Aeschylus

“ Yea, save us, the maidenly troop, from the doom and despair of the slave,
For the crests of the foemen come onward, their rush is the rush of a wave
Rolled on by the war-god’s breath! almighty one, hear us and save
From the grasp of the Argives’ might! to the ramparts of Cadmus they crowd,
And, clenched in the teeth of the steeds, the bits clink horror aloud!
And seven high chieftains of war, with spear and with panoply bold,
Are set, by the law of the lot, to storm the seven gates of our hold!
Be near and befriend us, O Pallas, the Zeus-born maiden of might! ”

“ Could only crouch and cower and yield himself.
Scared was I by that sight, and eke to you
No less a terror must it be to hear!
For mark this well—if Xerxes have prevailed,
He shall come back the wonder of the world:
If not, still none can call him to account—
So he but live, he liveth Persia’s King!
CHORUS.
Queen, it stands not with my purpose to abet these fears of thine,
Nor to speak with glazing comfort! nay, betake thee to the shrine!
If thy dream foretold disaster, sue to gods to bar its way,
And, for thyself, son, state, and friends, to bring fair fate to-day. ”

“ GHOST OF DARIUS.
He came—but how, and to what end? doth aught of hope remain?
ATOSSA.
With joy he reached the bridge that spanned the Hellespontine main.
GHOST OF DARIUS.
How? is he safe, in Persian land? speak soothly, yea or nay!
ATOSSA.
Clear and more clear the rumour comes, for no man to gainsay.
GHOST OF DARIUS.
Woe for the oracle fulfilled, the presage of the war
Launched on my son, by will of Zeus! I deemed our doom afar
In lap of time; but, if a king push forward to his fate,
The god himself allures to death that man infatuate! ”

“ O gods high-throned in bliss, we must crouch at the shrines in your home!
Not here must we tarry and wail: shield clashes on shield as they come—
And now, even now is the hour for the robes and the chaplets of prayer!
Mine eyes feel the flash of the sword, the clang is instinct with the spear!
Is thy hand set against us, O Ares, in ruin and wrath to o’erwhelm
Thine own immemorial land, O god of the golden helm?
Look down upon us, we beseech thee, on the land that thou lovest of old,
And ye, O protecting gods, in pity your people behold! ”

“ CHORUS.
O warders of the walls, betray them not!
ETEOCLES.
Bestrew your cries! in silence face your fate.
CHORUS.
Gods of our city, see me not enslaved!
ETEOCLES.
On me, on all, thy cries bring slavery.
CHORUS.
Zeus, strong to smite, turn upon foes thy blow!
ETEOCLES.
Zeus, what a curse are women, wrought by thee!
CHORUS.
Weak wretches, even as men, when cities fall.
ETEOCLES.
What! clasping gods, yet voicing thy despair?
CHORUS.
In the sick heart, fear machete prey of speech.
ETEOCLES.
Light is the thing I ask thee—do my will! ”

“ CHORUS.
Let me not fall, O nevermore,
A prey into the young men’s hand;
Rather than wed whom I abhor,
By pilot-stars I flee this land;
O king, take justice to thy side,
And with the righteous powers decide!
THE KING OF ARGOS.
Hard is the cause—make me not judge thereof.
Already I have vowed it, to do nought
Save after counsel with my people ta’en,
King though I be; that ne’er in after time,
If ill fate chance, my people then may say—
In aid of strangers thou the state hast slain.
CHORUS.
Zeus, lord of kinship, rules at will
The swaying balance, and surveys
Evil and good ”

“ A city saved doth honour to her gods!
[Exit ETEOCLES, etc.]
Enter the CHORUS OF MAIDENS.
CHORUS.
I wail in the stress of my terror, and shrill is my cry of despair.
The foemen roll forth from their camp as a billow, and onward they bear!
Their horsemen are swift in the forefront, the dust rises up to the sky,
A signal, though speechless, of doom, a herald more clear than a cry!
Hoof-trampled, the land of my love bears onward the din to mine ears.
As a torrent descending a mountain, it thunders and echoes and nears!
The doom is unloosened and cometh! ”

“ A herdsman by his heifer, Argus moved,
Earth-born, malevolent of mood, and peered,
With myriad eyes, where’er my feet would roam.
But on him in a moment, unforeseen,
Came Fate, and sundered him from life; but I,
Still maddened by the gadfly’s sting, the scourge
Of God’s infliction, roam the weary world.
How I have fared, thou hearest: be there aught
Of what remains to bear, that thou canst tell,
Speak on! but let not thy compassion warm
Thy words to cheering falsehood. Worst of woes
Are words that break their promise to our hope!
CHORUS.
Woe! woe! avaunt—thou and thy tale of bane! ”

“ When he that scorns the gods shall rue his scorn
CHORUS.
Ah but I shudder, father!—ah, even now,
Even as I speak, the swift-winged ships draw nigh!
I shudder, I shiver, I perish with fear:
Overseas though I fled,
Yet nought it avails; my pursuers are near!
DANAUS.
Children, take heart; they who decreed to aid
Thy cause will arm for battle, well I ween.
CHORUS.
But desperate is Aegyptus’ ravening race,
With fight unsated; thou too know’st it well.
In their wrath they o’ertake us; the prow is deep-dark
In the which they have sped,
And dark is the bench and the crew of the bark! ”

“ CHORUS.
Then let him herald help to freedom won.
DANAUS.
Lastly, adore this altar consecrate
To many lesser gods in one; then crouch
On holy ground, a flock of doves that flee,
Scared by no alien hawks, a kin not kind,
Hateful, and fain of love more hateful still.
Foul is the bird that rends another bird,
And foul the men who hale unwilling maids,
From sire unwilling, to the bridal bed.
Never on earth, nor in the lower world,
Shall lewdness such as theirs escape the ban:
There too, if men say right, a God there is
Who upon dead men turns their sin to doom,
To final doom. ”

“ Thou ne'er shalt say thou hast, come weal, come woe,
A friend more faithful than Oceanus.
Prometheus.
How now? Who greets me? What! Art thou too come
To gaze upon my woes? How could'st thou leave
The stream that bears thy name, thine antres arched
With native rock, to visit earth that breeds
The massy iron in her womb? Com'st thou
To be spectator of my evil lot
And fellow sympathizer with my woes?
Behold, a thing indeed to gaze upon!
The friend of Zeus, co-stablisher of his rule,
See, by his sentence with what pains I am bowed!
Oceanus. ”

“ And every hour shall bring its weight of woe
To wear thy heart away; for yet unborn
Is he who shall release thee from thy pain.
This is thy wage for loving humankind.
For, being a God, thou dared'st the Gods' ill will,
Preferring, to exceeding honour, Man.
Wherefore thy long watch shall be comfortless,
Stretched on this rock, never to close an eye
Or bend a knee; and vainly shalt thou lift,
With groanings deep and lamentable cries,
Thy voice; for Zeus is hard to be entreated,
As new-born power is ever pitiless.
Kratos.
Enough! Why palter? Why waste idle pity? ”

“ Hath burst on us and all the Persian realm!
MESSENGER.
Be well assured, the tale is but begun—
The further agony that on us fell
Doth twice outweigh the sufferings I have told!
ATOSSA.
Nay, what disaster could be worse than this?
Say on! what woe upon the army came,
Swaying the scale to a yet further fall?
MESSENGER.
The very flower and crown of Persia’s race,
Gallant of soul and glorious in descent,
And highest held in trust before the king,
Lies shamefully and miserably slain.
ATOSSA.
Alas for me and for this ruin, friends!
Dead, sayest thou? by what fate overthrown? ”

“ Thy sire, the mighty Nilus, drive thee hence
Turning to death and doom thy greedy violence!
HERALD OF AEGYPTUS.
Swift to the vessel of the double prow,
Go quickly! let none linger, else this hand
Ruthless will hale you by your tresses hence.
CHORUS.
Alack, O father! from the shrine
Not aid but agony is mine.
As a spider he creeps and he clutches his prey,
And he hales me away.
A spectre of darkness, of darkness. Alas and alas! well-a-day!
O Earth, O my mother! O Zeus, thou king of the earth, and her child!
Turn back, we pray thee, from us his clamour and threatenings wild! ”

“ One woe to suffer—and that the noblest sorrow,
Seeing we were compassed in on every hand,—
Tarrying not, with the fleeting ocean billow
To fly till our keel touched the Argive strand,
Whence we boast ourselves sprung, from the breath of Zeus' nostrils,
And the touch of his procreant finger laid,
For a dynasty's founding, on a king's daughter,
Even the gnat-tormented heifer-maid.
What land but this would offer us a haven,
Where else the world o'er should we welcome find,
Having no arms but the suppliant's feeble weapons,
Boughs from the woodland plucked with white wool twined? ”

“ Bringing the mighty ones of old to naught.
Prometheus.
Oh that he had conveyed me
'Neath earth, 'neath hell that swalloweth up the dead;
In Tartarus, inimitably vast
With adamantine fetters bound me fast,—
There his fierce anger on me visited,
Where never mocking laughter could upbraid me
Of God or aught beside!
But now a wretch enskied,
A far-seen vane,
All they that hate me triumph in my pain.
Chorus.
Who of the Gods is there so pitiless
That he can triumph in thy sore distress?
Who doth not inly groan
With every pang of thine save Zeus alone? ”

“ Whereby I may elude my present woe.
CHORUS.
A rueful doom is thine! distraught of soul,
And all astray, and like some sorry leech
Art thou, repining at thine own disease,
Unskilled, unknowing of the needful cure.
PROMETHEUS.
More wilt thou wonder when the rest thou hearest—
What arts for them, what methods I devised.
Foremost was this: if any man fell sick,
No aiding art he knew, no saving food,
No curing oil nor draught, but all in lack
Of remedies they dwindled, till I taught
The medicinal blending of soft drugs,
Whereby they ward each sickness from their side. ”

“ And wrappings richly dight: no Argive maid,
No woman in all Greece such garb doth wear.
This too gives marvel, how unto this land,
Unheralded, unfriended, without guide,
And without fear, ye came? yet wands I see,
True sign of suppliance, by you laid down
On shrines of these our gods of festival.
No land but Greece can read such signs aright.
Much else there is, conjecture well might guess,
But let words teach the man who stands to hear.
CHORUS.
True is the word thou spakest of my garb;
But speak I unto thee as citizen,
Or Hermes’ wandbearer, or chieftain king? ”

“ I see—I hear—the brandished spear—and many there be that smite!
Wilt thou aid us, Ares long-in-the-land, or wilt thou thine own betray?
Dear to thee once, God golden-helmed, look down on thy city this day!
Hail, Godheads all that guard this realm and keep her fortress free!
Draw nigh! Behold! 'Gainst bondage pleads a virgin company!
For loud with hissing surges, by blasts of Ares sped,
A wave of men with combing crest our home hath compasséd!
Nevertheless, O Father,—Zeus, who o'er-rulest all,
Into the toils of foemen let not their quarry fall! ”

“ His jaws gaped horror and their hiss was death,
And all heaven’s host he challenged to the fray,
While, as one vowed to storm the power of Zeus,
Forth from his eyes he shot a demon glare.
It skilled not: the unsleeping bolt of Zeus,
The downward levin with its rush of flame,
Smote on him, and made dumb for evermore
The clamour of his vaunting: to the heart
Stricken he lay, and all that mould of strength
Sank thunder-shattered to a smouldering ash;
And helpless now and laid in ruin huge
He lieth by the narrow strait of sea,
Crushed at the root of Etna’s mountain-pile. ”

“ ATOSSA, WIDOW OF DARIUS AND MOTHER OF XERXES.
A MESSENGER.
THE GHOST OF DARIUS.
XERXES.
The Scene is laid at the Palace of Susa.
CHORUS.
Away unto the Grecian land
Hath passed the Persian armament:
We, by the monarch’s high command,
We are the warders true who stand,
Chosen, for honour and descent,
To watch the wealth of him who went—
Guards of the gold, and faithful styled
By Xerxes, great Darius’ child!
But the king went nor comes again—
And for that host, we saw depart
Arrayed in gold, my boding heart
Aches with a pulse of anxious pain,
Presageful for its youthful king! ”

“ CHORUS.
For the woe and the wreck and the doom, Prometheus I utter my sighs;
O’er my cheek flows the fountain of tears from tender, compassionate eyes.
For stern and abhorred is the sway of Zeus on his self-sought throne,
And ruthless the spear of his scorn, to the gods of the days that are done.
And over the limitless earth goes up a disconsolate cry:
Ye were all so fair, and have fallen; so great and your might has gone by!
So wails with a mighty lament the voice of the mortals, who dwell
In the Eastland, the home of the holy, for thee and the fate that befel ”

“ The maiden and matron alike should pass to the wedlock of scorn!
I hear it arise from the city, the manifold wail of despair—
Woe, woe for the doom that shall be—as in grasp of the foeman they fare!
For a woe and a weeping it is, if the maiden inviolate flower
Is plucked by the foe in his might, not culled in the bridal bower!
Alas for the hate and the horror—how say it?—less hateful by far
Is the doom to be slain by the sword, hewn down in the carnage of war!
For wide, ah! wide is the woe when the foeman has mounted the wall ”

“ The Suppliant Maidens
Scene: Argos. A hill rises in the foreground, and on the summit of it stand altars and statues of many gods. Enter the fifty Danaides, with their slave girls, and Danaus.
Chorus.
Zeus, the Suppliant's God, be gracious to us,
Pitifully behold us, for fugitives are we;
Where the blown sand-dunes silt the mouths of Nilus,
There we took the highway of the blue, salt sea;
There looked our last at the land of Zeus, her borders
Lapped and lost in the Syrian marches wild,
Fleeing, not as outlaws banned for blood-guilt
Lest a people perish, but self-exiled. ”

“ Where haven there is none, when sunset fades
In night. To pilot wise, the adage saith,
Night is a day of wakefulness and pain.
Therefore no force of weaponed men, as yet
Scatheless can come ashore, before the bank
Lie at her anchorage securely moored.
Bethink thee therefore, nor in panic leave
The shrine of gods whose succour thou hast won
I go for aid—men shall not blame me long,
Old, but with youth at heart and on my tongue.
[Exit DANAUS.]
CHORUS.
O land of hill and dale, O holy land,
What shall befall us? whither shall we flee,
From Apian land to some dark lair of earth? ”

“ Our soul in distraction is lost, and we mourn o’er the prey of the spear!
Ah, woe for your ending,
Unbrotherly wrought!
And woe for the issue,
The fray that ye fought,
The doom of a mutual slaughter whereby to the grave ye are brought!
Ah, twofold the sorrow—
The heard and the seen!
And double the tide
Of our tears and our teen,
As we stand by our brothers in death and wail for the love that has been!
O grievous the fate
That attends upon wrong!
Stern ghost of our sire,
Thy vengeance is long!
Dark Fury of hell and of death, the hands of thy kingdom are strong! ”

“ CHORUS.
Ah yet, O father, leave us not forlorn!
Alone, a maid is nought, a strengthless arm.
With guile they pursue me, with counsel malign,
And unholy their soul;
And as ravens they seize me, unheeding the shrine!
DANAUS.
Fair will befall us, children, in this chance,
If thus in wrath they wrong the gods and you.
CHORUS.
Alas, nor tridents nor the sanctity
Of shrines will drive them, O my sire, from us!
Unholy and daring and cursed is their ire,
Nor own they control
Of the gods, but like jackals they glut their desire! ”

“ Wear thee away; for know, the womb of Time
Hath not conceived a power to set thee free.
Such meed thou hast, for love toward mankind
For thou, a god defying wrath of gods,
Beyond the ordinance didst champion men,
And for reward shalt keep a sleepless watch,
Stiff-kneed, erect, nailed to this dismal rock,
With manifold laments and useless cries
Against the will inexorable of Zeus.
Hard is the heart of fresh-usurpèd power!
STRENGTH.
Enough of useless ruth! why tarriest thou?
Why pitiest one whom all gods wholly hate,
One who to man gave o’er thy privilege? ”

“ Such fate it brings, to house with womankind.
Therefore if any shall resist my rule—
Or man, or woman, or some sexless thing—
The vote of sentence shall decide their doom,
And stones of execution, past escape,
Shall finish all. Let not a woman’s voice
Be loud in council! for the things without,
A man must care; let women keep within—
Even then is mischief all too probable!
Hear ye? or speak I to unheeding ears?
CHORUS.
Ah, but I shudder, child of Oedipus!
I heard the clash and clang!
The axles rolled and rumbled; woe to us
Fire-welded bridles rang! ”

“ Wails wild and sad for haunts beloved erewhile.
Yea, and for Itylus—ah, well-a-day!
Slain by her own, his mother’s hand,
Maddened by lustful wrong, the deed by Tereus planned.
Like her I wail and wail, in soft Ionian tones,
And as she wastes, even so
Wastes my soft cheek, once ripe with Nilus’ suns
And all my heart dissolves in utter woe
Sad flowers of grief I cull,
Fleeing from kinsmen’s love unmerciful—
Yea, from the clutching hands, the wanton crowd,
I sped across the waves, from Egypt’s land of cloud [1]
Gods of the ancient cradle of my race,
Hear me, just gods! ”

“ Is hard to come by; for the infernal Gods
Love better to hold fast than to let go.
Nevertheless, with them have I prevailed,
And ye behold me! Haste! my time is short
And I would not offend. What aileth Persia?
What strange, what heavy stroke hath smitten her?
Chorus.
I dare not meet thy gaze: I fear
To speak what must offend thine ear;
With veiled eyes, I bow me prone,
As at the footstool of thy throne!
Darius.
Know that by strong persuasion of thy grief
I am ascended from the shades. Be brief;
Put awe and forms of courtly speech away,
And utter boldly all thou hast to say. ”