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TITLE: SUPPLIANT MAIDENS AND OTHER PLAYS
AUTHOR: AESCHYLUS
EBOOK: E07131 (O'Briens Book Cellar)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

FOUR PLAYS OF AESCHYLUS

THE SUPPLIANT MAIDENS
THE PERSIANS
THE SEVEN AGAINST THEBES
THE PROMETHEUS BOUND

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH VERSE BY E.D.A. MORSHEAD, MA.

INTRODUCTION

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 Thermopylae,
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,

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