Delphi Complete Works of Aeschylus (Illustrated) (Delphi Ancient Classics) (74 page)

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[]γμα
γαιματρ.(.)[
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...
ἡ μὲν] σκηνὴ
τοῦ δρά̣[ματο]ς
ὑπόκειται
ἐν̣[.....]· ὁ δὲ χο(ρὸς)
συνέστη[κεν
ἐ]κ πολιτῶν
γε̣[ραιῶ]ν· ὁ
προλογί̣ζ̣[ω](ν)[
[].αδυνα
[].λημφθη
ἔπε]μπον
  
20
[ 
Φ]ι̣λ̣[οκ]τ̣[η]
[  π]αρ’ Εὐρι-
πίδῃ  Νεο]π̣τολεμο
[ ]Φι̣λοκτη
[  Ὀδυς]σευς
  
25
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]ω οὗ
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[  ].
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[  ].
[  ]..
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...
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[  ]ος ἔχει ἀντ[
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τον[
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γα.κα[
οὐ χρὴ
λέοντος
σκύμνον ἐν
πόλει τρέφειν,
ἢν δ’ ἐκτραφῇ
τις, τοῖς
τρόποις
ὑπηρετεῖν.
καλῶς
τεθνάναι
κάλλιον ἂν
μᾶλλον ἢ
σεσῶσθαι
οὐκ ἔτ’
ἀκταίνω
δράξαντι γάρ
τοι καὶ παθεῖν
ὀφείλεται
ἀρτίδροπος
ὀπώρα
νεάζουσα ()
μάντις (i.e.
ἰατρόσ)
μυχθίζειν
κυμάτων (vel sim.)
ἀγκάλαι
ὃς εἶχε
πώλους
τέσσαρας
ζυγηφόρους
φιμοῖσιν
αὐλωτοῖσιν
ἐστομωμένας
ζόης πονηρᾶς
θάνατος
αἱρετώτερος·
τὸ μὴ
γενέσθαι δ’
ἐστὶν ἢ
πεφυκέναι
κρεῖσσον
κακῶς
πράσσοντα
Δήμητερ ἡ
θρέψασα τὴν
ἐμὴν φρένα,
εἶναί με τῶν
σῶν ἄξιον
μυστηρίων
(καὶ) μὴ (πρὸς
ὀργὴν)
σπλάγχνα
θερμήνῃς κότῳ
χρόνος
καθαιρεῖ
πάντα
γηράσκων ὁμοῦ
(γύναι,)
γυναιξὶ
κόσμον ἡ σιγὴ
φέρει
πολλάκι τοι καὶ
μωρὸς ἀνὴρ
κατακαίριον
εἶπε
ὀργῆς
ματαίας εἰσὶν
αἴτιοι λόγοι
ἐνδεδυμένος
κύπασσιν
φοινικοῦν
ποδήρη
τέχνης
ἁπάσης ἐστὶν
ὄργανον (sc. τὸ
πῦρ) ˘ ˉ
τὸν σὸν
κατέκταν
παῖδα
πεζικὸς
ὥρμηται
στρατός
[τ]άδε πάσχειν
ἐ̣θέλεις
Μαραθώνιον
ποίημα
πισσοκώνητον
μόρον (vel alius casus)
σπίδιον
πεδίον
σπον̣δαὶ
χαλίκρητοι
αἰγίζειν vel
αἰγίζεσθαι
ἀλφινία
ἀπεριλάλητος
κορύθων
λάλησις
μενοινᾷ (
ὀρέγεται)
πρυλεύσεις
οἱ
περιλειφθέντες
τῶν Σπαρτῶν, ὡς
Αἰσχύλος φησίν,
ἦσαν Χθόνιος,
Οὐδαῖος,
..]...[.]ασιοσ̣[  
Α]ἰσχύλ̣ο̣ς
ομ[.].α[   ]
Λ̣ακεδα̣[ι]μόνιον
ἀ[ποφαί]νει
τὸν
Ἀλ̣[κμ]ᾶνα[·
λέγει] γὰρ ἐν̣
τοῖσ̣
Ὑακιν[θ   ] ἄκουσα
ταν ἀηδ̣[ον  ]
παρ’ Εὐρώτα.[  
]ταν
Ἀμυκλα[  ]μεναι
τατ[  ]τον εὐνο-
μω̣[  
]ουσαναυτα.[  ]
ἀρεταν ταν[  
]που μέλεσι.[  ]
  
5
ταλλαν ταν
τ.[   ] Ἀταρνίδα
ἐν[  ]· ἐν γὰρ
τούτο[ις  ]
γράφειν
ταπ[   ]
Ἀλκμᾶνο̣σ̣
[  ]τον αλ[  ]
ἐπιλε[

The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, where many of Aeschylus’ plays were
first performed

A modern reconstruction of how the theatre may have
appeared in Aeschylus’ time

The surviving
dramas of Aeschylus are seven in number, though he is believed to have written
nearly a hundred during his life of sixty-nine years, from 525 B.C. to 456 B.C.
That he fought at Marathon in 490, and at Salamis
in 480 B.C. is a strongly accredited tradition, rendered almost certain by the
vivid references to both battles in his play of
The Persians
, which was
produced in 472. But his earliest extant play was, probably, not
The
Persians
but
The Suppliant Maidens
— a mythical drama, the fame of
which has been largely eclipsed by the historic interest of
The Persians
,
and is undoubtedly the least known and least regarded of the seven. Its topic —
the flight of the daughters of Danaus from Egypt to Argos, in order to escape
from a forced bridal with their first-cousins, the sons of Aegyptus — is
legendary, and the lyric element predominates in the play as a whole. We must
keep ourselves reminded that the ancient Athenian custom of presenting dramas
in
Trilogies
- — that is, in three consecutive plays dealing with
different stages of one legend — was probably not uniform: it survives, for us,
in one instance only, viz. the Orestean Trilogy, comprising the
Agamemnon
,
the
Libation-Bearers
, and the
Eumenides
, or
Furies
. This
Trilogy is the masterpiece of the Aeschylean Drama: the four remaining plays of
the poet, which are translated in this volume, are all fragments of lost
Trilogies — that is to say, the plays are complete as
poems
, but in
regard to the poet’s larger design they are fragments; they once had
predecessors, or sequels, of which only a few words, or lines, or short
paragraphs, survive. It is not certain, but seems probable, that the earliest
of these single completed plays is
The Suppliant Maidens
, and on that
supposition it has been placed first in the present volume. The maidens,
accompanied by their father Danaes, have fled from Egypt
and arrived at Argos,
to take sanctuary there and to avoid capture by their pursuing kinsmen and
suitors. In the course of the play, the pursuers’ ship arrives to reclaim the
maidens for a forced wedlock in Egypt.
The action of the drama turns on the attitude of the king and people of Argos, in view of this
intended abduction. The king puts the question to the popular vote, and the
demand of the suitors is unanimously rejected: the play closes with thanks and
gratitude on the part of the fugitives, who, in lyrical strains of quiet
beauty, seem to refer the whole question of their marriage to the subsequent
decision of the gods, and, in particular, of Aphrodite.

Of the second
portion of the Trilogy we can only speak conjecturally. There is a passage in
the
Prometheus Bound
(ll. 860-69), in which we learn that the maidens
were somehow reclaimed by the suitors, and that all, except one, slew their
bridegrooms on the wedding night. There is a faint trace, among the Fragments
of Aeschylus, of a play called
Thalamopoioi
, — i.e.
The Preparers of
the Chamber
, — which may well have referred to this tragic scene. Its grim
title will recall to all classical readers the magnificent, though terrible,
version of the legend, in the final stanzas of the eleventh poem in the third
book of Horace’s
Odes
. The final play was probably called
The
Danaides
, and described the acquittal of the brides through some
intervention of Aphrodite: a fragment of it survives, in which the goddess
appears to be pleading her special prerogative. The legends which commit the
daughters of Danaus to an eternal penalty in Hades are, apparently, of later
origin. Homer is silent on any such penalty; and Pindar, Aeschylus’
contemporary, actually describes the once suppliant maidens as honourably
enthroned (
Pyth
. ix. 112:
Nem
. x. ll. 1-10). The Tartarean part
of the story is, in fact, post-Aeschylean.

The
Suppliant Maidens
is full of charm, though the text of the part which
describes the arrival of the pursuers at Argos is full of uncertainties. It
remains a fine, though archaic, poem, with this special claim on our interest,
that it is, probably, the earliest extant poetic drama. We see in it the
tendency
to grandiose language, not yet fully developed as in the
Prometheus
: the
inclination of youth to simplicity, and even platitude, in religious and
general speculation: and yet we recognize, as in the germ, the profound
theology of the
Agamemnon
, and a touch of the political vein which
appears more fully in the
Furies
. If the precedence in time here ascribed
to it is correct, the play is perhaps worth more recognition than it has
received from the countrymen of Shakespeare.

The
Persians
has been placed second in this volume, as the oldest play whose
date is certainly known. It was brought out in 472 B.C., eight years after the
sea-fight of Salamis which it commemorates, and five years before the
Seven
against Thebes
(467 B.C.). It is thought to be the second play of a
Trilogy, standing between the
Phineus
and the
Glaucus
. Phineus
was a legendary seer, of the Argonautic era— “Tiresias and Phineus, prophets
old” — and the play named after him may have contained a prophecy of the great
conflict which is actually described in
The Persae
: the plot of the
Glaucus
is unknown. In any case,
The Persians
was produced before the eyes of a
generation which had seen the struggles, West against East, at Marathon and
Thermopylæ, Salamis and Plataea. It is as though Shakespeare had commemorated,
through the lips of a Spanish survivor, in the ears of old councillors of
Philip the Second, the dispersal of the Armada.

Against the
piteous want of manliness on the part of the returning Xerxes, we may well set
the grave and dignified patriotism of Atossa, the Queen-mother of the Persian
kingdom; the loyalty, in spite of their bewilderment, of the aged men who form
the Chorus; and, above all, the royal phantom of Darius, evoked from the
shadowland by the libations of Atossa and by the appealing cries of the Chorus.
The latter, indeed, hardly dare to address the kingly ghost: but Atossa bravely
narrates to him the catastrophe, of which, in the lower world, Darius has known
nothing, though he realizes that disaster, soon or late, is the lot of mortal
power. As the tale is unrolled, a spirit of prophecy possesses him, and he
foretells the coming slaughter of Plataea; then, with a last royal admonition
that the defeated Xerxes shall, on his return, be received with all ceremony
and observance, and with a characteristic warning to the aged men, that they
must take such pleasures as they may, in their waning years, he returns to the
shades. The play ends with the undignified reappearance of Xerxes, and a
melancholy procession into the palace of Susa. It was, perhaps, inevitable that
this close of the great drama should verge on the farcical, and that the
poltroonery of Xerxes should, in a measure, obscure Aeschylus’ generous
portraiture of Atossa and Darius. But his magnificent picture of the battle of
Salamis is unequalled in the poetic annals of naval war. No account of the
flight of the Armada, no record of Lepanto or Trafalgar, can be justly set
beside it. The Messenger might well, like Prospero, announce a tragedy by one
line —

Sit still,
and hear the last of our sea-sorrow.

Five years
after
The Persians
, in 467 B. C., the play which we call the
Seven
against Thebes
was presented at Athens. It bears now a title which
Aeschylus can hardly have given to it for, though the scene of the drama
overlooks the region where the city of Thebes afterwards came into being, yet,
in the play itself, Thebes is
never
mentioned. The scene of action is
the Cadmea, or Citadel of Cadmus, and we know that, in Aeschylus’ lifetime,
that citadel was no longer a mere fastness, but had so grown outwards and
enlarged itself that a new name, Thebes, was applied to the collective city.
(All this has been made abundantly clear by Dr. Verrall in his Introduction to
the
Seven against Thebes
, to which every reader of the play itself will
naturally and most profitably refer.) In the time of Aeschylus, Thebes was, of
course, a notable city, his great contemporary Pindar was a citizen of it. But
the Thebes of Aeschylus’ date is one thing, the fortress represented in
Aeschylus’ play is quite another, and is never, by him, called Thebes. That the
play received, and retains, the name,
The Seven against Thebes
, is
believed to be due to two lines of Aristophanes in his
Frogs
(406 B.C.),
where he describes Aeschylus’ play as “the Seven against Thebes, a drama
instinct with War, which any one who beheld must have yearned to be a warrior.”
This is rather an excellent
description
of the play than the title of
it, and could not be its Aeschylean name, for the very sufficient reason that
Thebes is not mentioned in the play at all. Aeschylus, in fact, was poetizing
an earlier legend of the fortress of Cadmus. This being premised, we may adopt,
under protest as it were, the Aristophanic name which has accrued to the play.
It is the third part of a Trilogy which might have been called, collectively,
The
House of Laius
. Sophocles and Euripides give us
their
versions of
the legend, which we may epitomize, without, however, affirming that they
followed exactly the lines of Aeschylus Trilogy — they, for instance, speak
freely of
Thebes
. Laius, King of Thebes, married Iokaste; he was warned
by Apollo that if he had any children ruin would befall his house. But a child
was born, and, to avoid the threatened catastrophe, without actually killing
the child he exposed it on Mount Cithaeron, that it should die. Some herdsmen
saved it and gave it over to the care of a neighbouring king and queen, who
reared it. Later on, learning that there was a doubt of his parentage, this
child, grown now to maturity, left his foster parents and went to Delphi to
consult the oracle, and received a mysterious and terrible warning, that he was
fated to slay his father and wed his mother. To avoid this horror, he resolved
never to approach the home of his supposed parents. Meantime his real father,
Laius, on
his
way to consult the god at Delphi, met his unknown son
returning from that shrine — a quarrel fell out, and the younger man slew the
elder. Followed by his evil destiny, he wandered on, and found the now kingless
Thebes in the grasp of the Sphinx monster, over whom he triumphed, and was
rewarded by the hand of Iokaste, his own mother! Not till four children — two
sons and two daughters — had been born to them, was the secret of the lineage
revealed. Iokaste slew herself in horror, and the wretched king tore out his
eyes, that he might never again see the children of his awful union. The two
sons quarrelled over the succession, then agreed on a compromise; then fell at
variance again, and finally slew each other in single combat. These two sons,
according to one tradition, were twins: but the more usual view is that the elder
was called Eteocles, the younger, Polynices.

To the point
at which the internecine enmity between Eteocles and Polynices arose, we have
had to follow Sophocles and Euripides, the first two parts of Aeschylus’
Trilogy being lost. But the third part, as we have said, survives under the
name given to it by Aristophanes, the
Seven against Thebes
: it opens
with an exhortation by Eteocles to his Cadmeans that they should “quit them
like men” against the onslaught of Polynices and his Argive allies: the Chorus
is a bevy of scared Cadmean maidens, to whom the very sound of war and tramp of
horsemen are new and terrific. It ends with the news of the death of the two
princes, and the lamentations of their two sisters, Antigone and Ismene. The
onslaught from without has been repulsed, but the male line of the house of
Laius is extinct. The Cadmeans resolve that Eteocles shall be buried in honour,
and Polynices flung to the dogs and birds. Against the latter sentence Antigone
protests, and defies the decree: the Chorus, as is natural, are divided in
their sentiments.

It is
interesting to note that, in combination with the
Laius
and the
Oedipus
,
this play won the dramatic crown in 467 B.C. On the other hand, so excellent a
judge as Mr. Gilbert Murray thinks that it is “perhaps among Aeschylus’ plays
the one that bears least the stamp of commanding genius.” Perhaps the daring,
practically atheistic, character of Eteocles; the battle-fever that burns and
thrills through the play; the pathetic terror of the Chorus — may have given it
favour, in Athenian eyes, as the work of a poet who — though recently (468
B.C.) defeated in the dramatic contest by the young Sophocles — was yet present
to tell, not by mere report, the tale of Marathon and Salamis. Or the preceding
plays, the
Laius
and the
Oedipus
, may have been of such high
merit as to make up for defects observable in the one that still survives. In
any case, we can hardly err in accepting Dr. Verral’s judgment that “the story
of Aeschylus may be, and in the outlines probably is, the genuine epic legend
of the Cadmean war.”