Project Gutenberg's Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays, by AEschylus #2 in our series by AEschylusCopyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloadingor redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do notchange or edit the header without written permission.Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of thisfile. Included is important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how the file may be used. You can alsofind out about how to make a donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts****eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971*******These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****Title: Suppliant Maidens and Other PlaysAuthor: AEschylusRelease Date: August, 2005 [EBook #8714] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was firstposted on August 3, 2003]Edition: 10Language: English*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUPPLIANT MAIDENS AND OTHER PLAYS ***Produced by Ted Garvin, Robert Prince, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading TeamFOUR PLAYS OF AESCHYLUSTHE SUPPLIANT MAIDENS THE PERSIANS THE SEVEN AGAINST THEBES THE PROMETHEUSBOUNDTRANSLATED ...
Project Gutenberg's Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays, by AEschylus #2 in our series by AEschylus
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading
or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not
change or edit the header without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this
file. Included is important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how the file may be used. You can also
find out about how to make a donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
Title: Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays
Author: AEschylus
Release Date: August, 2005 [EBook #8714] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first
posted on August 3, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUPPLIANT MAIDENS AND OTHER PLAYS ***
Produced by Ted Garvin, Robert Prince, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading TeamFOUR PLAYS OF AESCHYLUS
THE SUPPLIANT MAIDENS THE PERSIANS THE SEVEN AGAINST THEBES THE PROMETHEUS
BOUND
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH VERSE BY E.D.A. MORSHEAD, MA.INTRODUCTION
The surviving dramas of Aeschylus are seven in number, though he is believed to have written nearly a hundred during his
life of sixty-nine years, from 525 B.C. to 456 B.C. That he fought at Marathon in 490, and at Salamis in 480 B.C. is a
strongly accredited tradition, rendered almost certain by the vivid references to both battles in his play of The Persians,
which was produced in 472. But his earliest extant play was, probably, not The Persians but The Suppliant Maidens—a
mythical drama, the fame of which has been largely eclipsed by the historic interest of The Persians, and is undoubtedly
the least known and least regarded of the seven. Its topic—the flight of the daughters of Danaus from Egypt to Argos, in
order to escape from a forced bridal with their first-cousins, the sons of Aegyptus—is legendary, and the lyric element
predominates in the play as a whole. We must keep ourselves reminded that the ancient Athenian custom of presenting
dramas in Trilogies- —that is, in three consecutive plays dealing with different stages of one legend—was probably not
uniform: it survives, for us, in one instance only, viz. the Orestean Trilogy, comprising the Agamemnon, the Libation-
Bearers, and the Eumenides, or Furies. This Trilogy is the masterpiece of the Aeschylean Drama: the four remaining
plays of the poet, which are translated in this volume, are all fragments of lost Trilogies—that is to say, the plays are
complete as poems, but in regard to the poet's larger design they are fragments; they once had predecessors, or
sequels, of which only a few words, or lines, or short paragraphs, survive. It is not certain, but seems probable, that the
earliest of these single completed plays is The Suppliant Maidens, and on that supposition it has been placed first in the
present volume. The maidens, accompanied by their father Danaes, have fled from Egypt and arrived at Argos, to take
sanctuary there and to avoid capture by their pursuing kinsmen and suitors. In the course of the play, the pursuers' ship
arrives to reclaim the maidens for a forced wedlock in Egypt. The action of the drama turns on the attitude of the king and
people of Argos, in view of this intended abduction. The king puts the question to the popular vote, and the demand of the
suitors is unanimously rejected: the play closes with thanks and gratitude on the part of the fugitives, who, in lyrical strains
of quiet beauty, seem to refer the whole question of their marriage to the subsequent decision of the gods, and, in
particular, of Aphrodite.
Of the second portion of the Trilogy we can only speak conjecturally. There is a passage in the Prometheus Bound (ll.
860-69), in which we learn that the maidens were somehow reclaimed by the suitors, and that all, except one, slew their
bridegrooms on the wedding night. There is a faint trace, among the Fragments of Aeschylus, of a play called
Thalamopoioi,—i.e. The Preparers of the Chamber,—which may well have referred to this tragic scene. Its grim title will
recall to all classical readers the magnificent, though terrible, version of the legend, in the final stanzas of the eleventh
poem in the third book of Horace's Odes. The final play was probably called The Danaides, and described the acquittal
of the brides through some intervention of Aphrodite: a fragment of it survives, in which the goddess appears to be
pleading her special prerogative. The legends which commit the daughters of Danaus to an eternal penalty in Hades are,
apparently, of later origin. Homer is silent on any such penalty; and Pindar, Aeschylus' contemporary, actually describes
the once suppliant maidens as honourably enthroned (Pyth. ix. 112: Nem. x. ll. 1-10). The Tartarean part of the story is, in
fact, post-Aeschylean.
The Suppliant Maidens is full of charm, though the text of the part which describes the arrival of the pursuers at Argos is
full of uncertainties. It remains a fine, though archaic, poem, with this special claim on our interest, that it is, probably, the
earliest extant poetic drama. We see in it the tendency to grandiose language, not yet fully developed as in the
Prometheus: the inclination of youth to simplicity, and even platitude, in religious and general speculation: and yet we
recognize, as in the germ, the profound theology of the Agamemnon, and a touch of the political vein which appears
more fully in the Furies. If the precedence in time here ascribed to it is correct, the play is perhaps worth more
recognition than it has received from the countrymen of Shakespeare.
The Persians has been placed second in this volume, as the oldest play whose date is certainly known. It was brought
out in 472 B.C., eight years after the sea-fight of Salamis which it commemorates, and five years before the Seven
against Thebes (467 B.C.). It is thought to be the second play of a Trilogy, standing between the Phineus and the
Glaucus. Phineus was a legendary seer, of the Argonautic era—"Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old"—and the play
named after him may have contained a prophecy of the great conflict which is actually described in The Persae: the plot
of the Glaucus is unknown. In any case, The Persians was produced before the eyes of a generation which had seen the
struggles, West against East, at Marathon and Thermopylæ, Salamis and Plataea. It is as though Shakespeare had
commemorated, through the lips of a Spanish survivor, in the ears of old councillors of Philip the Second, the dispersal of
the Armada.
Against the piteous want of manliness on the part of the returning Xerxes, we may well set the grave and dignified
patriotism of Atossa, the Queen-mother of the Persian kingdom; the loyalty, in spite of their bewilderment, of the aged
men who form the Chorus; and, above all, the royal phantom of Darius, evoked from the shadowland by the libations of
Atossa and by the appealing cries of the Chorus. The latter, indeed, hardly dare to address the kingly ghost: but Atossa
bravely narrates to him the catastrophe, of which, in the lower world, Darius has known nothing, though he realizes that
disaster, soon or late, is the lot of mortal power. As the tale is unrolled, a spirit of prophecy possesses him, and he
foretells the coming slaughter of Plataea; then, with a last royal admonition that the defeated Xerxes shall, on his return,
be received with all ceremony and observance, and with a characteristic warning to the aged men, that they must take
such pleasures as they may, in their waning years, he returns to the shades. The play ends with the undignified
reappearance of Xerxes, and a melancholy procession into the palace of Susa. It was, perhaps, inevitable that this close
of the great drama should verge on the farcical, and that the poltroonery of Xerxes should, in a measure, obscure
Aeschylus' generous portraiture of Atossa and Darius. But his magnificent picture of the battle of Salamis is unequalledin the poetic annals of naval war. No account of the flight of the Armada, no record of Lepanto or Trafalgar, can be justly
set beside it. The Messenger might well, like Prospero, announce a tragedy by one line—
Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow.
Five years after The Persians, in 467 B. C., the play which we call the Seven against Thebes was presented at Athens.
It bears now a title which Aeschylus can hardly have given to it for, though the scene of the drama overlooks the region
where the city of Thebes afterwards came into being, yet, in the play itself, Thebes is never mentioned. The scene of
action is the Cadmea, or Citadel of Cadmus, and we know that, in Aeschylus' lifetime, that citadel was no longer a mere
fastness, but had so grown outwards and enlarged itself that a new name, Thebes, was applied to the collective city. (All
this has been made abundantly clear by Dr. Verrall in his Introduction to the Seven against Thebes, to which every
reader of the play itself will naturally and most profitably refer.) In the time of Aeschylus, Thebes was, of course, a notable
city, his great contemporary Pindar was a citizen of it. But the Thebes of Aeschylus' date is one thing, the fortress
represented in Aeschylus' play is quite another, and is never, by him, called Thebes. That the play received, and retains,
the name, The Seven against Thebes, is believed to be due to two lines of Aristophanes in his Frogs (406 B.C.), where
he describes Aeschylus' play as "the Seven against Thebes, a drama ins