Sister Mary Faith Schuster, Philosophy of Life and Prose Style in Thomas More's Richard III and Francis Bacon's Henry VII

Sister Mary Faith Schuster, O.S.B., Philosophy of Life and Prose Style in Thomas More’s Richard III and Francis Bacon’s Henry VII, PMLA, June 1955, Volume LXX, Number 3, pp. 474-487.

With similar beliefs regarding the function of history—both considered it a teaching instrument—More and Bacon wrote histories of English monarchs against a frame of reference which reveals their philosophies of life and for purposes of instruction in those philosophies of life. (477)

The sentence structure in which More tells the story of Richard is prevailingly the logically subordinated, rhythmically balanced, and functionally figured humanistic period. More was not a narrow Ciceronian, even in his Latin style. In the English Richard III his sentences include occasional subtleties of expression which retard the flow of the whole; they are intermingled, too, with the medieval “aggregative” or cumulative sentence, a natural, non-oratorical sentence differing from the anti-Ciceronain in that its characteristic is accumulation rather than calculated asymmetry. But the prevailing sentence pattern of the History is the traditional period which Cicero had identified as the sentence best fitted to convince an audience of something worth the telling. In this sentence, according to Cicero who most clearly defined it, the thought was to dictate the logically subordinated parts of the whole, while the rhythmical arrangement and functional figures were to assist in making the truth eloquent. (De Oratore, III, 39, 139-153, 161). (478)

Bacon uses an anti-Ciceronian sentence, distinguished by unbalanced elements, by shifts in tense and voice and number, by loose relationship between clauses, by a general impression of experiment and asymmetry, and by the absence of emotionally connotative words and of sound figures. Morris Croll has ably analyzed this sentence, noting these characteristics, but Cicero had himself suggested it when he said that clarity would prohibit “breaking the structure of the sentences…using the wrong tenses…perverting the order” (De Oratore, III, 39). The skeptical attitude which Henry maintains towards his own actions, as he measures their possibility of material success, is thus matched by a skeptical proceeding in the sentences which move from clause to clause without logical sequence. The nondramatic quality of his actions is matched by the unemotional language void of figures of sound. (483)

In a passage, for example, in which Bacon narrates Henry’s careful measuring of expedient measures, he uses a long sentence loosely linked, proceeding disjointedly from one clause to another, unbalanced in its sentence elements, and devoid of pleasing sound patterns—all qualities showing sharp departure from Ciceronian style. (483)

‘But the King, out of the greatness of his own mind, presently cast the die; and the inconveniences appearing unto his on all parts, and knowing there could not be any interreign or suspension of title, and preferring his affection to his own line and blood and liking that title best which made him independent, and his being in his nature and constitution of mind not very apprehensive by the day, resolved to rest upon the title of Lancaster as the main, and to use the other two, that of marriage and that of battle, but as supporters, the one to appease secret discontents, and the other to beat down open murmur and dispute; not forgetting that the same title of Lancaster had formerly maintained a possession of three descents in the crown; and might have proved a perpetuity had it not ended in the weakness and inability of the last prince.’ (Works, XI, 50-51). /
The modifying elements here—separating the compound verbs “cast” and “resolved”—include a nominative absolute, three participles with objects of unlike construction and length, and one participle separated form its predicate noun by a long and involved modifier. Bacon divides and subdivides the parts of the sentence, matching the ramifications which the thought is undergoing in Henry’s mind and concluding with an element far removed in thought and construction from the opening of the sentence. There is a suggestion of symmetry in the series of participles, but it is shattered by constructions following each and by the general loose progress of the rest of the sentence. [ The making and breaking of symmetry is characteristic of the anti-Ciceronian sentence, as Croll observes. (p. 435)] (484)

Bacon, rejecting both traditional thought and traditional style as out of harmony with his own thought and unsuited for its promulgation, chose a loosely linked sentence, characterized by unbalanced parts, loose connectives such as “whereas” and “wherein,” nominative absolutes… (486)

Thomas More was to be followed in the history of English prose by such writers as Johnson and Newman; Bacon, by Donne and Browne, skeptics of a type different from his own. (486)

David Renaker, Robert Burton's Tricks of Memory

David Renaker, Robert Burton’s Tricks of Memory, PMLA, May 1972, Volume 87, Number 3, pp. 391-396.

Burton, as a glance at his sources will show, depended for his quotations either on his memory or on notes so sketchy that memory played a great part in the interpretation and misinterpretation of them. He was aware of the resulting inaccuracies, but disinclined to do anything about them: ‘although this be a sixth Edition, in which I should have been more accurate, corrected all those former escapes, yet it was magni laboris opus, so difficult and tedious, that as Carpenters do finde out of experience, tis much better build anew sometimes, then repair an old house; I could as soon write as much more, as alter that which is written. (P. xiii: I, 32). (391)

‘The matter is their most part, and yet mine, apparet unde sumptum sit (which Seneca approves) aliud tamen quam unde sumptum sit apparet, which nature doth with the aliment of our bodies incorporate, digest, assimulate, I do conquoquere quod hausi, dispose of what I take. (p. viii: I, 23). (391)

The perpetual exaggeration of the Anatomy, from the hyperbolical account of the things we do for money (“turne parasites and slaves, prostitute our selves, sweare and lye, damne our bodies and soules, forsake God, abjure Religion, steale, rob, murder”, p. 154,: I, 399) to the 102 epithets lavished on the ugly woman (“a dowdy, a slut, a scold, a nasty, ranke, rammy, filthy, beastly queane” and so on and on, p. 519: III, 179) extends also to matters of fact and figure which can be quite easily checked. To do so is to discover that Burton was more impressed by big numbers than concerned about their authenticity. (391)

Whatever may be concluded from all this, we cannot say that Burton had a bad memory. On the contrary, he never forgot anyting. Nor did the changes which the facts underwent in his well-stored mind ever lead to any important distortions of meaning. … The supporting evidence becomes rather less marvelous, but the conclusion is unchanged. (392)

These are mere misspellings; more remarkable, there is evidence that Burton could fuse two remembered names into a third. This figment could then take on sufficient autonomy to be mentioned repeatedly in series with more authentic names, including those from which it had been formed. (393)

It went through five editions in his lifetime, and he added material to each, as well as to the posthumous sixth; but he practically never deleted or altered anything. “I have not revised the copy” (p. xi: I, 29). One must conclude that he did not consider accuracy essential; and he may have sensed a positive value in the transformations wrought by his memory. (395)

Wesley Trimpi, Jonson and the Neo-Latin Authorities for the Plain Style

Wesley Trimpi, Jonson and the Neo-Latin Authorities for the Plain Style, PMLA, March 1962, Volume LXXVII, Number 1, pp. 21-26.

The neo-Latin influence upon anti-Ciceronianism in prose and anti-Petrarchanism in verse, therefore, became considerably more significant when an English writer, such as Jonson, in reacting again the poetic attitudes and practice of the Petrarchans, looked for rhetorical corroboration for his position and found it, not only in certain ancient writers, but in such men as Erasmus, Vives, Lipsius, and Bacon, who advocated various applications of the Attic style and argued their case with power and precision. Jonson’s Discoveries is particularly valuable as a statement of the neo-Latin influence on the plain style… Although it was not published until 1640, the neo-Latin authorities it cites exerted their formative influence on Jonson’s stylistic ideas and practice from the middle 1590’s on and, largely through his own authority, on those of the first half of the seventeenth century. (21)

One example of the important influence of Jonson’s authorities upon vernacular verse is the gradual extension of the range of subject matter which decorum permitted the plain style to treat. … Traditionally, the high style of genus grande treated high subjects such as matters of divinity and state, the plain or low style, the genus humile or tenue, treated matters of farce and comedy on the stage and communicated simple matters of daily life in conversation or in letters, and the middle style, the genus medium or floridum, ranged in between the usually settled on love. The reasons why poems concerning matters of religion and love, subjects traditionally treated in the high and middle styles, began to be written in a plain style, which traditionally had been associated with satire and comedy, can be explained in part by the general breakdown of the ancient characters in the Renaissance, which permitted the gradual extension of the range of subject matter which could be decorously treated by the plain style, an extension most generally described by the Latin satirists themselves and most specifically by the neo-Latin treatises on letter writing in the sixteenth century. /
It was in rebellion against this decorum of subject matter that the ancient writers of comedy, satire, epigrams, and epistles asserted so often their right to treat actual happenings, trivial or important, with moral seriousness in a plain style, to treat, in the style of the Platonic dialogues, the subjects, as Horace refers to them, of the Socraticae…chartae (Ars Poet., 310). Horace’s description and use of the sermo, whose intention or officium was to teach , while those of the high and middle styles were to move and to delight, are essentially the same as those of the style described by Cicero in his account of the ‘Attic’ orator. The purpose of comedy, satire, and epigram was to reveal with candid accuracy what men actually do and think in order to encourage them to reform, while that of the epistle was self-examination and candid self-revelation. The sermo was particularly suitable for these purposes, because, in the words of Morris Croll, “Its idiom is that of conversation and is adapted from it, in order that it may flow into and fill up all the nooks and crannies of reality and reproduce its exact image to attentive observation.” Jonson, whose rhetorical position as stated in the Discoveries is closest to that of the Attic orator, in extending the range of subject matter treated by the plain, is simply taking advantage of the flexibility of the sermo in the accurate representation and analysis of actual experience that Socrates and the satirists had taken before him. (22)

The most intelligent scholars were careful not to restrict too narrowly, in an effort to possess and apply more quickly and securely their classical learning, the terminology which they adopted from the ancient writers, but attempted instead to retain the flexibility of the original terms. Vives, for instance… The more popular literay writers, however, often over-simplified and obscured the problem. George Puttenham, … (22)

Whatever the causes for it, the breakdown of the characters of style with regard to subject matter facilitated Jonson’s and Donne’s attempt, which was directly analogous to Horace’s in style and intention, to extend the range of subject matter which the sermo could decorously treat in poetry. The most specific statements about this extension in the Renaissance occur in the treatises on letter writing and are directly relevant for three reasons. First, the sixteenth-century description of the proper epistolary style was identical to Cicero’s description of the plain stle in his account of the Attic orator; second, the writers of the treatises were most often among the new anti-Ciceronian authorities, of whom Jonson’s Discoveries might serve as an explicit handbook; and third, the epistolary style was described as the best style for imitation by Jonson’s rhetorical masters, such as Bacon, Vives, and Justus Lipsius, and by Jonson himself, who Lipsius’ description of the epistolary style from John Hoskyns and applied it to style in general. (23)

In his treatise, On Style, the first-century rhetorican, Demetrius, describes the style of the familiar letter as a further development of the plain style. Since a letter was a kind of written conversation, “one of the two sides of a dialogue,” it should employ the informal sermo and candidly reveal the mind of the writer to his correspondent, for, writes Demetrius, “in every other form of composition it is possible to discern the writer’s character, but in none so clearly as in the epistolary.” “Everybody,” he says, “reveals his own soul in his letters.” The letter should avoid the complicated periodic structure and organization of an oration and should confine itself to its proper subject matter, since, he continues, “there are epistolary topics, as well as an epistolary style.” “If anybody should write of logical subtleties or questions of natural history in a letter is designed to be the heart’s good wishes in brief; it is the exposition of a simple subject in simple terms.” /
This limitation of subject matter was perfectly in accord with the stylistic conventions against which the satirists and epigrammatists had successfully rebelled. Matters in which strong emotions were involved were usually treated in the grand style, or perhaps the middle. Conversation, whether oral or written in a letter, Cicero points out in his De officiis (I, 136) and Orator (64), ought to be free of emotions such as anger and inordinate desire. (23)

The epistolary manuals of the middle ages were not concerned with the familiar letter but with dectamen, the art of the professional letter writer, or secretary, whose business it was to compose official or ceremonious epistles to important men. Such letters imitated the formal organization of the oration, as prescribed by the classical rhetorical treatises, and were usually divided, with regard to their subject matter, into three categories: the Demonstrative, the Deliberative, and the Judicial. It was to these categories and to the formal and pretentious inflexibility of the official letter that Erasmum objected in his treatise De Ratione Conscribendi Epistolas, and he objected mainly on the grounds of its unrealistic limitations upon subject matter. (23-24)

The degree of freedom of subject matter that the epistolary tradition after Erasmus offered to the plain style, a freedom which was not extensively taken advantage of by the English poets until Jonson and Donne, is clear when one recalls the position of the conventional rhetoric book. Puttenham had stated that the middle, to say nothing of the plain, style must not treat matters of state or war, leagues or alliances. Erasmus said explicitly above that wars could be declared in letters, bellum denuntiamus, and Antonious Muretus, the most important spokesman, with the exception of Lipsius, of the anti-Ciceronian movement, echoed him … In describing the range of epistolary material, Francis Bacon writes: “Letters are according to all the variety of occasions, advertisements, advices, directions, propositions, petitions, commendatory, expostulatory, satisfactory, of compliment, of pleasure, of discourse, and all other passages of action.” (The Advancement of Learning, II, iii, 4, ed. W. A. Wright, Oxford, 1926, p. 100). (24-25)

There was, then, a tendency among those interested in reviving the Attic, or plain, style to consider the familiar letter as the ideal stylistic model. / It is not strange, therefore, that Jonson should apply to style in general a passage on letter writing from John Hoskyns’ Directions for Speech and Style. This passage, which Hoskyns took from Lipsius’ Institutio Epistolica and which Lipsius derived originally from Demetrius, defines his general rhetorical position. (25)

Notes to Modern American Novel

Notes to Modern American Novel

Notes to Huckleberry Finn

Huck’s humor is vicious. Huck is also the straight man for Twain’s jokes. Tom is the cruel, lyric, and barbaric, literary. For Huck, culture is feminized, Bible is feminized. This is a picaresque novel. Refer to 18th century tourism literature. Anti-plot is picaresque. Language is social—it’s not transcendent; it grounds you in place and time. It’s part of culture. Poor people have language, aren’t poor in language. Child narrator misperceives. Huck doesn’t perceive himself as abused.

Huck: constant reversal of our values, destabilizing. Women are bad in the book. Huck’s claim for authenticity is modern; sivilize, authenticity of voice. Rhythm of the book is hope vs. false hope; keeps meeting disappointing people. Huck stands for what’s best in America, different from most other Americans.

Does Twain believe in development, growing into a moral being? Professor thinks he doesn’t. Twain is too pessimistic. Not bildungsroman, transformed by experience. Twain sees character as static.

Twain is interested above all in cognition; how and why do people believe? How do they change? Like Melville is. Study of enslavement of belief. Huck is a major slave: every step forward, two steps back.

Huck is like roadrunner. Survivalism. Scrappy American.

Enslavement as a mental condition. Huck is potentially free to change, but he doesn’t. Huck is ‘reactive’ to pap when he cleans him out or strategic. If there’s any mechanims for change in the book it’s the love between Jim and Huck. We like Huck but we can’t look honestly at him because we like him.

One prominent rhythm in the book: flight from, return to civilization. Another rhythm is aestheticism. Is Huck’s aestheticism moral? Vs the ugliness of life.

Huck’s pathological tolerance for bad shit.

Stasis, idleness is the root of cruelty. Lighting the dog on fire. Huck does bad shit off the raft on land. Regression, becoming less enlightened, giving in to cruelty, river overflows.

Huck is brilliant and original; Tom is conventional. Twain is asking us to judge Huck and people in general. People—light dog on fire, torment pigs with dogs. Larger narrative voice is different from Huck’s.

The Raft: what does it symbolize, concretely: hand-made, pioneer skill. Also, there are no upper and lower decks, one democratic level.

The end: the power of aesthetics to imprison. Complcity—Twain’s beauteous writing with bad stuff. Theatricality is interrogated in the rope-ladder-pie scene. The legacy of slaves, dramatization of suffering is the route to Americanization of formerly marginalized people, e.g. freed slaves. Literary works are complicit in the reestablishment of racism (towards freed blacks) i.e. by Tom the intellectual.


Notes to My Antonia

Cather: mobility is associated with art, storytelling. Novel is centerted on the possibility and destructiveness of migration.

‘A Nation’ (My Antonia) Shimerda (His Dream). “The best days are the first to flee” (Virgil). The writing is beautiful, but Cather is a bit of a let down. Myth making and storytelling are important. Cather’s characters have difficulty being rooted, even if they’re not immigrants. She’s interested in psychological mobility, classic feature of American modernism. Cather is first obvious case of cosmopolitanism, citizens of the world. Defy local attachments. Cather was male-identified lesbian. Cosmopolitanism is often identified with unstable gender identification. Cather’s experiences similar to Jim’s. Cather interested in voluntary vs involuntary immigration. Americans are adrift, and/or in flight. Greatest divide in America is those who came here voluntarily vs involuntarily.

Nebraska was considered déclassé before Cather. Immigrants: how they reconcile traditional values with America. Railroad: cosmopolitan. Conductor speaks positively about immigrants. Jake’s xenophobia is contrasted with the conductor’s cosmopolitanism. Jake is consumerist dupe. He buys everything. The framework, the trope, highlights the fictionality of the book. The purpose of the book is mythmaking.

“There is nothing but land” : lie. Lots of description of red glass, red landscape; also in motion, moving grass. Blood letting, violence, sacrifice required for the settlement of the west. History of violence, slaughter of buffalo, destroy Indian food.

Union with land, transcendental, idealistic. Portrayal of Mr Shimerda’s grave. Catholic sin, suicide. Failure as an immigrant to stay, survive. Jim—port of the artifice of the book. Not childlike at all, not like Huckleberry.

Suicide: the clemency of the soft earth. Leniency of nature. Vs. the law. Darwinian violence of the landscape. The sacrifice of the Indians, vs Mr Shimerda’s sacrifice of himself for his family. Left his country for his family to move. Family appreciates. Nature is therefore positive, according to Jim. Mr Shimerda is a delicate artist.

Immigrants brings new agriculture, methods to the land. Immigrants are more prosperous than others. Part of the mythology is the ‘my’ Antonia. Positive, embrace nature is Jim’s mythology, not Darwinian nature.

Huck/Jim moment when looking at the stars; Cather hated Twain (loved James) yet she imitates him. Ideal of shared beliefs, stargazing, star influence. Unification through wonderment at a star.

Jim’s guilt, western mythology. Tall tales, survival, Robinson Crusoe.

Walter Benjamin: The storyteller: fiction is the warmth given off by death—we can’t experience and survive except through story. The chance to make death meaningful, guilty pleasure in survival.

Sleigh—immigrants who are on it have to throw shit off to survive. Give up too much? For some.

Peter, correspondence with the wolves; eat as if there’s no tomorrow. Peter eats all the melons. The survivor’s impulse: melons are mine, my final possession. Mr. Shimerda notably lacks this (Peter’s) impulse.

Cather is telling us that storytelling is morally indifferent—no judgments of Peter eating melons. Versus Twain, who confirms the reactivity of morality. Twain is a moralist. Cather’s novel doesn’t comment on some ugly moralities: race, Indians.

Piano scene: Mizruchi wonders whether it’s as important as she thinks it is. Cather was a music devotee. Cather’s portrait of other immigrants is different from piano player, black. There’s something unfair and illogical in expecting (old) writers to share our political views on race. Negro pianist as an early stereotype, negative, othering. Sensualizing portrait, monstrous.

19th century European immigrants didn’t assimilate because they were white; they became white because the assimilated. So no problem today with other races assimilating, because they do it fast, therefore they become white.

Notes to The Great Gatsby

Inevitable initial response is to fall for Nick. Mizruchi’s goal is to ruin him for us.

Materialism: Huck wants to be able to shuck off consumerism. In My Antonia, you, an immigrant, have to be willing to throw everything (material, values) overboard to survive and prosper in the new world. Nick says one thing about materialism, the novel says another.

A lot of the characters drink because their material desires are already met. Myrtle and Gatsby are so important because they, the aspirers, are the ones who bolster the class system. Desire and dissatisfaction make them attractive to Tom and Nick. Nick, in contrast, seems to be going nowhere or backward. Family doesn’t know what to do with him. He’s almost 30, and on a tight allowance. He’s nearly a failure. He falls for Gatsby. Do we like him because he falls for Gatsby? Nick is funny, more like Holden Caufield than any of the characters in this course.

Advertisers always aim slightly above the class status of the target class. Flattery sells.

Americans who want to be upper class and have things, vs. American populist streak; hatred of rich. If you want to love Daisy, you have to put aside populism. Fitzgerald is asking us to identify with the rich. One reason we hate [high] taxes is that we all believe we’re going to be rich.

We love Nick because he’s weaving a myth (of money?) that we need.

Gatsby’s smile: celebrity, Walter Benjamin. ‘aura’ not a personal quality.

Class dimensions of Nick: he’s snotty, he’s just subtle about it.
Is Nick moral? Mizruchi thinks so, even though he’s evasive. He does care about being a moral person.

Description of the material world is vibrant--the grass is more alive, the rug is more alive than Daisy. Material world has become naturalized. The aspiration [for manmade objects] is to become naturalized, obscure artificiality. They want to seem not made by human hands.

Materialism as Redemption? Have things? Have gifts from god? Blessed? Max Weber. Wealth and virtue are interdependent. (Nick’s belief. That’s a fact. BAM.) Weber’s version is a critique of this. But Fitzgerald/Nick may be ambivalent. The super-rich are a recipient of God’s bounty.

Timelessness in advertising. Overcoming time. Nullifying the effect of age. Can’t recapture the past? Gatsby says, ‘of course you can’. Irony: Commodities are only begun when sold. Car loses value when sold because it enters time.

Nick’s unconscious narration reveals continuity between aesthete (care for his writing) and world of advertising. Nick’s purpose is to conceal the logic of the American class system (which tells us we can be whatever we can afford). When in reality there is no social mobility. Myrtle and Gatsby die.

Morality for Nick is aesthetic beauty and perception. Gass says no.

Swollen length of car: penis. Misogynistic violence: car kills, rips Myrtle’s breast.

Material world is animate and sacred. Catholic Fitzgerald.

Nick’s racism: the underside of his myth of purity. Fix world series, purity of baseball no more.

Gatsby characters drink to anesthetize. Depressed because romantics. Sun Also Rises characters are already anesthetized. They drink to seek pain, or as inability to feel. They’re cynics.

Notes to The Sun Also Rises

‘All you have to do is write 1 true sentence; it must be the truest sentence you know.’ A Moveable Feast. Repetition in novel. Does it lead to clarity? What does ‘true’ here mean? Does all the repetition help you?

‘Not really such a bad novel…but a very poor novel.’ Links between Hemingway and prejudice and style. Characters are always making distinctions (which don’t add up to clearness).

Discriminate/Taste/Prejudice/Economy vs. Indiscriminate/Wasteful and Dissolute.

There are constant value judgments in a world where value is fundamentally unclear.

Jake is a lapsed Catholic, and yet he’s Puritanical, and has a strong work ethic. Get work done to feel okay. He thinks constantly about being financially sound. Also, payment is important to relationships. Women have to pay and pay.

Brett is the center of desire, Circe, around whom men revolve. Yet financially powerless and parasitic. Morality of exchange? Financial preoccupation is connected to the way this world is spiritually bereft. They yearn to believe and feel.

How concise is the novel really. Spareness. Jake seems to be the ultimate emissary for sparseness. Post WWI, values are shattered: hemingway’s writing on writing: war characters have been shattered by war. Jake literally wounded beyond repair by war. The war was senseless. There were many words Hemingway couldn’t bear to hear after it, like sacred and glorious. He said prose built of what was left without sacred and glorious.

Hemingway is really hostile. People are limiters of happiness. He said to Fitzgerald: heaven is a bull ring, with a private trout stream. His style, to tell us what we need to know and nothing more. Monkey wrench: repetition, e.g. ‘nice’ in opening. Does the repetition of nice make more clear? No. enhancement of ambiguity and obscurity. Repeat and raise more questions. ‘The truest sentence…true’.

The Hemingway writer discriminates in taste. Portrait of jews, blacks, gays, 3 most targeted by Nazis and Fascists in WWII…

Novel is interested in discrimination: formal, thematic, political. Mizruchi thinks this is a mean book. Jake wounded, we should sympathize; but we should reject his hatred. These impulses to hatred are so carefully dramatized, it’s difficult to see them as unqualified… Hemingway doesn’t believe? Book does critique—like Tunnel. Book does not endore these hatreds.

Why start the novel with Cohn? The narrative confers instability on us. He’s done some investigating on Robert—jealous. ‘nice’ is faint praise. Robert is from a great family—old and rich, yet crumbles. No money, fictional world of loss. You have money, you lose it: Jake.

Passiveness: amble around and drink. Passive voice. Masochist: jake and cohn. Willingness to put up with being scapegoat of social circle, analogy to bullfights. Cohn’s satisfaction at nose being flattened. Have a wound, red badge of courage.

Anesthetized. Can’t feel at all. Pain is the best way? Characters seek out situations where they risk being hurt. Women have to pay and pay (spill blood) to get pleasure. The chief route to pleasure.

Post-war, seeking reenactment of war experience. Not that far from ‘cutting’ need to feel something intensely. (therefore are characters internalizing anger?)

The Jew in exile, exaggerated exile, like all ex-pats. Jews are a race back then. Today, not so much. Italians too.

Robert’s romanticism is ridiculed. Robert is like Tom Sawyer. Dopey adolescent. Robert is a major irritant, we’re supposed to not like him. Pre-P.C. times, where we discriminate against jews and look down on masochism. Also pathetic desire to fit in: greedy grasping jews.

The point in Hemingway: you want to be wounded, but be cool, not have desire.

Lack of concision in Hemingway. Not Strunk and White. Those unnecessary statements are about control. Marlborough Man. Narrative moves to evade emotion. But unnecessary statements. There’s a dearth of verbs. Ecclesiastes: fundamentally static. Not much happens over the course of the novel. They are spectators.

He is still somewhat concise. It’s not Faulkner.

Dillard: bringing in everything in the world. Hemingway is decorous. (what does this mean?) For every stylistic tendency, there’s a thematic and political correlative. Writing is everything to Jake. Writing is a moral act in an amoral world. But what is moral? The way the people are not redeemed.

When you don’t know who’s speaking in the novel, deemphasizes individuation. It’s a circle a group of people. Anonymity enables people in a crowd to indulge violence. Precursor to the 3rd Reich. Group talk. ‘damned’. Defines crowd mores. People can get away with things they hate themselves for, e.g. seeing Mike abuse Robert. Morality is about what disgusts you.

Redemptive events? Bullfighting is traditional heroism in a modern world. It judges the people who respond to it; and those who judge it well are good. Establish your superiority. It’s real emotion and danger, not rhetoric. Obvious parallel to writing. Both are moral measures. Those who respond well to it achieve a certain moral position or even superiority. Bullfighting is a strive for perfection. Robert fails to appreciate. Problem/difference: bullfighting is a communal activity, not writing.

Danger—writing has to be about risking a wound. Ideal way of living. Yet, bullfighting ideal undermined, e.g. by the waiter who is disgusted by it. The novel is suggesting through the waiter that bloodlust is sick ultimately. The waiter is the conscience of bullfighting.

The book is so bleak, the bleakest of the course. It’s down on humanity. We’re sick.

Novels have to be smarter than their authors. Condeira? Hemingway was a hypocrite, so what. Novels can be more moral. (I don’t want to be lectured about bloodlust from people who attend bullfights, yet it’s the waiter who is lecturing me. The novel [waiter] is contrasted to Jake [Hemingway]).

Hemingway is limited in moral culpability because he killed himself.

Morality of language: if you simply describe the world, it’s a ritual in its own right. Might not content you, but it keeps you clean to keep looking.

Notes to As I Lay Dying

All characters become subjects and objects.

Flux: little sense of a foreground or background because switching consciousnesses. Even so, there is some growth (bildungsroman, a little). Outsiders’ narratives tend to fill in plot and details. Vs family narrators. The truth, e.g. who loves whom, lies between the outsiders and family narrative.

Varieties of Stream of Consciousness. Radical relativism of perception.

Written in 6 weeks when working 12 hour days. Lie, probably, but it was a charmed experience.

Vardaman, 6 year old talks too maturely. Death of mother can stimulate mind to heights, specifically linguistic. 6 year old capable of Vardaman’s eloquence. Faulkner wants us to realize southerners talk richly.

Critical tradition says: family is a picture of yeoman farmer’s will to survive. Vs. decaying society beholden to market values.

AILD does have a lot to say about consumption even though it is set apart from consumerism. Characters are preoccupied with consumerism. Consumerism is a way to fight death. Desire is a coping mechanism.

Giving and getting are big in the novel. Not so different from previous class novel. Cash—Christ symbol, carpenter, in competition with machines of production.

Rewriting the Scarlet Letter deliberately, Jewel/Pearl.

To think about commodification here, is to address desires created by loss/grief.

Anse: false teeth; Vardaman: toy train; Dewey Dell: abortion; Cash: grammiphone. At the end of the novel, all sit and eat an exotic fruit: banana.

Epictetus: stoicism. Say you give back, not you lose. Dead child. Contract exchange. Jewel is stoic, but masking passion. He’s a love-child.

Novel’s plot: disintegration because of the loss of center (mother). Each character must reexperience the loss in their own way.

Universal response among cultures to loss: consumption, display your vitality, eat, show, stage your survival.

Darl is a stand-in for Faulkner and crazy. Walks through window, empty, stoic, straight-forward, directed. Cigar-store Indian.

Reason you have a lot of kids is to make a lot of workers. Effective division of labor.

Few physical descriptions of characters. Anse’s self-pity story of his feet.

Dewey Dell ~ 17; Vardaman ~ 6; Cash/Darl ~ mid 20s. Addi ~ mid 40s.

Darl- not prophetic, just very sensitive and intuitive. Institutionalized. Cash- privileged sensibility, gets the last word. Sane.

Cora and Tull: defeat Christian reading, they are dumb and Christian. One-up-man-ship of this married couple, always gotta be right.

Addie is a victim of language. Language victimizes people love is private. To confess your kids’ physical needs enrages you is not to minimize your love.

What does God have to do with anyting? What is the place of transcendence?

Cash’s problem is Emersonian. Essay “Experience”. The problem that mourners have is the pain that they feel disconnected (in being) from the terminated.

Jewel is a minister’s son but says “If there is a God, what the hell is he for”

Could Addie have a shed to be buried abroad so as to get her family in better shape, bonded, off the farm for a change?

Anse: thinks he’s Job, no one sufferes more than me, and God loves me most. Angry. Narcissistic. Ultimate fatalist.


Notes to Their Eyes Were Watching God

Hurston, controversial in 30s/40s, for not being typical, not racial enough. Too universal, talking about language, folk, love, gender. Neglect social problems of her people. She’s actually brave: confronts racism within the black community. Also, all her gender stuff is ultimately slavery related.

Celebrate black folk culture. Similar to Huck Finn, in preference for idiomatic speech. Detested elitism, even though she had huge education.

Key to Hurston: works in different directions. Maverick. ‘niggerati’ : condescending blacks are at fault, morally, but also deluded victims, for not realizing that they are Bryant Gumbles.

Hurston is before her time in willingness to hang out culture’s dirty laundry. Like Toni Morrison.

Daisy parading in front of the guys. Courtship. Hurston enters a classical tradition. But twist. A woman so black that white is the ideal contrast. Her eyes shine white like money, like Daisy Buchanan.

Hemingway’s speech where you don’t know who’s speaking, is reflected in the gossip of Hurston. Communal behavior, pessimistic view. Not as much as the scapegoating in Hemingway, but gossip still is a social corrective.

Love is mobile, like dreams/ships/possibility. Love is identified with transformation. The more responsive you are, the higher the chance at love.

Hurston: the fundamental assumption is that language shapes reality.

You rise above, but not directly through language? ‘Janie is able to rise above. Her language is enabling and joyful’.

Given better prospects, slightly, than their predecessors in slavery, black women can soar.

Hurston’s universalism—transcendent love independent of institutions like racism, unwelcome idea to race thinkers.

Hurston, openness to possibility—power is constantly changing between lovers.

Faulkner/Hurston: values, material, are satisfied with very little. Teeth. Banana. These books critique Gatsbyism materialism. (Faulkner’s character are slightly more materialistic than Hurston’s.)

Racial self-hatred, some characters are more devoted to wanting to be white than on the idea that God doesn’t want you to worship idols.

Janie is pugnacious, protestant, liberated from religion.

Community religion, the last shall be first. Life is tough, and heaven is therefore good to you.

Their Eyes Watching God. People during hurricant. Yet novel may not does not correspond with wrathful hurricane god. Janie’s god doesn’t correspond.

Hurston’s novel is performative. The guys putting on hooting and hitting on Janie are putting it on (yet to a degree they really are attracted to her).

Words transform experience. Language can change reality.


Notes to Catcher in the Rye:

Consider- why is novel appealing form of alienation? Is Holden self-indulgent madman? This book repeatedly censored. If Holden is ultimately a conformist and therefore a hypocrite, why is the book so threatening? Is Holden like Hamlet? What’s the deal with religion—it’s constantly being talked about. Key scenes are ritualized, for example the breaking of the glass (which is part of religious ceremony). Glass breaking is about de-initiating or repudiating membership. The book is about mourning for brother and purity. Holden is an ascetic. Purity. Self-denial as a means of purifying.

What’s the role of gender? Conventional attitude. Homophobic. sees himself as knight in shining armor.

‘Catcher in the Rye’ title is a misprision; misremembers context.

Constantly contradicting himself. Reflective of culture? Novel is usually read a-historically, yet it’s a critique of class system.

Unreliable narrator. If everyone’s phony, there must be a real, an ideal.

Lonesome like Huck. His sense of awe makes us like him. Voyeur like Nick in Gatsby. Prefers looking and thinking to acting. Has anti-social impulses like The Sun Also Rises. hostility and aggression. People hunting red hat. Gets punched—feel authentic like Hemingway.

People are always ruining things for you—straight out of Hemingway.

Holden is incapable of not feeling other people’s pain. Empathetic. People caring for each other—Holden is obsessed with.

DB is a veteran, like Gatsby, and character in As I Lay Dying.

Novel is preoccupied with religion and ritual. Talks about Catholics and Bible, undertaker, nuns, Novel is a work of mourning. Grief/loss makes Holden unfit for social life. Holden becomes a fierce critic of world. The inequities, cruelties, phoniness. There are the hidden injuries of class in Holden.

Holden’s resistance to education, the only thing that interests him in history class is mummification. Death has taught him more than school could.

James Castle’s death brings back loss of Ally. J.C./Jesus, possibly raped by a group before he jumped out window.

Class-criticism: Headmaster Haas snubs parents of non-rich. Mean.

Dick Slegal is obsessed with Holden’s suitcases. Jealous. Calls them bourgeois. Slegal and Holden disdain snobbery, yet Slegal is jealous. Holden tries to minimize the class difference by hiding the suitcases, ultimately unsuccessful: they both find other roommates. Ultimately capitulate to class sytem and find someone your own class.

Is Holden ultimately paralyzed by his insight?

Sacrificial substitution: J. Castle dies with Holen’s sweater.

Dead ends: DB was an ideal; Mr. Antolini, Ernie the musician who forsake his art for money, Holden’s father threw away talent to do corporate law.

What is pure for Holden? Kids, nature, museum objects, the dead. Ally died of leukemia, he was nicest and smartest of family.

Holden loses fencing swords, brother. Compulsive need to lose, to show that he doesn’t care in a therapeutic way? Also, Holden is erratic and wandering; yet he does know what he thinks and is morally uncompromising.

Throw away stuff to clear headspace? And to repudiate materialism.

Holden’s anger at self is survivor’s guilt.

Break windows: wants to feel something—the problem with death is that you can’t feel/experience it. Also, re-experiencing pain of loss.

Jewel is also enraged by the death of Addie.

Distance between Salinger’s humor and narrator. Salinger’s humor at the expense of Holden.

Novel is ultimately on Holden’s side, idealizing youth.

Holden is good at diagnosing ills of society, but not with coming up with what he wants.

Critique: repudiating adulthood and normal development.

Nuns: lots of suitcases—carrying stuff, being burdened. Moves, always packing.

Great revelation of the novel takes place on merry-go-round, cyclical, no progress. Holden is sitting in rain, baptismal. He wants Phoebe to stay in time, merry-go-round doesn’t age.

Reciprocity of care: Phoebe starts to talk like him, but also returns a parental care. Conclusion is open. For sure? = a prophetic intent.


Notes to Lolita

Humbert’s #1 goal, to get us to see him as normal. Men are probably the key audience, he feels he’s gonna get more sympathy. He insults women: “frigid gentlewomen of the jury.”

“Men are all lovers of nymphs”. Lionel Trilling wasn’t able to resist Humbert.

No one is more obsessed with boundaries and classifications than a transgressor. Humbert loves to classify people.
Novel is preoccupied with the holocaust.

Cruelty and humor. Makes us feel guilty when we laugh. Unfortunately doesn’t get to molest Eva Rosen.

People are defined by the possessions they own. Charlotte Haze is trashy because she has trashy souveneirs .

Humbert also wants to confess his guilt.

Film is pervasive in the novel. The narrative is paralleled to film technology, e.g. pornography. If so, we’re consumers of it.

The book is a defense. He admits his crime. Our project, or one of them, is to unpack these layers.

Agency is completely obscured. Who is seducing whom. He suggests that she shares responsibility. She’s a succubus. He’s almost a victim.

He characterizes a type, nymphet, that we are supposed to recognize. Normalize this transgression. This passage is the classical example of the aesthetic defense.
He: entertains, impresses, seduces, makes us laugh.

Redemptive moment in the novel is when he tells us he loves her.

Real love is transgressive; it’s a total transformation, nullification of everything you believe.

It’s all about desire, her desire is small. She’s curious, but doesn’t have anywhere near his desire. Her appetite is for apples and ice cream. He turns her into a prostitute, giving her food for sex. He portrays her throughout as a consumer. Charlotte too.

He wants to preserve girls in time, like Holden wanted to preserve Phoebe.

Women are imitations of film stars, phonies. Gatsby was a phoney.

He has to represent Lolita ultimately as impure (a consumer of junky bad food) a consumer, to justify molestation. Plus her stupid mind and bad taste.

Novel is more disturbing in 2009 than 1959, because we’re so schizophrenic in our attitude towards young girls.

Some young girls exhibit a striking sexuality and curiosity about sex, altogether different from adults.

The media has enhanced our awareness of nymphets. Cultural unconscious fully aware of how erotic girls are. We’re supposed to be on Humbert’s side.

Critical heritage: Lolita is a pervy debauched little girl and wants to be a victim.

Continuum between normal sexuality and Humbert; novel never lets us forget that this is a child.

Lolita as a consumer; Humbert as a consumer of Lolita.

Nabokov is a list-maker, piles on to make his case. Like Huck Finn.

Relationship: for sex Lolita gets stuff.

Humbert’s lists: lyricize American junk. Humbert detests Lolita’s consumption but likes it in a way. He pays lyrical homage.

Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot

Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot; Design and Intention in Narrative, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1984.

We might think of plot as the logic or perhaps the syntax of a certain kind of discourse, one that develops its propositions only through temporal sequence and progression. (xi)

Our common sense of plot…Most of all, perhaps, it has been molded by the great nineteenth-century narrative tradition that, in history, philosophy, and a host of other fields as well as literature, conceived certain kinds of knowledge and truth to be inherently narrative, understandable (and expoundable) only by way of sequence, in a temporal unfolding. In this golden age of narrative, authors and their public apparently shared the conviction that plots were a viable and a necessary way of organizing and interpreting the world, and that in working out and working through plots, as writers and readers, they were engaged in a prime, irreducible act of understanding how human life acquires meaning. (xi-xii)

…I have looked for the ways in which the narrative texts themselves appear to represent and reflect on their plots. Most viable works of literature tell us something about how they are to be read, guide us toward the conditions of their interpretation. The novels of the great tradition all offer models for understanding their use of plots and their relation to plot as a model of understanding. (xii)

Even more than with plot, no doubt, I shall be concerned with plotting: with the activity of shaping, with the dynamic aspect of narrative—that which makes a plot “move forward,” and makes us read forward, seeking in the unfolding of the narrative a line of intention and as a portent of design that hold the promise of progress toward meaning. (xiii)

My interest in loosening the grip of formalism has taken me to psychoanalysis, particularly to the work of Freud himself, which presents a dynamic model of psychic processes and thus may offer the promise of a model pertinent to the dynamics of texts. Psychoanalysis, after all, is a primarily narrative art, concerned with the recovery of the past through the dynamics of memory and desire. (xiv)

It is not that I am interested in psychoanalysis study of author, or readers, or fictional characters, which have been the usual objects of attention for psychoanalytically informed literary criticism. Rather, I want to see the text itself as a system of internal energies and tensions, compulsions, resistances, and desires. (xiv)

When E. M. Forster, in the once influential Aspects of the Novel, asserts that Aristotle’s emphasis on plot was mistaken, that our interest is not in the “imitation of an action” but rather in the “secret life which each of us lives privately,” he surely begs the question, for if “secret lives” are able to be narratable, they must in some sense be plotted, display a design and logic. (4-5)

From sometime in the mid-eighteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century, Western societies appear to have felt an extraordinary need or desire for plots, whether in fiction, history, philosophy, or any of the social sciences, which in fact largely came into being with the Enlightenment and Romanticism. As Voltaire announced and then the Romantics confirmed, history replaces theology as the key discourse (5-6)

Not only history but historiography, the philosophy of history, philology, mythography, diachronic linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, and evolutionary biology all establish their claim as fields of inquiry, and all respond to the need for an explanatory narrative that seeks its authority in a return to origins and the tracing of a coherent story forward from origin to present. (6)

The enormous narrative production of the nineteenth century may suggest an anxiety at the loss of providential plots: the plotting of the individual or social or institutional life story takes on new urgency when one no longer can look to a sacred masterplot that organizes and explains the world. The emergence of narrative plot as a dominant mode of ordering and explanation may belong to the large process of secularization, dating from the Renaissance and gathering force during the Enlightenment, which marks a falling-away from those revealed plots—the Chosen People, Redemption, the Second Coming—that appeared to subsume transitory human time to the timeless. (6)

And this may explain the nineteenth century’s obsession with question of origin, evolution, progress, genealogy, its foregrounding of the historical narrative as par excellence the necessary mode of explanation and understanding. (6-7)

…with the advent of Modernism came an era of suspicion toward plot, engendered perhaps by an overelaboration of an overdependence on plots in the nineteenth century. If we cannot do without plots, we nonetheless feel uneasy about them, and feel obliged to show up their arbitrariness, to parody their mechanisms while admitting our dependence on them. Until such a time as we cease to exchange understandings in the form of stories, we will need to remain dependent on the logic we use to shape and to understand stories, which is to say, dependent on plot. (7)

…plot as the syntax of a certain way of speaking our understanding of the world. (7)

Nor can we, to be sure, analyze these narratives simply as a pure succession of events or happenings. We need to recognize, for instance, that there is a dynamic logic at work in the transformations wrought between the start and the finish… (10)

Plot, let us say in preliminary definition, is the logic and dynamic of narrative, and narrative itself a form of understanding and explanation. (10)

Mythos is deferred as “the combination of the incidents, or things done in the story,” and Aristotle argues that of all the parts of the story, this is the most important. It is worth quoting his claim once more: / ‘Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persona but of action and life, of happiness and misery. All human happiness of takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality. Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions—what we do—that we are happy or the reverse. In a play accordingly they do not act in order to portray the Characters; they include the Characters for the sake of action. (10-11)

Later in the same paragraph he reiterates, using an analogy that may prove helpful to thinking about plot: ‘We maintain, therefore, that the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is Plot; and that the Characters come second—compare the parallel in painting, where the most beautiful colours laid on without order will not give one the same pleasure as a simple black-and-white sketch of a portrait.” Plot, then, is conceived to be the outline or armature of the story, that which supports and organizes the rest. (11)

Finally, just as in the visual arts a whole must be “of a length to be taken in by the memory.” This is important, since memory—as much in the reading a novel as in seeing a play—is the key faculty in the capacity to perceive relations of beginnings, middles, and ends through time, the shaping power of narrative. (11)

…distinction urged by the Russian Formalists, that between fibula and sjuzet. Fabula is defined as the order of events referred to by the narrative, whereas sjuzet is the order of events presented in the narrative discourse. The distinction is one that takes on evident analytic force when one is talking about a Conrad or a Faulkner, whose dislocations of normal chronology are radical and significant… (12-13)

We must, however, recognize that the apparent priority of fibula to sjuzet is in the nature of a mimetic illusion, in the fabula—“what really happened”—is in fact a mental construction that the reader derives from the sjuzet, which is all that he ever directly knows. (13)

Perhaps the instance of the Russian Formalists’ work most compelling for our purposes is their effort to isolate and identify the minimal units of narrative, and then to formulate the principles of their combination and interconnection. In particular, Vladimir Propp’s The Morphology of the Folktale merits attention as an early and impressive example of what can be done to formalize and codify the study of narrative… Taking some one hundred tales classified by folklorists as fairy tales, he sought to provide a description of the fairy tale according to its component parts, the relation of these parts to one another and to the tale as a whole, and hence the basis for a comparison among tales. Propp claims that the essential morphological components are function and sequence. One identifies the functions by breaking down the tale into elements defined not by theme or character but rather according to the actions performed: function is “an act of character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action.” Functions will thus appear in the analysis as labels for kinds of action, such as “interdiction,” “testing,” “acquisition of the magical agent,” and so on; whereas sequence will concern the order of the functions, the logic of their consecution. (15)

Propp suggests an approach to the analysis of narrative actions by giving precedence to mythos over ethos, indeed by abstraction plot structure form the persons who carry it out. Characters for Propp are essentially agents of the action; he reduces them to seven “dramatis personae,” defined by the “spheres of influence” of the actinos they perform: the Villain, the Donor, the Helper, the Princess and her Father (who together function as a single agent), the Dispatcher, the Hero, and the False Hero. (15)

Propp’s analysis clearly is limited by the relatively simple and formulaic nature of the narratives he discusses. Yet something like the concept of “function” may be necessary in any discussion of plot… (16)

Todorov… is no doubt less valuable as a systematic model for analysis than as a suggestive metaphor, alerting us to the important analogies between parts of speech and parts of narrative, encouraging us to think about narrative as system, … Perhaps the most challenging work to come out of narratology has used the linguistic model in somewhat playful ways, accepting it as a necessary basis for thought but opening up its implications in an engagement with the reading of texts. What I have most in mind here is Roland Barthes’s S/Z. (17-18)

If we ask more specifically where in S/Z we find a notion approximating ‘plot,’ I thin the answer must be: in some combination of Barthes’s two irreversible codes—those that must be decoded successively , moving in one direction—the proairetic and the hermeneutic, that is: the code of actions (‘Voice of the Empirical’) and the code of enigmas and answers (‘Voice of Truth’). The proairetic concerns the logic of actions, how their completion can be derived from their initiation, how they form sequences. The limit-case of the purely proairetic narrative would be approached by the picaresque tale, or the novel of pure adventure: narratives that give precedence to the happening. The hermeneutic code concerns rather the questions and answers that structure a story, their suspense, partial unveiling, temporary blockage, eventual resolution, with the resulting creation of a ‘dilatory space’—the space of suspense—which we work through toward what is felt to be, in classical narrative, the revelation of meaning that occurs when the narrative sentence reaches full predication. The clearest and purest example of the hermeneutic would no doubt be the detective story, in that everything in the story’s structure, and its temporality, depends on the resolution of enigma. Plot, then, might best be thought of as an ‘overcoding’ of the proairetic by the hermeneutic, the latter structure the discrete elements of the former into larger interpretive wholes, working out their play of meaning and significance. (18)

In other words, the only ordering or solution to the problem in understanding Rousseau has set up here is more narrative. No analytic moral logic will give the answer to the question, why did I behave that way? As it will not answer the question, how can I be in my proper place? Nor indeed the question subtending these, who am I? question such as these cannot be addressed—as they might have been earlier in Rousseau’s century—by a portrait moral, a kind of analytic topography of a person. The question of identity, claims Rousseau—and this is what makes him at least symbolically the incipit of modern narrative—can be thought only in narrative terms… (32-33)

To understand me, Rousseau says more than once in the Confessions, most impressively at the close of Book Four, the reader must follow me at every moment of my existence; and it will be up to the reader, not Rousseau, to assemble the elements of the narrative and determine what they mean. Thus what Rousseau must fear, in writing his Confessions, is not saying too much or speaking lies, but failing to say everything. (33)

There is simply no end to narrative of this model, since there is no ‘solution’ to the ‘crime’. The narrative plotting in its entirety is the solution, and since that entirety has no endpoint for the writing—as opposed to the biographical—self, Rousseau is reduced to requesting the reader’s permission to make an end here: ‘Qu’il me soit permis de n’en reparler jamias.’ (33)

Our example from the ‘rpoairetic’ end of the narrative spectrum has turned out to be fully as ‘hermeneutic’ as the detective story. (34)

Aeschylus, Orestia, trasl. Paul Roche

Aeschylus, The Orestes Plays of Aeschylus, transl. Paul Roche, A Mentor Book, New American Library, New York, 1962.

Other Translations Referenced: Buckley, Theodore Alois, The Tragedies of Aeschylus Literally Translated, Harper & Brothers Publisher, Franklin Square, New York, 1859; Hamilton, Edith. Three Greek Plays. W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1937; Lattimore, Richard. Orestia, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1953; Fagles, Robert. The Orestia, Viking Press, New York, 1966; Harrison, Tony. The Orestia, Rex Collins, London, 1981.

Agamemnon

WATCHMAN: O you gods! how I long for an end to all this strain:
This year-long watch, up on the roof of the Atreidae,
Crouched on my elbows like a kennel hound,
Scanning by heart the stars at night,
That chorus of master shiners,
Dispensers of our summers and our storms—
Those so conspicuous stars: their wax and wane—
For I am watching still for one bright sign:
A beacon flash from Troy to tell me it is taken.
Yet, it’s fixed on that, this woman’s man-strong heart,
/
There’s my bed: dew-drenched, tossed, untouched by dreams;
Fear, not sleep my comrade;
Eyelids trussed from ever sleeping safely.
And if I whistle, then, hum a little ditty,
Just a tune to charm and drug sleep off,
Oh, it turns into a dirge for this stricken house—
So gone down, so fallen from its governance.
How I wish there’d come at last a happy end to strain!
Oh make that bonfire blaze
Good news upon the gloom.
[A beacon flare slowly spreads
across the dawn]
A light! Oh look:
Lovely dayspring in the dark,
Forerunner of that chorus and the dance
Which many in Argos shall celebrate this day.
/
Hullo, there! Hullo!
Cry out the news to Agamemnon’s queen.
Let the lady rise with instant shout and sing
Her welcome to the beacon…
If that clarion flash be true
And Troy great city fallen.
I’ll start a dance myself; the dice are tumbling well.
My master’s lucky throw is mine:
That bonfire’s scored a triple-six.
Master, may you soon come hope and I Grasp in this hand the hand I love.
/
The rest I leave to silence—
A giant ox treads on my tongue.
Though if these walls could find a voice,
They’d say it plain.
As for me: I’ll let the knowing know,
But with those others—let my memory go. (Roche)
WATCHMAN: I pray the gods a deliverance from these toils, a remedy for my year-long watch, in which, couching on my elbows on the roofs of the Atreidae, like a dog, I have contemplated the host of the nightly stars, and the bright potentates that bear winter and summer to mortals, conspicuous in the firmament. And now I am watching for the signal of the beacon, the blaze of fire that brings a voice from Troy, and tidings of its capture; for thus strong in hope is the woman’s heart, of manly counsel. And while I have a night-bewildered and dew-drenched couch, not visited by dreams, for fear, in place of sleep, stands at my side, so that I can not firmly close my eyelids in slumber. And when I think to sing or whistle, preparing this the counter-charm of song against sleep, then do I mourn, sighing over the sad condition of this house, that is not, as of yore, most excellently administered. But now, may there be a happy release from my toils, as the fire of joyous tidings appears through the gloom! Oh hail! thou lamp of night, thou that displayest a light like as the day, and the marshaling of many dances in Argos, on account of this event. Ho! Ho! I will give a signal distinctly to the wife of Agamemnon, that she, having arisen with all speed from her couch, may rise aloud a joyous shout in welcome to this beacon, if indeed the city of Ilion is taken, as the beacon-light stands forth announcing; and I myself will dance a prelude. For I will count the throws of my lord that have fallen well, mine own, since this kindling of the beacon-light has cast me thrice six. May it then befall me to grasp with this hand of min the friendly hand of the sovereign of this palace on his arrival. But for the rest I am silent; a mighty ox hath come upon my tongue: but the house itself, could it find a voice, would tell most plainly. Thus I readily speak to them that know, and for such as know not I have no memory. (Buckley)

WATCHMAN: Oh God, for an end to this weary work.
A year long I have watched here, head on arm,
crouched like a dog on Agamemnon’s roof.
The stars of night have kept me company.
I know them all, and when they rise and set.
Those that bring winter’s cold and summer’s heat—
For they have power, those bright things in the sky.
And what I watch for is a beacon fire,
a flash of flame to bring the word from Troy,
word that the town has fallen.
It’s a woman’s hope, for a woman is master here,
but her heart is as stout as ever a man’s.
no rest for me by night. I wander up and down.
My bed is wet with dew. Dreams keep away.
Fear is up here, not sleep. I never close my eyes.
Singing or whistling helps a sleepy man,
but if I try to make a sound I groan
for all the evil happening down there.
Things once were right in this house, but no more.
Oh, for a bit of luck to free me now,
that fire to bring news out of the night.
(A pause. He stands silent, watching. In the dark
a spark of light is seen. It grows brighter, spreading
into a blaze.)
A flame! Oh, see! It turns the dark to day.
There’ll be dancing now and singing in the town.
Ho there! Ho there! O Agamemnon’s Queen,
wake—wake.
Up from your bed—Quick, quick—and shout for joy.
Shout for the beacon light. Troy—Troy is taken.
The messenger has come, the fire signal.
(Lights and movement are seen within the palace.)
I’ll start the dancing up here by myself.
The dice have fallen well. I’ll mark the score.
This beacon fire has thrown us three times six.
Oh, let me see my master home again,
and hold once more his dear hand in my own.
Those other things—no more of them. I put
a weight big as an ox upon my tongue.
And yet the very house, if it had voice,
would speak out clear—just as I too speak out
to those who know. To those who do not—why,
I lose my memory. (Hamilton)

WATCHMAN: Dear gods, set me free from all the pain,
from the watch I keep, one whole year awake…
propped on my arms, crouched on the roofs of Atreus
like a dog.
I know the stars by heart,
the companies of the night, and there in the lead
the ones that bring us snow or the warm summer,
bring us all we have—
our great kings blazing across the sky,
I know them, when they sink and when they rise…
and now I watch for the light, the signal-fire
breaking out of Troy, shouting Troy is taken.
So she commands, full of her high hopes.
That woman—she maneuvers like a man.
/
And when I keep to my bed, soaked in dew,
and the thoughts go drifting through the night
and sleep’s aide, good dreams… not here,
it’s the old comrade, terror at my neck.
I mustn’t sleep, no—
Look alive, sentry.
And I try to pick out tines, I hum a little,
a good cure for sleep, and the tears start,
I sob for all that’s come to the house. So badly
managed now. Men die and things go down.
/
Oh for a blessed end to all our pain,
some godsend burning through the dark—
Light appears slowly in the east; he
Struggles to his feet and scans it.
I salute you1
You dawn of the darkness, you turn night to day—
I see the light at last.
They’ll be dancing in the streets of Argos
thanks to you, thanks to this new stroke of—
Aieeeeee!
There’s your signal clear and true, my queen!
Rise up from bed, hurry, lift a cry of triumph
through the house, praise the gods for the beacon,
if they’ve taken Troy…
But there she burns,
fire all the way. I’m for the morning dances.
Master’s luck is mine. A throw of the torch
has brought us triple-sixes—we have won!
My move now—
Beginning to dance, then breaking
off, lost in thought.
Just bring him home. My king,
I’ll take your loving hand in mine and then…
the rest is silence. The ox is on my tongue.
Aye, but the house and these old stones,
give them a voice and what a tale they’d tell.
And so would I, gladly…
I speak to those who know; to those who don’t
my mind’s a blank. I never say a word. (Fagles)

I ask the gods some respite from the weariness
of this watchtime measured by years I lie awake
elbowed upon the Atreidae’s roof dogwise to mark
the grand processionals of all the stars of night
burdened with winter and again with heat for men,
dynasties in their shining blazoned on the air,
these stars, upon their wane and when the rest arise.
/
I wait; to read the meaning in that beacon light,
a blaze of fire to carry out of Troy the rumor
and outcry of its capture; to such end a lday’s
male strength of heart in its high confidence ordains.
Now as this bed stricken with night and drenched with dew
I keep, nor ever with kind dreams for company:
since fear in sleep’s place stands forever at my head
against strong closure of my eyes, or any rest:
I mince such medicine against sleep failed: I sing,
only to weep again the pity of this house
no longer, as once, administered in the grand way.
Now let there be again redemption from distress,
the flare burning from the blackness in good augury.
(A light shows in the distance.)
Oh hail, blaze of the darkness, harbinger of day’s
shining, and of processionals and dance and choirs
of multitudes in Argos for this day of grace.
Ahoy!
I cry the news to Agamemnon’s queen,
that she may rise up from her bed of state with speed
to raise the rumor of gladness welcoming this beacon,
and singing rise, if truly the citadel of Ilium
has fallen, as the shining of this flare proclaims.
I also, I, will make my choral prelude, since
my lord’s dice cast aright are counted as my own,
and mine the tripled sixes of this torchlit throw.
/
May it only happen. May my king come home, and I
take up within this hand the hand I love. The rest
I leave to silence; for an ox stands huge upon
my tongue. The house itself, could it take voice, might speak
aloud and plain. I speak to those who understand,
but if they fail, I have forgotten everything. (Lattimore)

WATCHMAN: No end to it all, though all year I’ve muttered
my pleas to the gods for a long groped for end.
Wish it were over, this waiting, this watching,
twelve weary months, night in and night out,
crouching and peering, head down like a bloodhound,
paws propping muzzle, up here on the palace,
the palace belonging the bloodclan of Atreus—
Agamemnon, Menelaus, bloodkin, our clanchiefs.
/
I’ve been so long staring I know the stars backwards,
the chiefs of the star-clans, king-stars, controllers,
those that dispense us the coldsnaps and dogdays.
I’ve had a whole year’s worth so I ought to know.
A whole year of it! Still no sign of the signal
I’m supposed to catch sight of, the beacons,
the torch-blaze that means Troy’s finally taken…
/
The woman says watch, so here I am watching.
That women’s not one who’s all wan and woeful.
That woman’s a man the way she gets moving.
/
Put down your palliasse. Dew-drenched by daybreak.
Not the soft bed you’d dream anything good in—
Fear stays all night. Sleep gives me short time.
/
Daren’t drop off though. Might miss it. The beacon.
And if I missed it… life’s not worth the living!
Sometimes, to stop nodding, I sing or try singing
but songs stick in my gullet. I feel more like weeping
when I think of the change that’s come over this household,
good once and well ordered… but all that seems over…
/
Maybe tonight it’ll finish, this watching, this waiting,
an end to the torment we’ve yearned for ten years.
/
Come on, blasted beacon, blaze out of the blackness!
/
sees BEACON
/
It’s there! An oasis like daylight in deserts of dark!
It’s there! No mistaking!
Agamemnon’s woman—
best let her know the beacon’s been sighted.
Time all the women were wailing their welcome!
/
Troy’s taken! Troy’s down and Troy’s flattened.
There’ll be dancing in Argos and I’ll lead the dance.
My master’s struck lucky. So’ve I, I reckon.
Sighting the beacon’s a dice-throw all sixes.
/
Soon I’ll be grasping his hand, Agamemnon’s…
Let him come home to us, whole and unharmed!
/
As for the rest… I’m not saying. Better not said.
Say that an ox ground my gob into silence.
/
They’d tell such a story, these walls, if they could.
/
Those who know what I know, know what I’m saying.
Those who don’t know, won’t know. Not from me. (Harrison)

CHORUS: A thousands shouting ships of line,
Screaming like eagles high and disconsolate
Which circle and beat with the blade of their young.

CHORUS: No balm and no tears, no fire can burn
The gods’ wrath away from a sacrifice spurned.
[Clytemnestra, with oil and incense in her hands and surrounded by torchbearers, appears at the top of the palace steps. She motions the procession to halt as she stands there listening.]
We’re the deserted ones, senile carcasses,
Left behind by those glorious carcasses,
Left behind by those glorious armies,
Leaning our baby-weight frailly on crutches.
Youth’s surge in our hearts is futile with age.
Mars is misplaced; our greenery gone.
Dotage advances, totters along
Its three-footed way no more than a child:
Weak as a noonday dream.
[The old men turn toward Clytemnestra as she proceeds silently down the steps on her way to the various altars]
But you, Clytemnestra, Queen,
Tyndareus’ daughter,
What’s afoot? What news? What message has hastened you
To go in procession round blazing oblations?
The altars of all our city’s protectors—
The gods up above and gods down below,
Gods of the heavens and gods of the market place—
Are flaming with sacrifice.

Strophe 1—First Stasimon: But those redoubtable heroes
Blessedly speeded with omens—
Their saga at least I can sing.
For even senility still
Can draw on the breath of the gods
To cast a spell with song.

Strophe 1—First Stasimon: Sing of sorrow, sorrow,
But let the good prevail.

Antistrophe 1: But first take care
No rankling god shall blacken
The mighty muzzle forged
By our bettering battalions
For bridling Troy.
/
“For Artemis the chaste one
Rages in her pity:
…
Yes, Artemis is sickened
At the eagles glutting.

Epode (Plea to Artemis): “Fair though you be and full of
Grace to the ravening lions’
Little fumbling kittens,
And tender to the suckling young
Of beasts that rove the wilds—
Yet may good become the issue of that cruel vision.

Strophe 2: Zeus the unknown god,
If Zeus be his best title—
Hail by that: Incomparable!
Undivinable in style!

Strophe 4: The winds from Strymon pent them in the port,
A forced holiday of famine:

Strophe 4: And speaking for Artemis,
Proclaimed a palliative more deadly yet…
The sons of Atreus smashed their scepters down
And could not keep from crying.
[The sacrifice of his daughter by Agamemnon. The metaphor of the is inverted: Artemis, who was represented before as being angry at its being torn by the eagles, is here demanding the destructions of a human being.]
/
Antistrophe 4: Then the elder king found voice and said:
“This fate is hard to disobey,
And hard if I obey.
Sever my child—my palace pearl?
Bloody my hands in that virgin flood?
A father’s hands at the altar side? Oh which
Is worse? But how can I betray
My fleet and fail my allies?
They are right in their fury-bound frenzy
To imprecate the winds to calm
By the blood of a virgin sacrificed…
I hope it may be well!”
/
Strophe 5: And once he’d buckled on his need to do it,
His spirit changed, gave vent to wicked airs:
Was sacrilegious, impious,
Distorted, contumacious, wild.
So does the heart possessed, pressed on by delusion,
Race to its sinning.
Callously, he dealt the deathblow to his daughter:
All for a war waged for a woman—
An offering to the fleet.
/
Antistrophe 5: Her prayers, her cries of “Father!” and her girlhood
Were nothing to the passion of her jury:
The military minded.
Her father blessed her; told his ministers
To go and take her as she cowered huddled
In her tunic,
And boldly lift her lovely mouth and stopper
With cruelty her curses.
/
Strophe 6: And slipping to the ground her saffron dress,
She glanced with piteous eyes to wound
Each bloody celebrant;
Caught as in a painting…lips about to speak:
She who had so many times
Shed luster on them at her father’s feasts,
Singing with her lucent voice—
Tender, virginal—
The hymn of grace at the third salute.

CLYTEMNESTRA: News, sir, as blessed as the proverbial dawn
Which springs in gladness from her mother Night.
Listen to a greater joy than you could hope to learn:
Priam’s city has fallen to the Argive might.
[In the Greek these four lines are, prosodically, typical of the way Aeschylus often coordinates the sound of his end syllables with assonance, consonance, rhyme and near rhyme. They are typical, too, of the way I have handled the more obvious of such passages.]
CHORUS and CLYTEMNESTRA
CH: What did you say? It escapes belief.
CL: The Greeks have taken Troy. Am I plain enough?
CH: Happiness suffuses me, summoning my tears.
CL: Yes, your eyes give you away—your local heart.
CH: But have you proof? Is there evidence?
CL: Proof? Why not? Unless some god has cheated us.
CH: Or unless you are the victim of a dream.
CL: I don’t take revelations from a dormant brain.

CLYTEMNESTRA: Such was the course my fire-runners ran:
Relay on to relay, finishing their chain.
The final sprinter first and last has won.
And such the warrant that I give to you in token
That to me from Troy my lord has spoken.
[These five lines are the three following are again a strong example of the way Aeschylus dovetails the sound patter of his line endings. Here he gives these final syllables: nomoi—menoi—on—o—omoi—omai—asai—in.]

CLYTEMNESTRA: The Greeks have taken Troy this day.
Oh, I think I hear unmingling clamors rise:
You’d hardly say that vinegar and oil
Mix lovingly together in a bowl!
Defeat and Triumph are in the air,
With different cries:

CLYTEMNESTRA: If they will use with due regard the city’s gods
(The conquered country’s godly shrines),
The spoilers’ turn will never turn to spoiled.
But woe to any premature and insensate excess:

Strophe 2: And Ilium dealt a deathblow not a dower.

Strophe 3: Then pathetic epitaphs:
This one “skilled in combat,”
That one “nobly killed in action” …
“For another’s wife,” some whisper.
And so regret, reproach, come creeping on
Towards the House of Atreus—these quarrelers.
While there beneath the walls of Ilium
Those others in their splendid bodies lie:
Conquerors, but covered and entombed
In soil they loathed.
/
Antistrophe 3: There’s danger in the grumblings of a people’s ire.
It ratifies a nation in its curse.
Some night-swathed thing
Waits upon my ear.
The gods have eyes:
The multimurderer is marked,
And in the end
The black Fates overturn and batter down
The lucky but too lawless man—
His life a shadow
Where arrivals in oblivion are most lame.
Overreaching glory is a ruin.

[A Herald enters: a remnant of the returning Greek armies. He shows by his old and dirty uniform that he has recently been through a great deal]
HERALD: O soil of my fathers! Happy land!
The one bright spot come true in all ten years
Of hopes in shreds—
I never dared to dream
That on this ground of Argos here I’d die:

HERALD: For like a light, beatifically he comes
To you, to all of you: great Agamemnon King.
/
Render him the welcome he deserves.
Troy he’s toppled down; plowed up her plain
With God’s own mattock, Zeus the Punisher’s.
Her divinities, her shrines, her altars gone;
Uprooted all her country’s seed—erased.

HERALD: Ah! but it’s well and done with now.
Yes, it’s been a mixed experience all these years:
Success and failure—one might say—half-and-half composed…
But who except a god expects to have it all one way?
/
If I should tell you of our miseries:
Overcrowded decks and quarters cramped,
Narrow berths—our daily fare…Ah, then!
What was there not to complain about?
And once we’d landed—more abominations still:
Beds in the open underneath their hostile walls,
Constant drizzle from above,
Drenching meadow dews beneath—
Rotting our uniforms,
Tangling lice into our hair.
/
Then the winters—you’ve no idea!
A cold to kill birds dead;
And Ida’s snows—
Enough to make one shudder!
Or the sweltering summers: and noonday sea—
Not a wave, not a breath,
Upon its flaccid slumbering.

HERALD: In the night:
Ill-waved evil running high;
A Thracian gale;
Ships thrashing into ships—
Bucking and butting in the hurricane,
Stampeding into mists of storm and thundering rain:
A panic shepherding towards oblivion.
And then the sun’s rays lighting up the scene:

HERALD: Some rescuing spirit must have willed to sit inside our
ship
And stop her from succumbing to that smash and flood of surf
Or grinding on the stony shoals.
And we he refugees from that death-sea hell,
When the white dawn broke,
Could not convince ourselves we lived—our luck.
Our thoughts were heavy with the all-too-fresh ordeal:
The finished and the beaten fleet.
So if there’s life in any of them yet,
Now they must be saying we’re dead—why not?
Just as we think the very same of them.

Strophe 2: A man once reared a lion cub
In his house, a tender thing
Taken from its mother’s milk,
Gentle at its dawn of life:
Sweet little pet of the children,
Charming to the aged.
Much was it held in people’s arms,
Dandled like a human child,
Fawning on the hand that fed it:
Bright-eyed for its belly.
/
Antistrophe 2: Then one day the lion cub
Showed its proper parentage:
Gave its thanks for being raised,
At a banquet never bidden…
Running amok in the sheep,
Bloodying the house
Caught in helpless tragedy;
Turned it into a charnel house:
A fiendish priest by the wrath of God
Pampered in the home.
/
Strophe 3: So once there came to the town of Troy
What seemed a very breath of calm:
Unruffled, delicate,
Rare as a jewel is rich and rare;
Doe-eyed dartlings from her eyes;
Flower to prick the hand with longing.
Then suddenly she wheeled around,
Did her wedding to the death—
Evil guest and evil comrade—
Burst on Priam’s children
Like a demon: bridal
Tears at Zeus’ reception.
/
Antistrophe 3: It hath been said of old by men:
Prosperity becomes mature,
Grows great with child,
Engenders it and cannot die
Until it does. A man’s success
Breeds in his house a hungry brood
Of rapacious miseries.
But I say this—not like the rest—
It is the act of wickedness
Bears wickedness just like it.
A pious house begets
Fair piety.

AGAMEMNON: For this success we owe the gods
Some memorable return…
A city netted in our noose of hate,
Ground down to powder for a woman
By the Beast of Argos—Wooden Horse—

CLYTEMNESTRA: As for myself,
The wellsprings of my tears are dry;
Not a drop is left.
My eyes are sore with watching late nights,
Weeping for those bonfires set for you but never lit.
And if I drowsed I dreamt of you;
Wakened by the gnat’s thin airy whine—
Saw you in such sorrows still
As far outstretched that little space of sleep.

CLYTEMNESTRA: But now, all is endured.
With a mind released I salute this man:
…
A father’s only son,
…
First fair day when the tempest’s done,

AGAMEMNON: Daughter of Leda, guardian of my house,
Well suited to my absence is your speech:
Long drawn out.
Praise for another would be more appropriate.
Besides, I need no woman’s coddling,
No barbarian display,
With groveling on the ground and gaping praise;
Or have my path decked out to catch the Evil Eye
With carpets and embroiderings.
Keep these things and all the glory of them for the gods.
To walk on furbished trappings is for me, mere man,
A most disturbing thing.
Respect me as a man and not a god.

AGAMEMNON: Have someone loose my boots—
Those stalwart servants of my treading feet.
I want no far-off beam from some god’s eye
To smite me as I trample on these deep-sea purples.
Crass waste it is for tramping feet
To mar such substance and such stuffs that silver bought.
[The famous Tyrian purple was made from creatures of the sea—mollusks.]

CHORUS: …No confidence
Can overturn this nightmare of no meaning.

CLYTEMNESTRA: Inside the house, Cassandra—I mean you too.
…
At least you have the luck of masters old to money.
The newly rich with unexpected wealth
Are cruel to their slaves beyond all decency.
From us you can expect only what is proper.
[Cassandra still sits motionless]

CLYTEMNESTA: Perhaps she only understands some outlandish twittereing,
Like a swallow. I shall have to speak within her wits
To make my points.
/
CHORUS: Go, Cassandra: she offers you your only choice.
Please leave the chariot seat.
/
CLYTEMNESTRA: I simply have no time
To dawdle with this woman here outside the door.
The victims stand already at the hearthstone fro the kill—
An act of grace we never hoped to make.
So, if you’re going to join in it, don’t dally;
Or if you fail to follow what I mean,
Instead of words make signs with your barbarian hand.
[Cassandra shudders but says nothing]
CHORUS: Madam, she is a foreigner,
She needs a good interpreter.
Why, she’s like some freshly captured animal!
CLYTEMNESTRA: Mad—I say. Quite!
Cocking her inward ear to something crazed:
Fresh from a captured city.
She’ll foam and bleed at the mouth,
Play her passions out
Before she ever takes the bit.

CASSANDRA and CHORUS
CA: Oh, the hue and the cry!
Apollo! Apollo!
CH: Apollo—why?
He’s not the god of those who cry.
CA: Oh, the hue and the cry!
Apollo! Apollo!
CH: Apollo again? A most sinister shout!
A god who has no place with wailing.
CA: Apollo! Apollo!
Guiding god…oh, me to death!
This time to death appalling.
CH: I think she’s going to prophesy her own disaster.
Even in a slave the gift divine endures.
CA: Apollo! Apollo!
Guiding god…oh, me to death!
What house? Oh where have you guided?
CH: To the house of Atreus. Did you not know?
I tell you so: you will not find it false.
CA: No no: to a house God hates,
Full of family butcheries:
Dangling with horrors;
Human slaughterhouse…

[Fagles translation:
CA: Aieeeeee! Earth—Mother—
Curse of the Earth—Apollo Apollo!
CH: Why cry to Apollo?
He’s not the god to call with sounds of mourning.
CA: Aieeeeee! Earth—Mother—
Curse of the Earth—Apollo Apollo!
CH: Again, it’s a bad omen.
She cries for the god who wants no part of grief.
CA: God of the long road,
Apollo, Apollo my destroyer—
you destroy me once, destroy me twice—
CH: She’s about to sense her own ordeal, I think.
Slave that she is, the god lives on inside her.
CA: God of the iron marches,
Apollo Apollo my destroyer—
where, where have you led me now? what house—
CH: The house of Atreus and his sons. Really—
Don’t you know? It’s true, see for yourself.
CA: No…the house that hates god,
An echoing womb of guilt, kinsmen
Torturing kinsmen, severed heads,
Slaughterhouses of heroes, soil streaming blood—]

[Hamilton translation:
CA: Oh, God, God! Apollo—Apollo—
CH: Why do you cry to him in misery?
Apollo gives no heed to those who mourn.
CA: Oh, God, God! Apollo, Apollo!
CH: Again she cries dark words of evil omen
To him who has no place where sorrow is.
CA: Apollo, Apollo, our guide,
Guiding me
On to death.
Twice hast thou ruined me—now utterly.
CH: Some prophecy of her own fate she speaks.
The thing within that is divine abides,
Though in a slave.
CA: Apollo, Apollo, our guide,
Guiding me
On to death.
Where have you brought me—and to what a house—]

[Buckley translation
CA: Woe! Woe! O gods! O earth! O Apollo! Apollo!
CH: Why sayest thou, Woe! For Loxias? For he is not such [a god] as to have a mourner.
CA: Woe! Woe! O gods! O earth! O Apollo! Apollo!
CH: She with ill-omened outcry is again invoking the god not suited to stand by in wailings.
CA: Apollo! Apollo! Aguieus! [i.e. my destroyer] Apollo mine! For thou hast without difficulty destroyed me the second time.
CH: She seems to be upon the point of divining, touching her own ills. Divination remains even in the mind of a slave.
CA: Apollo! Apollo! Aguieus! Destroyer mine! Ah! whither canst thou have brought me? To what kind of dwelling?]

CASSANDRA: No, no, don’t you see it?
A death-net? Yes, a snare… No she’s the snare,
Casting bed and murder into one.
Yell it to mankind ye intemperate pack:
A victim downed!

CASSANDRA: Pity me! Pity! My own turn now:
Affliction in the bitter cup—
Lamentation…mine.
So unblessedly you bring me here:
For what?
Only to die; conjoined in death:
How not?
/
CHORUS: Poor craze-tossed sybil in a trance!
Unstopping music of your fate:
You melancholy nightingale,
Untuned brown bird,
Breaking forth with “Itys! Itys!”
[Itys: omomatopeia, and also the name of Philomela’s nephew, whom she lamented after being changed into a nightingale. She had been raped by Tereus, her brother-in-law.]
Through the thicket
Of a broken heart and ruined days.
CASSANDRA: Oh, for the nightingale—her so mellifluous lot!
Invested with a feathered form divine:
A sweet life free from all lament.

CASSANDRA: There rises from these halls in single voice
A perpetual choir,
A jangled symphony of ill,
With ill its theme.

CASSANDRA and CHORUS
CA: Apollo, god of prophets, gave me to this office.
CH: What! Was a god in love with you?
CA: I blushed to tell this tale before.
CH: Personal success makes people prim.
CA: But his courtship was a hot sweet-breathing thing.
CH: And put you in the family way, as these things do?
CA: Not that. I promised Loxias [Apollo] but broke my word.
CH: Did you already have the gift of prophecy?
CA: Yes: even then foretelling the disaster of my town.
CH: And Apollo’s anger left you quite unscathed?
CA: Since that mistake, no one will believe a thing I say.
CH: Well, to us at least what you say seems credible.

CASSANDRA: And the Lord High Admiral,
Ravener of Ilium,
Has no idea of what the bitch’s tongue has said:
It’s hate, its hidden kiss of death,
As she licks and fawns and pricks her ears,
Plotting the very hour and stroke.

CASSANDRA: [In another spasm of possession]
Oh, fire! What fire!...It’s on me now.
Apollo, ‘Pollo, Light…What pain!

CHORUS [of different elders] and CASSANDRA
ANOTHER: What is it now? What terror turns you back?
CA: Foul! Foul!
ANOTHER: What foul but in your fraught imagining?
CA: The room—it reeks! Drips red with murder.
ANOTHER: Only the animal victims at the hearth.
CA: A breath from an open grave.
ANOTHER: Hardly our costly Syrian incense!

CASSANDRA: So much for human happiness
…
Who in dismay
One wet dash can sponge away:
A picture totally destroyed—

CLYTEMNESTRA: Come to triumph at last—yes, long overdue.
I stand here where I struck him. The thing is done;
And done in such a way
(I shall now disavow it)
As to make all flight and all defense from doom
Impossible.
/
Around him like a net of fish
I swung that smothering looseness—
A fatal opulence of gown.
Then I struck him twice,
And with a double groan
His limbs went loose, he fell.
I was on him with a third—“thanksgiving”—stroke:
To the Zeus of the world below, the keeper of the
Life pumping out of him
And gurgling murderous spurts of blood
Which hit me with a black-ensanguined drizzle.
Oh, it freshened me like drops from heaven
When the earth is bright and sprung with budding.
[The third libation at feasts was always to Zeus the Preserver of Life. Clytemnestra says sarcastically that the god she offered her grace-stroke to was Hades—Preserver of the Dead.]

CHORUS: You shock us with your brazen tongue:
crowing over him—and he your husband!
CLYTEMNESTRA: You challenge me like any silly woman.
It does not make me nervous in the least.
You know it.

CLYTEMNESTRA: Very well, but listen to my sworn vow too:
By the perfect vengeance of my child,
By Ate and the powers of hell
(To whom I sacrificed this man),
I shall never tread the halls of terror
So long as my hearth burns bright
Kindled by Aegisthus, loyal as ever by my side.
He is my shield of courage: no flimsy shield.
/
Here lies the degrader of this woman:
Petter and fooled by every gilded girl at Troy.
And here she lies, his battle booty,
Clairvoyant, concubine,
Faithful fortuneteller, bedder down—
Not unfamiliar, either, to the rub of sailors’ boards.
A well rewarded pair…
Yes, here he lies, and here is she:
The swan who warbled out her swansong, his beloved,
Leading such a dainty morsel to my bed. (Roche)

CH: Thou art lofty in spirit, and proud things hast thou uttered: thy soul is raving as under a blood-dripping fate, an unavenged blood-clot is conspicuous on thy brow. Yet mts thou hereafter, bereft of thy friends, atone for stroke by stroke.
CLYT: And thou shalt hear this plea of mine oath: By the perfect vengeance of my daughter, by Ate, and Erinnys, to whom I sacrificed this man, I expect not to tread the hall of Terror, so long as Aegisthus burns fire on my hearth, well-disposed tome as heretofore: for he is to me no small shield of confidence. He lies, the marrer of this woman, the minion of the Chryseids under Illion: and she here, his captive and soothsayer, and partner of his bed, his faithful love, the weird prophetess and sharer with his of the benches of the ships. But these twain have not done deeds without a reward. For he indeed [lies] thus; and she too, his love, having like a swan warbled her last dying wail, to me she hath brought a nuptial dainty dish for my enjoyment. (Buckley)

CLYT: Hear me in turn. The oath I swear is holy.
By justice for my child now consummated,
by black, blind Doom, by all the powers of hall,
to whom I offered what I killed, I swear
hope does not treat the halls of fear for me
while on my hearth a fire is still kindled
by one now true in my heart to me as ever,
Aegisthus, my sure shield of confidence.
Here lies the man who scorned me—me, his wife—
the fool and tool of every shameless woman
beneath Troy’s walls. Here she lies too, his slave,
got by his spear, his sibyl bed-fellow,
his paramour—God’s words upon her lips,
who rubbed the galley’s benches at his side.
They have their due, he thus and she the same,
her swan-song sung. His lover—there she lies.
I in my soft bed lying, shall delight,
Thinking of her, still more in its smooth softness (Hamilton)

CLYT: Then listen to this, the oath I’ll swear by.
By bloodright exacted on behalf of my she-child,
by Iphigeneia whose bloodgrudge has roosted,
by the Fury for whom Agamemnon’s the booty,
I swear I’ll never let fear to my fireside
as long as the hearth’s kept alight by Aegisthus,
loyal friend always, my shield, my protector.
/
Look at him, Shaggermemnon, shameless, shaft-happy,
ogler and grinder of Troy’s golden girlhood.
Look at her, spearprize, prophetess, princess,
whore of his wartent, his bash back on shipboard.
They’ve got their deserts the two of them now.
There he lies, She’s sung her swansong and lies
as she should do stretched out alongside him,
his ‘dear’s’ death a side-dish to the banquet of his. (Harrison)

CLYT: Now hear you this, the right behind my sacrament:
By my child’s Justice driven to fulfillment, by
her Wrath and Fury, to whom I sacrificed this man,
the hope that walks my chambers is not traced with fear
while yet Aegisthus makes the fire shine on my hearth,
my good friend, now as always, who shall be for us
the shield of our defiance, no weak thing; while he,
this other, is fallen, stained with this woman you behold,
plaything of all the golden girls at Ilium;
and here lies she, the captive of his spear, who saw
wonders, who shared his bed, the wise in revelations
and loving mistress, who yet knew the feel as well
of the men’s rowing benches. Their reward is not
unworthy. He lies there; and she who swanlike cried
aloud her lyric mortal lamentation out
is laid against his fond heart, and to me has given
a delicate excitement to my bed’s delight. (Latimore)

CLYT: Then learn this too, the power of my oaths.
By the child’s Rights I brought to birth,
by Ruin, by Fury—the three gods to whom
I sacrificed this man—I swear my hopes
will never walk the halls of fear so long
as Aegisthus lights the fire on my hearth.
Loyal to me as always, no small shield
to buttress my defiance.
Here he lies.
He brutalized me. The darling of all
the golden girls who spread the gates of Troy.
And here his spearprize—what wonders she beheld.
The seer of Apollo shared my husband’s bed,
his faithful mate who knelt at the rowing-benches,
worked by every hand.
They have their rewards.
He as you know. And she, the swan of the gods
who lived to sing her latest, dying song—
his lover lies beside him.
She brings a fresh, voluptuous relish to my bed! (Fagles)

CLYTEMNESTRA: Nor load yourself so
With anger to fall upon Helen as though
She were the man-eater:

Strophe 3: Bewildered, bereft of ready expedient,
I ask and I anxiously wonder
Where to escape from a house which is falling.
Cowered I wait while the blood-beating rainstorm
Shivers the dwelling, no longer in drops;
And Destiny whets on another whetstone
Vengeance for another disaster.

AEGISTHUS: But Atreus—godless father of the dead man here—
Outstripping even love in welcome,
Pretended a day of celebration for him:
A great dinner to be carved—
Meat of his own chidren.
And, sitting apart,
He served first before he served it
The toes from the rest of the comblike crest of fingers.
/
My unwitting father
Took those unsuspicious parts and ate—
Meal so poisonous, as you see, for all his race.
Then discovering what he’s done,
He made a cry, reeled back, spewed out the butchered mess,
/
Kicked the table over in a curse,
Bellowing out abomination on the House of Pelops:
“Go down so—in ruin—you total race of Pleisthenes.”


The Libation Bearers

ORESTES: Hermes:
God of my fathers, lord of the dead,
I invoke you.
Be my champion, be my friend.
I am home again—back on my soil—
And beg my father from this mounded grave
To hear me and attend.
[He advances to the tomb and lays a strand of hair upon it]
One lock, Inachus, for you,
Who fed my manhood;
And here’s a second—fed with mourning.
For I was not there, Father, to break my grief upon your murder
Or stretch out my hand towards your bier
And body’s passing.
[As he speaks, a band of captive women in black, the Chorus, led by Electra, emerge from the palace and make their way towards the tomb. They carry vases and, in the extravagant manner of the East, beat themselves and wail. Note: The women who make up the Chorus are ladies of the court brought back from captured Troy. Expressions of grief which to the Greeks might seem barbarous were current in Asia. Solon’s later laws forbade them to the Athenians.]
But, what do I see?
What solemnities of black
Draped upon this throng of women coming?
What matching sorrow?
Some new death to strike the house?
Or is it rather urns of peace
They carry to my father here
To pour out for the dead?
/
Yes, surely so;
For I think I see my sister there, Electra,
Distinguished in her bitter walk of sorrow.
O Zeus,
Grant me to avenge my father’s fate—
By my ready ally.
/
Pylades, let us step aside
And let me see
What this processional of women means.
[Orestes and Pyaldes take cover]
/
Strophe 1: Straight from the house precipitate
With urns dispatched I come and flying fingers spoiling
New furrows in my face which nails have flared
Bright with crimson tearing,
While perpetually my heart is fed
Upon perpetual crying.
Ah! loud from my breast is rent that brave
Display of vestments, rags, so sorrow-shred,
And all my smiling shattered.
/
Antistrophe 1: Keen the bristling horror seen
By a palace dreamer in a dream which deep within
Blasted sleep with hate abd broke
The fabric of the night with shrieking;
Fell like vivid lead upon
The women’s walls. The dream-diviners called
The gods to witness, said:
The livid underworld was smoldering still
Against the murderers of the dead.

ELECTRA: Come, you handmaids, sweet orderers of home,
Who join me on this suppliant walk,
Counsel me in this: what shall I say
As I empty out these urns of empty grief?
What words of grace? What invocation to my father?
/
Shall I say I carry love—a woman’s to a man—
And mean my mother?
I have no heart for this, I have no words
For pouring chrism on my father’s tomb.
[Chrism – honey, meal, and oil was the mixture commonly used for funeral libations]
Or shall I mouth this formula and pray:
“Reward us fittingly for these honored wreaths
with a gift that—ah!—fully fits the crime”?
Or in a mute indignity,
Just as my father died,
Shall I scatter forth these tributes fro the guzzling ground to drink,
Then toss away my urn, step back,
Avert my eyes—like someone emptying refuse out?
/
Share these counsels with me, friends of mine,
As in this house we share a common hate.
Do not hide behind your hearts for fear of anyone.
The fated hour awaits the free
Just as it does the foisted subjects of a mighty hand.
/
Tell me, if you know a better course than this.
[The women of the Chorus lay their hands on Agamemnon’s tomb]
…
CHORUS: Pray that to them may come some god or man…
ELECTRA: You mean, a judge or punisher?
CHORUS: Just say: “One to render death for death.”
ELECTRA: But in the eyes of the gods is that a pious prayer?
CHORUS: Why not? A stroke for a stroke against your enemies.
[Electra advances to the tomb and begins to pour]

ORESTES: Too many cravings coincide in me:
The god’s behest,
My father’s giant grief,
The loss of my estates,
The scandal of my citizens, those famous ones
Who toppled Troy down with their sterling worth,
Now at the beck and call of this brace of women…
For Aegisthus is a woman too at heart,
Or must prove it soon if he is not.

ORESTES: Strophe 1:
Father, my father so sad, what word
Or action of mine could I conjure
Down from afar like a filtering breeze
To the purlieus of your chamber,
A light to match your darkness?
Nevertheless, my sorrow
Given away for the once great house
Of Atreus is glory.
/
CHORUS: Strophe 2:
My son, the fire’s yawning
Jaws consume no spirit
Of the dead; he vividly blazes
His anger afterwards.
The deceased receives his funeral moan,
The noxious murderer is shown,
The Dirges antiphone
A hue and a cry on every side
For parents wronged and the father.

[Buckley: ORESTES: Father, unhappy father, by saying or by doing what, could I, with a favoring breeze, waft from afar to thee, where thy couch [of death] holds thee, a light equal to darkness? But nevertheless, a glorious dirge for the patriarchs of Atreus’ line, at all events, is deemed a grateful offering.
CHORUS: My child, the consuming jaws of fire quell not the spirit of the dead, but afterward he shows his wrath. But the dead is bewailed with a funeral moan, and he that wronged him is discovered. A righteous grief for fathers and for parents, stirred up on all sides, investigates the whole.]

[Fagles: ORESTES:
Dear father, father of dread,
What can I do or say to reach you now?
What breath can reach from here
To the bank where you lie moored at anchor?
What light can match your darkness? None,
But there is a kind of grace that comes
When the tears revive a proud old house
And Atreus’ sons, the warlords lost and gone.
/
CHORUS: The ruthless jaws of the fire,
My child, can never tame the dead,
His rage inflames his sons.
Men die and the voices rise, they light the guilty, true—
Cries raised for the fathers, clear and just,
Will hunt their killers harried to the end. ]

[Lattimore: ORESTES:
Father, o my dread father, what thing
Can I say, can I accomplish
From this far place where I stand, to mark
And reach you there in your chamber
With light that will match your dark?
Yet it is called an action
Of grace to mourn in style for the house,
Once great, of the sons of Atreus.
/
CHORUS: Child, when the fire burns
And tears with teeth at the dead man
It can not wear out the heart of will.
He shows his wrath in the after-
Days. One dies, and is dirged.
Light falls on the man who killed him.
He is hunted down by the deathsong
For sires slain and for fathers,
Disturbed, and stern, and enormous.]

CHORUS: Single Strophe: (in response to Electra’s and
Orestes’ wish that their father had the chance to die
honorably at Troy)
Ah! daughter, your wish is better than gold,
Bigger than bliss north of the wind,
Voiced because your wishing is easy.
But wait: the crack of this dual stroke
Already resounds to your champions under
The ground and hands of the rulers are rotten;
Accursed are these, and now the advantage
Grows on the side of the children.

[Buckley: CHORUS: These things of which thou speakest, my child, are more precious than gold, and surpassing e’en Hyperborean happiness, for thou art in anguish. But [enough], for the clang of this double scourge comes upon me: the protectors of these [children] are already beneath the earth: but the hands of the odious pair that rule are polluted; on their children too it hath fallen heavier.]

[Fagles: CHORUS:
You are dreaming, children,
Dreams dearer than gold, more blessed
Than the Blest beyond the Northwind’s raging.
Dreams are easy, oh,
But the double lash is striking home.
Now our comrades group undergroud.
Our masters’ reeking hands are doomed—
The children take the day!]

[Lattimore: CHORUS:
Child, child, you are dreaming, since dreaming is a light
Pastime, of fortune more than gold
Or the Blessed Ones north of the North Wind.
But the stroke of the twofold lash is pounding
Close, and powers gather under ground
To give aid. The hands of those who are lords
Are unclean, and these are accursed.
Power grows on the side of the children.]

CHORUS: Antistrophe 6:
And he was mangled—if you must know.
As she maimed, so she buried him;
Keen to consummate a violence
More than your young life could bear:
A father mutilated—listen to it.
[The limbs of the murdered person were cut off and dangled under the armpits. This was done in symbol and hope that now he was disabled and powerless to take vengeance.]

CHORUS: Antistrophe 8:
Sink it deep, this tale,
Into your ears, through to your soul’s still fundament.
This is the way things are.
This is the way your zeal must go
To learn the reaches of a rage undampable.

[Buckley: [confused line attribution]
Listening to such things grave them within my bosom, and make my tale pass through thine ears with the leisure step of thin understanding. For these matters some are thus, and others seek thou thyself eagerly to learn. But it becomes thee to enter the lists with unflinching spirit.]

[Fagles: CHORUS: Let it ring in your ears
but let your heart stand firm.
The outrage stands as it stands,
You burn to know the end,
But first be strong, be steel, then down and fight.]

[Lattimore: CHORUS: Let words such as these
drip deep in your ears, but on a quiet heart.
So far all stands as it stands;
What is to come, yourself burn to know.
You must be hard, give no ground, to win home.]

[Harrison: CHORUS: Antistrophe 8:
Yes, let it fire the rage you feel.
Two bouts are lost. The bout to be
Depends upon your fire and steel,
Hot heart, cool head to win bout three.]

Antistrophe 11: In this house a cure—
Not from others or without
But savage on itself—
Can staunch this curse with gore.
Such is the song we sing to the gods below.
/
Single Strophe: Hear us you blessed ones under the ground.
Despatch this prayer, and graciously
Cheer on your children to victory.

ELECTRA: So, though you died, you never yet were dead.
For children are the saving voices of a dead man’s fame.
Like buoyant corks they float the net
And in the deep bear up the flaxen lines.
Please hear us, then.
It is for you these supplications pour.

ORESTES: Yet I must ask—and not outside my course—
How comes it that she sent libations out?
…
CHORUS: My son, I know, for I was there.
It was her dreams.
Shaken by the flitting terrors of the dark,
This godless woman sent these offerings out.

CHORUS: Strophe 1—First Stasimon:
How many terrors the world
Produces of mischief and wonder.
The crotches of the sea-deeps
Swarm with menace and monsters.
And high in the air swing near
The shooting torches.
Creatures that fly, and crawlers;
Tell of them all and the gusty
Rage of whirlwinds.

[Buckley translation: CHORUS:
Full many a dread and grievous horror does the earth nurture, and the arms of the deep teem with monsters hostile to mortals! And there spring forth in mid-air lights hung aloft. Both the creatures that fly and those that crawl, and the gusty rage of hurricanes, one might be able to describe.]

[Lattimore translation: CHORUS:
Numberless, the earth breeds
Dangers, and the sober though of fear.
The bending sea’s arms swarm
With bitter, savage beasts.
Torches blossom to burn along
The high space between ground and sky.
Things fly, and things walk the earth.
Remember too
The storm and wrath of the whirlwind.]

[Harrison translation: CHORUS:
What Earth breeds is appalling.
Monsters rock in the arms of the sea.
Fearful sky-flames flare and fall
Through terrible void territory.]

[Fagles: CHORUS:
Marvels, the Earth breeds many marvels,
Terrible marvels overwhelm us.
The heaving arms of the sea embrace and swarm
With savage life. And high in the no man’s land of night
Torches hang like swords. The hawk on the wing,
The beast astride the fields
Can tell of the whirlwind’s fury roaring strong.]

CHORUS: Strophe 3:
And since I am telling of evils that harrow,
It is timely to speak of that unloved marriage
Haunting a house; and a woman—
Secretive wife who plotted the life
Of a man and a hero in armor;
Of a man who could make his enemies cower.
Give me the hearth of a house which is cold
To assertive conceit; and a meekness of woman.
/
CHORUS: Antistrophe 3:
But the Lemnian horror presides in legend:
Prime, regrettable, odious, painful.
The Lemnian horror became
The pattern and image of every calamity:
The disgrace of the heaven-abhorred
Stroke which removed a tribeful of men.
No one respects what the gods find disgusting…
Is any one of these tales unfair?
/
CHORUS: Strophe 4:
Because of the Right the sword
Is keen-tipped, ready to strike right through
The lungs. For sulely it is not fit
For every sovereign credit of Zeus
To be flouted and trampled under foot.
/
CHORUS: Antistrophe 4:
The anvil of Justice is firm.
Destiny forges and hammers her steel
Already. The famous and pondering Fury
Contributes a son to the house at last
To pay for murders gone stale, and pollution.

[Buckley translation: CHORUS:
And since I have made mention of savage horrors, though unseasonably, [one may also mention] the odious match, execrated by the house, and plots laid by a woman’s mind against an armed warrior, against a warrior for his majesty bitter to his enemies; and I honor the hearth of a household that knows not audacity, and in women an undaring spirit. Of horrors, indeed, that of Lemnos holds the first place in story; and it is deplored in every clime as an abomination, and a man is wont to compare what is dreadful to Lemnian sufferings. And by reason of heaven-detested guilt the race of mortals perishes in infamy; for no one reverses that which is offensive to the gods. Which of these hideous facts do I unreasonably reckon up? But the sword, sharp and bitter, inflicts a wound right through the lungs, driven by the hand of Justice. For the lawless conduct of him that hath lawlessly trespassed against every awful attribute of Jupiter, is not trampled under foot on the ground. But the base of Justice is planted firm; and Fate, that forges the sword, prepares it for the deed, and brings into the house a new offering of ancient murders, and time-honored Erinnys avenges the stain.]

[Lattimore translation: CHORUS:
Since I recall cruelties from quarrels long
Ago, in vain, and married love turned to bitterness
A house would fend far away
By curse; the guile, treacheries of the woman’s heart
Against a lord armored in
Power, a lord his enemies revered,
I prize the hearth not inflamed within the house,
The woman’s right pushed not into daring.
/
Of all foul things the legends tell the Lemnian
Outranks, a vile wizard’s charm, detestable
So that man names a hideous
Crime “Lemnian” in memory of their wickedness.
When once the gods loathe a breed
Of men they go outcast and forgotten.
No man respects what the gods have turned against.
What of these tales I gather has no meaning?
/
The sword edges near the lungs.
It stabs deep, bittersharp,
And right drives it. For that which had no right
Lies not yet stamped into the ground, although
One in sin and transgressed Zeus’ majesty.
/
Right’s anvil stands staunch on the ground
And the smith, Destiny, hammers out of the sword.
Delayed in glory, pensive from
The murk, Vengeance brings home at last
A child, to wipe out the stain of blood shed long ago.]

[Fagles translation : CHORUS:
Now that I call to mind old wounds that never heal—
Stop, it’s time for the wedded love-in-hate,
For the curse of the halls,
The woman’s brazen cunning
Bend on her lord in arms,
Her warlord’s power—
Do you respect such things?
I prize the hearthstone warmed by faith
a woman’s temper nothing bends to outrage.
/
First at the head of legendary crime stands Lemnos.
People shudder and moan, and can’t forget—
Each new horror that comes
We call hells of Lemnos.
Loathed by the gods for guilt,
Cast off by men, disgraced, their line dies out.
Who could respect what god detests?
What of these tales have I not picked with justice?
/
The sword’s at the lungs!—it stabs deep,
The edge cuts through
And Justice drives it—Outrage still lives on,
Not trodden to pieces underfoot, not yet,
Though the laws lie trampled down,
The majesty of Zeus.
/
The anvil of Justice stands fast
And Fate beats out her sword.
Tempered for glory, a child will wipe clean
The inveterate stain of blood shed long ago—
Fury brings him home at last,
The brooding mother Fury! ]

[Harrison translation: CHORUS
This bloodclan too. A bedbond void
Of love by which a man’s destroyed.
/
The plot against your manlord’s life,
You the cunning killer wife.
/
Against a man his enemies revered
And all his spear-foes justly feared.
/
You prized a fireless hearth instead
A spearless she-man in your bed.
/
LEMNOS! Its very name is vile
Clytemnestra should have been
Of that murderous and manless isle
The killer queen.
/
Queen of women who wield knives
Of slaughtered husband’s sword.
The Lemnos husband-killing wives.
LEMNOS—name to be abhorred.
/
The swordpoint pricks against the skin
Ready to be driven in.
/
Bloodright pushes at the hilt
To broach the gory springs of guilt.
/
The transgressors, those who trod
Down the laws of ZEUS, high he-god.
/
Bloodright’s the whetstone where fate whets
The blades demanding old blood-debts.
/
Bloodgrudge leads the son at last
To purge the bloodspill of the past.]

CHORUS and CILISSA
CH: And how did she tell him to come? Prepared?
CI: Prepared? What? Please repeat the question for me.
CH: I mean, with guards? Or altogether unattended?
CI: She said: “Bring your bodyguard, and armed.”
CH: No: don’t tell our hated master that.
Just tell him to bring himself,
Cheerfully and quickly.
He mustn’t be alarmed… Ha! The messenger
Straightening out the message!

CHORUS: Antistrophe 2:
May Mercury, son of Maia,
Send the support for the right he outgh,
Since nobody better than he
Can waft a fair wind when he will.
All that lies secret he can make plain.
He utters his mystic word;
Mantles our eyes with the darkness of night;
Keeps mystery there in the day.

[Buckley translation: CHORUS:
May Maia’s most propitious son also, willing him an auspicious issue, rightfully take up the case. Many other mysterious things too will he develop if he be willing; and uttering obscure language, both by night he brings darkness before the eyes, and in the daytime he is nought clearer.]

[Harrison translation: CHORUS:
HERMES, guile-god, if you choose,
Those you champion can’t lose.
/
You blind their opponents so
They can’t see the coming blow.
/
Those you help see through the dark
And shoot their weapons at the mark.]

[Lattimore translation: CHORUS:
And with right may the son
Of Maia lend his hand, strong to send
Wind fair for action, if he will.
Much else lies secret he may show at need.
He speaks the markless word, by
Night hoods darkness on the eyes
Nor shows more plainly when the day is there.]

[Fagles translation: CHORUS:
And lend a hand and scheme
For the rights, my Hermes, help us,
Sail the action on with all your breath.
Reveal what’s hidden, please,
Or say a baffling word
In the night and blind men’s eyes—
When the morning comes your word is just as dark.]

ORESTES, CLYTEMNESTRA, PYLADES
OR: You’re the one I’m looking for. This wretch has had enough.
CL: Oh, no! Aegisthus dead?... you my strong beloved?
OR: You love that man? Then in the same grave with him you’ll lie:
Faithful unto death and ever afterwards.
CL: Wait, son, wait. My baby, soften
Towards this bosom where so many times
You went to sleep, with little gums
Fumbling at the milk which sweetly made you grow.
OR: Pylades, what shall I do? Weaken and not kill my mother?
PY: Then what becomes of the oracles Apollo spoke,
Those oracles at Pythia,
And all our solemn oaths?
Make the world your enemy but not the gods.
OR: Your word wins. It is good advice. [Turns on his mother]
Come here. I’ll drop you slaughtered by his side.
You thought him finer than my father while he lived.
Go then: sleep with him in death.
You love this man and hate the one you ought to love.
CL: I reared you up from babyhood. Oh, let me then grow old with you.
OR: What! Slay my father—then come sharing homes with me?
CL: Fate, my son, is half to blame for that.
OR: Then Fate arranges for your dying now.
CL: Son, does a parent’s curse mean nothing to you?
OR: Not a thing. You gave me birth, then flung me out—to misery.
CL: No, no—into a friend’s house. Is that to fling?
OR: Shamefully sold. A freeborn father’s son.
CL: Oh? Then where is the price I got for you?
OR: That, in public, I should blush to say.
CL: Then blush as well for those senseless things your father did.
OR: Do not taunt him. You sat at home. He toiled.

ORESTES: But this woman—this plotter who upset her man,
By whom she carried children underneath her zone,
Once joyous weight and now proved bitter load—
What does she seem to you?
Some deadly moray, some adder-born,
Whose touch would shrivel long before her bite
By very force of poison in the will.

[Buckley translation: ORESTES:
But she who plotted this detestable deed against a husband, from whom she had been wont to bear the burden of children beneath her zone—a burden once dear, but now, as is plain, a hostile ill—what thinkest thou? Assuredly she was a conger, or a viper, that could canker by a touch one who had not suffered from her bite, by reason of her daring and unrighteous spirit; ]

[Fagles translation: ORESTES:
But she who plotted this horror against her husband,
She carried his children, growing in her womb
And she—I loved her once
And now I loathe, I have to loathe—
What is she?
Some moray eel, some viper born to rot her mate
With a single touch, no fang to strike him,
Just the wrong, the reckless fury in her heart!]

[Lattimore translation: ORESTES:
But she, who plotted this foul death against the man
By whom she carried the weight of children underneath
Her zone, burden once loved, shown hard and hateful now,
What does she seem to be? Some water snake, some viper
Whose touch is rot even to him who felt no fang
Strike, by that brutal and wrong daring in her heart.]

[Harrison translation: ORESTES:
What of her who hatched this horror up for her husband,
Whose children she carried under her girdle,
A burden apparently loved but really abhorrent,
What about her? If she’d been shark-hag or viper
Just the mere feel of her, without any fang-marks
Would turn her poor victim purple with poison,
Make him all stiff and all swollen with blood.
Her spirit alone spurts out putrefaction.]


The Eumenides

THE PYTHIA:
These are the gods fixed in the prelude of my prayer;
With words of praise for Pallas-of-the-Holies too,
And worship for the nymphs where the hollow rock
Of Corycis is bird-loud, loved
By deities that haunt.

[Buckley translation: THE PYTHIA:
To these deities I prelude my address with prayers. And Pronaean Pallas is celebrated in story. And I venerate the nymphs, where is the Corician hollow grot, bird-loved, the haunt of Deities.]

[Fagles translation: THE PYTHIA:
But Athena at the Forefront of the Temple crowns my stories.
I revere the nymphs who keep the Corycian rock’s deep hollows,
Loving haunt of birds where the spirits drift and hover.]

[Lattimore translation: THE PYTHIA:
These are the gods I set in the proem of my prayer.
But Pallas-before-the-temple has her right in all
I say. I worship the nymphs where the Corycian rock
Is hollowed inward, haunt of birds and paced by gods.]

[Harrison translation: THE PYTHIA:
Next Pallas Athene who stands before god-shrines.
I honour the nymphs in the Corycian caverns
Hollow, where birds swoop, patrol place of spirits.]

THE PYTHIA: Oh, horrible to tell about—horrible to see!
Things that hurl me back again from Loxias’ domain,
Too weak to walk or stand;
Scurrying on my hands with legs gone dumb.
An old woman in a panic is nothing but a child.
/
I was on my way
To the deep garland-heavy shrine,
When there I see a man in God’s disgrace
Upon the center-stone:
Sitting where the contrite sit,
Hands oozing blood,
Sword fresh-drawn, long olive branch
Piously, enormously, bedecked with wool
As white as fleece and piercing as I saw it.
And before that man:
The weirdest troupe of women
Lolling on their seats asleep—
Oh no, not women, Gorgons, surely!
Or not Gorgons even but shapes like…
Like once I saw in pictures—
Carrying off the feast of Phineus—
Only, these I saw were wingless, black,
Absolute in their mephitic deadliness:
Snoring and blowing disgustingly,
With cess of droopings leaking from their eyes; their dress
Not fit to wear before the idols of the gods
Nor any human home.
I have not seen what race could spawn
Such clots as these, nor any earth
That could be proud of such a breed
And not groan out in hurt and sorrow.

[Buckley: THE PYTHIA: Certainly tings dreadful to tell, and dreadful to behold with eyes have sent me back from the abodes of Loxias, so that I neither have strength, nor can uplift my steps: but I run with my hands, not by swiftness of legs; for an affrightened old woman is nothing, like a child [in strength]. I creep, indeed, towards the shrine of many garlands, and I behold at the marble navel stone a man under the curse of god, sitting as a suppliant, with his hands dripping with blood, and holding a newly-drawn sword, and a high-grown branch of olive, for so I will clearly declare. But before this man a wondrous troop of women sleeps seated in the seats; by no means women, but Gorgons I call them; nor again will I liken them to Gorgon forms, [for] I have seen once on a time [the Harpies] painted, carrying off the food of Phineus; but these are wingless to behold, and black, abominable in kind. And they snore with breathings not to be approached, and form their eyes they distill hateful violence. And their dress is fit to wear neither at the images of gods, nor within the dwellings of men. I have not beheld the tribe of this sisterhood; nor [do I know] what land can boast of having nourished this face with impunity, so as not to groan on account of its troubles.]


[Fagles: THE PYTHIA: Terrors—
terrors to tell, terrors all can see!—
they send me reeling back from Apollo’s house.
The strength drains, it’s hard to stand,
Crawling on all fours, no spring in the legs…
An old woman, gripped by fear, is nothing,
A child, nothing more.
[Struggling to her fee, trying to compose herself.]
I’m on my way to the vault,
It’s green with wreaths, and there at the Navelstone
I see a man—an abomination to god—
He holds dripping blood, and his sword just drawn,
And he holds a branch (it must have topped an olive)
Wreathed with a fine tuft of wool, all piety,
Fleece gleaming white. So far it’s clear, I tell you.
But there in a ring around the man, an amazing company—
Women, sleeping, nestling against the benches…
Not women, no,
Gorgons I’d cal them; but then with Gorgons
You’d see the grim, inhuman…
I saw a picture
Years ago, the creatures tearing the feast
Away from Phineus—
These have no wings,
I looked. But black they are, and so repulsive.
Their heavy, rasping breathing makes me cringe.
And their eyes ooze a discharge, sickening,
And what they wear—to flaunt that at the gods,
The idols, sacrilege! Even in the homes of men.
The tribe that produced that brood I never saw,
Or a plot of ground to boast it nursed their kind
Without some pain and tears for all its labor.]

[Lattimore translation: THE PYTHIA:
Things terrible to tell and for the eyes to see
Terrible drove me out again from Loxias’ house
So that I have no strength and cannot stand on springing
Feet, but run with hands’ help and my legs have no speed.
An old woman afraid is nothing: a child, no more.
See, I am on my way to the wreath-hung recess
And on the centrestone I see a man with god’s
Defilement on him postured in the suppliant’s seat
With blood dripping from his hands and from a new-drawn sword,
Holding too a branch that had grown high on an olive
Tree, decorously wrapped in a great tuft of wool,
And the fleece shone. So far, at least, I can speak clear.
In front of this man slept a startling company
Of women laying all upon the chairs. Or not
Women, I think I call them rather gorgons, only
Not gorgons either, since their shape is not the same.
I saw some creatures painted in a picture once,
Who tore the food from Phineus, only these had no
Wings, that could be seen; they are black and utterly
Repulsive, and they snore with breath that drives one back.
From their eyes drips the foul ooze, and their dress is such
As is not right to wear in the presence of the gods’
Statues, not even into any human house.
I have never seen the tribe that owns this company
Nor know what piece of earth can claim with pride it bore
Such brood, and without hurt and tears for labor given.]


[Harrison translation: THE PYTHIA:
Terribel things to clap mortal eyes on
Have made me bolt out of the house of Apollo.
Sapped of all strength my feet can’t support me.
I scrabble on all fours. My legs have gone liquid.
A scared old woman crawling, worse than a baby.
/
Entering the innermost shrine with its garlands
I set eyes on a man at the shrine’s central stone,
An abomination to gods in the suppliant’s seat.
His hands dripped blood. He had his drawn sword out.
He held an olive-branch tipped with white wool tufts.
In front of this person, a strange group of she-hags
Sighing and snorting, asleep on the thronestools.
Not women really, but more like the Gorgons.
I call them Gorgons but they weren’t that exactly.
I once saw a picture of Harpiae, Graspers,
Unflaggingly swooping on Phineus the Thracian,
Keeping the blind king in perpetual tension,
Filched his food off him or left it beshitten,
Splattered their bat-bowels over his platters
And kept him terror-stricken and starving.
These were black like Harpiae but they were wingless.
The snorts from their nostrils would keep you a mile off.
Their eye-sockets glued with sickening ooze-clots.
Their grave-garb’s all wrong for the statues of godheads
Nor would it seem right in the houses of mortals.
Don’t know what brute-clan this brood belongs to,
What region would want to boast that it bred them
And didn’t wish now that their birth had been aborted.]

APOLLO: But you must still go fleeing
And not grow faint of heart;
For they will chase your roaming footfall far
Over the steppes and constant
Across the oceans even
To sea-enswirling cities.
So leave the though behind
Or tire before your time;
But when you touch upon the town of Pallas,
Sit down and hug in your hands her ancient effigy.
For there’ll be judges there of this
And words to charm; and we shall find a means—
An absolute release for you from all this strife:
For I it was who told you to take your mother’s life.

[Apollo disappears. Orestes departs led by Hermes. The Ghost of Clytemnestra rises from the ground.]
CLYTEMNESTRA:
Go on! Go sleeping on! We just need sleepers, eh?
So you can make this fool of me among other dead—
Among the shades where I (because of those I killed)
Am a reproach that never stops wandering in my shame.
Oh, I tell you, in their eyes—most heinously—
I am the one to blame.
Yet even this absurd suffering from my own
Makes not a single deity excite himself for me,
Cut down though I am by a mother-killing son.
/
See these gashes here—into my heart—from where?
Surely in sleep your eyes can see it plain,
Where the daylight blaze is dark for man’s concern.
You’ve sucked up quite a goodly deal from me:
With your wineless oblations, thin appeasements,
And those dead-of-nightly dinners
Grilled by me in fore and sacrifice
At an hour no god shared.
All under food now, I see.
All trodden down;
While he skips off, is gone, just like a fawn:
Yes, leaps out lightly from your midst
With a merry bleat of laughter.
/
Listen to me pleading for my soul.
Awake and think, you goddesses of deep below;
For only in your dreams now is Clytemnestra calling.
[The Chorus stirs, whimpering and muttering in sleep]
Oh, whine away! The man is gone, fled far.
His friends are not at all like mine.

[Buckley translation: CLYTEMNESTRA: Sleep on, will ye? And what need is there of sleepers? But I thus dishonoured by you among the other dead, because I was a slayer, reproach among the dead ceases not: and in disgrace I wander, and I declare to you that I have the greatest reproach from those. But having suffered thus dreadful things from those most dear, none of the deities is enraged on account of me, slaughtered by matricidal hands. Behold these blows on thee, my heart; for the slumbering mind is keen in its eyes, but during day the fate of mortals can not foresee futurity. Full oftentimes have ye tasted of my offerings, both wineless libations, temperate soothing gifts, and I have offered at the hearth of fire nightly solemn feasts at an hour common to none of the gods. and all these things I behold trampled under the heel. But he is gone having escaped like a fawn, and moreover lightly has he rushed from the midst of the toils, having greatly laughed at you. Hear what I have said in behalf of my soul, O goddesses beneath the earth: for I Clytemnestra, a dream now call upon you. Snore on, but the man is gone flying afar: for the gods of supplication are friendly to my relatives, not me.]

[Fagles translation: CLYTEMNESTA:
So, you can sleep…
Awake, awake—what use are sleepers now?
I go shorn of honor, thanks to you,
Alone among the dead. And of those I killed
The charges of the dead will never cease, never—
I wander in disgrace, I feel the guilt, I tell you,
Enormous gilt from all the outraged dead!
/
But I suffered too, terribly, from dear ones,
And none of my spirits rages to avenge me.
I was slaughtered by his matricidal hand.
See these gashes—
[Seizing one of the Furies weak with sleep.]
Carve them in your senses.
/
The sleeping brain has eyes that give us light;
We can never see our destiny by day.
/
And after all my libations…how you lapped
The honey, the sober offerings poured to soothe you,
Awesome midnight feasts I burned at the hearthfire,
Your dread hour never shared with gods.
All those rites, I see them trampled down.
And he springs free like a fawn, one light leap
At that—he’s through the thick of your nets,
He breaks away!
Mocking laughter twists across his face.
Hear me, I am pleading for my life.
Awake, my Furies, goddesses of the Earth!
A dream is calling—Clytemnestra calls you now.
[The Furies mutter in their sleep.]
Mutter on. Your man is gone, fled far away.
My kin has friends to defend him, not like mine.]

[Lattimore translation: CLYTEMNESTRA:
You would sleep, then? And what use are you, if you sleep?
It is because of you I go dishonoured thus
Among the rest of the dead. Because of those I killed
My bad name among the perished suffered no eclipse
But I am driven in disgrace. I say to you
That I am charged with guilt most grave by these. And yet
I suffered too, horribly, and from those most dear,
Yet none among the powers is angered for my sake
That I was slaughtered, and by matricidal hands.
Look at these gashes in my heart, think where they came
From. Eyes illuminate the sleeping brain,
But in the daylight man’s future cannot be seen.
Yet I have given you much to lap up, outpourings
Without wine, sober propitiations, sacrificed
In secrecy of night and on a hearth of fire
For you, at an hour given to no other god.
Now I watch all these honors trampled into the ground,
And he is out and gone away like any fawn
So lightly, from the very middle of your nets,
Sprung clear, and laughing merrily at you. Hear me.
It is my life depends upon this spoken plea.
Think then, o goddesses beneath the ground. For I,
The dream of Clytemnestra, call upon your name.
[The Furies stir in their sleep and whimper]
Oh, whimper, then, but your man has got away and gone
Far. He has friends to help him, who are not like mine.]

[Harrison translation: CLYTEMNESTRA:
You’re supposed to be Furies and I find you sleeping!
When Furies need naps they’re no longer Furies.
Dishonoured, defamed by the dead that I dwell with,
I walk underground through a gauntlet of ghost-cries,
Catcalls that brand my phantom with blood-guilt.
Slaughtered through I was by the hand of my he-child
Not one spirit’s incensed at the sore fate I’ve suffered.
Look here at my heart with hackmarks all over.
Remember too all those midnight libations,
Not winebowls, but liquor much redder and thicker,
Poured at the house when there’s only you stirring
While mortals are sleeping, gods in god-spaces.
But you trample and spurn all my spendthrift libations.
He’s given you the slip the quarry you’re hunting
Like a nimble deer clearing the spread of your net-mesh
Belling his beast-taunts as he bounds off for freedom.
Listen! It’s for my after-life that I’m pleading.
Wake up, she-gods of underneath spaces.
The Clytemnestra you’re dreaming calls you from sleep.
[Furies are heard within moaning in their sleep.]
O make your cow noises! Your quarry’s escaped.
He’s luck in his friends. At least they aren’t Furies.]

CLYTEMNESTRA:
Oh, breathe upon him with that butchery breath of yours.
Shrivel him to ash from your smoking burning bowels.
Off at him again. Pursue him to the bone.

Strophe 1: Oh, curse it! Curse it, sisters:
We have been betrayed.
And after all I’ve suffered,
All of it in vain.
Oh, yes! Oh, yes, we’ve suffered
Though a deal of pain,
Of hellish pain.
He’s slipped out from our noose,
Our beast he’s got away.
We lose ourselves in sleep,
And lost our prey.

APOLLO: Out, I say from here.
Leave this edifice at once.
Get off and gone from my prophetic holy place,
Or feel the strike of a winged and coruscating snake
Whipped from my golden bow,
To make you froth away your life in spasms
Of black and man-drawn bile—
Spewing out your clotted human suckings.
/
This is no fitting residence for you to board.
Yours is a place of sentences:
Where heads are chopped, eyes gouged, throats cut,
And seed is crushed from striplings spoiled in flower.
Yes, a place of mutilations, stonings—
Helpless wailings long drawn out
From men pinned through the spine.
/
Do you want to know what turns the stomachs of the Gods?
Those feasts you find so charming.
Your whole shape and mien give you away.
Freaks like you should make their hole
Deep in some blood-beslobbered lion’s den
And not come rubbing off their filth
On those beside these sacred mantic spots.
/
Get gone, you goatish rabble with no goatherd:
No god’s love is long on such a flock.

[Buckley translation: APOLLO: Out, I bid you depart with speed from these abodes; begone from the prophetic shrines, lest even having received the winged swift snake, hurled from the golden string, you send forth through pain the black foam [sucked] from men, vomiting the clots of gore which you have drawn. By no means is it fitting to approach these abodes, but where there are head-cutting, eye-digging revenges and slaughters, and the vigor of boys is injured, and destruction of the seed, and maiming, and stoning, [and where] those impaled by the spine groan with much wailing. Hear, you abhorred by the gods, of what a feast you have the delight? But the whole fashion of your of the blood-sucking lion, not to tarry in these oracular seats, an abomination to the neighbors. Begone, you who feed without a keeper; but none of the gods has regard for such a herd.]

[Falges translation: APOLLO:
Out, I tell you out of these halls—Fast,
Set the Prophet’s chamber free!
[Seizing one fo the Furies, shaking an arrow across her face.]
Or take
The flash and stab of this, this flying viper
Shot from the longbow’s golden cord strung taut!
/
Heave in torment, black froth erupting from your lungs,
Vomit the clots of all the murders your have drained.
But never touch my falls, you have no right.
/
Go where heads are severed, eyes gouged out,
Where Justice and bloody slaughter are the same…
Castrations, wasted seed, young men’s glories butchered,
Extremities maimed, and huge stones at the chest,
And the victims wail for pity—
Spikes inching up the spine, torsos stuck on spikes.
[The Furies close in on him.]
So, you hear your love east, yearn to have it all?
You revolt the gods. Your look,
Your whole regalia gives you away—your kind
Should infest a lion’s cavern reeking blood.
But never rub your filth on the Prophet’s shrine.
Out, you flock without a herdsman—out!
No god will ever shepherd you with love.]

[Lattimore translation: APOLLO:
Get out, I tell you, go and leave this house. Away
In haste, from your presence set the mantic chamber free,
Else you may feel the flash and bite of a flying snake
Launched from the twisted thong of gold that spans my bow
To make you in your pain spew out the black and foaming
Blood of men, vomit the clots sucked from their veins.
This house is no right place for such as you to cling
Upon; but where, by judgment given, heads are lopped
And eyes gouged out, throats cut, and by the spoil of sex
The glory of young boys is defeated, where mutilation
Lives, and stoning, and the long moan of tortured men
Spiked underneath the spine and stuck on pales. Listen
To how the gods spit out the manner of that feast
Your loves lean to. The whole cast of your shape is guide
To what you are, the like of whom should hole in the cave
Of the blood-reeking lion, not in oracular
Interiors, like mine nearby, wipe off your filth.
Out then, you flock of goats without a herdsman, since
No god has such affection as to tend this brood.]

[Harrison translation: APOLLO:
Get out! Get out! Out you go! Out you go!
Leave the prophet’s earthcleft free of pollution
Or a serpent with wings on and venomous fangbane
Shot from gold bowstrings will go through your gutbag!
You’ll spew up black salver of gobbled up goreswill,
Gore-clots your crones’ gobs sucked out of corpses.
Not a finger of yours should befoul my own hearth-fane.
You belong where heads go splat off the hackblock,
Eyes get gouged out and lugged from their sockets,
Where bloodright’s castrations, boys’ ballocks battered,
Men spitted on stakespikes screaming for mercy.
Your bat-snouts go snorting in society’s bloodtroughs.
It’s the food you get fat on makes you hated by he-gods.
All your appearance says blood food and filth baths.
You hags should live in the beast dens in jungles,
Dark lairs all larded with shit and chewed gristle,
Not here, contagious to all you come to.
Get out! Out you go! You goats with no goatherd!]

CHORUS: Murderers of mothers we harry form their homes.
APOLLO: Then what about a woman who undermines her man?
CHORUS: Such a killing does not count as blood of kin.
APOLLO: How you heap contempt upon—make cheap—
Hera’s consummated pact with Zeus.
Aphrodite too such logic brushes off, condemns—
The source of mankind’s sweetest joys.
Love in marriage is a holy state between a man and woman:
Stronger than an oath, sentineled by Right.
And if one slays the other and you be lax,
Not flash in anger on them,
I’ll never for a moment say you are not wrong
To hunt Orestes down.

CHORUS: But that may not be:
A mother’s blood once spilt
Is passed recall.
Oh, that flood on the floor
Has gushed and gone!
/
In requisite I’ll suck
Your limbs alive
Of scarlet chrism;
And you must let me.
/
Oh, to feed on you—
You grisly elixir!
And when I’ve sucked you limp
I’ll drag you down
Below to pay
A murdered mother’s pains.

CHORUS: Not Apollo, not all Athena’s power,
Can snatch you from abandonment and ruin:
A spirit absolutely ignorant of joy—
Bloodless fodder for the demons; and a shade.
[The Furies wait for some response]
What! Won’t you answer?
Not repudiate these words of mine?
Sweet victim fattened for me!
Banquet all alive—oblated at no altar!...
Then listen spellbound to this song.
[The Furies begin to dance and sing in a weird measure]
[First Stasimon] Come, link hands and join the dance
of hate in the canticle
blasted by us with the best of intent
to give you a lesson on how the lots
are issued to men by our committee.
Oh, we’re so fair
So very proper!

[Buckley translation: CHORUS: By no means shall Apollo, or the might of Minerva set you free, so as not to perish neglected, not having learned where in your mind to rejoice, the bloodless food of demons a shadow. Dost thou not reply, but dost thou disdain my words, thou who art both nourished for, and devoted to me? And alive you shall feed me, not slain at the altar, and you shall hear this hymn that charms you. Come then, let us also join the dance, since it has seemed good to us to pour forth the hated song, and to declare how our band distributes its lots among men; and we delight in being upright [ministers] of justice.]

[Fagles translation: LEADER: Never—neither
Apollo’s nor Athena’s strength can save you.
Down you go, abandoned,
Searching your soul for joy but joy is gone.
Bled white, gnawed by demons, a husk, a wraith—
[She breaks off, waiting for reply, but Orestes prays in silence]
No reply? You spit my challenge back?
You’ll feast me alive, my fatted calf,
Not cut on the altar first. Now hear my spell,
The chains of song I sing to bind you tight.
FURIES: Come, Furies, dance!—
Link arms for the dancing hand-to-hand
Now we long to reveal our art,
Our terror, now to declare our right
To steer the lives of men,
We all conspire, we dance! We are
The just and upright, we maintain.]

[Lattimore translation: CHORUS:
Neither Apollo nor Athene’s strength must win
You free, save you from going down forgotten, without
Knowing where joy lies anywhere inside your heart,
Blood drained, chewed dry by the powers of death, a wraith, a shell.
You will not speak to answer, spew my challenge away?
You are consecrate to me and fattened for my feast,
And you shall feed me while you live, not cut down first
At the altar. Hear the spell I sing to bind you in.
/
Come then, link we our choral. Ours
To show forth the power
And terror of our music, declare
Our rights of office, how we conspire
To steer men’s lives.
We hold we are straight and just.]

[Harrison translation: CHORUS:
Neither the power of Apollo, nor the power of Athena
Can save you from perishing spurned and abandoned,
Even forgetting that joy had a meaning,
Broached of blood, banqueted on, flesh pod, shadow,
A shriveled up fruitfind squeezed dry of its juices.
Won’t answer! Spits what we say back in our faces!
Our little sacrifice all ready for slicing!
No need of godstones, we’ll eat you still living.
It will swaddle you helpless, our ‘lullaby’ listen—
/
She-kin, show our force, Join hands!
Dance the doom-dance steps, display
Through our grim music that our band’s
A power over men that gets its way:
/
Our mission’s bloodright, we’re not sent
Ever to harm the innocent.]

Strophe 2:
This was the settlement made us—our lot when begot:
Hands off Immortals and no collocations of banquets;
Nothing in common and nothing at all of the whiteness
They wear on their feast days:
The staggering whiteness.

[Buckley translation: CHORUS: This lot was assigned to us at our birth: to keep our hands from the immortals, nor is there any common feeder with us; and of white garments am I ever destitute and devoid.]

[Fagles translation: CHORUS:
Even by birth, I say, our rights were so ordained.
The deathless gods must keep their hands far off,
No god may share our cups, our solemn feasts.
From all part in their pure white robes the Fates
That gave us power have kept us free.]

[Lattimore translation: CHORUS:
When we were born such lots were assigned for our keeping.
So the immortals must hold hands off, nor is there
One who shall sit at our feasting.
For sheer white robes I have no right and no portion.]

[Harrison translation: CHORUS:
When we came into being, they were marked out, the confines.
We and the Olympians have no intimate contacts.
Food’s offered to either but not to both together.
We don’t wear white robes, they don’t wear black ones.]

Strophe 4: Dishonored, despised, we do
Our duty (though barred from the gods
With a sunless torch) : to roughen the road
For eyes that are dark and that see.

[Buckley translation: CHORUS: …executing an office ignoble and unhonored, apart from gods with a sunless torch, in a way alike difficult to be trodden by those who see and by the blind.]

[Falges translation: CHORUS:
disgraced, degraded, drive our powers through;
banished far from god to a sunless, torchlit dusk,
we drive men through their rugged passage,
blinded dead and those who see by day.]

[Lattimore translation: CHORUS: …spurned, outcast
from gods, driven apart to stand in light
not of the sun. So sheer with rock are ways
for those who see, as upon those whose eyes are lost.]

[Harrison translation: CHORUS:
We’re despised, we’re rejected. The light we work by
Is nothing like sunshine. Sharp and sheer-sided
Our tracks are a peril to blind and to sighted.]

ATHENA: Who in the world are you? The lot of you, I mean?
This stranger sitting at my statue’s feet?
And you—you spawn of race unclassified,
Unglimpsed among the goddesses by gods,
Not even stamped from any human mold?...
But no, it is not fair to be unkind
In the presence of a freak—
Fairness stands aloof.
CHORUS: Daughter of Zeus, you shall hear it all in brief:
We are the dismal children of the Night—
Called curses in the deep abodes beneath.
ATHENA: A race I know: oh, names notorious!

ATHENA: You truly want to lay the case with me?
CHORUS: Why not? From noble lineage cherish noble law.
ATHENA: [turning to Orestes] Stranger, your turn now:
And what have you to say?
Tell me first your country, race and fortunes;
Then defend yourself against this charge—
If you really think your case is sound,
Which makes you sit here by my hearth and hug my form:
A dedicated penitent like Ixion.
Give me some assurance of these things.
ORESTES: Sovereign Athena,
First from your last words
I would remove a mighty slur:
I am no contaminated suppliant
Clinging to your effigy with dirty hands.
I’ll give you proof of this—a weighty proof.
/
The man of blood keeps mute, the canons say,
Until he is sprinkled with a yeanling sacrificed
By one who is fit to was his blood away.
Victims and running streams,
These rites at other seats I have fulfilled:
This care at least I clear from off our way.

ATHENA: Yet, these women have a work we cannot slight
And if they fail to be victorious in this,
The poison of their disappointment afterwards
Will drop infection on the ground
And blight our earth with everlasting plague.

Antistrophe 2: There is a time for fear
To sit inside the will;
To guard and there preside.
Oh, it is good
To groan and so be wise.
/
How might a man not trained
In fear of heart—a man
Or city too—still learn
Respect for Righteousness?
/
Strophe 3: The life which has no law,
The life which is a slave’s,
Be far from praise.

ORESTES and CHORUS
OR: I say: I took my sword and ran her through the throat.
CH: On whose suggestion? Who planned the thing?
OR: The selfsame prophet-god. He’ll answer for me.
CH: What! A god and a prophet prompt to matricide?
OR: Yes. And to this moment I do not blame my lot.
CH: Ah! when the sentence grips you, you’ll change your tone.
OR: I am confident. My father’ll send his help beyond the grave.
CH: So—kill a mother, all to trust a corpse!
OR: I do. She smeared herself twice over with her sin.
CH: Precisely how? Please tell the judges that.
OR: The stroke that slayed her husband felled my father.
CH: She paid for it and died: you still live.
OR: But when she lived why didn’t you pursue and pounce?
CH: Because she was not one blood with the man she killed.

APOLLO: Such is justice at its strongest—mark it well.
I am asking you to bow before the Father’s will.
No oath exists more binding-strong than Zeus.
CHORUS: So Zeus, you say, was prompter of this oracle,
Bidding this man Orestes to avenge his father’s blood
By ignoring every scrap of honor to his mother?

CHORUS: Zeus, you say, puts greater stock upon a father’s end,
Yet he himself put chain on his old father, Cronus.
How does this not contradict?
I call upon the court to witness.

[The Jurors drop their ballots one by one into the two urns, either of bronze for acquittal, or of wood for condemnation]
CHORUS: I advise you not to disregard our sisterhood:
We can be a heavy load upon your land.
APOLLO: And my oracles—which are those of Zeus—I ask you:
Do not ignore or make them fruitless.
CHORUS: Oh, you and your concern with blood beyond your business!
The prophecies you prophecy are tainted now.
APOLLO: So my Father made an error in his judgment
When Ixion, first murderer, appealed to him?
CHORUS: You talk. But if I fail to win my cause
I shall come back and haunt this land.
APOLLO: You are of no consequence either among the elder
Or the younger gods… I shall win.

ATHENA: My business is to close the case:
My own vote goes in favor of Orestes.
/
No mother ever gave me birth:
I am unreservedly for male in everything
Save marrying one—
Enthusiastically on my father’s sid.e

CHORUS: Strophe 1:
Curse on you upstart gods who have ridden
Down immemorial laws and filched them
Clean from my fingers. Abused, disappointed,
Raging I come—oh, shall come!—
And drip from my heart
A hurt on your soil, a contagion,
A culture, a canker:
Leafless and childless Revenge
Rushing like wildfire over the lowlands,
Smearing its death-pus on the mortals and meadows.
/
Shall I cry—oh, cry for the future?
Mocked by these burghers!
Insufferably worsted!
Bitter Night’s daughters, immensely
Dishonored and saddened.
ATHENA: Let me persuade you not to break your heart so:
You were not beaten; the votes were only even;
All fell fair and no disgrace to you.
…
I pledge to you in absolute good faith
A cavernous deep place—your rightly promised land.
There you shall sit by hearths on shining thrones;
And by these selfsame citizens
Most abundantly be worshiped.

CHORUS: Strophe 2: That I could be so beaten!
I the old wisdom under the earth
Displaced like dirt!
My very breath is caught with fury and disgust.
Earth, the disgrace!
Oh, what is this pain—seeping through my sides?
Mother, I am hurt.
O hear me Night.
They have stripped me down, the gods:
Tricked all my status from me.
ATHENA: I’ll bear with your anger, for you are elder
And therefore certainly more wise than I;
But Zeus gave me a mind as well:
This other-peopled land you’ve come to
You shall learn to love—I so predict it.
…
So, in these my realms you must not throw
Your bloody whetstone down
To sharpen up and spoil the spleen of youth
With passions worse than wine;
Or snatch the hearts from fighting cocks
And bury them with Ares deep amongst my citizens
Made savage on each other.
Keep war outside and far from home—
Keep it for the greedy of hard-won fame.
Battle with the home-bred bird…I do not name.
…
I shall not tire of tempting you with good,
And you shall never say that you—
Uncivilly and scorned—
Were ousted from this land by me,
Old goddess by a new,
And by my mortal citizens.

[Buckley translation: CHORUS: That I should have suffered these things! Alas! That I wretched should dwell on earth! Alas! A dishonorable pollution! Therefore I breathe forth my rage, and all my wrath. Oh! oh! Earth! Alas! What anguish pierces my sides! Hear my rage, mother Night! For the crafty wiles of the gods have deprived me of my public honors as if of no account.
ATHENA: I will bear with your passion; for you are older; and certainly indeed you are much more wise than I: but to me too Jove has given no small share of wisdom. But you having come into a land of strangers will be loved by this country: I foretell these things… But do not you in my realms cast either bloody whetstones, a destruction to the entrails of youths, rendering them frantic with rage not excited by wine; nor rousing them like the heart of cocks, among my citizens plant Mars both civil and bold against each other. Let there be a foreign war, not a present broil with difficulty, in which there shall be a violent love of glory; but I mention not the fight of the domestic bird...By no means shall I be tired of speaking wht is good for you; that you may never say that you, an ancient goddess, did through me a younger, and through men that dwell in cities, depart dishonored, inhospitably driven from this land.]

[Fagles translation: ATHENA:
Here in our homeland never cast the stones
That whet our bloodlust. Never waste our youth,
Inflaming them with the burning wine of strife.
Never pluck the heart of the battle cock
And plant it in our people—intestine war
Seething against themselves. Let our wars
Rage on abroad, will all their force, to satisfy
Our powerful lust for fame. But as for the bird
That fights at home—my curse on civil war.]

[Lattimore translation: ATHENA:
Only in this place that I haunt do not inflict
Your bloody stimulus to twist the inward hearts
Of young men, raging in a fury not of wine,
Nor, as if plucking the heart from fighting cocks,
Engraft among my citizens that spirit of way
That turns their battle fury inward on themselves.
No, let our wars rage outward hard against the man
Who has fallen horribly in love with high renown.
No true fighter I call the bird that fights at home.]

[Harrison translation: ATHENA:
On this land, my land, goad no-one to bloodshed,
Or let them strop their grudge on your whetstones,
Our youth up in arms and drunk with aggression
Battling like bantams in the strife between bloodkin.
Let them battle abroad if they need to gain glory.
I want no cocks fighting in my country’s farmyard,
Birds of a feather I forbid to do battle.]

CHORUS and ATHENA
CH: Lady Athena, what is this place for me you speak of?
AT: One innocent of pain. Take it for your own.
CH: And if I do, what privilege is in store?
AT: No single house shall thrive except by you.
CH: But will you really work it that I wax so strong?
AT: Yes; for we bless the fortunes of our votaries.
CH: And what assurance can you give—everlastingly?
AT: I am not the one to pledge and not perform.
CH: You are winning me, I think: my anger goes.

ATHENA: Never to see wrong right,
But blessings from the earth
And from our deep sea drifts;
And out of the sky
Winds and breezes blowing
Clear sunshine on the soil;
And overflowing plenty
Of fruit and field and lock,
Which fails our people never;
And precious life
For man’s own mortal seed;
The wicked weeded out—
For like a careful gardener
I love my plants:
This race of just and harmless men.
/
Such your part; and mine:
Never to allow
This city in the dazzling lists of war
Not to be conquest-crowned in the world of men
And not to be distinct.

[Buckley translation: ATHENA: Such things as regard good victory, and these from the earth, and from the dews of the sea, and from heaven, and the gales of the winds blowing with clear sunshine to come upon this land; and that the fruit of the earth and of flocks flowing plenteously abounding to the citizens fail not with time, and that there be safety of mortal seed. But may you be more inclined to root out the impious: for I cherish free from calamity, like a gardener, this race of just men here. Such be thy care. But with respect to illustrious warlike contests, I will not endure not to honor this city with victory among mortals.]

[Fagles translation: ATHENA:
Nothing that strikes a note of brutal conquest. Only peace—
Blessings, rising up from the earth and the heaving sea,
And down the vaulting sky let the wind-gods breathe
A wash of sunlight streaming through the land,
And the yield of soil and grazing cattle flood
Of our city’s life with power and never flag
With time. Make the seed of men live on,
The more they worship you the more they thrive.
I love them as a gardener loves his plants,
These upright men, this breed fought free of grief.
All that is yours to give.
And I,
In the trails of war where fighters burn for fame,
Will never endure the overthrow of Athens—
And will praise her, victor city, pride of man.]

[Lattimore translation: ATHENA:
Something that has no traffic with evil success.
Let it come out of the ground, out of the sea’s water,
And form the high air make the waft of gentle gales
Wash over the country in full sunlight, and the seed
And stream of the soil’s yield and of the grazing beasts
Be strong and never fail our people as time goes,
And make the human seed be kept alive. Make more
The issue of those who worship more your ways, for as
The gardener works in love, so love I best of all
The unblighted generation of these upright men.
All such is yours fro granting. In the speech and show
And pride of battle, I myself shall not endure
This city’s eclipse in the estimation of mankind.]

[Harrison translation: ATHENA:
Brings blessings from earth, sea-billows and sky.
Let the wind warm the land as sun-filled sou’westers,
Let farm-fields and flocks always be fruitful
And never fail fold who will farm them in future,
And as the land prospers so will the people,
Especially those who give gifts to your godstones.
Like a green-fingered gardener tending his garden
I let the good grow, and nip the bad as it’s budding.
I see that the good’s wants get well enough watered,
Protect their green life-lot from all blight and croprot.
/
Your part’s to prosper my people in peace-time,
And mine, when the time comes for war-cries and weapons,
Is to make certain my city’s triumphant.]

ATHENA: Thus with a will, thus dispatching
This for these citizens, I’m investing
Divinities for them great and exacting:
Everything human falls to their function,
And anyone failing
To feel their import
Does not know whence life can hit him.
The sins of the fathers draw a man near them
Till destruction
Without a sound levels him down
Loudly boasting:
Viciously, angrily, into the dust.
CHORUS: Antistrophe 1:
Let no blasting wind blight trees:
This is the grace I utter.
Let no hotness blaze across
And scorch away the buddings.
Let no thwarting canker creep, blistering the fruitings.
Btu may Earth engender
In her lavish season
Twofold yeanlings to the flocks;
A stream of fortunes form the mines,
God-blessed and god-given.

[Buckely translation: ATHENA: I willingly do these things for these my citizens, having settled in this place these mighty deities, and hard to be appeased: for they have obtained by lot to administer all things regarding men. But he who has not found them gentle, knows not whence come the ills of life: for the sins of his forefathers lead him away to these, and silent destruction with hostile wrath lays him low even while talking big.]

[Fagles translation: ATHENA:
These blessings I bestow on you, my people, gladly.
I enthrone these strong, implacable spirits here
And root them in our soil.
Theirs,
Theirs to rule the lives of men,
It is their fated power.
But he who has never felt their weight,
Or known the blows of life and how they fall,
The crimes of his fathers hale him toward their bar,
And there for all his boasts—destruction,
Stilent, majestic in anger,
Crushes him to dust.]

[Lattimore translation: ATHENA:
Here are my actions. In all good will
Toward the citizens I establish in power
Spirits who are large, difficult to soften.
To them is given the handling entire
Of men’s lies. That man
Who has not felt the weight of their hands
Takes the strokes of life, knows not whence, not why,
For crimes wreaked in past generations
Drag him before these powers. Loud his voice
But the silent doom
Hates hard, and breaks him to dust.]

[Harrison translation: ATHENA:
I act on behalf of a people I cherish
And install among them these implacable spirits
Whose province has been and is to manage mankind.
A man feels their onslaught but not where it comes from.
Crimes from the past get him hauled up before them.
And though he bursts his lungs with loud shouting
Their silent grudge grinds him down into nothing.]

[While the following verses are sung, Pallas Athena stations herlsef at the head of the Furies—now propitiously renamed the Eumenides or Gentle Ones. At the same time an escort of matrons, girls, and grandmothers—the Chorus of Athenian Women—foroms for the grand processional exit.]

ATHENA: And farewell to you; but first by the holy light
Of this escort and marching before you
I mean to show you your chambers.
Oh, go majestically sped,
With these holocausts, under the ground. Hold off
All harm against this country:
…
Praised be the words of your prayers.
And now with the light of these torch-flung flames,
I take you down to the deeps of the underworld
With this ministrant escort—women devoted
To watching my image.
…
[The procession begins to move off. The Eumenides are led down the steps of the temple towards their shrines under the earth.]