House of Atreus 2nd ed (1889)/Preface 1
PREFACE.
Æschylus, son of Euphorion, an Athenian of the deme of Eleusis, was born, B.C. 525. He consecrated his life to the tragic art from his youth upwards: yet he is held to have been a valiant soldier, and with his brother Cynegirus to have fought at Marathon, and at Salamis, and at Platæa as some say. Afterwards, being at variance with the Athenians, he went away from them unto Sicily, and dwelt at the court of Hiero, tyrant of Gela, and was held by him in high honour. He died in his sixty-ninth year by a strange fate, whereof he had been warned in an oracle, saying A stroke from heaven shall slay thee. For as he was walking on the shore, an eagle, that had snatched up a tortoise into the air, let it drop; and it fell upon him, and he died.
Such is almost all that we are told, and more than we can be said to know certainly, of the life of the poet, whose masterpiece I have done my best to render into English verse, with the hope of helping one or two of those to whom the original is a closed book, to share in its treasures.
The remaining fragments of tradition—the cause of his quarrel with his countrymen—the statement that he divulged the Sacred Mysteries—remain, not now to be verified. Of those given above, the tale of his death has been preserved for its striking singularity: it has the authority of story, and no more. To his familiarity with war, by land and sea, his surviving dramas bear the strongest witness. There is a priori likelihood, and intrinsic evidence, and some external testimony, of his having shared in one or more of the great battles which saved the western world. Nor does his departure from Athens—to whatever cause it was due—nor his residence, apparently on two separate occasions, in Sicily, admit of doubt. A vague statement[1] that his poetry was inspired by wine—a portraiture of him by the pen of Aristophanes in the Frogs (intended, as, I am convinced, those of Euripides and Socrates by the same hand were intended, mainly as a literary portrait of the author and teacher, not a delineation of the man as he was); some notices[2] from Aristotle of the improvements introduced by him into the arrangements of the dramatic stage: these, and a few others, form the whole of our scanty information respecting the life of Æschylus, son of Euphorion. Stat magni nominis umbra.
Of his works there remain to us seven dramas only, out of a very large number. Fragments or notices bring up the total to seventy-eight plays of which the titles are known. If we can judge of those we have not, in any degree, by those which we have,—and many of the fragments lead us towards such an estimate,—the chaos of lost things holds no equal treasure: but it is not now to be rescued; in his own words
ἐν ἀΐστοις τελέθοντος οὔτις ἀλκά.
Perhaps a list of the surviving dramas may be useful to those wishing to form an idea of the poet's scope and range.
These plays (in the chronological order that seems most probable) are—
| I. | The Suppliant Maidens. The Scene is laid at Argos. | |
| II. | The Prometheus Bound. The Scene is on a Scythian peak, looking down from afar upon the Euxine. | |
| III. | The Persians. Scene—The Tomb of Darius at Susa, the treasure city of the king of Persia. | |
| IV. | The Seven against Thebes. Scene, the City of Thebes in Bœotia. | |
| V. | The Agamemnon. | |
| VI. | The Libation-Bearers. | |
| VII. | The Furies. |
Of these three last plays, which form a consecutive whole, called a Trilogy, and yet are individually complete, the scene is Argos or Mycenæ:[3] afterwards, the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: lastly, the Acropolis and Areopagus at Athens.
Of an Athenian Trilogy (i.e., a combination of three dramas by the same hand, whether on the same or different subjects, for consecutive presentment on the same day, and followed by a lighter play called a Satyric Drama), there remains to us this solitary specimen: of the Satyric Drama, the Cyclops of Euripides, familiar to English readers by Shelley's translation.
It may be added, to explain the apparent difficulty of listening continuously to three dramas, each in itself a perfect whole, that, in the first place, a whole day of leisure, and not the few last hours, between work or play, and sleep, of an exhausted audience, was devoted to the Theatre; and secondly, that the whole length of the three plays combined which form this Trilogy is rather less than that of Hamlet. I do not say that they would not necessarily take longer to act than Hamlet: but merely that the intellectual strain, to an appreciative audience, would not necessarily be greater. Change of interest, not mere rest, is the essential relaxation of the mind, and this, which Shakespeare provides, e.g., by the soliloquies of Hamlet, the Greek dramatists and preeminently Æschylus provided by the Choric Odes, or chants inserted between the several episodes of the play. Of such Odes, this Trilogy, and especially the Agamemnon, presents to us the noblest surviving specimens. They may be regarded as the poet's profoundest musings on the moral and religious and historical problems suggested by the mythical tale which forms the groundwork of his drama.
Of the grandeur, the preternatural effect, of these musings, while the imminent doom is preparing, no words of explanation or translation can give an adequate account. If it is lawful to adopt words written for a very different purpose by a poet in whom survives more of the spirit of Æschylus than in any other modern—one might say of these choric odes, "They are as a pause, a breathing-space, a curtain behind which God, the great scene-shifter, prepares the last and supreme act of the mighty drama. Listen, how, in the deep shadow behind, a dull and heavy sound is waxing! Listen, what footstep is that which passes to and fro? Look! how the curtain sways and waves and trembles before the breath of that which is behind!"[4]
Of the mythical tale, well known as it is, which forms the groundwork of this Trilogy, some slight sketch may be useful.
Atreus and Thyestes, sons of Pelops, fled from their father and dwelt at Argos with Eurystheus the king thereof: and when he died, Atreus[5] ruled in his place, and wedded his daughter. But Thyestes wronged his brother's wife, and was banished from Argos. And after a while he returned again, and clung unto the altar at Argos; and Atreus, fearing to slay him, devised this deed. He slew certain of the children of Thyestes, and bade him to a banquet, and gave him to eat of his own children's flesh: and he ate, knowing not what it was. But when he knew what was done, he spake a bitter curse upon the house of Atreus, that they all should perish by a doom like that of his own children. And there befel these woes unto that house, that for three generations the curse of murder departed not away. For the children of Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaus, wedded the daughters of Leda, Clytemnestra and Helen: and afterwards Paris the son of Priam, being the guest of Menelaus, did bear away Helen his queen unto Troy. And Agamemnon and Menelaus went forth to vengeance against Paris and Troy. But Artemis was wroth with the brothers, and forbade their ships to sail; and they lay at Aulis many days. And Calchas the prophet proclaimed that they should not go forth, unless Agamemnon should offer up his daughter Iphigenia in sacrifice unto Artemis. And the king was unwilling so to do: yet for his oath's sake, and for his brother and the captains of the fleet, he consented, and offered up his daughter: and the fleet sailed. And they besieged Troy for nine years, and in the tenth year it fell.
But Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon, was wroth because of her daughter's death; and she did evil with Ægisthus, the youngest son of Thyestes; and they plotted to murder Agamemnon when he should return, and sent away his son Orestes unto Strophius, king of Phocis, that he might not know what they did. And when Agamemnon came back from Troy Clytemnestra received him gladly, and led him into the palace: and as he was bathing himself, she flung over him a net, and smote him, and he died: and Clytemnestra and Ægisthus ruled in Argos.
But Orestes heard of his father's wrongful death, and went unto the oracle of Delphi to enquire thereof, and Apollo bade him avenge his father, and not spare his own mother but slay her. And secretly he came to Argos, bearing feigned news of his own death in Phocis, and so came into the palace of his father again, and slew his mother Clytemnestra and Ægisthus. Then was he distraught and maddened by the Furies, in revenge for Clytemnestra's slaying: and he wandered over the earth, seeking purification for his deed, but the Furies followed him. At last he came to the temple of Delphi, and clung to the altar: and the God cast a deep sleep over the Furies, and bade him fly to Athens, where he should find safety. But the ghost of Clytemnestra arose from the shades and awoke the Furies, and they followed him, and were wroth with Apollo. And they held dispute on the Acropolis, and Athena bade certain of the men of Athens decide the cause with her. And in the end they proclaimed the deed of Orestes to have been rightly done, and the guilt of matricide to have been wiped away. Then the Furies were angered with Athena and her land: but Athena promised them great honour from the Athenians, and a sacred dwelling place in the land, even a cave beneath Areopagus; and they were appeased, and were called no more Furies, but Gracious Goddesses. And Orestes went back unto his father's kingdom, and the curse of blood upon the house of Atreus was stayed.[6]
It will be obvious, even from a compendium like the foregoing, that the myth is an epic in itself: and regarding Æschylus' treatment of it as a whole, we may discern a special propriety in the poet's recorded saying, that his dramas were "scraps from the lordly feast of Homer." I have sometimes fancied that an interesting parallel might be drawn between the three parts of the Trilogy, and the three divisions of the Divina Commedia. For we have in both, the same central idea; the succession, that is, of guilt, atonement, absolution. Dante fixes his epic in the future world, Æschylus in the present: but mutatis mutandis, substituting the deepest religious thought of Athens for that of the middle ages, the most shadowy and gigantic vision of retributory forces for the clearest and most distinct—we shall find the parallel curiously suggestive, to say the least, of the essential unity of moral speculation. The first part of the Trilogy, the drama Agamemnon, takes up the above myth at the point where Agamemnon's return from Troy is being anxiously awaited at Argos, in the tenth year of the war. The first choric ode recalls some of the previous history, dwelling particularly on the circumstances of the sacrifice of Iphigenia. Then follows the appearance of the Herald, and of Agamemnon; the treacherous welcome of Clytemnestra; the prophecy of Cassandra, daughter of Priam, now a captive in Agamemnon's train; the murder of the king, and Clytemnestra's savage exultation over his body and that of Cassandra. With the appearance of Ægisthus, and his avowal of his plot and motives, the drama closes, leaving Clytemnestra and her paramour in supreme power over Argos.
The second part, called the Choephoroi, or Libation-Bearers—from the duty imposed upon the chorus of pouring libations on Agamemnon's tomb—opens with the secret return of Orestes, the mutual recognition of himself and his sister Electra, and their invocation of the sleepless spirit of their father to aid their planned revenge. Then Orestes, assuming the character of a Phocian stranger, recounts to Clytemnestra a feigned tale of his own death in that land. Then, received into the palace, he slays Ægisthus and Clytemnestra, and avows his commission from Apollo to do the deed. But already his "are but wild and whirling words;" and, maddened by the guilt of blood, he sees the Furies arise, with dark robes and snaky hair; and, calling on Apollo for protection, he flees wildly away.[7]
The third part, called The Furies (the Greek name "Eumenides" signifying literally "The Gracious Ones," from the change in the nature of the Furies with which the drama closes), opens at Delphi in the temple of Apollo. The Furies lie in sleep, made drowsy by the God: Orestes clings to the altar: Apollo bids him be of good hope, and depart unto Athens while the Furies are yet asleep. As he passes from the stage, the ghost of Clytemnestra rises and calls the slumbering Furies to arise and pursue the criminal. Then Apollo himself, with words of loathing, bids them forth from his temple; and scenting like hounds the truck of blood, they follow the flying Orestes.
Here the scene shifts to Athens; Orestes, having followed the behest of Apollo, clings to the statue of Athena on the Acropolis, and claims her aid. The cause is tried, apparently on Areopagus—(the scene probably representing both the Acropolis and the adjacent Areopagus)—Athena presiding, Apollo pleading Orestes' part, the Furies impeaching him of matricide. The votes are cast, and found equal, for acquittal and condemnation; and this result, as Athena has previously ruled, gives Orestes the benefit of the doubt. The Furies, wroth at being thus defrauded of their victim, vow vengeance on Athena's land and nation: but she appeases them by promising them honourable worship for ever, as gracious and fostering Powers of Earth, from her own Athenians: and so, solemnly escorted by torches and processions, they pass down into their subterranean cave beneath Areopagus, with words of blessing upon Attica; and the third and last part of the Trilogy closes with joy and with extinction of the curse.
It will appear by a glance at this plot that the Agamemnon and The Libation-Bearers are both of them Tragedies in the accepted modern sense; the one closing with the death of Agamemnon and the triumph of murder and adultery; the other, with the death of Clytemnestra and with madness as the reward of matricide. The Furies might seem, to modern eyes, less a tragedy than a drama of restoration; yet it conforms in all respects to the Aristotelian definition of Tragedy. The situation is undeniably tragic, though the conclusion dispels the gloom.
The Trilogy is Æschylus' presentment of two problems, each of eternal import, though the form in which he contemplated them was the common theme of the Greek drama. These problems are:
I.The Retribution of Crime.
II.The Inheritance or Transmission of Evil.
The views of the poet on each may perhaps be illustrated by a few excerpts from his writings. It has been pointed out (Plumptre, Biographical Essay) that, in many cases, they are reflections on the γνῶμαι, or current proverbs of the day: the foundations of Greek philosophy, but often as forgotten as those who laid them. Sometimes the poet actually quotes and acknowledges the proverb, as a τριγέρων μῦθος, "an immemorial saying;" but often, it is probable that some piece of apparently irrelevant mysticism is in reality the poet's reflection on some saying familiar to his audience, but not recognizable by us. Such, e.g., I believe to be the case in the celebrated passage (Agam. 160) Ζεὺς, ὅστις ποτ᾽ εστίν.—κ.τ.λ.
Retribution.—"Among the dead, this bitter name of murderess clings ever to my soul; I wander scorned of all." "Though he go down to the grave, the guilty is never freed . . . the sinner on whose hand is the stain of blood must see the Furies rise at his side, avengers of murder, champions of the slain."—The Furies, ll. 175, 316.
"There is one who spoils the spoiler; the slayer in his turn is slain; while Zeus is lord of the world, it is fixed that all who sin shall suffer."—Agamemnon, l. 1562.
"The anvil-block of Justice is planted firm: Fate the sword-smith hammers the steel of her design: the mighty Fury from her dark depth of counsel requites to the uttermost at last the guilt of blood shed forth of old."—The Libation-Bearers, l. 647.
"There is a law that blood-drops shed upon the ground demand other bloodshed in requital: Murder calls aloud, summoning a Fury, who brings a further woe, sent up in vengeance from those who were slain before.—Ibid, l. 400.
Inheritance of Evil.—"One said of old that the gods have no heed to punish him who tramples down the grace of things holy: 'twas impiously said! their vengeance is manifested upon the children of all who breathe forth rebellion overmuch, what time their houses teem with weal too great for man."—Agamemnon, l. 369.
"There is an ancient saying, that human bliss, if it reach its summit, doth not die childless; that from prosperity springs up a bane, a woe insatiable. I hold not so: 'tis impious act that bears those many children, all like the race from which they sprang: but the house of the upright hath a blessed fate, a progeny of good."—Agamemnon, l. 750.
These excerpts, few out of many passages bearing on the same subject, may perhaps be a help towards grasping the import of these dramas as a whole. Not the least of Æschylus' claims to honour in his divergence, in some points, from the traditional and accepted views of the time, with respect to hereditary guilt and responsibility. A belief in a jealous and vindictive Power,—in children suffering for their fathers' sins,—in families lying under a curse for generations—was not only familiar to the Athenians of this epoch, but approached the condition of an accepted tenet: it was even, at times, a political force: as, in the case of Pericles, his membership of the Alcmæonid family (which lay under a curse for the perfidious and impious murder of the partisans of Cylon) undoubtedly operated in his disfavour. (See Thucyd. Bk. i, ch. 127.)
The proportion of people who believe in an unjust, capricious, and vindictive God may have diminished since the time of Æschylus and Ezekiel: yet to this day so large a minority are haunted by corresponding ideas—so considerable even in our own time has been the political influence of such notions—that the earnest protest of the Hebrew prophet and the less distinct yet equally purified doctrine of the Athenian poet can neither of them be said to have lost their importance nor to have done their work. The eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel, and the third chorus of the Agamemnon, should be read together, as the grandest assertions, in pre-christian times, of the justice of God.
The poetry of Æschylus is the precursor of the philosophy of Plato: the vague and mysterious problems over which the poet brooded became the subjects of moral philosophy in the next generation. Let it be remembered that we have in Æschylus the beginnings of speculation, not its ultimate forms; and the greatness of this first step will be at once apparent. Æschylus deals especially with two popular theories: (i.) The doctrine of the jealousy of Heaven against human prosperity as such; (ii.) The doctrine above mentioned of the inheritance of evil in certain families.
The first, he may be said to deny. The teaching of Solon, as recorded and exemplified by Herodotus in the history of Croesus (Book i, ch. 30–33), "that the Divine Power is altogether jealous, and loves to trouble the estate of man," is confronted by Æschylus with the assertion of justice, not caprice, as ruling over man. That this conception brought the poet into collision with the popular ideas of Zeus, is manifest from the drama of Prometheus Vinctus (where, unfortunately, we have the problem without its solution, the rest of the trilogy being lost): that the national polytheism had little hold on his belief, however largely it affected his poetry, seems to me plain from all his deeper utterances, notwithstanding the assertion of Klausen (Theol. Æsch., p. 5) to the contrary.[8] But of the poet's attitude towards the theory of a vindictive God, there is no question. "I am alone in my thought," he cries; "it is not wealth, nor prosperity it is impiety that breeds other sins, and woe for its sequel." It is hard to resist the temptations of wealth, and power, and victory; yet not these things, but the yielding to their temptations, do the gods punish: not Agamemnon's triumph, not even the carnage of Troy, but his arrogance and pride on his return: his making himself equal to the gods. (Ag. l. 811).
The second doctrine—that of the inheritance of evil in certain families, forms the groundwork of the whole Trilogy; and the poet's views on it must be collected: they are nowhere concentrated or distinctly expressed. Substantially they appear to apply to the following condition of things. The idea of an Atè, or inherited curse which dogs certain families, has a double origin.
I. An origin of fact: that children are like their parents, grow up under their influence, borrow from their connection with them much of their own character.
II. An origin in custom. A family crime had a far more serious import to an ancient Greek than we can readily realize.[9] It is the simple fact, that the idea of individual responsibility, and even of individual existence, was almost absent from him. The family was his unit; the family sinned in the sin of any of its members; the family exacted or suffered vengeance; any member of the family who was slain by another was held to have incurred the stain of suicide.
The author of the Trilogy endeavours to purify these ideas, and to reconcile them alike with the doctrine of Justice and with the facts of the world. The reality of the curse is not denied, but the voluntary nature of each stage in its history is asserted, as is the responsibility of the individual criminal for his own act. The temptation, the predisposition, may be extraneous, may be imposed by heaven; the deed is his own.
"The first step he is master not to take;" but, if once it be taken, if the altar of right be once spurned the miserable, desperate impulse is upon him; he goes from sin to sin, there is no help for him, he has passed among the lost.
Such, I believe, is the inner doctrine of Æschylus, struggling to light through language of vague import, and occasional inconsistencies; especially in the relation of this process of evil to the divine will or permission. Nor must we forget his solution of the moral problem, in The Furies. The family guilt and curse are to be closed by an appeal to human justice, which measures the guilt of the individual by the circumstances and motives of his crime, and has power to absolve, as well as to mete out punishment to, an admitted criminal.
Granting, as we must grant, the belief in such an hereditary curse as Æschylus made the subject of his trilogy, it is impossible to conceive a nobler solution of the problem; a nobler "purification by pity and terror," if we may adopt in an extended sense Aristotle's definition of Tragedy.
Perhaps it may not be out of place to say a few words with respect to a charge, often brought against Æschylus, of being a bombastic poet. It is undeniable that in his earlier plays there is a tendency towards inflated language; such prodigies as ἐφεψαλώθη κἀξεβροντήθη σθένος (Prom. l. 362), as ἁλώσιμον παιᾶν᾽ ἐπεξιακχάσας (Seven against Thebes, l. 635), show, at all events, a poetic artist who has not yet fully dissevered the large from the fine, the grandiose from the grand. Neither are the thoughts in these plays always free from the same charge, though the occurrence of such metaphors as we regard as Oriental, seems to me to demonstrate capacity rather than extravagance in the Greek poet. It is surprising, for instance, to hear in the celebrated description of the battle of Salamis (The Persians, l. 577), and of the floating corpses of the drowned Persians, and "death gnawing upon them:"
σκύλλονται πρὸς ἀναύδων
παίδων τᾶς ἀμιάντου.
"They are scattered and peeled by the voiceless children of the Pure," i.e., the sea—it is surprising, I say, to find such a phrase treated as fantastic and Oriental. The same thought has been touched by Shakespeare (The Tempest, Act ii, sc. 1):
"O thou mine heir
Of Naples and of Milan, what strange fish
Hath made his meal on thee!"
and by Shelley (Similes):
"As a shark and dog-fish wait
Under an Atlantic isle,
For the negro-ship whose freight
Is the theme of their debate,
Wrinkling their red gills the while."
But how inferior each expression is to that of Æschylus, need hardly be pointed out. Shakespeare's is simple almost to baldness: Shelley's, powerfully, almost horribly, descriptive; but Æschylus, retaining the physical word (σκύλλονται), paints the rest of the scene with a rich imagination. The children of earth, but now so clamorous, are at the mercy of the still children of that sea whose translucent purity they have harassed and distracted in vain.
However this may be, what I wish to point out is that all traces of immature work have disappeared, when we reach the Trilogy. The sonorous verse remains, but the exaggerated style is gone. The ponderous imprecations of the Prometheus or the Seven against Thebes have turned to verse like this:
μὰ τὴν τέλειον τῆς ἐμῆς παιδὸς δίκην,
Ἄτην Ἐρινύν θ᾽, αἷσι τόνδ᾽ ἔσφαξ᾽ ἐγώ,
οὔ μοι Φόβου μέλαθρον ἐλπὶς ἐμπατεῖν.
Occasionally, as in the prophecy of Calchas, the oracular style is purposely assumed; or, as in The Furies, l. 285 sqq.) a scene of monstrous horrors is described in monstrous terms; but of real bombast, of large language misapplied, there is no more. With this disappearance, a new faculty has arisen: a dramatic art of the most admirable kind. Not even the excellent double interest of the Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles is superior to the scene of Clytemnestra's welcome of Agamemnon, with its effusive insincerity and ominous words of double and deadly meaning. The whole character of Clytemnestra is a refutation of those who maintain that we may find poetry in Æschylus, but must go to Sophocles or Euripides for drama. Nor must we omit to notice the marvellous art displayed in the whole episode of Cassandra. Her spirit is utterly full of Apollo, the Sun-God, the Slayer of Night: a mention, nay, a mere hint of him (πυθόκραντα, l. 1255) banishes in a moment her brief sanity, and she bursts into ravings again. She is penetrated with the "fire intolerant and intense" of his coming, of the sunrise of prophecy burning brighter and clearer, while in its light the great waves of doom roll up and on. His approach is a scorching glow of fire, before his presence is revealed,
παπαῖ, οἷον τὸ πῦρ· ἐπέρχεται δέ μοι·
ὀτοτοῖ Λύκει᾽ Ἄπολλον·
"Ah, ah the fire! it waxes, nears me now—
Woe, woe for me, Apollo of the dawn!"
And her last speech is a cry to the actual sun, whose light she will see no more for ever, to light her avengers to their work. Close inspection of all this scene will show Æschylus at his very highest point of inspiration; it is as true, and as imaginative, as anything in King Lear.
With respect to the text, I think I have only once departed from usual interpretations. Where the text is mutilated or corrupt I have supplied or amended, as the context seemed to direct, to the extent of a word or two. (See Appendix to The Libation-Bearers.)
The one occasion where my version differs, I believe, from any yet suggested, is the celebrated passage (Ag. ll. 105–7):
ἔτι γὰρ θεόθεν καταπνείει
πειθὼ μολπᾶν
ἀλκᾷ σύμφυτος αἰών.
This I have interpreted in opposition to those who have taken ἀλκᾷ σύμφυτος αἰών as in some way describing the condition of the speaker. I suggest that it may rather be taken closely with θεόθεν and that the whole passage means "Still upon me doth the divine life, whose strength waxes never old (lit. which is congenital with strength), breathe from heaven the impulse of song." This seems to suit the context well, as I may shortly explain. The chorus have just been bewailing the sad and tremulous weakness of old age, too feeble for war, too feeble to walk without a staff, sad and presageful of future evils, and only at moments roused to hope by propitious omens of sacrifice. Suddenly the light of comfort breaks upon them. Old and feeble, they have yet the divine inspiration of song, breathed on them from "realms of help" (ἀλκά) by powers which never wax old nor feeble. Then follows the matchless ode, with its profound theology, its analysis of human perplexity, its utter pathos in describing the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
In defence of this view, I would urge that ἀλκὰ is not a usual word—at least, I have been unable to find an instance of its use—for any mental power like genius or inspiration. It almost always means physical prowess; and if it becomes metaphorical at all, it becomes so in the sense of help or aid (as in The Furies, l. 257, ἀλκὰν ἔχων = clasping or holding help, by embracing the image of the goddess: taking sanctuary, in short). If this view of the word be correct, the word itself applies very ill to the chorus, whose physical feebleness and powerlessness to help has just been alluded to: but very well to the gods, whose ageless strength and power to aid is contrasted with human weakness. The thought in ἀλκᾷ σύμφυτος αἰὼν will thus be parallel to that in ἀγήρῳ χρόνῳ δυνάστας of Sophocles Ant. l. 608.
Undoubtedly there is a difficulty in applying such a phrase as σύμφυτος αἰὼν to the divine life at all. But it seems allowable to use words, properly only applicable to human life, with reference to the divine, in a passage like this, where in thought the contrast is drawn between the former as an αἰὼν σύμφυτος indeed, but not ἀλκᾷ σύμφυτος, and the latter, verily an αἰὼν in the wider sense, and ἀλκᾷ σύμφυτος, coeval with its eternal power to prompt and aid.
And certainly the word καταπνείει in its most literal sense, seems to suit this idea of a sacred impulse, an aid like a wafting wind, breathed down from heaven.
I put forward this conjecture without confidence, and merely as one more endeavour to elucidate a passage of more than usual interest, which is allowed to be dubious hitherto. To make it refer to the life or condition of the speaker seems to me difficult; to translate it "the time co-extensive with the war" almost impossible: whether my own conjecture is any better, iudicent alii. For the feeling of the whole passage, it might not be amiss to compare Goethe's vindication of the "honour and toil" that await the old, in song.
Doch in's bekannte Saitenspiel
Mit Muth und Anmuth einzugreifen,
Nach einem selbstgesteckten Ziel
Mit holdem Irren hinzuschweifen,
Das, alte Herrn, ist eure Pflicht.
Faust, Part i., Theatre Prelude.
With respect to the translation, my object has been, throughout, to be, if possible, readable. I have sacrificed much that scholars might fairly desiderate—reproduction of the original metres, preservation of strophe and antistrophe and so forth—on this ground, that I found my own metrical skill insufficient to satisfy even myself, in such a task. I have little doubt that certain parts—Cassandra's earlier ravings for instance, or the wrath of the Furies—would be most fitly rendered in prose like that of the analogous passages of King Lear and Macbeth: but here, too, after a struggle, I resigned the conflict. It is easy to write prose; it is impossible to write that prose.
The Anapæstic systems have been mostly rendered in octosyllabic metre; where dactylic feet were predominant in the original, I have sometimes adopted the heroic quatrain, sometimes loose and irregular, but always rhyming, measures. The earlier part of the third chorus of the Agamemnon I have endeavoured to reproduce in that arrangement of octosyllabic verses used with such admirable effect by Mr. Swinburne in the Prologue and Epilogue of "Songs before Sunrise." The iambic dialogue has been rendered into such blank verse, or rhyming couplets, as I could command: the trochaic passages into rhyming verse of greater length.
Any coincidences that may be found between other translations and the present may claim to be for the most part accidental. Whatever has been consciously adopted from elsewhere has been acknowledged in a foot-note, unless so familiar as to have become common property. Thus I have not thought it necessary to avow obvious obligations to Shakespeare, nor the "airy rings" of the vultures' flight, in the first chorus of the Agamemnon, to Jonson, nor the "sleep of swords" that fine rendering of the Homeric χάλκεος ὕπνος, to Kingsley, nor the rhythm of one choric passage in The Libation-Bearers to Mr. W. Morris. Such things are public property now.
Part of this translation, viz., the Agamemnon, having been already published, I have had, for that part, the advantage of public criticism. I have carefully considered all such criticism, so far as it has reached me, and have removed, I hope, all positive errors that have been detected. Those critics who have complained rather of the general faults of the translation—such, e.g., as diffuseuess, or a modern tone—than of particular errors, will, I hope, believe my assurance that their words have been duly weighed. If I have not recast the translation to the extent their criticism demanded, it is neither from doubting its substantial truth, nor the seriousness of the fault. But I am not sanguine, after various attempts, of my being able to translate in a closer and more pregnant style. It is not a question of how the thing could be done best, in the abstract; it is, unfortunately, the more limited and painful question, how a particular individual can do it least imperfectly.
My main obligations, in the matter of Æschylus, are expressed in the dedication: in addition, I am indebted to the Rev. W. A. Fearon, Assistant Master of Winchester, for revising a large part of the Agamemnon; to Mr. C. Kegan Paul for useful criticisms, mainly, though not wholly, on the same play; to Mr. A. O. Prickard, Fellow and Lecturer of New College, Oxford, for incidental assistance throughout the work, particularly in The Libation-Bearers and The Furies; to Mr. C. B. Phillips, Assistant Master of Winchester, who has gone over the whole translation with care; to Mr. D. S. Margoliouth, Fellow of New College, Oxford, who has helped me especially with several difficulties in The Furies. Other friends will, I doubt not, accept a general acknowledgment of their aid. I cannot, however, leave unspecified my gratitude to Mr. F. R. Benson and the rest of the Oxford company, who last year performed the Agamemnon on the stage, for the practical insight they afforded their audience into the spectacular as well as the literary and dramatic merit of that noblest of poems.
E. D. A. M.
Winchester, March, 1881.
- ↑ Athen. x, p. 428, F.
- ↑ Poet. 4, Hor. A. P. l. 278; Themistius Or. 26.
- ↑ Argos and Mycenæ are in reality about six miles apart, in the great κοῖλον Ἄργος, wide valley of Argolis. The relics of the dynasty of Atreus are undoubtedly at Mycenæ. Æschylus however calls the scene, always, Argos: not caring to particularize about a district so well known. The fact that he describes the beacon fire on Mount Arachne as visible to the palace need not lead us to conclude that he had Argos more in mind than Mycenæ: though the mountain is visible (if I remember right) from Larissa, the citadel of Argos, and not (I am sure) from the Acropolis of Mycenæ. The beacon-glare would have been clearly seen from either, no doubt. But Æschylus ignores such detail: as Mr. Clark (Peloponnesus, p. 70) remarks, every Athenian saw daily from his own hills the peak of Arachne to the south, and knew it looked upon the region of Argos: and this was enough for the poet.
- ↑ V. Hugo, Napoleon le Petit, ch. last.
- ↑ The position of Pleisthenes in the family of Atreus seems doubtful, though the lineage is twice called by his name. (Ag. ll. 1569, 1602). Atreus is distinctly called father of Agamemnon (l. 1561), yet tradition rather holds that Pleisthenes was son of Atreus and father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, but, dying young, left his children to the care of their grandfather Atreus.
- ↑ I have ventured to give to the whole Trilogy the title of The House of Atreus as the name most applicable to all three parts. The older name Oresteia seems to me to have meant, in Aristophanes, (Frogs, 1124), The Libation-Bearers only: it is hardly applicable to the Agamemnon.
- ↑ Two scenes of the Trilogy have been thus admirably sketched by Mr. Browning in "Pauline."
"Old lore,
Loved for itself and all it shows; the king
Treading the purple calmly to his death,
While round him, like the clouds of eve, all dusk,
The giant shades of fate, silently flitting,
Pile the dim outline of the coming doom.
And the boy
With his white breast and brow, and clustering curls,
Streaked with his mother's blood, and striving hard
To tell his story ere his reason goes." - ↑ See Fr. 295.
- ↑ See Maine, "Ancient Law," ch. 5.