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.”
There remains one Aeschylean play, the most famous—unless we except the
_Agamemnon_—in extant Greek literature, the _Prometheus Bound_. That it
was the first of a Trilogy, and that the second and third parts were
called the _Prometheus Freed_, and _Prometheus the Fire-Bearer_,
respectively, is accepted: but the date of its performance is unknown.
The _Prometheus Bound_ is conspicuous for its gigantic and strictly
superhuman plot. The _Agamemnon_ is human, though legendary the
_Prometheus_ presents to us the gods of Olympus in the days when
mankind crept like emmets upon the earth or dwelt in caves, scorned by
Zeus and the other powers of heaven, and—still aided by Prometheus the
Titan—wholly without art or science, letters or handicrafts. For his
benevolence towards oppressed mankind, Prometheus is condemned by Zeus
to uncounted ages of pain and torment, shackled and impaled in a lonely
cleft of a Scythian precipice. The play opens with this act of divine
resentment enforced by the will of Zeus and by the handicraft of
Hephaestus, who is aided by two demons, impersonating Strength and
Violence. These agents of the ire of Zeus disappear after the first
scene, the rest of the play represents Prometheus in the mighty
solitude, but visited after a while by a Chorus of sea nymphs who, from
the distant depths of ocean, have heard the clang of the demons’
hammers, and arrive, in a winged car, from the submarine palace of
their father Oceanus. To them Prometheus relates his penalty and its
cause: viz., his over tenderness to the luckless race of mankind.
Oceanus himself follows on a hippogriff, and counsels Prometheus to
submit to Zeus. But the Titan who has handled the sea nymphs with all
gentleness, receives the advice with scorn and contempt, and Oceanus
retires. But the courage which he lacks his daughters possess to the
full; they remain by Prometheus to the end, and share his fate,
literally in the crack of doom. But before the end, the strange half
human figure of Io, victim of the lust of Zeus and the jealousy of
Hera, comes wandering by, and tells Prometheus of her wrongs. He, by
his divine power, recounts to her not only the past but also the future
of her wanderings. Then, in a fresh access of frenzy, she drifts away
into the unknown world. Then Prometheus partly reveals to the sea
maidens his secret, and the mysterious cause of Zeus’ hatred against
him—a cause which would avail to hurl the tyrant from his power. So
deadly is this secret, that Zeus will, in the lapse of ages, be forced
to reconcile himself with Prometheus, to escape dethronement. Finally,
Hermes, the messenger of Zeus, appears with fresh threats, that he may
extort the mystery from the Titan. But Prometheus is firm, defying both
the tyrant and his envoy, though already the lightning is flashing, the
thunder rolling, and sky and sea are mingling their fury. Hermes can
say no more; the sea nymphs resolutely refuse to retire, and wait their
doom. In this crash of the world, Prometheus flings his final defiance
against Zeus, and amid the lightnings and shattered rocks that are
overwhelming him and his companions, speaks his last word, “_It is
unjust!_”
Any spectacular representation of this finale must, it is clear, have
roused intense sympathy with the Titan and the nymphs alike. If,
however, the sequel-plays had survived to us, we might conceivably have
found and realized another and less intolerable solution. The name
_Zeus_, in Greek, like that of _God_, in English, comprises very
diverse views of divine personality. The Zeus in the _Prometheus_ has
little but the name in common with the Zeus in the first chorus of the
_Agamemnon_, or in _The Suppliant Maidens_ (ll. 86-103): and parallel
reflections will give us much food for thought. But, in any case, let
us realize that the _Prometheus_ is not a human play: with the possible
exception of Io, every character in it is an immortal being. It is not
as a vaunt, but as a fact, that Prometheus declares, as against Zeus
(l. 1053), that “Me at least He shall never give to death.”
A stupendous theological drama of which two-thirds has been lost has
left an aching void, which now can never be filled, in our minds. No
reader of poetry needs to be reminded of the glorious attempt of
Shelley to work out a possible and worthy sequel to the _Prometheus_.
Who will not echo the words of Mr. Gilbert Murray, when he says that
“no piece of lost literature has been more ardently longed for than the
_Prometheus Freed_”?
But, at the end of a rather prolonged attempt to understand and
translate the surviving tragedies of Aeschylus, one feels inclined to
repeat the words used by a powerful critic about one of the greatest of
modern poets—“For man, it is a weary way to God, but a wearier far to
any demigod.” We shall not discover the full sequel of Aeschylus’
mighty dramatic conception: we “know in part, and we prophesy in part.”
The Introduction (pp. xvi.-xviii.) prefixed by Mr. A. O. Prickard to
his edition of the _Prometheus_ is full of persuasive grace, on this
topic: to him, and to Dr. Verrall of Cambridge—_lucida sidera_ of help
and encouragement in the study of Aeschylus—the translator’s thanks are
due, and are gratefully and affectionately rendered.