I have here with a certain freedom of version expressed Kl ’s idea, that the preference expressed by Orestes for a male ear to receive his message arose from the nature of his news; but I do not think it is “inept” to believe, with Bl. and Peiie, that we have here merely an instance of the general secluded state in which Greek women lived, so that it was esteemed not proper to talk with them, in public—as Achilles says, in Euripides—
To an English ear this sounds more like the apparatus of modern luxury than the accompaniment of travel in the stout heroic times. It is a fact, however, as Kl. well notes, that of nothing is there more frequent mention in Homer than of warm baths. This is especially frequent in the Odyssey, where so many journeys are made Telemachus, for instance, at Pylus, is washed by the beautiful Polycaste, the youngest daughter of his venerable host; and the poet records with pleasure how “out of the bath he came in appearance like to the immortal gods” (III. 468), a verse which might serve as a very suitable motto to a modern work on Hydropathy.
Electra Well. is very imperative in taking these words out of Electra’s mouth, and giving them to some other person, he does not exactly know who; but, though she left the stage before, there is no reason why she should not come back; and, in fact, she is just doing what she ought to do in appearing here, and carrying on the deception.
The passage is corrupt. I read παρ’ ὀυδέν, with Blomfield. ’Tis certainly difficult to say whether βακχείας καλης should be made to depend on ἐλπὶς, as I have made it, or being changed into κακης, be referred to Clytemnestra.
The reader need hardly be reminded that these qualities, so necessary to the present transaction, render the invocation (in the next line) peculiarly necessary of the god, who was the recognised patron of thieves, and of whom the Roman lyrist, in a well-known ode sings—
τὸν νύχιον. That there is a great propriety in the epithet nightly, as applied to Mercury, both in respect of his general function as πομπα̂ιος, or leader of the dead through the realms of night, and in respect of the particular business now in hand, and the particular time of the action, is obvious. In spite of some grammatical objections, therefore, I cannot but think it far-fetched in Blom. and Peile to refer the epithet to Orestes. Were I editing the text I should be very much inclined to follow Herm. and Pal. in putting καὶ τὸν νύχιον within brackets, as perhaps a gloss.
I translate thus generally, in order to avoid the necessity of settling the point whether κυπτὸς or κρυπτὸς is the proper reading—a point, however, of little consequence to the translator of Æschylus, as the Venetian Scholiast to Il. O. 207 has been triumphantly brought forward to prove the real meaning of this otherwise corrupt and unintelligible verse. Pot. was not in a condition to get hold of the true text—so he has given the best version he could of what he had—
evidently from the reading of Paw. —
Choral Hymn. The text of this Chorus is a ruin, with here a pillar and there a pillar, some fragments of a broken cornice, and something like the cell of a god, but the rubbish is so thick, and the excavations so meagre, that perfect recovery of the original scheme is in some places impossible, and restoration in a great measure conjectural. Under these circumstances, with the help of the Commentators (chiefly Peilr and Lin. ), I have endeavoured to piece out a connection between the few fragments that are intelligible; but I have been guided throughout more by a sort of poetical instinct than by any philological science, and have allowed myself all manner of liberties, convinced that in this case the most accurate translation is sure to be the worst. In the metre, I follow Peile.
’Tis a misfortune, arising from having such a body as a Chorus always on the stage, that they are often found to be spectators, where they cannot be partakers of a great work, and thus their attitude as secret sympathisers, afraid to show their real sentiments, becomes on many occasions the very reverse of heroic. This strikes us moderns very strongly, apt as we are, from previous associations, to take the Chorus along with the other characters of the play, and judge it accordingly; but to the Greeks, who felt that the Chorus was there only for the purpose of singing, criticisms of this kind were not likely to occur.
Clytemnestra says only that she wished to be allowed to spend her old age in peace; but she implies further, according to a natural feeling strongly expressed by Greek writers, that it was the special duty of her son to support her old age, and thus pay the fee of his nursing. Thus, in Homer, it is a constant lament over one who dies young in battle—
“In general it was accounted a great misfortune by the Greeks to die childless (ἄπαιδα γηράσκειν, Eurip Ion 621). And at Athens there was a law making it imperative on an heir to afford aliment to his mother.”— Klausen.
So Telemachus says to his mother; and on other occasions he uses what we should think, rather sharp and undutiful language—but in Greece a woman who left the woman’s chamber without a special and exceptional call subjected herself to just rebuke. With regard to the matter here at issue between Orestes and Clytemnestra, Kl. notes that, though the wandering Ulysses is allowed without blame to form an amorous alliance with Calypso, the same excuse is not allowed for the female sitting quietly in her “upper chamber” (ὑπερώιον, Il. II. 514) as Homer has it. For “in ancient times,” says the Scholiast to that passage, “the Greeks shut up their women in garrets (ὑπερ τονˆ δυσεντεύκτους ἀυτάς [Editor: illegible character]ιναι) that they might be difficult to get at. ”—How Turkish!
Orestes. I have little doubt that Kl., Peile, Fr., Well., and Pal., are right in giving the line ἠ̂ κάρτα μάντις to Orestes. I should be inclined to agree with Well. and Pal. also, that after this line a verse has dropt out—“ in quo instantem sibi mortem deprecata sit Clytemnestra; ” but there is no need of indicating the supposed blank in the translation, as the sense runs on smoothly enough without it.
An Oriental expression, to which the magnificent phraseology of our Celestial brother who sells tea, has made the English ear sufficiently familiar. He calls our king, or our consul, I forget which, “the Barbarian eye.” Other examples of this style occur in the Persians and the Eumenides.—See p. 172 above.
Klausen, who, like other Germans, has a trick, sometimes, of preferring what is far-fetched to what is obvious, considers that this double Mars is the double death, first of Agamemnon in the previous piece, then of Clytemnestra in this; but notwithstanding what he says, the best comment on this passage is that given by the old Scholiast, when he writes “ Pylades and Orestes. ”
ποινὰ. Ahrens, with great boldness, changes this into Ἐρμα̂ς, which reading has been rashly thrown into the text by Fr. If any special allusion is needed, I agree with Pal. that Orestes is indicated, who is mentioned in the next clause as inflicting the blow, under the guidance of celestial Justice.
In this corrupt passage I adopt Hermann’s correction of τάν περ for τάπέρ. How much the whole meaning is guesswork, the reader may see, by comparing my translation with Pot. and the E. P. Oxon, in this place, who follow the old Scholiast in referring χρονισθε̂ισαυ to Clytemnestra.
This passage being very corrupt, is rendered freely. I adopt Stan.’s conjecture [Editor: illegible character]δεɩ̂ν ἀκονˆσαι θ’ [Editor: illegible character]εμενοις, and suppose μέτοικοι to refer to Orestes and Electra.
There is a certain mannerism in this description of a thing by the negation of what is similar, to which the tragedians were much addicted. As to the invocation of the sun, see the note in the Prometheus to the speech beginning
Literally, a lamprey, μύραινα; but to translate so would have been ludicrous; and besides, as Blom. has noted from Athenaeus, it was not a common lamprey that, in the imagination of the Greeks, was coupled with a viper, but “a sort of monstrous reptile begotten between a viper and a lamprey.”
’Tis difficult to say whether δρόιτη, in this place, means the bath in which Agamemnon was murdered, or the bier on which any dead body is laid after death. Kl. supports this latter interpretation. I have incorporated a reference to both versions.
I read—
These insignia of suppliants are familiar to every reader of the Classics. I shall only recall two of the most familiar intances In the opening scene of the Iliad the priest of Apollo appears before Agamemnon, and
And in the opening lines of the Œdipus Tyrannus, the old King asks the Chorus—
As the old astronomers made Earth the centre of the planetary system, and as men are everywhere, and at all times, apt to consider their own position and point of view as of more importance in the great whole of things than it really is; so the Greeks, in their ignorant vanity, considered their own Delphi to be the navel, or central point of Earth. As to the immortal fire, Stan. quotes here from Plutarch, who, in his life of Numa (c. ix.), describing the institution of the Vestal Virgins, takes occasion to mention the sacred fire kept alive in Greece at two places, Delphi and Athens, which, if extinguished, was always rekindled from no earthly spark, but from the Sun.
Ἐισιν καθαρμόι, Schutz, Pal.; [Editor: illegible character] σται καθαρμός, Bothe. Either of these seems preferable to the vulgate ἐισω. Franz has [Editor: illegible character]ις σοι καθαρμὸς. Eins bleibt Dir Suhnung.
Ghosts and gods are never visible to the bystander, but only to the person or persons who may be under their special influence at the moment of their appearance—so in the Iliad (I. 197), Pallas Athena—
and so in a thousand places of the poet To the spectator, however, in the theatre, spiritual beings must be visible, because (as Muller, Eumen 3, properly remarks) they are the very persons from before whose eyes it is the business of the poet to remove the veil that interposes between our everyday life and the spiritual world. That the Furies of the following piece were seen bodily at this part of the present play, and are not supposed to exist merely in the brain of Orestes, is only what a decent regard for common poetical consistency on the part of a great tragic poet seems to imply.
What god is not said, but the word θεός is used indefinitely without the article. The Greeks had an indefinite style when talking of the divine providence— a god, or some god, or the god, or the gods —a style which arose naturally out of the Polytheistic form of celestial government. Examples of all the different kinds of phraseology are frequent in Homer. Sometimes, in that author, the expression, though indefinite in itself, has a special allusion, plain enough from the context; and in the present passage I see no harm in supposing an allusion to Apollo, under whose immediate patronage Orestes acts through the whole of this piece and that which follows.
This original germ of the Furies is mentioned frequently in these plays, as πολυκρατεɩ̂ς ἀρὰι ϕθιμενων, Fell Curses of the Dead, in the Chocphoræ, p. 111 above. See also the words of Clytemnestra, My curse beware, p. 126 above.
Wordsworth’s “Athens and Attica,” London, 1836, c. 11
“Καὶ τὴν μὲν ἐν Ἀρείῳ πάγῳ βουλὴν Ἐϕιάλτης ἐκόλουσ[Editor: illegible character] καὶ Περικλη̂ς. τὰ δὲ δικαστήρια μισθοϕόρα κατέστησε Περικλη̂ς.”— Aristotle, Pol. II. 9. 3.
“Τη̂ς ναναρχίας γὰρ ἐν τοɩ̂ς Μηδικοɩ̂ς ὀ δη̂μος ἄιτιος γενόμενος ἐϕρονηματίσθη.”— Aristotle, ibid.
The progany of Earth and Heaven were called Titans, among whom Phœbe is numbered by Hesiod — Theog. 136.
Apollo.
One of the waters that descend from Parnassus.
Neptune.
See note to Choephoræ, No. 73
πομπα̂ιος. Of the dead specially, but also of the living: as of Ulysses in the Odyssey, Book X.
Literally the unseen world. Sometimes used for the King of the unsoon world—Pluto.
See Introductory Remarks.
Lucidae sedes. - Horace III. 3
See Introductory Remarks. They designate themselves here from their origin ’Apal or imprecations.
That is, the Furies themselves.
Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass,
Und durch die kummervollen Nächte
Auf seinem Bette weinend sass,
Er kennt Euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte!—Goethe.
“For strangers and the poor are from Jove.”— Homer.
See above, p. 141, Note 4.
That is, Asia. See Introduction to the Agamemnon.
Alluding to the well-known and beautiful allegoric myth that the goddess of wisdom sprang, full-armed, into birth from the brain of the all-wise Omipotent, without the intervention of a mother.
See the Preliminary Remarks.
παρόρνιθας, as we say ill-starred—that is, unfortunate, unlucky, the metaphor being varied, according to the changes of fashions in the practice of divination.
Alii γελωˆμαι—“fortasse non male”— Paley
The goddess of Persuasion—πειθὼ.
Like Erectheus (p. 167 above), one of the most ancient Earth-born kings of Attica
So the Greeks called anything very ancient, from Ogyges, an old Bœotian king.
Earth, or Gaea, as the Greeks name her, is described here, and in Pausanias (X. 5), as the most ancient prophetess of Delphi, for two reasons; first, because out of the earth came those intoxicating fumes or vapours, by the inspiration of which the oracles were given forth (see Diodorus XVI. 26); second, because, as Schoemann well observes, Gaea, as the aboriginal divine mother, out of whose womb all the future celestial genealogies were developed, necessarily contained in herself the law of their development, and is accordingly represented by Hesiod as exercising a prophetic power with regard to the fates of the other gods —(Theog 463, 494, 625) The same writer remarks with equal ingenuity and truth, that Themis, her successor in the prophetic office, is only a personification of that law of development which, by necessity of her divine nature, originally lay in Gaea, and I would remark, further, how admirable the instinct was of those old mythologists, who placed Love and Right, and other ineradicable feelings or notions of the human mind, among the very oldest of the gods It is notable also, that previous to Apollo, all the presidents of prophecy at Delphi—including the famous Phemonoe, not mentioned here but by Pausanias l[Editor: illegible character]c, were women, and even Loxias himself could not give forth oracles without the help of a Pythoness. There is a great fitness in this, as women are naturally both more pious and more emotional than men. Hence their peculiar fitness for exercising prophetic functions, of which ancient Germany was witness—(see Cæsar b.c I. 50).
There can be no question that Schutz was right in translating λίμνη, in this passage, lake (and not sea, as Abresch did), it being impossible that a well-informed Athenian, on hearing this passage in the theatre, should not understand the poet to refer to the circular lake in Delos, described by Herodotus in II. 170.
i.e. “The Athenians”— Scholiast —“who,” adds Stan., “were called the sons of Vulcan, because they were skilled in all the arts of which Vulcan and Pallas were patrons; or, because Erichthonius, from whom the Athenians were descended, was the son of Vulcan;” with which latter view Muller and Schoemann concur; and it appears to me sufficiently reasonable. There is no reason, however, for not receiving, along with this explanation, another which has been given, that the sons of the fire-god mean “smiths.” Artificers of this kind were necessary to pioneer the path for the procession of the god in the manner here described, and would naturally form, at least, a part of the convoy.
’Tis plain from the whole language of Homer, both in the Iliad and Odyssey, that the fountain of the whole moral government of the world is Jove, and, of course, that all divination and inspiration comes originally from him. Even Phœbus Apollo acts only as his instrument (Nagelsbach Homerische Theologie, p. 105). Stan. compares Virgil Æneid III. 250.
The reading προνάια (or προνᾴα), which I translate, is that of Well. and all the MSS.; but Lin has put πρόνοια, providential or foresecing, into the text, following out a criticism of Lennep on Phalaris, which has been stoutly defended by Hermann, in his remarks on Müller’s Eumenides (Opusc. VI. v. 2, p. 17). This, however, in the face of an express passage of Herodotus (I. 92), as Pal. well observes, has been done rashly; and now Fr. and Schoe. bring forward inscriptions which prove that there is not the slightest cause for tampering with the text. I have not been able to learn the substance of Lennep’s remarks otherwise than from the account of them by Muller in the Anhang, p. 14, but, taken at their highest value, they seem only to prove that a vagueness had taken hold of the ancients themselves in respect to the designation of this temple, not certainly that Æschylus and Herodotus both made a mistake in calling it προνᾴα, or that all the transcribers of their texts made a blunder.
“From Delphi, which lies pretty high, the traveller ascended about 60 stadia, or two hours’ travel, till he arrived at the Corycian cave, dedicated to Pan and the Nymphs, in which there were many stalactites and live fountains.”— Sickler. alte geog. II. 134.
Bacchus, so called from βρέμω, fremo —the roaring or boisterous god. His connection with Apollo (though drinking songs are not so common now as they were last century) is obvious enough; and some places of the ancient poets where the close connection of these two gods is described, may be seen in Stan. The Scholiast to Euripides Phœnissai (v. 227, Matthiae) says expressly that Apollo and Artemis were worshipped on the one peak of Parnassus, and Bacchus on the other.
“A son of Echion and Agave, the daughter of Cadmus. He was the successor of Cadmus as king of Thebes, and being opposed to the introduction of the worship of Dionysus in his kingdom, was torn to pieces by his own mother and two other Mænads, Ino and Autonoe, who in their Bacchic frenzy believed him to be a wild beast The place where Pentheus suffered death is said to have been Mount Cithæron; but, according to some, it was Mount Parnassus.”— Myth. Dict.
Next to Jove, Poseidon is the strongest of the gods, as the element which he rules demands; and this strength, in works of art, is generally indicated by the breadth of chest given to this god. So Homer, also, wishing to magnify Agamemnon, says—
The connection of the god of the waters with Delphi is given by Pausanias x. 5, where it is said, that originally Poseidon possessed the oracle in common with Gaea; a legend easily explained by the fact, that all high mountains necessarily produce copious streams of water of which, no less than of the waves of ocean, Poseidon is lord.
Stan. refers here to the account given by Diodorus of the origin of the Delphic oracle, c. xvi. 26, where he relates, that in the most ancient times the prophetess was a young woman; but that, afterwards, one Echecrates, a Spartan, being smitten with the beauty of a prophetess, had offered violence to her, in consequence of which an edict was published by the Delphians, forbidding any female to assume the office of Pythoness till she was fifty years old.
The Harpies; who, from the names given to them in Homer and Hesiod (and specially from Odyssey xx 66 and 77 compared) seem to have been impersonations of sudden and tempestuous gusts of wind; though, again, it is not impossible that these winds may be symbolical of the rapacious power of swift and sudden death—
as suggested by Braun. See the article by Dr Schmitz in the Biographical Dictionary.
With regard to the dress of the Furies, Stan. quotes a curious passage from Diogenes Laertius, which I shall translate:—“Menedemus, the Cynic,” says he, “went to such fantastic excess as to go about in the dress of the Furies, saying, that he was sent as a visitant of human iniquity from Hades, that he might descend again, and report to the Infernal powers. His garb was as follows—a dun-coloured tunic (χιτων) reaching down to the feet, girt with a crimson sash, on his head an Arcadian cap, with the twelve signs of the Zodiac inwoven; tragic buskins, a very long beard, and an ashen rod in his hand.”—VI. 9. 2 The Romans were once put to flight by the Gauls, dressed in the terrible garb of the Furies, with burning torches in their hands.— Livy VII. 17.
So I have thought it best to translate somewhat freely τὸνδε βουκολούμενος πόνον in order to express the original meaning of the verb βουκολουμαι. In this I have followed Müller — diese Schmerzentrift zu weiden This is surely more pregnant and poetical than to say with Fr. “ Diese Lebensbahn durcheilend. ” The idea of soothing and beguiling, the only one given by Hesychius, cannot apply to this place Pal, who agrees with me in this, translates the word in both places of our author where it occurs (here and in Agam 655) by “ brooding over, ” which differs little from my idea of feeding on.
“The image of Athena Pallas, on the citadel, which existed in the days of Pausanias, and had maintained for ages its place here by a sort of inviolable holiness In the narrow area of the temple, on the north-east slope of the Acropolis, Erechtheus had placed a carved image, either first made by himself, or, perhaps, fallen from Heaven; and round this, as a centre, the most ancient groups of Attic religion and legend assembled themselves.”— Gerhard, “ uber die Minerven Idole Athen’s, ” quoted by Schoe.
I am not able to see what objection lies against the literal rendering of
as I read with Fr. and Linw. Pal and Schoe. take πληγὰς metaphorically to signify the contumelious language used by Clytemnestra to the Furies; but this is surely rather going out of the way. If there were any necessity for deserting the literal meaning, I would rather take Hermann’s way of turning it (Opusc VI. v. 2, p. 28), and read—
This method of speaking is quite in keeping with ancient ideas on the nature of the connection ’twixt mind and body, as Schoe. has proved from Galen (Kuhn Med gr V. 301) As to the sentiment which follows, Stan. has quoted—“ Quum ergo est somno sevocatus animus a societate et a contagione corporis, tum meminit praeteritorum, praesentia cernit, futura providet ”—Cic. Divinat. I 30 According to Aelian (var. hist. III. 11). the Peripatetics held the same opinion.
There is another translation of this passage—the old one in Stan —
to which Pot., E P Oxon., and Mul. adhere; but I cannot help thinking with Hermann (Opusc. VI. p ii. 30), that it is rather flat ( matt ) when compared with the other. Which of the two the poet meant cannot perhaps be settled now, as the meaning might depend on the rhetorical accent which the player was taught to give by the poet; but I am certain that the version in the text, sanctioned as it is by Wakefield, Schütz, Herm., Lin., and Pal. does not deserve to be stigmatised (in E. P.’s language) as “fanciful nonsense.” When Clytemnestra calls herself “a dream,” she uses the same sort of language which Achilles does to Ulysses regarding his own unsubstantial state as a Shade.—Odys XI.
I have thought it better to retain the old and most obvious interpretation of this passage; not seeing any proof that προσίκτορες can be used in this general way as applied to the gods who are supplicated, without being affixed as an epithet to some special god; as when we say Ζεὺς ἀϕίκτωρ (Suppl. 1.)
Chorus. Whether Hermann in his “ Dissertatio de Choro Eumenidum ” (Leipzig, 1816) was the first that directed special attention to the peculiar character of this Chorus as indicated by the Scholiast, I do not know (Wellauer says so, and I presume he knew). Certain it is that Pot., by neglecting this indication, has lost a great deal of the dramatic effect of this part of the tragedy. The style of the chorus is decidedly fitful and exclamatory throughout, and must have formed a beautiful contrast to the steady stability of the solemn hymn that follows, beginning, “ Mother night that bore me. ” As to the particular distribution of the parts of this chorus, that is a matter on which, as Schoe. remarks, no two critics are likely to agree; nor is minute accuracy in this respect, even if it were attainable, a matter of any importance to the dramatic effect of the composition as now read. The only thing to be taken care of is, that we do not blend in a false continuity what was evidently spoken fitfully, and by different speakers, with a sort of staccato movement, as the musicians express it. This is Pot.’s grand error, not only here, but in many other of the choral parts of our poet; and, in this view, some of Hermann’s remarks (Opusc. VI. 2, 38) on Muller’s division are perfectly just. As for myself, by distributing the parts of the chorus among three voices, I mean nothing more than that these parts were likely spoken by separate voices. Scholefield and Dyer’s view (Classical Museum, Vol. I. p 281), that there were three principal Furies prominent above the rest in this piece, is not improbable, but admits of no proof. In my versification I have endeavoured to imitate the rapid Dochmiacs of the original.
The idea of a succession of celestial dynasties proceeding on a system of “development,” as a certain class of modern philosophers are fond to express it, is characteristic of the Greek mythology.—(See p. 47 above, Antistrophe I.) The Furies, according to all the genealogies given of them, were more ancient gods than Apollo, with whom they are here brought into collision. Our poet, as we shall see in the opening invocation of the first grand choral hymn of this piece, makes them the daughters of most ancient Night, who, according to the Theogony (v. 123), proceeded immediately from the aboriginal Chaos. Hesiod himself makes the Errinyes, along with the giants, to be produced from the blood of Uranus, when his genitals were cut off by Kronos (Theog. 185); a genealogy, by the way, quite in consistency with the Homeric representation given in the Introductory Remarks, of the origin of the Furies from the curses uttered by injured persons, worthy of special veneration, on those by whom their sacrosanct character had been violated.
In this enumeration of horros I have omitted κακονˆ τε χλο̂υνις, concerning which Lin. says, “ Omnino de hoc loco maximis in tenebris versamur; nam neque de lectione, ncque de verborum significatione certi quidquam constat. ”
The reasons given by Well. and Her. (Opusc. vi. 2. 42) why the two lines, 203-4 W., should not both be given with Stan., Schutz, and Mul., to Apollo, have satisfied Lin., Pal., Fr., Schoe., Dr., E. P. Oxon., and But. Certainly the epithets ὅμαιμος and αυθέντης (which latter the Scholiast interprets μιαρὸς) sound anything but natural in the mouth of Apollo. The emphasis put on δμαιμος in this very connection by the Furies, in v. 575, infra, noted by Hermann, should decide the question.
Literally the perfect Hera, the perfecting or consummating Hera, Ἤρα τελεια, marriage being considered the sacred consummating ceremony of social life, and, therefore, designated among the Greeks by the same term, τέλος, which they used to express initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries. As Jove presides over all important turns in human fate, there is also neces sarily a Ζὲυς τελειος. See Blom Agam. 946, and Passow in voce τέλειος. Conf. Æn. iii. 605, Juno pronuba.
Stan. has remarked that this word fated, μορσίμη, so applied, is Homeric (Od. XVI. 392); and, indeed, though we seem to choose our wives, we choose them oft-times so strangely, that a man may be said, without exaggeration, to have as little to do with his marriage as with his birth or his death—but all the three in a peculiar sense belong to that Μοɩ̂ρα, or divine lot, which distributes all the good and evil of which human life is made up.
Chorus. For the arrangement of this Chorus I refer the reader back to what I said on the previous one. The concluding part I have here arranged as an Epode, because it seems more continuous in its idea than what precedes—less violent and exclamatory.
Æschylus here follows the tradition of Apollodorus (I. 3, § 6), that the epithet Τριτογένεια, given by Homer to Pallas, was derived from the lake Tritonis in Libya, near which she is said to have been born. Compare Virgil Æn. IV. 480.
I have not the slightest doubt that τίθησιν·ο̂ρθὸν πόδα in this passage can only mean to plant the foot down firmly and stand erect; if so, τίθησι κατηρεϕη̂ πόδα can only mean to sit, “the feet being covered by the robes while sitting”— Lin.; so also Pal. and Schoe. Sitting statues of the gods were very common in ancient times, as we see in the Egyptian statues, and in the common representations of the Greek and Roman Jupiter (see Thirlwall’s History of Greece, c. VI.). I am sorry that Hermann (p. 57) should have thrown out the idea that κατηρεϕη̂ς in this passage may mean “enveloped in clouds,” which has been taken up by Franz—
because manifestly κατηρεϕη̂ς, in this sense, forms no natural contrast to ὀρθὸς. The “ forward foot firm-planted, ” I have taken from Muller’s note, p. 112, as, perhaps, pointing out more fully what may have been in the poet’s eye, without, however, meaning to assert seriously against a severe critic like Hermann, that the words of the text necessarily imply anything of the kind.
The peninsula of Pallene in Macedonia, as also the district of Campania about Baiæ and Cumae, were called Phlegraean, or fire-fields (ϕλέγω), in all likelihood from the volcanic nature of the country, to which Strabo (Lib. V. p. 245) alludes. These volcanic movements in the religious symbolism of early Greece became giants; and against these the Supreme Wisdom and his wise daughter had to carry on a war worthy of gods.
Choral Hymn. “This sublime hymn is of a character, in some respects, kindred to the καταδέσεις, or incantations of antiquity, which were directed to Hermes, the Earth, and other infernal Deities for the pupose of binding down certain hated persons to destruction. For this reason it is called ὔμνος δέσμιος This character is specially indicated by the refrain or burden, which occurs in the first pair of Strophes; such repetitions containing the emphatic words of the incantation being common in all magical odes. So in Theocritus (Idyll. 2), we have constantly repeated, ‘ Iungx, bring me the man, the man whom I mean, to my dwelling, ’ and, in the song of the Fates at the marriage of Thetis in Catullus, the line—‘ Currite ducentes subtemina, currite fusi! ’ and there can be no question, the movements and gestures of the Furies while singing this hymn were such as to indicate the scapeless net of woe with which they were now encompassing their victim.”— Mül The reader will observe how impressively the metre changes on the recurrence of this burden, the rhythm in the original being Pæonic υ υ υ—, the agitated nature of which foot, when several times repeated, is sufficiently obvious. I have done what I could to make the transition and contrast sensible to the modern ear.
αλαο̂ισι και δεδορκόσι, i.e. the living and the dead, an expression familiar to the Greeks, and characteristic of a people who delighted to live in the sun. βλέπειν ϕάος— to look on the light, is the most common phrase in the tragedians for to live; and wisely so—
Pot. has allowed himself to be led quite astray here by a petulant criticism of De Pauw.
ὔμνος ’αϕόρμιγκτος. “The musical character of this Choral Hymn must be imagined as working upon the feelings with a certain solemn grandeur. The κιθάρα or lyre is silent; an instrument which, as the Greeks used it, always exercised a soothing power, restorative of the equipoise of the mind: only the flute is heard, whose notes, according to the unanimous testimony of antiquity, excited feelings, now of thrilling excitement, now of mute awe; always, however, disturbing the just emotional tenor of the soul. Assuredly the ὔτνος ἀϕόρμιγκτος in this place is no mere phrase.”— Muller.
I have paraphrased, or rather interpolated, in this Antistrophe, a little, because I do not see much in it that is either translatable or worth translating. A meaning has been squeezed out of the two lines beginning σπευδόμενοι; but one cannot help feeling, after all, that there is something wrong, and saying with honest Wellauer, “ certi nihil video. ” The main idea, shimmering through the first three lines, is plain enough— that the Furies exercise a function, the legitimacy of which no one is entitled to question This the words, μηδ ες ἄγκρισιν ’ελθεɩ̂ν, plainly indicate; and it is upon this, and Schoe.’s conjectural emendation of the first line—
that my paraphrase proceeds. With regard to the second part of this Strophe, beginning with Μάλα γὰρ δυν, I follow Well. and all the later editors, except Schoe., in retaining it for metrical reasons, in the place to which Heath transposed it. Schoe’s observations, however, are worthy of serious consideration, as it is manifest that, if these Pæonic lines be replaced to where they stand in all the old editions, viz.:—between ὀρχησμοɩ̂ς τ’ ε̂πιϕθόνοις ποδός and πιπτων δ’ουκ ὀιδεν, their connection with what precedes, and also with what follows, will be more obvious than what it is now. Fr.’s observation, however, in answer to this, is not to be kept out of view—that this second part of the Antistrophe takes up the idea, as it takes up the measure, with which the corresponding part of the Strophe, as now arranged, ends, viz.—διόμεναί κρατερὸν ὄνθ, which the reader will find clearly brought out in my version—the concluding lines of the Pæonic section of the Strophe—
being taken up in the opening lines of the Pæonic section of the Antistrophe—
The Sigean territory in the Troad was disputed between the Athenians and the people of Mitylene; which strife Herodotus informs us (V. 94) ended, by the activity of Pisistratus, in favour of the Athenians— b. c. 606. In that same territory, continues the historian, there was a temple of Pallas, where the Athenians hung up the arms of the poet Alcæus, who, though “ ferox bello, ” had been obliged to flee from the battle which decided the matter in favour of the Athenians Æschylus, like a true patriot and poet, throws the claim of the Athenians to this territory as far back into the heroic times as possible; and, by the words put into the mouth of Athena, makes the claim on the part of the Lesbians tantamount to sacrilege.—See Scholiast and Stan.
“The Greek words, ἀλλ ὅρκον ὀυ δεξαιτ [Editor: illegible character]ν, ὀυ δονˆναι θέλει, have, in the juridical language of Athens, decidedly only this meaning; and, in the present passage, there is no reasonable ground for taking them in any other sense, though it is perfectly true that in some passages, ὅρκου διδόναι signifies simply to swear, and ὅρκον δέχεσθαι, to accept an attestation on oath. ”— Schoemann.
“Ixíon was the son of Phlegyas, his mother Dia, a daugher of Deioneus. He was king of the Lapithæ, or Phlegyes, and the father of Peirithous. When Deioneus demanded of Ixíon the bridal gifts he had promised, Ixíon treacherously invited him as though to a banquet, and then contrived to make him fall into a pit filled with fire. As no one purified Ixíon from this treacherous murder, and all the gods were indignant at him, Zeus took pity on him, purified him, and invited him to his table.”— Mythol. Dict.
The original ἄπολιν Ιλίου πόλιν [Editor: illegible character]θηκας, contains a mannerism of the tragedians too characteristic to be omitted ’Tis one of the many tricks of that wisdom of words which the curious Greeklings sought, and did not find, in the rough Gospel of St. Paul.
The best exposition that I have seen of the various difficulties of this speech, is that of Schoe., unfortunately too long for extract. As to κατηρτὺκὼς, Lin. has, in the notes to his edition, justly characterised his own translation of it, in the Dictionary as durissimum. The first δμως, of course, must go; and there is nothing better than changing it with Pauw, Müll., and Schoe., into ’εμο̂ις. The second δμως must likewise go; say ὀσιὼς with Müll. or ὅυτως with Schoe. There is then no difficulty.
Choral Hymn. This chorus contains a solemn enumeration of some of the main texts of Greek morality, and is in that view very important. The leading measure is the heptasyllabic trochaic verse so common in English, varied with cretics and dactyles. I have amused myself with giving a sort of imitation of the rhythm, so far as the trochees and cretics are concerned; to introduce the dactyles in the places where they occur, would produce—as I found by experiment—a tripping effect altogether out of keeping with the general solemnity of the piece
’Tis impossible not to agree with Schoe. that these two lines are corrupt beyond the hope of emendation. He proposes to read—
A very ingenious restoration; and one which, as matters now stand, I should have little scruple in introducing into the text; but, for poetical purposes, I have not been willing to lose the image with which the present reading, ἐν ϕἀει, supplies me and Fr. —
This is one of those current common-places of ancient wisdom, which are now so cheap to the ear, but are still as remote from the general temper and the public heart as they were some thousands of years ago, when first promulgated by some prophetic Phemonoe of the Primeval Pelasgi. The great philosopher of common sense, Aristotle, seized this maxim, as the groundwork of practical ethics, some three hundred years before Christ—‘Φθείρεται γαρ, says he, ἡ σωϕροσύνη και ἡ ἀνδρεία ὑπὸ τη̂ς ὑπερβολη̂ς καὶ τη̂ς ’ελλειψεως, ὑπὸ δὲ τη̂ς μεσότητος σώζεται; and Horace, the poet of common sense, preachea many a quiet, tuneful sermon to the same ancient text—
I will not multiply citations here to show the reader how this pride or insolence of disposition, [Editor: illegible character]βρις (the German Uebermuth ), is marked by the Greek moralists as the great source of all the darker crimes with which the annals of our floundering race are stained (See Note, p. 349 above). They are wrong who tell us that Humility is a Christian and not a Heathen virtue: no doubt the name ταπεινοϕροσύνη, used in the New Testament, was not the fashionable one among the Greeks: but that they had the thing, every page of their poetry testifies, with this difference, however, to be carefully noted, that while Heathen humility is founded solely on a sense of dependence, Christian humility proceeds also, and perhaps more decidedly, from a sense of guilt. Neither does the phraseology of Heathen and Christian writers on this subject differ always so much as people seem to imagine; between the μη ὐπερϕρονε̂ιν παρ [Editor: illegible character] δεɩ̂ ϕρονεɩ̂ν of St. Paul (Rom. xii. 3), and the ὀυδεπώποτε ὐπερ ἄνθρωπον ἐϕρόνησα of Xenophon (Cyropaed. VIII), it were a foolish subtlety that should attempt to make a distinction.
“It is a correct and significant observation made by the Scholiast on Iliad XVIII. 219, that Homer never mentions the trumpet (σάλπιγξ) in the narrative part of his poem, but only for a comparison: familiar as he was with the instrument, he was not ignorant that the use of it was new, and not native in Greece. Indeed, it was never universally adopted in that country: the Spartans and Cretans marching into battle, first to the accompaniment of the lyre, and afterwards of the flute. The tragedians again are quite familiar with the Tuscan origin of the trumpet, though they make no scruple of introducing it into their descriptions of the Hellenic heroic age”— Müll.; Etrusker I. p. 286.
Enter Apollo Here commences a debate between the daughters of Night and the god accusing and defending, which, as Grote (History of Greece, I. 512) remarks, is “eminently curious.” And not only curious, but unfortunately, to our modern sense at least, not a little ludicrous in some places. The fact is, that the strange moral contradictions and inconsistencies so common in the Greek mythology, so long as they are concealed or palliated under a fair imaginative show, give small offence; but when placed before the understanding, in order to be interrogated by the strict forms of judicial logic, they necessarily produce a collision with our practical reason and a smile is the result.
“In the fable of the binding of Kronos by his son Jove, Æschylus saw nothing disrespectful to the character of the supreme ruler, but only the imaginative embodiment of the fact, that one celestial dynasty had been succeeded by another. The image of binding, and of the battles of the Titans generally, might seem to his mind not the most appropriate; but the offence that lay in them was softened not a little by the consideration that the enchainment of Kronos and the Titans was only a temporary affair, leading to a reconciliation The result was, that the Titans themselves at last acknowledged the justice of their punishment, and submitted themselves to Jove, as the alone legitimate ruler of Earth; and Herr Welcker is quite wrong in supposing that either here, or in the Agamemnon, or the Prometheus, there is any indication that the mind of Æschylus was fundamentally at war with his age in regard to the celestial dynasties.”— Schoemann’s Prometheus, p. 97.
Or, with Buck., “what laver of his tribe shall receive him?”—the word in the original being ϕρατόρων. The ancient Hellenic tribes ϕράτραι were social unions, founded originally in the family tie, and afterwards extended. These unions had certain religious ceremonies which they performed in common, and to which allusion is here made. (Compare Livy VI. 40, 41, nos privatim auspicia habemus of the Patrician families.) To be ἀϕρήτωρ, or excluded from a tribe (Il. IX. 63), was among the Greeks of the heroic ages a penalty half-civil, half-religious, similar in character to the excommunciation of the middle ages. Of this extremely interesting subject, the English reader will find a most luminous exposition in Grote’s Greece, vol. iii. p. 74.
Strange as this doctrine may seem to our modern physiologists, it seems founded on a very natural notion; and to the Greeks, who had such a low estimate of women, must have appeared perfectly orthodox. The same doctrine is enunciated by the poet in the Suppliants, v. 279, when he says, “the male artist has imprinted a Cyprian character on your female features”—the image being borrowed from the art of coining. And this, like many fancies cherished by the Greeks, seems to have had its home originally in Egypt. Stan. quotes from Diodorus I. 80, who says—“The Egyptians count none of their sons bastards, not even the sons of a bought slave. For they are of opinion that the father is the only author of generation; the mother but supplieth space and nourishment to the fœtus.” In the play of Euripides, Orestes uses the same argument (Orest. 543).
This address of the goddess, of practical wisdom, in constituting the Court of the Areopagus, was pointed by the poet directly against the democratic spirit, in his day beginning to become rampant in Athens; and is applicable not less to all times in which great and, perhaps, necessary social changes take place. The poet states, with the most solemn distinctness, that the mere love of liberty will never protect liberty from degenerating into licentiousness; but that a religious reverence for law is as essential to society as a religious jealousy of despotism. Only he who profoundly fears God can dispense with the fear of man; and he who fears both God and man is the only good citizen.
The Amazons, “as strong as men” (αντιάνειραι, Il. III. 189), are famous in the history of the Trojan war; and their expedition against Athens, mentioned here, was familiar to every Athenian eye, from the painting in the Stoa Pæcile, described by Pausanias (I. 15). As to the historical reality of these hardy females, the sober Arrian (VII. 13) is by no means inclined (after the modern German fashion) to brush them, with a stroke of his pen, out of the world of realities; and, considering what a strange and strangely adaptable creature man is, I see no reason why we should be sceptical as to their historical existence.
“This is an ancient way of replying to a captious question, as we see in the Gospel (Matth. xxvii.), where, when Pilate asks, ‘art thou the king of the Jews,’ our Lord, Jesus Christ, answers in these very words Συ λέγεις—‘ Thou say’st. ’ ”— Stan.
“Alluding to Admetus, son of Pheres, whom Apollo raised from the dead, having obtained this boon from the Fates, on condition that some one should die in his stead.—See the well-known play of Euripides, the Alcestes.”— Stan. The Scholiast on that play, v. 12, as Dindorf notes, remarks that, on this occasion, Apollo moved the inflexible goddesses by the potent influence of wine. This is alluded to a few lines below.
κάρτα δ’ειμι τονˆ πατρος; specially wisdom and energy.—So Milton—
Compare the Homeric epithet of Pallas ὁβριμοπάτρη with Nagelsbach’s Comprehensive Commentary—Hom. Theologie, p. 100.
Apollo. Fr., who examined the Medicean Codex, says that there is here discernible the mark which introduces a new speaker. Who that speaker is, however, the sense does not allow us to decide; but Orestes and the Chorus having spoken, I do not see why Apollo, who showed such eagerness before, should not now also, put in his word; and, therefore, deserting Well., I follow the old arrangement of Vict. and Stan.
As Pallas possesses all her father’s characteristic qualities of wisdom and strength, so she is entitled to wield all his instruments, and even the thunder. Stan quotes—
And Wakefield compares Callim, Lavac. Pall, 132. So the aegis, or shield of dark-rushing storms (ἀισσω), belongs to Pallas no less than to Zeus (Il. V. 738).
Erectheus, who, as his name signifies ([Editor: illegible character]ραζε, Eretz, Heb, Erde, Teut., Earth ), was the earth-born, or Adam of Attic legend, had a temple on the Acropolis, beside the temple of the city-protecting (πολιάς) Pallas, of which the ruins yet remain. The cave of the Furies was on the Hill of Mars, directly opposite.—See Introductory Remarks.
It was a principle with the Romans that no victory in a civil war should be followed by a triumph; and, accordingly, in the famous triumph of Julius Cæsar, which lasted three days, there was nothing to remind the Roman eye that the conqueror of Pharsalia had ever plucked a leaf from Pompey’s laurels. In v. 826, I read with Mul. ’ου δόμοις παρων, the present reading, μόλις, being clumsy any way that I have seen it translated.
This designation is given to Athens with special reference to the Persian wars; for the Persians destroyed everywhere the temples of the Greek gods (only in the single case of Delos are they said to have made an exception), and the Athenians, in conquering the Persians, saved not only their own lives, but the temples of the gods from destruction.
Well., as usual, is too cautious in not changing μὴ κύρσας into δὴ κύρσας with Pauw and Mül., or μὴν with Lin. and Schoe.
“The sins of the fathers, as in the Old Testament, so also among the Greeks, are visited on the children even to the third and fourth generation; nay, even the idea of original sin, derived from the Titanic men of the early ages, and exhibiting itself as a rebellious inclination against the gods more or less in all—this essentially Christian idea was not altogether unknown to the ancient Greeks.”— Schoemann.
What we call a “god-send,” or a “wind-fall,” was called by the Greeks [Editor: illegible character]ρμαιον, or a thing given by the grace of Hermes. In his original capacity as the patron god of Arcadian shepherds, Hermes was, in like manner, looked on as the giver of patriarchal wealth in the shape of flocks.—Il. xiv. 490.
There is no small difficulty in this passage, from the state of the text; but, unless it be the Furies themselves that are spoken of, as Kl imagines (Theol. p. 45), I cannot think there are any celestial powers to whom the strong language of the Strophe will apply but the Fates If the former supposition be adopted, we must interrupt the chaunt between Athena and the Furies, putting this Strophe into the mouth of the Areopagites, as, indeed, Kl. proposes; but this seems rather a bold measure, and has found no favour. It remains, therefore, only to make such changes in the text as will admit of the application of the whole passage to the Fates, who stand in the closest relation to the Furies, as is evident from Strophe III. of the chorus (p. 146 above). This Mül. has done; and I follow him, not, however, without desiring some more distinct proof that ματροκασιγνη̂ται, in Greek, can possibly mean sisters.—See Schoe.’s note.
Ζεὺς ἀγορα̂ιος. The students of Homer may recollect the appeal of Telemachus to the Ithacans in council assembled (Odys. II. 68). Jove, as we have already had occasion to remark, has a peculiar right of presidency over every grand event of human life, and every important social institution; so that, on certain occasions, the Greek Polytheism becomes, for the need, a Monotheism—somewhat after the same fashion as the aristocratic Government of the old Roman Republic had the power of suddenly changing itself, on important occasions, into an absolute monarchy, by the creation of a Dictator.
The Furies were called Ευμενίδες, or gracious, to propitiate their stern deity by complimentary language. Suidas says ( voc. Ευμενίδες) that Athena, in this play, calls the Furies expressly by this name; but the fact is, that it does not occur in the whole play. Either, therefore, the word ἔυϕρων, which I have translated “gracious-minded” in the play, must be considered to have given occasion to the remark of the lexicographer (which seems sufficient), or, with Hermann and Schoe., we must suppose something to have fallen out of the present speech.
note
On p. 132, after the dramatis persona, I perceive that I have stated that the scene of this piece changes from Delphi to the Hill of Mars, Athens. This is either inaccurate, or, at least, imperfect; for the first change of scene is manifestly (as stated p. 148), to the temple of Athena Pallas, on the Acropolis; and, though the imagination naturally desires that the institution of the Court of the Areopagus should take place on the exact seat of its future labours, yet the construction of the drama by no means necessitates another change of scene, and the allusion to the Hill of Mars in p 162 is easily explicable on the supposition that it lies directly opposite the Acropolis, and that Pallas points to it with her finger.
Classical Museum, No. XV. p. 1.
Buck (Introduction, p. xiii.) has very aptly compared here the position of Antigone, in the well-known play of that name, and the half-approving, half-condemning tone of the Chorus in that play
The most remarkable passages of the ancients where reference is made to the Prometheus Unbound of Æschylus are.— Cicero, Tusc II. 10, Arrian. Periplus Pont. Eux. p. 19; Strabo, Lib I p. 33 and IV. 182-3; Plutarchus vit Pompeii, init.; Athenæus. XV p 672, Cas.
“Veniat Æschylus non poeta solum, sed etiam Pythagoreus. Sic enim accepimus. Quo modo fert apud eum Prometheus dolorem, quem excipit ob furtum Lemnium “— Tusc Quast. II. 10, Welcker, Prilogie, p. 7.
“ Chorus consilietur amicis. ”— Horace.
On the stage, of course, her transmutation can only be indicated by the presence of a pair of ox horns on her virgin forehead.
ἡ ποικιλείμων νύξ. Buntgewandige — Schoe. “ Various-vested Night. ”— Coleridge, in a Sonnet to the Autumnal Moon.
ἀιθέριον κίνυγμα.
Saturn the father of Jove.
“And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air: for it repenteth me that I have made him”— Gen. vi. 7.
The Sea of Azof
i.e. Delphi —See Schol. to Iliad II. 519.
Rhea’s bosomed sea—the Hadriatic.
The Ionian sea.
The Danaids, daughters of Danaus, who colonized Argos from Egypt This forms the subject of the next plav—the Suppliants.
See the Agamemnon, Note 15
Compare Odyssey, I. 32.
“The ancient Greek writers called all the Northern tribes ( i.e. all who dwelt in the Northern parts of Europe and Asia) generally by the name of Scythians and Celto-Scythians; while some even more ancient than these make a division, calling those beyond the Euxine, Ister, and Adria, Hyperboreans, Sarmatians, and Arimaspi; but those beyond the Caspian Sea, Sacæ and Massagetæ.” Strabo, Lib. XI. p. 507.— Stan.
λεωργὸν, a difficult word; “evil-doer”— Med. and Prow.; Bosewicht — Toelp.; Freveler — Schoe. The other translation of this word—“artificer of man” (Potter)—given in the Etym. was very likely an invention of Lexicographers to explain this very passage. But the expounders did not consider that Æschylus through the whole play makes no allusion to this function of the fire-worker. It was, I believe, altogether a recent form of the myth.—See Weiske. “The precise etymology of the word is uncertain.”— Lin.
“A fellow deity”— Med. But this is not enough. Vulcan, as a smith, and Prometheus were kindred in their divine functions, for which reason they were often confounded in the popular legends, as in the case of the birth of Pallas from the brain of Jove, effected by the axe, some say of Hephaestus, some of Prometheus— Apollodor. I. 3-6. Euripid. Ion. 455; from which passage of the tragedian Welcker is of opinion that Prometheus, not Hephaetus, must have a place in the pediment of the Parthenon representing the birth of Pallas.— Class. Museum, Vol. II. p. 385.
Not Clymene according to the Theogony (V. 508) or Asia, one of the Oceanides according to Apollodorus (I. 2), which parentage has been adopted by Shelley in his Prometheus Unbound. That Æschylus in preferring this maternity meant to represent the Titan as suffering in the cause of Right against Might, as Welcker will have it ( Trilog p. 42), is more than doubtful. One advantage, however, is certainly gained, viz., that Prometheus is thus brought one degree further up the line of ascent in direct progress from the two original divinities of the Theogony— Uranus or Heaven, and Gee or the Earth; for, according to Hesiod, Themis is the daughter, Clymene only the grand-daughter, of these primeval powers (Theog. 135, 315). Thus, Prometheus is invested with more dignity, and becomes a more worthy rival of Jove.
I entirely agree with Schoe. that in the indefinite expression—ο̂ λωϕήσων γὰρ ὀυ πέϕυκέ πω any allusion, such as the Scholiast suggests, to Hercules, the person by whom salvation did at length come, would be in the worst possible taste here, and quite foreign to the tone of the passage.
This character of harshness and inexorability belongs as essentially to Jove as to the Fates. Pallas, in the Iliad, makes the same complaint—
We must bear in mind that Jove represents three things—(1) that iron firmness of purpose which is so essential to the character of a great ruler; (2) the impetuous violence and resistless power of the heavenly elements when in commotion; (3) the immutability of the laws of Nature.
Ἅπαντ ἐπράχθη πλὴν θεο̂ισι κοιρανεɩ̂ν—literally, all things have been done, save commanding the gods. I do not know whether there is any philological difficulty in the way of this translation It certainly agrees perfectly well with the context, and has the advantage of not changing the received text. Schoe., however, adopting Herm.’s emendation of ἐπαχθη̂ translates—
On the theological sentiment, I would compare that of Seneca —“ In regno nati sumus; Deo parere libertas est ” ( Vit. Beat. 15)—and that of Euripides, where the captive Trojan queen, finding the king of men, Agamemnon, willing to assist her, but afraid of the opinion of the Greeks, speaks as follows:—
This is merely translating Prometheus (from προ before, and μη̂τις counsel) into English. These allusions to names are very frequent in Æschylus—so much so as to amount to a mannerism; but we who use a language, the heritage of years, a coinage from which the signature has been mostly rubbed off, must bear in mind that originally all words, and especially names, were significant. See the Old Testament everywhere (particularly Gen. c. xxix. and xli., with which compare Homer, Odyssey xix. 407). And, indeed, in all original languages, like Greek or German, which declare their own etymology publicly to the most unlearned, no taunt is more natural and more obvious than that derived from a name. Even in Scotland, a man who is called Bairnsfather will be apt to feel rather awkward if he has no children. “In the oldest Greek legend,” says Welcker ( Tril. p. 356), “names were frequently invented, in order to fix down the character or main feature of the story”—(so Bunyan in the Pilgrim’s Progress)—a true principle, which many German writers abuse, to evaporate all tradition into mere fictitious allegory But the practice of the Old Testament patriarchs shows that the significancy of a name affords of itself no presumption against its historical reality.
Prometheus. The critics remark with good reason the propriety of the stout-hearted sufferer observing complete silence up to this point. It is natural for pain to find a vent in words, but a proud man will not complain in the presence of his adversary. Compare the similar silence of Cassandra in the Agamemnon; and for reasons equally wise, that of Faust in the Auerbach cellar scene. So true is it that a great poet, like a wise man, is often best known, not by what he says, but by what he does not say—(και τη̂ς ἂγαν γάρ έστί που σιγη̂ς βάρος, as Sophocles has it). As to the subject of the beautiful invocation here made by the Titan sufferer, the reader will observe not merely its poetical beauty (to which there is something analogous in Manfred, act I. sc. 2—
but also its mythological propriety in the person of the speaker, as in the early times the original elementary theology common to the Greeks with all polytheists, had not been superseded by those often sadly disguised impersonations which are represented by the dynasty of Jove. Ocean and Hyperion (ὑπερίων—he that walks aloft) are named in the Theogony, along with Themis and Iapetus, as the first generation of gods, directly begotten from Heaven and Earth.—(Theog. 133-4.) In the natural progress of religious opinion, this original cosmical meaning of the Greek gods, though lost by anthropomorphism to the vulgar, was afterwards brought out by the natural philosophers, and by the philosophical poets; of which examples occur everywhere among the later classics. Indeed, the elemental worship seems never to have been altogether exploded, but continued to exist in strange confusion along with the congregation of fictitious persons to which it had given birth. So in Homer, Agamemnon prays—
ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα. I must offer an apology here for myself, Mr. Swayne, and Captain Medwyn, because I find we are in a minority. The Captain, indeed, has paraphrased it a little—
but he retains the laugh, which is the stumbling-block. Swayne has
also a little paraphrased, but giving due prominence to the characteristic idea. E. P. Oxon. has
with a reference to Stanley’s note, “Refertur ad levem sonum undarum ventis exagitatarum qui etiam aliquantulum crispant maris dorsum quasi amabili quadam γελασιᾳ,” in which words we see the origin of Pot.’s —
Prow. has—
And Schoe.’s —
And so Blom. in a note, emphatically—
But why all this gentleness? Does it agree either with the strength of the poet’s genius, or with the desolation of the wild scene around his hero? I at once admit that γελάω is often used in Greek, where, according to our usage, smile would be the word; but in the Old Testament we find the broad strong word laugh often retained in descriptions of nature; and I see not the least reason for walking in satin shoes here.
νάρθηξ—“still used for this purpose in Cyprus, where the reed still retains the old Greek name”— Welcker, Tril. p. 8, who quotes Walpole’s Memoirs relative to Turkey, p. 284, and Tournefort, Letter 6. I recollect at school smoking a bit of bamboo cane for a cigar.
The increased agitation of mind is here expressed in the original by the abandonment of the Iambic verse, and the adoption of the Bacchic—τίς ἀχὼ, etc., which speedily passes into the anapæst, as imitated by my Trochees. Milton was so steeped in Greek, that I think he must have had this passage in his mind when he wrote the lines of Samson Agonistes, v. 110, beginning “ But who are these? ” Altogether, the Samson is, in its general tone and character, quite a sort of Jewish Prometheus.
The ancient sea-goddess, sister and wife of Oceanus, daughter of Heaven and Earth. The reader will observe that the mythology of this drama preserves a primeval or, according to our phrase, antediluvian character throughout. The mythic personages are true contemporaries belonging to the most ancient dynasty of the gods. For this reason Ocean appears in a future stage of the play, not Poseidon. Tethys, with the other Titans and Titanesses are enumerated by Hesiod, Theog. 132-7, as follows—
As for the epithet prolific applied to Tethys, the fecundity of fish is a proverb in natural history; but I suppose it is rather the infinite succession of waves on the expanded surface of Ocean that makes his daughters so numerous in the Theogony (362)—
Here we have distinctly indicated that contrast between the old and the new gods, which Æschylus makes so prominent, not only in this play, but also in the Furies. The conclusion has been drawn by various scholars that Æschylus was secretly unfavourable to the recognised dynasty of Jove, and that his real allegiance was to these elder gods. But the inference is hasty and unauthorised. His taste for the sublime led him into these primeval ages, as it also did Milton: that is all we can say.
The new-forged counsels were of Jove’s own devising—viz., that he should marry Thetis; of which marriage, if it should take place, the son was destined to usurp his father’s throne.— Scholiast.
Inexorability is a grand characteristic of the gods.
And so Homer makes Nestor say of Agamemnon, vainly hoping to appease the wrath of Pallas Athena, by hecatombs—
And of Jove, in particular, Hera says to Themis, in the council of the gods—
Æschylus does not and could not confound these two distinct persons, as Pot. will have it.—See Eumenides, 2. Schoe. has stated the whole case very clearly. Pot. remarks with great justice, that a multiplicity of names “is a mark of dignity;” it by no means follows, however, that Themis, in this passage, is one of those many names which Earth receives. In illustration we may quote a passage from the Kurma Ouran (Kennedy’s Researches on Hindoo Mythology; London, 1831; p. 208)—“That,” says Vishnu, pointing to Siva, “is the great god of gods, shining in his own refulgence, eternal, devoid of thought, who produced thee (Brahma), and gave to thee the Vedas, and who likewise originated me, and gave me various names. ” Southey, in the roll of celestial dramatis personæ prefixed to the Curse of Kehama, says “that Siva boasts as many as one thousand and eight names. ”
“ Nam regibus boni quam mali suspectiores sunt, semperque his aliena virtus formidolosa est. ”—Sall. Cat VII. “In princes fear is stronger than love; therefore it is often more difficult for them to tear themselves from persons whom they hate than to cast off persons whom they love.”— Richter (Titan).
This is one of the passages which has suggested to many minds a comparison between the mythical tortures of the Caucasus and the real agonies of Calvary. The analogy is just so far; only the Greek imagination never could look on Prometheus as suffering altogether without just cause; he suffered for his own sins. This Toepel. p. 71, has well expressed thus—“ Prometheus deos laesit ut homines bearet: Christus homines beavit ut suae, Deique patris obsecundaret voluntati. ”
ἀνηλεωˆς ἐῤῥύθμισμαι—“ so bin ich sugerichtet ”— Passow. A sort of studious malignity is here indicated. So we say allegorically to trim one handsomely, to dress him, when we mean to punish. The frequent use of this verb ρυθμίζω is characteristic of the Greeks, than whom no people, as has been frequently remarked, seem to have possessed a nicer sense of the beauty of measure and the propriety of limitation in their poetry and works of art. So Sophocles, Antig. 318, has ρυθμίζειν λύπην.
A striking phrase, meaning, however, nothing more, I imagine, according to the use of the Greek writers (and also of the Latins with caecus ) than dim, indistinct; neither, indeed, is the phrase foreign to our colloquial English idiom—“The swearing to a blind etcetera they (the Puritans) looked upon as intolerable.”—Calamy’s Life of Baxter. In the well-known story of Pandora, Hesiod relates that, when the lid of the fatal box was opened, innumerable plagues flew out, only Hope remained within.— Works and Days, 84.
Lieutenant-Colonel Collins, in his account of New South Wales (London, 1804), mentions that the wild natives produced fire with much difficulty, and preserved it with the greatest care. The original inhabitants of New Holland, and the wild African bushmen described by Moffat, the missionary, are among the lowest specimens of human nature with which we are acquainted. As for Æschylus, it is evident he follows in this whole piece the notion of primitive humanity given in his introductory chapters by Diodorus, and generally received amongst the ancients, viz., that the fathers of our race were the most weak and helpless creatures imaginable, like the famous Egyptian frogs, as it were, only half developed from the primeval slime
Enter Ocean. “This sea god enters,” says Brunoy, quoted by Pot., on “I know not what winged animal— bizarrerie inexplicable. ” Very inexplicable certainly; and yet, as the tragedian expressly calls the animal a bird, I do not see why so many translators, both English and German, should insist on making it a steed. The bird certainly was a little anomalous, having, as we learn below, four feet (τετρασκελὴς ὀιωνός, v. 395—a four-footed bira ); but it was a bird for all that, and the air was its element. If the creature must have a name, we must even call it a griffin, or a hippogriff, notwithstanding Welcker’s remarks ( Tril. p. 26). Those who wish to see its physiognomy more minutely described may consult Aeliean. hist. animal. IV. 27, in an apt passage quoted from Jacobs by Both. There is an ambiguity in the passage which I have translated—
some applying γνώμῃ not to the animal, but to the will of the rider. So Prow. —
But for the poetical propriety of my translation I can plead the authority of Southey —
and of Milton —
and what is much more conclusive in the present instance, that of Homer, whose τιτυσκόμεναι ϕρεσὶ νη̂ες (Odyssey VIII. 556), or self-piloted ships of the Phœnicians, belong clearly to the same mythical family as the self-reined griffin of old Ocean.
i.e., in the far West, extreme Atlantic, or “ends of the earth,” according to the Homeric phrase.
says Hera in the Iliad (XIV. 200).
The reader will see by referring to the old editions and to Pot. that the following description of the miseries of Atlas and Typhon is, in the MS., given to Ocean; and, it must be confessed, there seems a peculiar dramatic propriety in making the old sea god hold up the fate of the Cilician Blaster as a warning to the son of Iapetus, whom he saw embarked in a similar career of hopeless rebellion against the Thunderer. But philological considerations, well stated by Schoe., have weighed with that editor, as with his predecessors Blom. and Well., whose authority and arguments I am for the present willing to follow, though not without some lingering doubts. The alteration of the text originally proceeded from Elmsley, and the original order of the dialogue is stoutly defended by Toepel. in his notes.
If the reader is a curious person, he will ask how Atlas when standing on the Earth—in the extreme west of the Earth—could bear the pillars of Heaven and Earth? and the question will be a very proper one; for the fact is that, as Hesiod distinctly states the case, he bore the pillars of Heaven only (Theog. 517). This is, indeed, the only possible idea that could be admitted into a mythology which proceeded on the old principle that the Earth was a flat solid platform in the centre of the Universe, round which the celestial pole (πόλος) wheeled. The phrase “ pillars of Heaven and Earth ” is, therefore, to a certain extent an improper one; for the Earth, being the stable base of all things, required no pillars to support it. In one sense it is true that the pillars of Atlas are the pillars of Heaven and Earth, viz., in so far as they have Heaven at one end and Earth at the other, which is what Homer means when he says (Odyssey I. 54), that these pillars “γα̂ιάν τε καὶ ὀυρανὸν ἀμϕὶς ἔχουσιν.” And that this is the idea of Æschylus, also, is plain, both from the present passage, and from the Epode of the next following Chorus, where, unless we force in one conjecture of Schutz, or another of Hermann into the text, there is no mention of anything but the celestial pole. In all this I but express in my own words, and with a very decided conviction, the substance of the admirable note in Schoe. to v. 426, Well.
The idea of Typhon is that of a strong windy power, δεινόν ὑβριστήν τ ἄνεμον, according to the express statement of Hesiod (Theog 307). The Greek word Typhon, with which our typhus fever is identical, expresses the state of being swollen or blown up, with this, the other idea of heat, which belongs also to Typhon (Sallust, περὶ θεωˆν, c. 4), is naturally connected. According to the elementary or physical system of mythology, therefore, Typhon is neither more nor less than a simoom or hot wind.
The reader may like to see Cicero’s version of these four lines—
Here, and in the epithet of the rivers in the Epode (compare Homer’s Odyssey X 351, ἱερων ποταμων, and Nagelsbach, Homer, Theologie, p. 85), the original word is ἁγνος, a term to be particularly noted, both in the heathen writers and in the Old Testament, as denoting that religious purity in connection with external objects and outward ceremonies which the Christian sentiment confines exclusively to the moral state of the soul. I have thought it important, in all cases, to retain the Greek phrase, and not by modernizing to dilute it. The religious sentiment in connection with external nature is what the moderns generally do not understand, and least of all the English, whose piety does not readily exhibit itself beyond the precincts of the church porch. The Germans, in this regard, have a much more profound sympathy with the Greek mind.
Arabia certainly comes in, to a modern ear, not a little strangely here, between the Sea of Azof and the Caucasus; but the Greeks, we must remember, were a people whose notions of barbarian geography (as they would call it) were anything but distinct; and, in this play, the poet seems wisely to court vagueness in these matters rather than to study accuracy.
With regard to the origin of the human race there are two principal opinions, which have in all times prevailed. One is, that man was originally created perfect, or in a state of dignity far transcending what he now exhibits; that the state in which the earliest historical records present him is a state of declension and aberration from the primeval source; and that the whole progress of what is called civilization is only a series of attempts, for the most part sufficiently clumsy, and always painful, whereby we endeavour to reinstate ourselves in our lost position. This philosophy of history—for so it may most fitly be called—is that which has always been received in the general Christian world, and, indeed, it seems to flow necessarily from the reception of the Mosaic records, not merely as authentic Hebrew documents, but as veritable cosmogony and primeval history—as containing a historical exposition of the creation of the world, and the early history of man. The other doctrine is, that man was originally created in a condition extremely feeble and imperfect; very little removed from vegetable dulness and brutish stupidity; and that he gradually raised himself by slow steps to the exercise of the higher moral and intellectual faculties, by virtue of which he claims successful mastery over the brute, and affinity with the angel This doctrine was very common, I think I may safely say the current and generally received doctrine, among the educated Greeks and Romans; though the poets certainly did not omit, as they so often do, to contradict themselves by their famous tradition of a golden age, which it was their delight to trick out and embellish. In modern times, this theory of progressive development, as it may be called, has, as might have been expected, found little favour, except with philosophers of the French school; and those who have broached it in this country latterly have met with a most hot reception from scientific men, principally, we may presume, from the general conviction that such ideas go directly to undermine the authority of the Mosaic record. It has been thought, also, that there is something debasing and contrary to the dignity of human nature in the supposition that the great-grandfather of the primeval father of our race may have been a monkey, or not far removed from that species; but, however this be, with regard to Æschylus, it is plain he did not find it inconsistent with the loftiest views of human duty and destiny to adopt the then commonly received theory of a gradual development; and, in illustration, I cannot do better than translate a few sentences from Diodorus, where the same doctrine is stated in prose. “Men, as originally generated, lived in a confused and brutish condition, preserving existence by feeding on herbs and fruits that grew spontaneously. * * * Their speech was quite indistinct and confused, but by degrees they invented articulate speech. * * * They lived without any of the comforts and conveniences of life, without clothing, without habitations, without fire (Prometheus!), and without cooked victuals; and not knowing to lay up stores for future need, great numbers of them died during the winter from the effects of cold and starvation. By which sad experience taught, they learned to lodge themselves in caves, and laid up stores there. By-and-by, they discovered fire and other things pertaining to a comfortable existence. The arts were then invented, and man became in every respect such as a highly-gifted animal might well be, having hands and speech, and a devising mind ever present to work out his purposes.” Thus far the Sicilian (I. 8); and the intelligent reader need not be informed that, to a certain extent, many obvious and patent facts seemed to give a high probability to his doctrine. “Dwellers in caves,” for instance, or “troglodytes,” were well known to the ancients, and the modern reader will find a historical account of them in Strabo, and other obvious places. The Horites (Gen. xiv. 6) were so called from the Hebrew word Hor, a cave—(see Gesenius and Jahn, I. 2-26). But it is needless to accumulate learned references in a matter patent to the most modern observation.— Moffat’s “African Missions” will supply instances of human beings in a state as degraded as anything here described by the poet; and with regard to the aboriginal Australians, I have preserved in my notes the following passage from Collins: “The Australians dwell in miserable huts of bark, all huddled together promiscuously (ἔϕυρον εικη̂ πάντα!) amid much smoke and dirt. Some also live in caves. ” I do by no means assert, however, that these creatures are remnants of primeval humanity, according to the development theory; I only say they afford that theory a historic analogy; while, on the other hand, they are equally consistent with the commonly received Christian doctrine, as man is a creature who degenerates from excellence much more readily in all circumstances than he attains to it. These Australians and Africans may be mere imbecile stragglers who have been dropt from the great army of humanity in its march.
“The Pythagorean tenets of Æschylus here display themselves. It was one of the doctrines attributed to this mysterious sect that they professed to find in numbers, and their combinations, the primordial types of everything cognisable by the mind, whether of a physical or moral nature. They even spoke of the soul as a number.”— Prow. But, apart from all Pythagorean notions, we may safely say—from observation of travellers indeed certainly affirm—that there is nothing in which the civilized man so remarkably distinguishes himself from the savage, as in the power to grasp and handle relations of number. The special reference to Pythagoras in this passage is, I perceive, decidedly rejected by Schoe.; Bergk. and Haupt., according to his statement, admitting it. Of course, such a reference in the mind of the poet can never be proved, only it does no harm to suppose it.
(ϕλογωπὰ σήματα). Prowett refers this to lightning; but surely, in the present connection, the obvious reference is to the sacrificial flame, from which, as from most parts of the sacrificial ceremony, omens were wont to be taken. When the flame burned bright it was a good omen; when with a smoky and troublous flame, the omen was bad. See a well-known description of this in Sophocles’ Antigone, from the mouth of the blind old diviner Tiresias, when he first enters the stage, v. 1005; and another curious passage in Euripides’ Phœniss 1261.
Necessity (Ἀνάγκη), a favourite power to which reference is made by the Greek dramatists, is merely an impersonation of the fact patent to all, that the world is governed by a system of strict and inexorable law, from the operation of which no man can escape. That the gods themselves are subject to this Ἀνάγκη, is a method of expression not seldom used by Heathen writers, but that they had any distinct idea, or fixed theological notion of Necessity or Fate, as a power separate from and superior to the gods I see no reason to believe.—See my observations on the Homeric μοɩ̂ρα in Clas. Mus., No. XXVI., p. 437. And in the same way that Homer talks of the fate from the gods, so the tragedians talk of necessity from or imposed by the gods —τὰς γὰρ έκ θεωˆν ἀνάγκας θνητον ὀντα δεɩ̂ ϕέρειν. With regard to Æschylus, certainly one must beware of drawing any hasty inference with regard to his theological creed from this insulated passage. For here the poet adopts the notion of the strict subjection of Jove to an external Fate, principally, one may suppose, from dramatic propriety; it suits the person and the occasion. Otherwise, the Æschylean theology is very favourable to the absolute supremacy of Jove; and, accordingly, in the Eumenides, those very Furies, who are here called his superiors, though they dispute with Apollo, are careful not to be provoked into a single expression which shall seem to throw a doubt on the infallibility of “the Father.” For the rest, the Fates and Furies, both here and in the Eumenides, are aptly coupled, and, in signification, indeed, are identical; because a man’s fate in this world can never be separated from his conduct, nor his conduct from his conscience, of which the Furies are the impersonation.
The idea that the Supreme Ruler of the Universe can ever be dethroned is foreign to every closely reasoned system of monotheism; but in polytheistic systems it is not unnatural (for gods who had a beginning may have an end); and in the Hindoo theology receives an especial prominence. Southey accordingly makes Indra, the Hindoo Jove, say—
We must bear in mind, however, that it is not Æschylus in the present passage, but Prometheus who says this.
The original of these words, “μηδάμ θε̂ιτ’ εμᾀ γνώμα̂ κράτος ἀντίπαλον Ζεὺς,” has been otherwise translated “ Minime Jupiter indat animo meo vim rebellem, ” but, apart altogether from theological considerations, I entirely agree with Schoe. that this rendering puts a force upon the word κράτος, which is by no means called for, and which it will not easily bear.
Observe here the primitive practice according to which the bridegroom purchased his wife, by rich presents made to the father. In Iliad IX. 288, Agamemnon promises, as a particular favour, to give his daughter in marriage to Achilles ἀνάεδνον, that is, without any consideration in the shape of a marriage gift.
Enter Io. Io is one of those mysterious characters on the border-land between history and fable, concerning which it is difficult to say whether they are to be looked on as personal realities, or as impersonated ideas. According to the historical view of ancient legends, Io is the daughter of Inachus, a primeval king of Argos; and, from this fact as a root, the extravagant legends about her, sprouting from the ever active inoculation of human fancy, branched out. Interpreted by the principles of early theological allegory, however, she is, according to the witness of Suidas, the Moon, and her wanderings the revolutions of that satellite. In either view, the immense extent of these wanderings is well explained by mythological writers (1) from the influence of Argive colonies at Byzantium and elsewhere; and (2) from the vain desire of the Greeks to connect their horned virgin Io, with the horned Isis of the Egyptians. It need scarcely be remarked that, if Io means the moon, her horns are as naturally explained as her wanderings. But, in reading Æschylus, all these considerations are most wisely left out of view, the Athenians, no doubt, who introduced this play, believing in the historical reality of the Inachian maid, as firmly as we believe in that of Adam or Methuselah. As little can I agree with Both. that we are called upon to rationalize away the reality of the persecuting insect, whether under the name of ’ο̂ιστρος or μύωψ. In popular legends the sublime is ever apt to be associated with circumstances that either are, or, to the cultivated imagination, necessarily appear to be ridiculous.
I have here given the received traditionary rendering of Αλενˆ [Editor: illegible character] δα̂; but I must confess the appeal to Earth here in this passage always appeared to me something unexpected; and it is, accordingly, with pleasure that I submit the following observations of Schoe. to the consideration of the scholar—“Δα̂ is generally looked on as a dialectic variation of γα̂; and, in conformity with this opinion, Theocritus has used the accusation Δα̂ν. I consider this erroneous, and am of opinion that in Δημητηρ we are rather to understand Δεαμητηρ than Γημητηρ; and δα̂ is to be taken only as an interjection. This is not the place to discuss this matter fully; but, in the meantime, I may mention that Ahrens de dialecta Doricâ, p. 80, has refuted the traditionary notion with regard to δα̂
Chorus. With Well., and Schoe, and the MSS., I give this verse to the Chorus, though certainly it is not to be denied that the continuation of the lyrical metre of the Strophe pleads strongly in favour of giving it to Io. It is also certain that, for the sake of symmetry, the last line of the Antistrophe must also be given to the Chorus, as Schoe. has done.
Inachus, the Argive river, was, like all other rivers, the son of Ocean, and, of course, the brother of the Ocean-maids, the Chorus of the present play. Afterwards, according to the historical method of conception, characteristic of the early legends, the elementary god became a human person—the river was metamorphosed into a king.
We most commonly read of the water or fountain of Lerne; this implies a meadow—and this, again, implies high overhanging grounds, or cliffs, of which mention is made in the twenty-third line below. In that place, however, the reading ἄκρην is not at all certain; and, were I editing the text. I should have no objection to follow Pal. in reading Λέρνης τε κρήνην, with Canter. In fixing this point, something will depend upon the actual landscape.
Here begins the narration of the mythical wanderings of Io—a strange matter, and of a piece with the whole fable, which, however, with all its perplexities, Æschylus, no doubt, and his audience, following the old minstrels, took very lightly. In such matters, the less curious a man is. the greater chance is there of his not going far wrong; and to be superficial is safer than to be profound The following causes may be stated as presumptive grounds why we ought not to be surprised at any start ling inaccuracy in geographical detail in legends of this kind.—(1) The Greeks, as stated above, even in their most scientific days, had the vaguest possible ideas of the geography of the extreme circumference of the habitable globe and the parts nearest to it which are spoken of in the passage (2) The geographical ideas of Æschylus must be assumed as more kindred to those of Homer than of the best informed later Greeks. (3) Even supposing Æschylus to have had the most accurate geographical ideas, he had no reasons in handling a Titanic myth to make his geographical scenery particularly tangible; on the contrary, as a skilful artist, the more misty and indefinite he could keep it the better. (4) He may have taken the wanderings of Io, as Welcker still suggests ( Trilog 137), literally from the old Epic poem “Aigimius,” or some other traditionary lay as old as Homer, leaving to himself no more discretion in the matter, and caring as little to do so as Shakespere did about the geographical localities in Macbeth, which he borrowed from Hollinshed. For all these reasons I am of opinion that any attempt to explain the geographical difficulties of the following wanderings would be labour lost to myself no less than to the reader; and shall, therefore, content myself with noting seriatim the different points of the progress, and explaining, for the sake of the general reader, what is or is not known in the learned world about the matter:—
(1) The starting-point is not from Mount Caucasus, according to the common representation, but from some indefinite point in the Northern parts of Europe. So the Scholiast on v. 1, arguing from the present passage, clearly concludes; and with him agree Her. and Schoe.; Welcker whimsically, I think, maintaining a contrary opinion.
(2) The Scythian nomads, vid. note on v. 2, supra, their particular customs alluded to here are well known, presenting a familiar ancient analogy to the gipsy life of the present day. The reader of Horace will recall the lines—
and the same poet (III. 4-35) mentions the “quiver-bearing Geloni”; for the bow is the most convenient weapon to all wandering and semi-civilized warriors.
(3) The Chalybs, or Chaldaei, are properly a people in Pontus, at the north-east corner of Asia Minor; but Æschylus, in his primeval Titanic geography, takes the liberty of planting them to the north of the Euxine.
(4) The river Hubristes. The Araxes, says the Scholiast; the Tanais, say others; or the Cuban (Dr. Schmitz in Smith’s Dict.) The word means boisterous or outrageous, and recalls the Virgilian
(5) The Caucasus, as in modern geography.
(6) The Amazons; placed here in the country about Colchis to the northward of their final settlement in Themiscyre, on the Thermodon, in Pontus, east of the Halys.
(7) Salmydessus, on the Euxine, west of the Symplegades and the Thracian Bosphorus; of course a violent jump in the geography.
(8) The Cimmerian Bosphorus, between the Euxine and the Sea of Azof. Puzzling enough that this should come in here, and no mention be made of the Thracian Bosphorus in the whole flight! The word Bosporus means in Greek the passage of the Cow.
(9) The Asian continent; from the beginning a strange wheel! For the rest see below.
This mythical genealogy is thus given by Schutz from Apollodorus. 1. Epaphus; 2. Libya, 3. Belus (see Suppliants, p. 228, above); 4. Danaus, 5. Hypermnestra; 6. Abas; 7. Proetus; 8. Acrisias; 9. Danae; 10. Perseus; 11. Electryon, 12. Alcmena; 13. Heracles.
I now proceed with the mythical wanderings of the “ox-horned maid,” naming the different points, and continuing the numbers, from the former Note—
(10) The Sounding Ocean. —Before these words, something seems to have dropt out of the text, what the “sounding sea” (πόντου ϕλο̂ισβος) is, no man can say; but, as a southward direction is clearly indicated in what follows, we may suppose the Caspian, with Her.; or the Persian Gulf, with Schoe.
(11) The Gorgonian Plains. —“The Gorgons are conceived by Hesiod to live in the Western Ocean, in the neighbourhood of Night, and the Hesperides; but later traditions place them in Libya.”—Dr. Schmitz, in Smith’s Dict.: but Schoe., in his note, quotes a scholiast to Pindar, Pyth. X. 72, which places them near the Red Sea, and in Ethiopia. This latter habitation, of course, agrees best with the present passage of Æschylus.
With regard to Cisthene, the same writer ( Schoe. ) has an ingenious conjecture, that it may be a mistake of the old copyists, for the Cissians, a Persian people, mentioned in the opening chorus to the play of the Persians.
(12) The country of the Griffins, the Arimaspi, and the river Pluto. The Griffins and the Arimaspi are well known from Herodotus and Strabo, which latter, we have seen above (Note 1), places them to the north of the Euxine Sea, as a sub-division of the Scythians. Æschylus, however, either meant to confound all geographical distinctions, or followed a different tradition, which placed the Arimaspi in the south, as to which see Schoe. “The river Pluto is easily explained, from the accounts of golden-sanded rivers in the East which had reached Greece.”— Schoe.
(13) The river Aethiops seems altogether fabulous.
(14) The “Bybline Heights,” meaning the κατάδουπα (Herod. II. 17), or place where the Nile falls from the mountains.— Lin. in voce καταβασμός, which is translated pass. No such place as Byblus is mentioned here by the geographers, in want of which Pot. has allowed himself to be led, by the Scholiast, into rather a curious error. The old annotator, having nothing geographical to say about this Byblus, thought he might try what etymology could do; so he tells us that the Bybline Mountains were so called from the Byblos or Papyrus that grew on them. This Potter took up and gave—
overlooking the fact that the papyrus is a sedge, and grows in flat, moist places.
ἔυποτον ρέος, literally, good for drinking The medicinal qualities of the Nile were famous in ancient times. In the Suppliants, v. 556, our poet calls the Nile water, νόσοις ἄθικτον, not to be reached by diseases; and in v 835, the nurturing river that makes the blood flow more buoyantly. On this subject, the celebrated Venetian physician, Prosper Alpin, in his Rerum Ægyptiarum, Lib. IV. (Lugd. Bat. 1735) writes as follows: “Nili aqua merito omnibus aliis præfertur quod ipsa alvum subducat, menses pellat ut propterea raro mensium suppressio in Ægypti mulieribus reperiatur. Potui suavis est, et dulcís; sitim promptissime extinguit; frigida tuto bibitur, concoctionem juvat, ac distributioni auxilio est, minime hypochondriis gravis corpus firmum et coloratum reddit,” etc.—Lib. I. c. 3. If the water of the Nile really be not only pleasant to drink, but, strictly speaking, of medicinal virtue, it has a companion in the Ness, at Inverness, the waters of which are said to possess such a drastic power, that they cannot be drunk with safety by strangers.
I quite agree with Schoe. that, in the word παλιμπλάγκτος, in this passage, we must understand πάλιν to mean to and fro, not backwards. With a backward or reverted course from the Adriatic, Io could never have been brought northward to Scythia. The maziness of Io’s course arises naturally from the fitful attacks of the persecuting insect of which she was the victim. A direct course is followed by sane reason, a zigzag course by insane impulse.
As Io was identified with Isis, so Epaphus seems merely a Greek term for the famous bull-god Apis.—(Herod. III. 27, and Muller’s Prolegom. myth.) The etymology, like many others given by the ancients, is ridiculous enough; ὲπαϕἡ, touch. This derivation is often alluded to in the next play, The Suppliants. With regard to the idea of a virgin mother so prominent in this legend of Io, Prow. has remarked that it occurs in the Hindoo and in the Mexican mythology; but nothing can be more purile than the attempt which he mentions as made by Faber to connect this idea with the “promise respecting the seed of the woman made to man at the fall.” Sound philosophy will never seek a distant reason for a phenomenon, when a near one is ready. When an object of worship or admiration is once acknowledged as superhuman, it is the most natural thing in the world for the imagination to supply a superhuman birth. A miraculous life flows most fitly from a miraculous generation. The mother of the great type of Roman warriors is a vestal, and his father is the god of war. Romans and Greeks will wisely be left to settle such matters for themselves, without the aid of “patriarchal traditions” or “the prophecy of Isaiah.” The ancient Hellenes were not so barren, either of fancy or feeling, as that they required to borrow matters of this kind from the Hebrews. On the idea of “generation by a god” generally, see the admirable note in Grote’s History of Greece, P. I c. 16 (Vol. I. p 471).
“A surname of Nemesis, derived by some writers from Adrastus, who is said to have built the first sanctuary of Nemesis on the river Asopus (Strabo XIII p 588), and by others from the verb διδράσκειν, according to which it would signify the goddess whom none could escape.”—Dr. Schmitz. On this subject, Stan. has a long note, where the student will find various illustrative references.
The word in the original, ἀυθαδιά, literally “self-pleasing,” expresses a state of mind which the Greeks, with no shallow ethical discernment, were accustomed to denounce as the great source of all those sins whose consequences are the most fearful to the individual and to society. St. Paul, in his epistle to Titus (i. 7), uses the same word emphatically to express what a Christian bishop should not be (ἀυθὰδη, self-willed). The same word is used by the blind old soothsayer Tiresias in the Antigone, when preaching repentance to the passionate and self-willed tyrant of Thebes, ἀυθαδιά τοι σκαιότητ ὀϕλισκάνει, where Donaldson gives the whole passage as follows:—
The idea of vicarious sacrifice, or punishment by substitution of one person for another, does not seem to have been very familiar to the Greek mind; at least, I do not trace it in Homer. It occurs, however, most distinctly in the well-known case of Menœceus, in Euripides’ play of the Phænissæ. In this passage, also, it is plainly implied, though the word διάδοχος, strictly translated, means only a successor, and not a substitute. Welck. ( Trilog. p 47) has pointed out that the person here alluded to is the centaur Chiron, of whom Apollodorus (II. 5-11-12) says that “Hercules, after freeing Prometheus, who had assumed the olive chaplet ( Welck. reads ὲλόμένον), delivered up Chiron to Jove willing, though immortal, to die in his room (θνήσκειν ἀντ’ ἁυτου). This is literally the Christian idea of vicarious death. The Druids, according to Cæsar ( b. c. VI. 16), held the doctrine strictly—“ pro vita hominis nisi hominis vita reddatur non posse aliter deorum immortalium numen placari. ” Of existing heathens practising human sacrifice, the religious rites of the Khonds in Orissa present the idea of vicarious sacrifice in the most distinct outline. See the interesting memoir of Captain M‘Pherson in Blackwood’s Magazine for August, 1842.
I have translated these lines quite freely, as the text is corrupt, and the emendations proposed do not contain any idea worth the translator’s adopting. Schoe. reads—
and translates
Prow. from a different reading, has
Vol I., c. 3.
Fast., Hellen., Introduc. pp. 6, 7.
See Introductory Remarks to the Eumenides.
The usual insignia of Suppliants Wool was commonly used in the adornment of insignia hallowed by religion —See Dict Antiq, voc. infula and apex; and Note 72 to the Choephoræ, and Clem. Alex Prot. § 10
Epaphus and Io
Epaphus, from ἑπαϕὴ. See Note 3 immediately above.
This is explained by what follows An augur, of course, was the proper person to recognise the notes of birds, or what resembled them.
See Note 76 to Agamemnon.
Pal quotes from Massinger’s Emperor of the East, “To a sad tune I sing my own dirge,“ which I have adopted.
Artemis, or Diana.
τον πολυξενώτατον Ζη̂να, that is, Pluto.
See Note 46 to the Eumenides
See Iliad viii. 69, and other passages, describing the “golden scales of Jove,” in which the fates of men are weighed.
See the Agamemnon, Note 94.
See Paley.
Cyprus.
See Prometheus Bound, p. 192 above.
See Prometheus Bound, p 204 and Note 46.
In this very perplexed passage I follow Pal. Bothe’s conjecture, Αργεɩ̂ος, is very happy.
A promontory in Cilicia — Strabo, p. 670. Pal.
πρόξενοι.—See Note 19 to page 226 above.
“Potui humor ex hordeo aut frumento in quandam similitudinem vini corruptus.’— Tacitus de mor. Geom. c. 23.
Venus.
This river and the Inachus flow into the Argolic gulf, both near the city of Argos, taking their rise in the mountain ridge that separates Argos from Arcadia.
The goddess of Persuasion.
Ζεὺς ἀϕίκτωρ, literally suppliant Jove, the epithet which properly belongs to the worshipper being transferred to the object of worship. The reader will note here another instance of the monotheistic element in Polytheism, so often alluded to in these Notes. Jove, as the supreme moral governor of the universe, has a general supervision of the whole social system of gods and men; and specially where there is no inferior protector, as in the case of fugitives and suppliants—there he presses with all the weight of his high authority. In such cases, religion presents a generous and truly humanizing aspect, and the “ primus in orbe Deos fecit timor ” of the philosophers loses its sting.
Wellauer, in his usual over-cautious way, has not received Pauw’s emendation λεπτοψαμάθων into his text, though he calls it certissimum in his notes. Pal., whom I follow, acts in these matters with a more manly decision. Even without the authority of Pliny (XXXV. 13), I should adopt so natural an emendation, where the text is plainly corrupt.
See p. 204 above, and Note 48 to Prometheus. There prevails throughout this play a constant allusion to the divine significance of the name Epaphus, meaning, as it does, touch. To the Greeks, as already remarked (p. 388), this was no mere punning; and the names of the gods (Note 17, p. 391 above) were one of the strongest instruments of Heathen devotion. That there is an allusion to this in Matthew vi. 7, I have no doubt.
I see no necessity here, with Pal., for changing [Editor: illegible character]ν πολις into [Editor: illegible character] πολις—but it is a matter of small importance to the translator. Jove, the third, is a method of designating the supreme power of which we have frequent examples in Æschylus—see the Eumenides, p. 164, where Jove the Saviour all-perfecting is mentioned after Pallas and Loxias, as it were, to crown the invocation with the greatest of all names. In that passage τρίτου occurs in the original, which I was wrong to omit.
In what countries are first cousins forbidden to marry? Welcker does not know. “ Das Eherecht worauf diese Weigerung beruht ist nicht bekannt. ”— Welcker ( Trilog. 391).
“Perhaps Ionian is put in this place antithetically to Νειλοθερη̂, from the Nile, in the next line, and the sense is, ‘though coming from Egypt, yet, being of Greek extraction, I speak Greek.’ ”— Paley. This appears to me the simplest and most satisfactory comment on the passage.
That is Egypt. So called according to the Etymol. M. quoted by Stan., from the cloudy appearance which the low-lying Delta district presents to the stranger approaching it from the sea.
It would be unfair not to advertise the English reader that this fine sentiment is a translation from a conjectural reading, πα̂ν ἄπονον δαιμονιων, of Well., which, however, is in beautiful harmony with the context. The text generally in this part of the play is extremely corrupt. In the present stanza, Well.’s correction of δε ἀπιδων into ἐλπίδων deserves to be celebrated as one of the few grand triumphs of verbal criticism that have a genuine poetical value.
The reader must imagine here a complete change in the style of the music—say from the major to the minor key. In the whole Chorus, the mind of the singer sways fitfully between a hopeful confidence and a dark despair. The faith in the counsel of Jove, and in the sure destruction of the wicked, so finely expressed in the preceding stanzas, supports the sinking soul but weakly in this closing part of the hymn These alterations of feeling exhibited under such circumstances will appear strange to no one who is acquainted with the human, and especially with the female heart.
“Apia, an old name for Peloponnesus, which remains still a mystery, even after the attempt of Butmann to throw light upon it.”— Grote, Hist. of Greece, Part I. c. 4. Æschylus’ own account of Apis, the supposed originator of the name Apia, will be found in this play a few lines below. I have consulted Butmann, and find nothing but a conglomeration of vague and slippery etymologies.
καμπύλος, with a bend or sweep; alluding to the form of the rim of the ancient chariot, between the charioteer and the horses. See the figure in Smith’s Dict. Antiq., Articles ἄντυξ and currus.
The common meaning that a Greek scholar would naturally give to the phrase θεοɩ̂ ἀγωνιοι is that given by Hesych, viz., gods that preside over public games, or, as I have rendered it in the Agamemnon (p. 57 above), gods that rule the chance of combat. For persons who, like the Herald in that play, had just escaped from a great struggle, or, like the fugitive Virgins in this piece, were going through one, there does not appear to be any great impropriety (notwithstanding Pal.’s. inepte ) in an appeal to the gods of combat. Opposed to this interpretation, however, we have the common practice of Homer, with whom the substantive ἀγών generally means an assembly; and the testimony of Eustathius, who, in his notes to that poet, Iliad, Ω 1335, 58, says, “παρ Αισχύλῳ ἀγώνιοι θεοὶ ὁι ἀγορα̂ιοι;” i.e. gods that preside over assemblies.
διὰ χερων συνωνύμων. I am inclined to think with Pal. that ἐυωνύμων may be the true reading; i e. in your left hands. And yet, so fond is Æschylus of quaint phrases that I do not think myself at liberty to reject the vulgate, so long as it is susceptible of the very appropriate meaning given in the text. “ Hands of the same name ” may very well be tolerated for “ hands of the same race ”—“hands of sisters.”
I have here departed from Well.’s arrangement of this short colloquy between Danaus and his daughters, and adopted Pal.’s, which appears to me to satisfy the demands both of sense and metrical symmetry. That there is something wrong in the received text Well. admits.
I have here incorporated into the text the natural and unembarrassed meaning of this passage given by Pal. The bird of Jove, of course, is the eagle. What the Scholiast and Stan. say about the cock appears to be pure nonsense, which would never have been invented but for the confused order of the dialogue in the received text.
“They invoke Apollo to help them, strangers and fugitives, because that god himself had once been banished from heaven by Jove, and kept the herds of Admetus.
This plainly points out a distinction between the Greek and the famous Egyptian Hermes. So the Scholiast, and Stan. who quotes Cic., Nat. Deor. III. 22.
This seems to have been a common-place among the ancients. Pliny, in the following passage, draws a contrast between man and the inferior animals, not much to the honor of the former:—“ Cætera animalia in suo genere probe degunt; congregari videmus et stare contra dissimilia; leonum feritas inter se non dimicat; serpentum morsus non petit serpentes; ne maris quidem belluæ ac pisces nisi in diversa genera sæviunt. At hercule homini plarima ex homine sunt mala. ”— Nat. Hist. VII. proem. This custom of blackening human nature (which is bad enough, without being made worse) has been common enough also in modern times, especially among a certain school of theologians, very far, indeed, in other respects, from claiming kindred with the Roman polyhistor; but the fact is, one great general law over-rides both man and the brute, viz. this— Like herds with like —the only difference being that human beings, with a great outward similarity, are characterized by a more various inward diversity than the lower animals. There are, in fact, men of all various kinds represented in the moral world—all those varieties which different races and species exhibit in the physical. There are lamb-men, tiger-men, serpent-men, pigeon-men, and hawk-men. That such discordant natures should sometimes, nay always in a certain sense, strive, is a necessary consequence of their existing.