon his son should he neglect to take vengeance on his father's murderers.
420. Stress is laid here, as in Agam. 1224, on the effeminacy of the adulterer.
421. The great law of retribution is repeated from Agam. 1564. As one of the earliest utterances of man's moral sense, it was referred popularly among the Greeks to Rhadamanthos, who with Minos judged the souls of the dead in Hades. Comp. Aristot. Ethic. Nicom., v. 8.
422. The funeral pyre, which consumes the body, leaves the life and power of the man untouched. The spirit survives, and calls on the Gods that dwell in darkness to avenge him. The very cry of wailing tends, as a prayer to them, to the exposure of the murderer.
423. The Lykians, of whom Glaucos and Sarpedon are the representative heroes in the Iliad, are named as the chief allies of the Troïans.
424. The words embody the widespread feeling that the absence of funereal honours affected the spirit of the dead, and that the souls with whom he dwelt held him in high or low esteem according as they had been given or withheld.
425. Pindar (Pyth. x. 47), the contemporary of Æschylos, had made the name of these Hyperborei well known to all Greeks. The vague dreams of men, before the earth had been searched out, pictured a happy land as lying beyond their reach. There were Islands of the Blest in the far West; Æthiopians, peaceful and long-lived, in the South; and far away, beyond the cold North, a people exempt from the common evils of humanity. The latter have been connected with the old Aryan belief in the paradise of Mount Meru. Comp. also Herod. iv. 421; Prom. 812.
426. Sc., the beating of both hands upon the breast, as the Chorus uttered their lamentations.
427. Perhaps, simply “the sharp and bitter cry.” But the rendering in the text seems justified as repeating the wish already expressed (v. 260), that the murderers may die by this form of death.
428. The Chorus at this point renew their words and cries of lamentation, smiting on their breasts. By some critics this speech and Antistrophe VII. are assigned to Electra, Antistrophe VIII. to the Chorus, with a corresponding change in the pronouns “my” and “thy.” The Chorus, as consisting of Troïan captives, is represented as adopting the more vehement Asiatic forms of wailing. Among these the Arians, Kissians, and Mariandynians (Pers. 920) seem to have been most conspicuous for their skill in lamentation, and, as such, were in request where hired mourners were wanted. Compare the opening chorus, v. 22.
429. The practice of mutilating the corpse of a murdered man by cutting off his hands and feet and fastening them round his waist, seems to have been looked on as rendering him powerless to seek for vengeance. Comp. Soph. Elect. v. 437. This kind of mutilation, and not mere wanton outrage, is what the Chorus refer to.
430. As in v. 351 the loss of honour among the dead was represented as one consequence of the absence of funereal rites from those who loved the dead, so here the restoration of the children to their rights appears as the condition without which that dishonour must continue. If they succeed, then, and then only, can they offer funereal banquets, year by year, as was the custom. There may be a special reference to an Argive custom mentioned by Plutarch (Quæst. Græc., c. 24) of sacrificing immediately after the death of a relative to Apollo, and thirty days later to Hermes.
431. Another reference to the third cup of undiluted wine which men drank to the honour of Zeus the Preserver. Comp. Agam. v. 245.
432. Possibly the pronoun refers to Pylades.
433. The story of Althæa has perhaps been made most familiar to English readers by Mr. Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon. More briefly told, the legend ran that she, being the wife of Œneus, bare a son, who was believed to be the child of Ares—that the Fates came to her when the boy, who was named Meleagros, was seven days old, and told her that his life should last until the firebrand then burning on the earth should be consumed. She took the firebrand and quenched it, and laid it by in a chest; but when Meleagros grew up, he joined in the chase of the great boar of Calydon, and when he had slain it, gave the skin as a trophy to Atalanta, and when his mother's brothers, the sons of Thestios, claimed it as their right, he waxed wroth with them and slew them. And then Althæa, in her grief, caring more for her brothers than her son, took the brand from the chest, and threw it into the fire, and so Meleagros died. Phrynichos is said to have made the myth the subject of a drama. In Homer (Il. x. 566), Althæa brings about her son's death by her curses.
434. Skylla (not to be confounded with the sea-monster of Messina) was the daughter of Nisos, king of Megaris, who had on his head a lock of purple hair, which was a charm that preserved his life from all danger. And the Cretans under Minos attacked Nisos, and besieged him in his city; and Minos won the love of Skylla, and tempted her with gifts, and she cut off her father's lock of hair, and so he perished. But Minos, scorning her for her deed, bound her by the feet to the stern of his ship and drowned her.
435. Hermes, i.e., in his office as the escort of the souls of the dead to Hades.
436. The Chorus apparently is represented as on the point of completing its catalogue of crimes committed by women with the story of Clytæmnestra's guilt. Something leads them to check themselves, and they are contented with a dark and vague allusion.
437. The story of the Lemnian women is told by Herodotos (vi. 138). They rose up against their husbands and put them all to death; and the deed passed into a proverb, so that all great crimes were spoken of as Lemnian. This guilt is that alluded to in Strophe III.
438. In every case of which the Chorus had spoken guilt had been followed by retribution. So, it is implied, it will be in that which is present to their thoughts.
439. Sc., is not forgotten or overlooked, but will assuredly meet with its due punishment.
440. So in Homer (Il. xxii. 444), the warm bath is prepared by Andromache for Hector on his return from the battle in which he fell.
441. As in her speeches in the Agamemnon (vv. 595, 884), Clytæmestra's words here also are full of significant ambiguity. The “things that befit the house,” the proposed conference with Ægisthos, her separation of Orestes from his companions, are all indications of suspicion already half aroused. The last three lines were probably spoken as an “aside.”
442. Suasion is personified, and invoked to come and win Clytæmnestra to trust herself in the power of the two avengers.
443. An alternative rendering is,
444. Apollo in the shrine at Delphi.
445. Hermes invoked once more, as at once the patron of craft and the escort of the dead.
446. Or “before our eyes.”
447. The “treasured score” is explained by the words that follow to mean the cry of exultation which the Chorus will raise when the deed of vengeance is accomplished; or, possibly (as Mr. Paley suggests), the funereal wail over the bodies of Ægisthos and Clytæmnestra, which the Chorus would raise to avert the guilt of the murder from Orestes.
448. As Perseus could only overcome the Gorgon, Medusa, by turning away his eyes, lest looking on her he should turn to stone, so Orestes was to avoid meeting his mother's glance, lest that should unman him and blunt his purpose.
449. Ægisthos had suffered enough, he says, for his share in Agamemnon's death. He has no wish that fresh odium should fall on him, as being implicated also in the death of Orestes, of which he has just heard.
450. The word (ephedros) was applied technically to one who sat by during a conflict between two athletes, prepared to challenge the victor to a fresh encounter. Orestes is such a combatant, taking the place of Agamemnon.
451. So, in Homer (Il. xxii. 79), Hecuba, when the entreaties of Priam had been in vain, makes this last appeal—
452. The reader will note this as the only speech put into the lips of Pylades, though he is present as accompanying Orestes throughout great part of the drama.
453. The different ethical standard applied to the guilt of the husband and the wife was, we may well believe, that which prevailed among the Athenians generally. It has only too close a parallel in the ballads and romances of our own early literature.
454. The line is memorable as prophetic of the whole plot of the Eumenides.
455. The phrase “wail as to a tomb” seems to have been a by-word for fruitless entreaty and lamentation.
456. Clytæmnestra sees now the important of the dream referred to in vv. 518-522.
457. The words must be left in their obscurity. Commentators have conjectured Orestes and Pylades, or the deaths of Agamemnon and Iphigeneia, or those of Ægisthos and Clytæmnestra, as the “two lions,” spoken of. The first seems most in harmony with the context.
458. The Eternal Justice which orders all things is mightier than any arbitrary will, such as men attribute to the Gods. That will, even if we dare to think of it as changeable or evil, is held in restraint. It cannot, even if it would, protect the evildoers.
459. The Chorus feel that they have been too long silent; now, at last, they can speak. As slaves dreading punishment they had been gagged before; now the gag is removed.
460. Or, “Once more for those who wail.”
461. It is not clear with what form of animal life the myræna is to be identified. The ideal implied is that of some sea-monster whose touch was poisonous, but this does not hold good of the “lamprey.”
462. As the text stands, Orestes says that at last he can speak of the murder over which he had long brooded in silence. Another reading makes him speak of the oscillations in his own mind—
463. Comp. vv. 270-288.
464. Delphi was to the Greek (as Jerusalem was to mediæval Christendom) the centre at once of his religious life and of the material earth. Its rock was the omphalos of the world. Consecrated widows watched over the sacred and perpetual fire. Once only up to the time of Æschylos, when the Temple itself was desecrated by the Persians, had it ceased to burn.
465. Once again we have the thought of the third cup offered as a libation to Zeus as saviour and deliverer. The Chorus asks whether this third deed of blood will be true to that idea and work out deliverance.
ARGUMENT.—The Erinnyes who appeared to Orestes after the murder of Clytæmnestra made his life miserable, and drove him without rest from land to land. And he, seeking to escape them, had recourse to the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, believing that he who had sent him to do the work of vengeance would also help to free him from this wretchedness. But the Erinnyes followed him there also, and took their places even within the holy shrine of the Oracle, and while Orestes knelt on the central hearth as a suppliant, they sat upon the seats there, and for very weariness fell asleep.
Scene changes to Athens, in front of the Temple of Athena Polias, on the Acropolis[489]
The Erinnyes, as they sing the ode that follows, move round and round in solemn and weird measure
The scene changes to the Areopagos. Enter Athena, followed by Herald and twelve Athenian citizens
Enter an array of women, young and old, in procession, leading the Erinnyes—now, as propitiated, the Eumenides or Gentle Ones—to their shrines
466. The succession is, in part, accordant with that in the Theogonia of Hesiod (vv. 116-136), but the special characteristic of the Æschylean form of the legend is that each change is a step in a due, rightful succession, as by free gift, not accomplished (as in other narratives of the same transition) by violence and wrong.
467. Phœbe, in the Theogonia, marries Coios, and becomes the mother of Leto, or Latona, and so the grandmother of Apollo. The “birthday gift” was commonly presented on the eighth day after birth, when the child was named. The oracle is spoken of as such a gift to Apollo, as bearing the name of Phœbos.
468. The sacred circular pool of Delos is the crater of an extinct volcano. There Apollo was born, and thence he passed through Attica to Parnassos, to take possession of the oracle, according to one form of the myth, depriving Themis of it and slaying the dragon Python that kept guard over it.
469. The people of Attica are thus named either as being mythically descended from Erichthonios the son of Hephæstos, or as artificers, who own him as their father. The words refer to the supposed origin of the Sacred Road from Athens to Delphi, passing through Bœotia and Phokis. When the Athenians sent envoys to consult the oracle they were preceded by men bearing axes, in remembrance of the original pioneering work which had been done for Apollo. The first work of active civilisation was thus connected with the worship of the giver of Light and Wisdom.
470. Delphos, the hero Eponymos (name-giving) of Delphi, was honoured as the son of Poseidon. Hence the Priestess invokes the latter as one of the guardian deities of the shrine.
471. Pronaia, as having her shrine or statue in front of the temple of Apollo.
472. The Korykian rock in Parnassos, as in Soph., Antig., v. 1128; known also as the “Nymphs' cavern.”
473. Bromios, a name of Dionysos, embodying the special attributes of loud, half-frenzied revelry.
474. In the legend which Euripides follows, Kithæron, not Parnassos, is the scene of the death of Pentheus. He, it was said, opposed the wild or frantic worship of the Pelasgic Bacchos, concealed himself that he might behold the mysteries of the Mœnads, and was torn to pieces by his mother and two others, on whose eyes the God had cast such glamour that they took him for a wild beast. English readers may be referred to Dean Milman's translation of the Bacchanals of Euripides.
475. Pleistos, topographically, a river flowing through the vale of Delphi, mythically the father of the nymphs of Korykos.
476. At one time the Oracle had been open to questioners once in the year only, afterwards once a month. The pilgrims, after they had made their offerings, cast lots, and the doors were opened to him to whom the lot had fallen. Plutarch, Qu. Græc., p. 292.
477. The altar of the adytum, on the very centre, as men deemed, of the whole earth. Zeus, it was said, had sent forth two eagles at the same moment; one from the East and the other from the West, and here it was that they had met. The stone was of white marble, and the two eagles were sculptured on it. Strabo, ix. 3.
478. The priestess dwells upon the outward tokens, which showed that the suppliant came as one whose need was specially urgent. On the ritual of supplication generally comp. Suppl., vv. 22, 348, 641, Soph., Œd. King, v. 3; Œd. Col., vv. 469-489.
479. Æschylos apparently follows the Theogonia of Hesiod, (l. 278), who describes the Gorgons as three in number, daughters of Phorkys and Keto, and bearing the names of Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa. The last enters into the Perseus cycle of myths, as one of the monsters whom he conquered, with a face once beautiful, but with her hair turned to serpents by the wrath of Athena, and so dreadful to look upon that those who gazed on her were turned to stone. When Perseus had slain her, Athena placed her head in her ægis, and thus became the terror of all who were foes to herself or her people. A wild legendary account of them meets us in the Prom. Bound, v. 812. As works of art, the Gorgon images are traceable to the earliest or Kyclopian period.
480. Here also we have a reference to a familiar subject of early Greek art, probably to some painting familiar to an Athenian audience. The name of Phineus indicates that the monstrous forms spoken of are those of the Harpies, birds with women's faces, or women with birds' wings, who were sent to vex the blind seer for his cruelty to the children of his first marriage. Comp. Soph. Antig., v. 973. In the Æneid they appear (iii. 225) as dwelling in the Strophades, and harassing Æneas and his companions.
481. The old image of Pallas, carved in olive-wood, as distinguished from later sculpture.
482. The early code of hospitality bound the host, who as such had once received a guest under the shelter of his roof, not to desert him, even though he might discover afterwards that he had been guilty of great crimes, but to escort him safely to the boundary of his territory. Thus Apollo, as the host with whom Orestes had taken refuge, sends Hermes, the escort God, to guide and defend him on his way to Athens.
483. The thought that the highest wisdom came to men rather in “visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men,” than through the waking senses, which we have already met with in Agam., v. 173, is traceable to the mysticism of Pythagoras, more distinctly perhaps to that of Epimenides.
484. Wine, as in Soph. Œd. Col., vv. 100, 481, was rigidly excluded from the cultus of the Eumenides, and to them only as daughters of Night were midnight sacrifices offered. We must not lose sight of the thought thus implied, that Clytæmnestra had herself lived, after her deed of guilt, in perpetual terror of the Erinnyes, seeking to soothe them by her sacrifices.
485. The common rendering “in a dream” gives a sufficient meaning, and is, of course, tenable enough. But there is a force in the repetition of the same word, as in v. 116, which is thus lost, and which I have endeavoured to preserve. The Erinnyes, thus impotent in their rage, are as much mere dreamlike spectres as is the ghost of Clytæmnestra.
486. Here, as throughout Æschylos, the Olympian divinities are thought of as new comers, thrusting from their thrones the whole Chthonian and Titanic dynasty, Gods of the conquering Hellenes superseding those of the Pelasgi.
487. The accumulation of horrid forms of cruelty had, probably, a special significance for the Athenians. These punishments belonged to their enemies, the Persians, not to the Hellenic race, and the poet's purpose was to rekindle patriotic feeling by dwelling on their barbarity, as in Agam., v. 894, he points in like manner to their haughtiness and luxury.
488. The argument of the Erinnyes is, to some extent, like that of the Antigone of Sophocles (Antig., 909-913), and the wife of Intaphernes (Herod. iii. 119). The tie which binds the husband to the wife is less sacred than that between the mother and the son. This, therefore, brings on the slayer the guilt of blood of kin, while murder in the other case is reduced to simple homicide. Orestes therefore was not justified in perpetrating the greater crime as a retribution for the less. Apollo, in meeting this plea, asserts the sacredness of the marriage bond as standing on the same level as that of consanguinity.
489. The ideal interval of time between the two parts of the drama is left undefined, but it would seem from vv. 230, 274-6, and 429, to have been long enough to have allowed of many wanderings to sacred places, Orestes does not go straight from Delphi to Athens. He appears now, not as before dripping and besmeared with blood, but with hands and garments purified.
490. The story of Adrastos and Crœsos in Herod. i. 35, illustrates the gradual purification of which Orestes speaks. The penitent who has the stain of blood-guiltiness upon him comes to the king, and the king, as his host, performs the lustral rites for him. Here Orestes urges that he has been received at many homes, and gone through many such lustrations. He has been cleansed from the pollution of sin: what he now seeks, to use the terminology of a later system, is a forensic justification.
491. Sc., the scent of blood, which, though no longer visible to the eyes of men, still lingers round him and is perceptible to his pursuers.
492. Here, too, we trace the political bearing of the play. In the year when it was produced (B.C. 458) an alliance with Argos was the favourite measure of the more conservative party at Athens.
493. The names Triton and Tritonis, wherever found in classical geography (Libya, Crete, Thessaly, Bœotia), are always connected with the legend that Athena was born there. Probably both name and legend were carried from Greece to Libya, and then amalgamated with the indigenous local worship of a warlike goddess. Hesiod (iv. 180, 188) connects the Libyan lake with the legend of Jason and Argonauts.
494. In the war with the giants fought in the Phlegræan plains (the volcanic district of Campania) Athena had helped her father Zeus by her wise counsel, and was honoured there as keeping in check the destructive Titanic forces which had been so subdued, burying Enkelados, e.g., in Sicily. The “friends” are her Libyan worshippers. The passage is interesting, as showing the extent of Æschylos's acquaintance with the African and Italian coasts of the Mediterranean.
495. The Choral ode here is brought in as an incantation. This weapon is to succeed where others have failed, and this too, the frenzy which seizes the soul in the remembrance of its past transgression, is soothed and banished by Athena.
496. White, as the special colour of festal joy, was not used in the worship of the Erinnyes.
497. Another rendering gives—
498. The thought which underlies the obscurity of a corrupt passage seems to be that, as they relieve the Gods from the task of being avengers of blood, all that the Gods on their side can legitimately do against them is to render powerless the prayers for vengeance offered by the kindred of the slain. Their very isolation, as Chthonian deities, from the Gods of Olympos should protect them from open conflict. But an alternative rendering of the second line gives, perhaps, a better meaning—
i.e., by being the appointed receivers of such prayers for vengeance, they leave the Gods free for a higher and serener life.
499. Perhaps, “With torch of sunless gloom.”
500. The words contain an allusion to the dispute between Athens and Mitylene in the time of Peisistratos, as to the possession of Sigeion. Athena asserts that it had been given to her by the whole body of Achæans at the time when they had taken Troïa. Comp. Herod. vv. 94, 95. It probably entered into the political purposes of the play to excite the Athenians to a war in this direction, so as to draw them off from the constitutional changes proposed by Pericles and Ephialtes.
501. Here, and throughout the trial, we have to bear in mind the technicalities of Athenian judicial procedure. The prosecutor, in the first instance, tendered to the accused an oath that he was not guilty. This he might accept or refuse. In the latter case, the course of the trial was at least stopped, and judgment might be recorded against him. If he could bring himself to accept it, he was acquitted of the special charge of which he was accused, but he was liable to a prosecution afterwards for that perjury. If, on the other hand, he tendered an oath affirming his guilt to the prosecutor, he placed himself in his hands. Orestes, not being able to deny the fact, will not declare on oath that he is “not guilty,” but neither will he place himself in the power of his accusers. The peculiarities of this use of oaths were: (1) That they were taken by the parties to the suit, not by the witnesses. (2) That if both parties agreed to that mode of decision, the oath was either way decisive. An allusion to the latter practice is found in Heb. vi. 16, and traces of it are found in the law-proceedings of Scotland. If either party refused, the cause had to be tried in the usual way, and witnesses were called.
502. Æschylos seems here to attach himself to the principles of those who were seeking to reform the practice described in the previous note as being at once cumbrous and unjust, throwing its weight into the scale of the least scrupulous conscience, and to urge a simpler, more straightforward trial. The same objection is noticed by Aristotle in his discussion of the subject. (Rhet. i. 15.)
503. Athena offers herself, not as arbitrator or sovereign judge, but as presiding over the court of jurors whom she proceeds to appoint.
504. Ixion appeared in the mythical history of Greece as the prototype of all suppliants for purification. When he had murdered Deioneus, Zeus had had compassion to him, received him as a guest, cleansed him from his guilt. His ingratitude for this service was the special guilt of his attempted outrage upon Hera. The case is mentioned again in v. 687.
505. In heathen, as in Jewish sacrifices, the blood was the very instrument of purification. It was sprinkled or poured upon men, and they became clean. But this could not be done by the criminal himself, nor by any chance person. The service had to be rendered by a friend, who of very love gave himself to this mediatorial work.
506. In the legend related by Pausanias (Corinth., c. 3), Trœzen was the first place where Orestes was thus received, and in his time the descendants of those who had thus helped held periodical feasts in commemoration of it.
507. The course which Athena takes is: (1) to receive Orestes as a settler with the rights which attached to such persons on Athenian soil, not a criminal fugitive to be simply surrendered; (2) to offer to the Erinnyes, as being too important to be put out of court, a fair and open trial; (3) to acknowledge that he and they are equally “blameless,” as far as she is concerned. She has no complaint to make of them.
508. The red blight of vines and wheat was looked on as caused by drops of blood which the Erinnyes had let fall.
509. Stress is laid on the fact that the judges of the Areopagos, in contrast with those of the inferior tribunes of Athens, discharged their duty under the sanction of an oath.
510. Perhaps
511. At a more advanced period of human thought, Cicero (Orat. pro Roscio, c. 24) could point to the “thoughts that accuse each other,” the horror and remorse of the criminal, as the true Erinnyes, the “assiduæ domesticæque Furiæ.” Æschylos clings to the mythical symbolism as indispensable for the preservation of the truth which it shadowed forth.
512. Once again we have the poet of constitutional conservatism keeping the via media between Peisistratos and Pericles.
513. The Tyrrhenian trumpet, with its bent and twisted tube, retained its proverbial pre-eminence from the days of Æschylos and Sophocles (Aias, 17) to those of Virgil (Æn., viii. 526).
514. The fondness of the Athenians for litigation, and the large share which every citizen took in the administration of justice, would probably make the scene which follows, with all its technicalities, the part of the play into which they would most enter.
515. It was necessary that some one, sitting as President of the Court, should formally open the pleadings, by calling on this side or that to begin. Here Athena takes that office on herself, and calls on the Erinnyes.
516. The technicalities of the Areopagos are still kept up. The three points on which the Erinnyes, as prosecutors, lay stress are: (1) the fact of the murder; (2) the mode; (3) the motive. “Three bouts,” as referring to the rule of the arena, that three struggles for the mastery should be decisive.
517. The pleas put in by the Erinnyes as prosecutors are: (1) That Clytæmnestra had been adequately punished by her death, while Orestes was still alive; and (2) when asked why they had not intervened to bring about that punishment, that the relationship between husband and wife was less close than that between mother and son. They drew, in other words, a distinction between consanguinity and affinity, and upon this the rest of the discussion turns. Orestes, and Apollo as his counsel, on the other hand, meet this with the rejoinder, that there is no blood-relationship between the mother and her offspring.
518. Sc. Their oath to give a verdict according to the evidence must yield to the higher obligation of following the Divine will rather than the letter of the law.
519. To have died in health by the arrows of a woman-warrior might have been borne. To be slain by a wife treacherously in his bath was to endure a far worse outrage.
520. In this new argument, and the answer to it, we may trace, as in the Prometheus and the Agamemnon, the struggles of the questioning intellect against the more startling elements of the popular religious belief. Zeus is worshipped as the supreme Lord, yet His dominion seems founded on might as opposed to goodness, on the unrighteous expulsion of another. Here, in Apollo's answer, there is a glimmer of a possible reconciliation. The old and the new, the sovereignty of Cronos and that of Zeus may be reconciled, and one supreme God be “all in all.”
521. Comp. the thought and language of the Suppliants, v. 93.
522. The last argument is, that the acquittal can be, at the best, partial only, not complete; formal, not real. There would remain for ever the pollution which would exclude Orestes from the Phratria, the clan-brotherhood, by which, as by a sacramental bond, all the members were held together.
523. The question seems to have been one of those which occupied men's minds in their first gropings towards the mysteries of man's physical life, and both popular metaphors and primary impressions were in favour of the hypothesis here maintained. Euripides (Orest., v. 534) puts the same argument into the mouth of Orestes.
524. The story of Athena's birth, full-grown, from the head of Zeus, is next referred to as the leading case bearing on the point at issue.
525. Here, of course, the political interest of the whole drama reached its highest point. What seems comparatively flat to us must, to the thousands who sat as spectators, have been fraught with the most intense excitement, showing itself in shouts of applause, or audible tokens of clamorous dissent. The rivalry of Whigs and Tories over Addison's Cato, the sensation produced in times of Papal aggression by the king's answer to Pandulph in King John, presents analogies which are worth remembering.
526. The story ran that the tribe of women warriors from the Caucasos, or the Thermodon, known by this name, had invaded Attica under Oreithyia, when Theseus was king, to revenge the wrongs he had done them, and to recover her sister Hippolyta. Ares, the God of Thrakians, Skythians, and nearly all the wilder barbaric tribes, was their special deity; and when they occupied the hill which rose over against the Acropolis, they sacrificed to him, and so it gained the name of the Areopagos, or “hill of Ares.”
527. As in the Agamemnon (v. 1010), so here we find the aristocratic conservative poet showing his colours, protesting against the admission to the Archonship, and therefore to the Areopagos, of men of low birth or in undignified employments.
528. The words, like all political clap-trap, are somewhat vague; but, as understood at the time, the “lawless” policy alluded to was that of Pericles and Ephialtes, who sought to deface and to diminish the jurisdiction of the Areopagos, and the “tyrannical,” that which had crushed the independence of Athens under Peisistratos. Between the two was the conservative party, of which Kimon had been the leader.
529. The Skythians may be named simply as representing all barbarous, non-Hellenic races; but they appear, about this time, wild and nomadic as their life was, to have impressed the minds of the Greeks somewhat in the same way as the Germans did the minds of the Romans in the time of Tacitus. Tales floated from travellers' lips of their wisdom and their happiness—of sages like Zamolxis and Aristarchos, who rivalled those of Hellas—of the Hyperborei, in the far north, who enjoyed a perpetual and unequalled blessedness.—Comp. Libation-Pourers, v. 366.
530. Two topics of praise are briefly touched on: (1) the lower, popular courts of justice at Athens might be open to the suspicion of corruption, but no breath of slander had ever tainted the fame of the Areopagos; (2) it met by night, keeping its watch, that the citizens might sleep in peace.
531. The first of the twelve jurymen rises and drops his voting-ballot into one of the urns, and is followed by another at the end of each of the short two-line speeches in the dialogue that follows. The two urns of acquittal and condemnation stand in front of them. The plan of voting with different coloured balls (black and white) in the same urn, was a later usage.
532. Compare note on v. 419.
533. In the legend of Admetos son of Pheres, and king of Pheræ in Thessalia, Apollo is represented as having first given wine to the Destinies, and then persuaded them to allow Admetos, whenever the hour of death should come, to be redeemed from Hades, if father, or mother, or wife were willing to die for him. The self-surrender of his wife, Alkestis, for this purpose, forms the subject of the noblest of the tragedies of Euripides.
534. Partly as setting at nought the power of Erinnyes and the Destinies, partly as giving wine to those whose libations were wineless.—Comp. Sophocles, Œd. Col. v. 100.
535. The practice of the Areopagos is accurately reproduced. When the votes of the judges were equal a casting vote was given in favour of the accused, and was known as that of Athena.
536. Another reading gives—
537. The conservative poet enters his protest through the Erinnyes against the innovating spirit that looked with contempt upon the principles of a past age.
538. Cock-fighting took its place among the recognised sports of the Athenians. Once a year there was a public performance in the theatre.
539. The Temple of the Eumenides or Semnæ (“venerable ones”) stood near the Areopagos.
540. Some two or three lines have probably been lost here.
541. Probably an allusion to the silver-mine at Laureion, which about the time formed a large element of the revenues of Athens, and of which a tithe was consecrated to Athena.
542. Reference is made to another local sanctuary, the temple on the Areopagos dedicated to the Olympian Zeus.
543. The figure of Athena, as identical with Victory, and so the tutelary Goddess of Athens, was sculptured with out-spread wings.
544. Cranaos, the son of Kecrops, the mythical founder of Athens.
545. The sanctuaries of the Eumenides were crypt-like chapels, where they were worshipped by the light of lamps or torches.
546. Perhaps, “Children of Night, yourselves all childless left.”