Æschylos Tragedies and Fragments

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 —

“Memory, handmaid true

And mother of the Muses.”

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.

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 —

“Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.”

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 —

“For not as subject sitting 'neath the sway

Of strength above his own.”

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.