Edith Hamilton, Three Greek Plays

Edith Hamilton, Three Greek Plays, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1937.

Professor Murray has said that the Greek mode of expression would often seem so bald as to antagonize a reader if it were rendered literally, and that he prefers, then, to give a richer, more decorated expression, in accordance with the genius of English poetry; but I believe that his idea dates from the Victorian poets, and that today when Tennyson and Swinburne have lost their spell, English poetry is drawing closer to the simplicity and directness of the Greek. (14)

So far, there has never been a really great translation of a Greek play, none which, like the English Bible, sweepts away all consciousness of any original other than the English words, so beautiful and so moving that the mind refuses to go back of them. Greek translations become quickly dated. (15)

In the translation of The Trojan Women and Prometheus I have not tried to keep the original meters anywhere, as I have done in the choruses of Agamemnon. In the dialogue of a Greek play the meter used was always a line with six accents. In English poetry this line is rarely found, and for the most part at the end of a verse, where it has the effect of a pause in the poem. /

And in the midst, ‘mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and kings. /

The last line is the exact numerical equivalent of the line used in the Greek dialogue, but it is not the aesthetic equivalent. The English is slow and weighty; the Greek is light and swift. A line with five accents, like the first two lines of the quotation, is far nearer to the effect of the Greek, and in general it has been adopted (17) by translators. I have followed them, but only to a limited extent. I have not held myself bound to any fixed meter. Nor have I made any attempt to keep all the lines the same length. In a Greek play the dialogue runs on unbroken, with hardly ever a line cut short. But in a translation the use of a line of varying length sets the translator free from the necessity of padding. Words and even whole sentences have often to be added if each line must invariably be as long as the others—as witness all the translators who have felt that necessity. In such translations a reader, ignorant of Greek, can never feel any certainty whether a word or phrase or a sentence is the poet’s or only a makeshift required to fill out the line. This serious disadvantage is never counterbalanced by reproducing the Greek meter. No translator, as far as I know, has done this./

The meter of a Greek chorus, however, is always irregular, and often to an astonishing degree. In one of the choruses of the Prometheus a seven-syllable line is followed by a line of twenty-four syllables. The accent, too, may vary from line to line. In using an irregular line scheme a translator cannot be accused of doing something that is alien to the genius of Greek poetry. /

It is hardly necessary to add that rhyme was not used by the Greek tragedians. To rhyme Aeschylus is like rhyming Isaiah. (17-18)

The greatest piece of anti-war literature there is in the world was written 2,350 years ago. This is a statement worth a thought or two. Nothing since, no description or denunciation of war’s terrors and futilities, ranks with The Trojan Women, which was put upon the Athenian stage by Euripides in the year 416 B.C. in that faraway age a man saw with perfect clarity what war was, and wrote what he saw in a play of surpassing power, and then—nothing happened. No one was won over to his side—no band of eager disciples took up his idea and went preaching it to a war-ridden world. (19)

Consider the greatest of all, Shakespeare. He never bothered to think war through. Of course, that was not his way with anything. He had another method. Did he believe in “Contumelius, beastly, mad-brain’d war”? Or in “Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war”? He says as much on the one side as on the other. … It is not possible to know what Shakespeare really thought about war, if he really thought about it at all. Always that disconcerting power of imagination blocks the way to our knowledge of him. He saw eye to eye with Henry on one page and with the citizens of Harfleur on the next, and what he saw when he looked only for himself, he did not care to record. (21)

“The burden of the valley of vision,” wrote Isaiah, when he alone knew what could save his world from ruin. (21) To perceive an overwhelmingly important truth of which no one else sees a glimmer, is loneliness such as few even in the long history of the world can have had to suffer. But Euripides suffered it for the greater part of his long life. The valley of vision was his abiding place. /

He was the youngest of the three Greek tragic poets, but only a few years younger than Sophocles, who, indeed, survived him. The difference between the two men was great. Each had the keen discernment and profound spiritual perception of the supreme artist. Each lived and suffered through the long-drawn-out war, which ended in the crushing defeat of Athens, and together they watched the human deterioration brought about during those years. But what they saw was not the same. Sophocles never dreamed of a world in which such tings could not be. To him the way to be enabled to endure what was happening, the only way for a man to put life through no matter what happened, was to face acts unwaveringly and accept them, to perceive clearly and bear steadfastly the burden of the human lot, which is as it is and never will be different. To look at the world thus, with profundity, but in tranquility of spirit, without bitterness, has been given to few, and to no other writer so completely as to Sophocles. /

But Euripides saw clearest of all not what is, but what might be. So rebels are made. (22)

The Prometheus is unlike any other ancient play. Only in the most modern theatre is a parallel to be found. There is no action in it. Aristotle, first of critics, said that drama depends on action, not character. There is only character in the Prometheus. (91)

The dialogue is sustained with an admirable art. Each of the minor personages, however brief his appearance, is an individual, clearly characterized. Nothing in the picture is blurred. Force is a rough careless villain; Hephestus, the fire-god, a feeble (91) kindly tool; the chorus, gentle conventional-minded girls, who can find courage enough in a crisis; Hermes, a crude youth, much set up by his high office, but beneath his grand assumption unsure of himself. (91-92)

Ocean’s character merits a fuller consideration for the reason that the traditional view is that Attic tragedy did not admit of comedy or humor. …most readers will agree that the comedy of Ocean’s talk with Prometheus is beyond dispute. Ocean is a humorous creation, an amiable, self-important old busybody, really distressed at Prometheus’ hard fate, but bent upon reading him a good lecture now that he has him where he cannot run away; delighted to find himself the person of importance who has pull with Zeus and can get that unpractical fool, Prometheus, out of his not entirely undeserved punishment; but underneath this superior attitude very uneasy because of Zeus, who “isn’t so far off but he might hear,” and completely happy when Prometheus finally gives him a chance to save his face and run off safely home. (92)

…the bird with four feet… the Athenian spectators were at least as keen-witted as we are today, and when there appeared on the stage an enormous, grotesque bird with a pompous old man riding on its back, they had no more trouble than we should have in recognizing a comic interlude. Ocean is a figure of fun, and the steed he bestrides is there to give the audience the clue. (92-93)

Milton’s Satan is often called Prometheus in-(93)jected with Christian theology, but the comparison falls to the ground. For all Satan’s magnificence, he is, to use Prometheus’ words, “young-young.” Shame before the other spirits keeps him from submission quite as much as his own ambition. He has learned what is important to him and what is not. He is calmly strong loftily indifferent, never to be shaken, because he is sure, both of what he wants and what he means to do. He stands forever as the type of the great rebel. (94)

A large part of a Greek tragedy consists of poems written in a way that is completely foreign to English poetry and, indeed, to the poetry of any other language of the Western world. There is nothing like it even in Latin poetry. In the Agamemnon, of the 1,673 lines of the play, 900 are dialogue, the rest is made up of these strange poems. They marked the division of the play into scenes, as a curtain does with us. (144)

In contrast to the dialogue, which was always written in a six-foot measure, felt by the Greeks, according to Aristotle, to be “better [144] adapted for being spoken” than any other, the choral poems were never written in a fixed measure, but in most varying meters that changed constantly within a single verse, often from line to line. We have no parallel to this in our poetry and the sound falls strangely on our ears… It would offend us to have a poem that began in the measure of / There is sweet music here that softer falls/ swing into that of / It was many and many a year ago / … Greatly as the lines given above [greek in translation] vary, each has its own strongly marked rhythm. … (145)

Furthermore, the Greek choruses are written in sets of similar verses and the two that belong to the same set must correspond in the most meticulous way. The poet was free to do what he wanted with the first verse. Every line might be in a different meter. But the second verse had to follow the irregularity of the first, line for line and syllable for syllable. Each line had to have not only exactly the same accents as the corresponding line in the companion verse, but exactly the same number of syllables. …In truth, as compared with the Greeks even our most academic poets are careless metricians. Milton writes:

…Thus with the year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Eve’n or Morn,
Of sight of vernal bloom or summer’s rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine—

and we hear al the lines alike. We never notice that the poet has begun the first two lines with an accented syllable and in the following has changed to an accent on the second syllable. We feel no difficulty in reading them; they all sound exactly the same to our ear. No so the Greeks. If in two corresponding lines of a choral ode Aeschylus had done what Milton did, it would have been wrong to his hearers; it would have offended their ear. To each age its own poetic license. (146)

To me, who had been familiar with the sound of the choruses of the Agamemnon from my youth and [147] knew much of them by heart, it seemed even more impossible to conceive of changing them into other meters [for translation] than to do so to an English poem, and my feeling was based on fact. For meter was more important to the Greek than it is to us; it played a bigger role with them. They felt it in a way we do not; they perceived a connection between the sense and the sound which we are not aware of. There was to their ear some actual correspondence. Emotions could be expressed by meters as well as by words; if a poem changed from grief to joy, from tranquility to passion, it was expected that the meter would change too. (148) … It is true that the reasons for the changes in meter are often not so clear as the instances cited [pages 148-9], but when we can perceive them they illuminate the poetry and give it added meaning. They are more than a curious illustration of the strange way of poets of long ago. (147-9)

The play belongs to Clytemnestra, his heroine. Her only rival is the chorus into whose mouth Aeschylus puts the greatest poetry he wrote. (154)

Aeschylus keeps her human through her power to feel pain, as Shakespeare keeps Macbeth. We know what she has suffered and that she will go on suffering. / There is no character in literature to put beside her. She is Lady Macbeth up to Duncan’s murder, and more than Macbeth after it. She can do what she has planned; she did not plan without full justification in her own eyes; remorse will never touch her. (157)

Perhaps—one can never feel certain with a poet like Aeschylus—in a verse in the greatest of them all, he gives his own final belief about the world—that world of which he makes Cassandra say,

O world of men, what is your happiness?
A painted show. Comes sorrow and the touch—
a wet sponge—blots the painting out.

No one ever felt the blackness of the evil always here with us more than he did, and no writing anywhere shows it blacker than the Agamemnon does. Nevertheless he did not in the end see it as senseless, signifying nothing. At the very least, he says, this is certain.

Knowledge won through suffering.
Drop, drop, in our sleep, upon our hearts,
sorrow falls, memory’s pain,
and to us, through against our very will,
even in our own despite,
comes wisdom,
by the awful grace of God.

Two hundred years before Aeschylus there lived a Hebrew who would have understood him. The one whom we are constrained to turn to, Isaiah said, is not the radiantly happy, but a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. (161)

(opening) CHORUS:
The tenth year is this from the time Priam’s foe,
the great adversary,
Agamemnon and Prince Menelaus,
with honor of scepter and honor of throne,
strong men, yoked together and brothers,
launched a thousand ships form this Argive land,
a warrior band to carry help,
and they shouted a great shout, War!
So eagles scream as they circle aloft
on their feathered oars,
high over their nest on a lonely crag,
when the eaglets are stolen crag,
when the eaglets are stolen away.
And they grieve for their young
and the nest never more to be tended.
But in heaven above there is one who hears,
or Pan or Zeus or Apollo,
hears the shrill, screaming cry of the dwellers in air,
and slow-footed vengeance
he sends to those that transgress.
Even thus the Almighty who guards guest and host,
sent the children of Atreus to Paris,
for a woman wooed of many men.
And many a struggle that weighs down the limbs,
when the knee is bowed in the dust,
when the spear-shaft is shivered in the prelude of the fight,
he has sent to the Greek and the Trojan.
It is as it is. It shall end as it must.
Not by secret grief, not by secret gifts,
not by tears, can one make atonement
for altars without fire and the stubborn wrath of God.
But we, all unhonored for that we are old,
left behind when the host sailed to help,
weak as a child, we lean on our staves.
We are waiting.
When the marrow in the bones is young,
when a child’s heart is lord within the breast,
war is far away—the aged are like children.
He that is exceeding old, when the leaf is withered,
walks the roads on three feet with his staff.
No better than a child,
he wanders, a dream—at noonday.
(As the old men take their positions around the altar, they approach nearer to Clytemnestra. She does not appear to notice them.)
But you, Tyndarus’ daughter,
Queen Clytemnestra, what thing is this?
What tidings, what news, has aroused you?
You have sent to the shrines. They have kindled the fires,
and the gods that guard the city,
gods of heaven and gods of hell,
gods of the market and gods of the field,
the sacrifice flames on their altars.
From one and another heaven-high
the fire is leaping.
They have brought from the king’s treasure holy oil,
thick unguents of myrrh and honey,
to coax the flame with a magic spell,
a pure and guileless persuasion.
Tell us of these things what is known
and what may be spoken.
Heal us now of our fear
that works in us thoughts of evil.
The light from your altars shows us hope,
hope that defends from consuming care,
from grief that eats away life.
(Clytemnestra still takes no notice of them but goes silently into the palace. The marching song, in Greek tragedy sung as the chorus entered and took their positions, comes here to an end, and the chorus proper begins. They sing of the omen shown to the two leaders of the army, Agamemnon and Menelaus, as they were starting for Troy—two eagles that tore a hare to pieces.)
/
CHORUS:
Power is mine to sing of a journey of heroes fate-driven.
Old though we are the spirit of God breathes in us music’s mighty
persuasion.
How then the two,
the twin-throned strength of the young men of Hellas
two with one purpose,
were sent with spear and with hand to seek vengeance
by a rushing bird to the land of Teucer.
To the kings of ships came the kings of birds, one black and the
other with tail white-feathered.
By the house of the king,
high toward the spear-hand where all could behold them,
two birds swooping together
tore at a pregnant hare and the brood of her young big within her.
Forever ended her swift coursing.
Sorrow, sing sorrow, but good shall prevail with power.
/
Calchas the wise, the host’s seer, beholding two with one spirit,
Atreus’ warrior sons, knew them for eagles,
leaders and captains,
and thus he foretold the omen:
A time shall be
when these shall capture the city of Priam.
Before the towers,
sheep and oxen, the wealth of the people,
the fortune of war will ravage and slaughter.
Only may never our army, the great curb of Troy, be foredoomed by
the anger of heaven.
For pity and wrath
move in the heart of Artemis holy.
Winged hounds, eagles of Zeus,
slew a poor cowering creature, her unborn young slaughtered with
her.
She loathes the feast the eagles made.
Sorrow, sing sorrow, but good shall prevail with power.
So gentle is she, loveliest,
to dewy youth,
fierce lions’ tender sucklings,
the young of the beasts that roam the meadow,
nurslings of all wild forest creatures,
yet does she ask for the omen’s fulfillment,
the signs from heaven, the good and the evil.
But I call upon God the healer,
Let her not send to the Greeks ill winds that will hold fast the ships
from the sailing,
seeking to lay on her altar a victim abhorrent to offer,
worker of strife among kinsmen that spares not and fears not to
murder.
For terrible, ever up-springing,
treachery waits in the house to avenge the old murder of children.
These were the words of Calchas. With mightiest blessings he spoke
them,
omens of fate from the birds on the road to the house of the
chieftain.
So in accordance,
Sorrow, sing sorrow, but good shall prevail with power.
/
God—who is he? If that name he choose,
by it I will cry to him.
Nothing can I reach in thought,
all things searching to the depths,
nothing save God, if the load of vain care from my spirit.
I must case and find the truth.
/
One first—who was great to them of old,
full of swollen blustering wrath,
now is a tale that’s told.
He who next came, went his way
like a wrestler overthrown.
God—he who hails him in triumph as victor forever,
shall be led to understand.
/
Guide of mortal man to wisdom,
He who has ordained the law,
knowledge won through suffering.
Drop, drop—in our sleep, upon the heart
sorrow falls, memory’s pain,
and to us, though against our very will,
evening our own despite,
comes wisdom
by the awful grace of God.
/
Then the leader of the ships,
prince of all the Grecian host,
spoke no word to blame the seer,
bent beneath
fortune’s sudden stroke of doom.
When the ships could not sail, and the food
failed through all the Grecian camp
spread along the Thracian coast,
in Aulis where
waves roar with the ebb and flow. (164-170)