The Trojan women of Euripides - Euripides
THE TROJAN WOMEN OF EURIPIDES
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH RHYMING VERSE WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES BY
GILBERT MURRAY, LL.D., D.LITT.
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
1915
THE TROJAN WOMEN
In his clear preface, Gilbert Murray says with truth that _The Trojan
Women_, valued by the usage of the stage, is not a perfect play. "It is
only the crying of one of the great wrongs of the world wrought into
music." Yet it is one of the greater dramas of the elder world. In one
situation, with little movement, with few figures, it flashes out a
great dramatic lesson, the infinite pathos of a successful wrong. It has
in it the very soul of the tragic. It even goes beyond the limited
tragic, and hints that beyond the defeat may come a greater glory than
will be the fortune of the victors. And thus through its pity and terror
it purifies our souls to thoughts of peace.
Great art has no limits of locality or time. Its tidings are timeless,
and its messages are universal. _The Trojan Women_ was first performed
in 415 B.C., from a story of the siege of Troy which even then was
ancient history. But the pathos of it is as modern to us as it was to
the Athenians. The terrors of war have not changed in three thousand
years. Euripides had that to say of war which we have to say of it
to-day, and had learned that which we are even now learning, that when
most triumphant it brings as much wretchedness to the victors as to the
vanquished. In this play the great conquest "seems to be a great joy and
is in truth a great misery." The tragedy of war has in no essential
altered. The god Poseidon mourns over Troy as he might over the cities
of to-day, when he cries:
"How are ye blind,
Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast
Temples to desolation, and lay waste
Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie
The ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die!"
To the cities of this present day might the prophetess Cassandra speak
her message:
"Would ye be wise, ye Cities, fly from war!
Yet if war come, there is a crown in death
For her that striveth well and perisheth
Unstained: to die in evil were the stain!"
A throb of human sympathy as if with one of our sisters of to-day comes
to us at the end, when the city is destroyed and its queen would throw
herself, living, into its flames. To be of the action of this play the
imagination needs not to travel back over three thousand years of
history. It can simply leap a thousand leagues of ocean.
If ever wars are to be ended, the imagination of man must end them. To
the common mind, in spite of all its horrors, there is still something
glorious in war. Preachers have preached against it in vain; economists
have argued against its wastefulness in vain. The imagination of a great
poet alone can finally show to the imagination of the world that even
the glories of war are an empty delusion. Euripides shows us, as the
centre of his drama, women battered and broken by inconceivable
torture--the widowed Hecuba, Andromache with her child dashed to death,
Cassandra ravished and made mad--yet does he show that theirs are the
unconquered and unconquerable spirits. The victorious men, flushed with
pride, have remorse and mockery dealt out to them by those they fought
for, and go forth to unpitied death. Never surely can a great tragedy
seem more real to us, or purge our souls more truly of the unreality of
our thoughts and feelings concerning vital issues, than can The Trojan
Women at this moment of the history of the world.
FRANCIS HOVEY STODDARD.
_May the first, 1915_.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Judged by common standards, the Troaedes is far from a perfect play; it
is scarcely even a good play. It is an intense study of one great
situation, with little plot, little construction, little or no relief or
variety. The only movement of the drama is a gradual extinguishing of
all the familiar lights of human life, with, perhaps, at the end, a
suggestion that in the utterness of night, when all fears of a possible
worse thing are passed, there is in some sense peace and even glory. But
the situation itself has at least this dramatic value, that it is
different from what it seems.
The consummation of a great conquest, a thing celebrated in paeans and
thanksgivings, the very height of the day-dreams of unregenerate man--it
seems to be a great joy, and it is in truth a great misery. It is
conquest seen when the thrill of battle is over, and nothing remains but
to wait and think. We feel in the background the presence of the
conquerors, sinister and disappointed phantoms; of the conquered men,
after long torment, now resting in death. But the living drama for
Euripides lay in the conquered women. It is from them that he has named
his play and built up his scheme of parts: four figures clearly lit and
heroic, the others in varying grades of characterisation, nameless and
barely articulate, mere half-heard voices of an eternal sorrow.
Indeed, the most usual condemnation of the play is not that it is dull,
but that it is too harrowing; that scene after scene passes beyond the
due limits of tragic art. There are points to be pleaded against this
criticism. The very beauty of the most fearful scenes, in spite of their
fearfulness, is one; the quick comfort of the lyrics is another, falling
like a spell of peace when the strain is too hard to bear (cf. p. 89).
But the main defence is that, like many of the greatest works of art,
the _Troaedes_ is something more than art. It is also a prophecy, a
bearing of witness. And the prophet, bound to deliver his message, walks
outside the regular ways of the artist.
For some time before the _Troaedes_ was produced, Athens, now entirely in
the hands of the War Party, had been engaged in an enterprise which,
though on military grounds defensible, was bitterly resented by the more
humane minority, and has been selected by Thucydides as the great
crucial crime of the war. She had succeeded in compelling the neutral
Dorian island of Melos to take up arms against her, and after a long
siege had conquered the quiet and immemorially ancient town, massacred
the men and sold the women and children into slavery. Melos fell in the
autumn of 416 B.C. The _Troaedes_ was produced in the following spring.
And while the gods of the prologue were prophesying destruction at sea
for the sackers of Troy, the fleet of the sackers of Melos, flushed with
conquest and marked by a slight but unforgettable taint of sacrilege,
was actually preparing to set sail for its fatal enterprise against
Sicily.
Not, of course, that we have in the _Troaedes_ a case of political
allusion. Far from it. Euripides does not mean Melos when he says Troy,
nor mean Alcibiades' fleet when he speaks of Agamemnon's. But he writes
under the influence of a year which to him, as to Thucydides, had been
filled full of indignant pity and of dire foreboding. This tragedy is
perhaps, in European literature, the first great expression of the
spirit of pity for mankind exalted into a moving principle; a principle
which has made the most precious, and possibly the most destructive,
elements of innumerable rebellions, revolutions, and martyrdoms, and of
at least two great religions.
Pity is a rebel passion. Its hand is against the strong, against the
organised force of society, against conventional sanctions and accepted
Gods. It is the Kingdom of Heaven within us fighting against the brute
powers of the world; and it is apt to have those qualities of unreason,
of contempt for the counting of costs and the balancing of sacrifices,
of recklessness, and even, in the last resort, of ruthlessness, which so
often mark the paths of heavenly things and the doings of the children
of light. It brings not peace, but a sword.
So it was with Euripides. The _Troaedes_ itself has indeed almost no
fierceness and singularly little thought of revenge. It is only the
crying of one of the great wrongs of the world wrought into music, as it
were, and made beautiful by "the most tragic of the poets." But its
author lived ever after in a deepening atmosphere of strife and even of
hatred, down to the day when, "because almost all in Athens rejoiced at
his suffering," he took his way to the remote valleys of Macedon to
write the _Bacchae_ and to die.
G. M.
THE TROJAN WOMEN
CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY
THE GOD POSEIDON.
THE GODDESS PALLAS ATHENA.
HECUBA, _Queen of Troy, wife of Priam, mother of Hector and Paris_.
CASSANDRA, _daughter of Hecuba, a prophetess_.
ANDROMACHE, _wife of Hector, Prince of Troy_.
HELEN, _wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta; carried off by Paris, Prince
of Troy_.
TALTHYBIUS, _Herald of the Greeks_.
MENELAUS, _King of Sparta, and, together with his brother Agamemnon,
General of the Greeks_.
SOLDIERS ATTENDANT ON TALTHYBIUS AND MENELAUS.
CHORUS OF CAPTIVE TROJAN WOMEN, YOUNG AND OLD, MAIDEN AND MARRIED.
_The Troaedes was first acted in the year_ 415 B.C. "_The first prize was
won by Xenocles, whoever he may have been, with the four plays Oedipus,
Lycaon, Bacchae and Athamas, a Satyr-play. The second by Euripides with
the Alexander, Palamedes, Troaedes and Sisyphus, a Satyr-play_."--AELIAN,
_Varia Historia_, ii. 8.
THE TROJAN WOMEN
_The scene represents a battlefield, a few days after the battle. At the
back are the walls of Troy, partially ruined. In front of them, to right
and left, are some huts, containing those of the Captive Women who have
been specially set apart for the chief Greek leaders. At one side some
dead bodies of armed men are visible. In front a tall woman with white
hair is lying on the ground asleep._
_It is the dusk of early dawn, before sunrise. The figure of the god _
POSEIDON _ is dimly seen before the walls._
POSEIDON.[1]
Up from Aegean caverns, pool by pool
Of blue salt sea, where feet most beautiful
Of Nereid maidens weave beneath the foam
Their long sea-dances, I, their lord, am come,
Poseidon of the Sea. 'Twas I whose power,
With great Apollo, builded tower by tower
These walls of Troy; and still my care doth stand
True to the ancient People of my hand;
Which now as smoke is perished, in the shock
Of Argive spears. Down from Parnassus' rock
The Greek Epeios came, of Phocian seed,
And wrought by Pallas' mysteries a Steed
Marvellous[2], big with arms; and through my wall
It passed, a death-fraught image magical.
The groves are empty and the sanctuaries
Run red with blood. Unburied Priam lies
By his own hearth, on God's high altar-stair,
And Phrygian gold goes forth and raiment rare
To the Argive ships; and weary soldiers roam
Waiting the wind that blows at last for home,
For wives and children, left long years away,
Beyond the seed's tenth fullness and decay,
To work this land's undoing.
And for me,
Since Argive Hera conquereth, and she
Who wrought with Hera to the Phrygians' woe,
Pallas, behold, I bow mine head and go
Forth from great Ilion[3] and mine altars old.
When a still city lieth in the hold
Of Desolation, all God's spirit there
Is sick and turns from worship.--Hearken where
The ancient River waileth with a voice
Of many women, portioned by the choice
Of war amid new lords, as the lots leap
For Thessaly, or Argos, or the steep
Of Theseus' Rock. And others yet there are,
High women, chosen from the waste of war
For the great kings, behind these portals hid;
And with them that Laconian Tyndarid[4],
Helen, like them a prisoner and a prize.
And this unhappy one--would any eyes
Gaze now on Hecuba? Here at the Gates
She lies 'mid many tears for many fates
Of wrong. One child beside Achilles' grave
In secret slain[5], Polyxena the brave,
Lies bleeding. Priam and his sons are gone;
And, lo, Cassandra[6], she the Chosen One,
Whom Lord Apollo spared to walk her way
A swift and virgin spirit, on this day
Lust hath her, and she goeth garlanded
A bride of wrath to Agamemnon's bed.
[_He turns to go; and another divine Presence
becomes visible in the dusk. It is the
goddess_ PALLAS ATHENA.
O happy long ago, farewell, farewell,
Ye shining towers and mine old citadel;
Broken by Pallas[7], Child of God, or still
Thy roots had held thee true.
PALLAS.
Is it the will
Of God's high Brother, to whose hand is given
Great power of old, and worship of all Heaven,
To suffer speech from one whose enmities
This day are cast aside?
POSEIDON.
His will it is:
Kindred and long companionship withal,
Most high Athena, are things magical.
PALLAS.
Blest be thy gentle mood!--Methinks I see
A road of comfort here, for thee and me.
POSEIDON.
Thou hast some counsel of the Gods, or word
Spoken of Zeus? Or is it tidings heard
From some far Spirit?
PALLAS.
For this Ilion's sake,
Whereon we tread, I seek thee, and would make
My hand as thine.
POSEIDON.
Hath that old hate and deep
Failed, where she lieth in her ashen sleep?
Thou pitiest her?
PALLAS.
Speak first; wilt thou be one
In heart with me and hand till all be done?
POSEIDON.
Yea; but lay bare thy heart. For this land's sake
Thou comest, not for Hellas?
PALLAS.
I would make
Mine ancient enemies laugh for joy, and bring
On these Greek ships a bitter homecoming.
POSEIDON.
Swift is thy spirit's path, and strange withal,
And hot thy love and hate, where'er they fall.
PALLAS.
A deadly wrong they did me, yea within
Mine holy place: thou knowest?
POSEIDON.
I know the sin
Of Ajax[8], when he cast Cassandra down....
PALLAS.
And no man rose and smote him; not a frown
Nor word from all the Greeks!
POSEIDON.
And 'twas thine hand
That gave them Troy!
PALLAS.
Therefore with thee I stand
To smite them.
POSEIDON.
All thou cravest, even now
Is ready in mine heart. What seekest thou?
PALLAS.
An homecoming that striveth ever more
And cometh to no home.
POSEIDON.
Here on the shore
Wouldst hold them or amid mine own salt foam?
PALLAS.
When the last ship hath bared her sail for home!
Zeus shall send rain, long rain and flaw of driven
Hail, and a whirling darkness blown from heaven;
To me his levin-light he promiseth
O'er ships and men, for scourging and hot death:
Do thou make wild the roads of the sea, and steep
With war of waves and yawning of the deep,
Till dead men choke Euboea's curling bay.
So Greece shall dread even in an after day
My house, nor scorn the Watchers of strange lands!
POSEIDON.
I give thy boon unbartered. These mine hands
Shall stir the waste Aegean; reefs that cross
The Delian pathways, jag-torn Myconos,
Scyros and Lemnos, yea, and storm-driven
Caphereus with the bones of drowned men
Shall glut him.--Go thy ways, and bid the Sire
Yield to thine hand the arrows of his fire.
Then wait thine hour, when the last ship shall wind
Her cable coil for home! [_Exit_ PALLAS.
How are ye blind,
Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast
Temples to desolation, and lay waste
Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie
The ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die!
[_Exit_ POSEIDON.
* * * * *
_The day slowly dawns_: HECUBA _wakes_.
HECUBA.
Up from the earth, O weary head!
This is not Troy, about, above--
Not Troy, nor we the lords thereof.
Thou breaking neck, be strengthened!
Endure and chafe not. The winds rave
And falter. Down the world's wide road,
Float, float where streams the breath of God;
Nor turn thy prow to breast the wave.
Ah woe!... For what woe lacketh here?
My children lost, my land, my lord.
O thou great wealth of glory, stored
Of old in Ilion, year by year
We watched ... and wert thou nothingness?
What is there that I fear to say?
And yet, what help?... Ah, well-a-day,
This ache of lying, comfortless
And haunted! Ah, my side, my brow
And temples! All with changeful pain
My body rocketh, and would fain
Move to the tune of tears that flow:
For tears are music too, and keep
A song unheard in hearts that weep.
[_She rises and gazes towards the Greek ships far off on the shore._
O ships, O crowding faces
Of ships[9], O hurrying beat
Of oars as of crawling feet,
How found ye our holy places?
Threading the narrows through,
Out from the gulfs of the Greek,
Out to the clear dark blue,
With hate ye came and with joy,
And the noise of your music flew,
Clarion and pipe did shriek,
As the coiled cords ye threw,
Held in the heart of Troy!
What sought ye then that ye came?
A woman, a thing abhorred:
A King's wife that her lord
Hateth: and Castor's[10] shame
Is hot for her sake, and the reeds
Of old Eurotas stir
With the noise of the name of her.
She slew mine ancient King,
The Sower of fifty Seeds[11],
And cast forth mine and me,
As shipwrecked men, that cling
To a reef in an empty sea.
Who am I that I sit
Here at a Greek king's door,
Yea, in the dust of it?
A slave that men drive before,
A woman that hath no home,
Weeping alone for her dead;
A low and bruised head,
And the glory struck therefrom.
[_She starts up from her solitary brooding, and calls to the other
Trojan Women in the huts._
O Mothers of the Brazen Spear,
And maidens, maidens, brides of shame,
Troy is a smoke, a dying flame;
Together we will weep for her:
I call ye as a wide-wing'd bird
Calleth the children of her fold,
To cry, ah, not the cry men heard
In Ilion, not the songs of old,
That echoed when my hand was true
On Priam's sceptre, and my feet
Touched on the stone one signal beat,
And out the Dardan music rolled;
And Troy's great Gods gave ear thereto.
[_The door of one of the huts on the right
opens, and the Women steal out severally,
startled and afraid_.
FIRST WOMAN.
[_Strophe_ I.
How say'st thou? Whither moves thy cry,
Thy bitter cry? Behind our door
We heard thy heavy heart outpour
Its sorrow: and there shivered by
Fear and a quick sob shaken
From prisoned hearts that shall be free no more!
HECUBA.
Child, 'tis the ships that stir upon the shore....
SECOND WOMAN.
The ships, the ships awaken!
THIRD WOMAN.
Dear God, what would they? Overseas
Bear me afar to strange cities?
HECUBA.
Nay, child, I know not. Dreams are these,
Fears of the hope-forsaken.
FIRST WOMAN.
Awake, O daughters of affliction, wake
And learn your lots! Even now the Argives break
Their camp for sailing!
HECUBA.
Ah, not Cassandra! Wake not her
Whom God hath maddened, lest the foe
Mock at her dreaming. Leave me clear
From that one edge of woe.
O Troy, my Troy, thou diest here
Most lonely; and most lonely we
The living wander forth from thee,
And the dead leave thee wailing!
[_One of the huts on the left is now open, and the rest of the_ CHORUS
_come out severally. Their number eventually amounts to fifteen_.
FOURTH WOMAN.
[_Antistrophe_ I.
Out of the tent of the Greek king
I steal, my Queen, with trembling breath:
What means thy call? Not death; not death!
They would not slay so low a thing!
FIFTH WOMAN.
O, 'tis the ship-folk crying
To deck the galleys: and we part, we part!
HECUBA.
Nay, daughter: take the morning to thine heart.
FIFTH WOMAN.
My heart with dread is dying!
SIXTH WOMAN.
An herald from the Greek hath come!
FIFTH WOMAN.
How have they cast me, and to whom
A bondmaid?
HECUBA.
Peace, child: wait thy doom.
Our lots are near the trying.
FOURTH WOMAN.
Argos, belike, or Phthia shall it be,
Or some lone island of the tossing sea,
Far, far from Troy?
HECUBA.
And I the aged, where go I,
A winter-frozen bee, a slave
Death-shapen, as the stones that lie
Hewn on a dead man's grave:
The children of mine enemy
To foster, or keep watch before
The threshold of a master's door,
I that was Queen in Troy!
A WOMAN TO ANOTHER.
[_Strophe 2_.
And thou, what tears can tell thy doom?
THE OTHER.
The shuttle still shall flit and change
Beneath my fingers, but the loom,
Sister, be strange.
ANOTHER (_wildly_).
Look, my dead child! My child, my love,
The last look....
ANOTHER.
Oh, there cometh worse.
A Greek's bed in the dark....
ANOTHER.
God curse
That night and all the powers thereof!
ANOTHER.
Or pitchers to and fro to bear
To some Pirene[12] on the hill,
Where the proud water craveth still
Its broken-hearted minister.
ANOTHER.
God guide me yet to Theseus' land[13],
The gentle land, the famed afar....
ANOTHER.
But not the hungry foam--Ah, never!--
Of fierce Eurotas, Helen's river,
To bow to Menelaus' hand,
That wasted Troy with war!
A WOMAN.
[_Antistrophe 2_.
They told us of a land high-born,
Where glimmers round Olympus' roots
A lordly river, red with corn
And burdened fruits.
ANOTHER.
Aye, that were next in my desire
To Athens, where good spirits dwell....
ANOTHER.
Or Aetna's breast, the deeps of fire
That front the Tyrian's Citadel:
First mother, she, of Sicily
And mighty mountains: fame hath told
Their crowns of goodness manifold....
ANOTHER.
And, close beyond the narrowing sea,
A sister land, where float enchanted
Ionian summits, wave on wave,
And Crathis of the burning tresses
Makes red the happy vale, and blesses
With gold of fountains spirit-haunted
Homes of true men and brave!
LEADER.
But lo, who cometh: and his lips
Grave with the weight of dooms unknown:
A Herald from the Grecian ships.
Swift comes he, hot-foot to be done
And finished. Ah, what bringeth he
Of news or judgment? Slaves are we,
Spoils that the Greek hath won!
[TALTHYBIUS[14], _followed by some Soldiers, enters from the left_.
TALTHYBIUS.
Thou know'st me, Hecuba. Often have I crossed
Thy plain with tidings from the Hellene host.
'Tis I, Talthybius.... Nay, of ancient use
Thou know'st me. And I come to bear thee news.
HECUBA.
Ah me, 'tis here, 'tis here,
Women of Troy, our long embosomed fear!
TALTHYBIUS.
The lots are cast, if that it was ye feared.
HECUBA.
What lord, what land.... Ah me,
Phthia or Thebes, or sea-worn Thessaly?
TALTHYBIUS.
Each hath her own. Ye go not in one herd.
HECUBA.
Say then what lot hath any? What of joy
Falls, or can fall on any child of Troy?
TALTHYBIUS.
I know: but make thy questions severally.
HECUBA.
My stricken one must be
Still first. Say how Cassandra's portion lies.
TALTHYBIUS.
Chosen from all for Agamemnon's prize!
HECUBA.
How, for his Spartan bride
A tirewoman? For Helen's sister's pride?
TALTHYBIUS.
Nay, nay: a bride herself, for the King's bed.
HECUBA.
The sainted of Apollo? And her own
Prize that God promised
Out of the golden clouds, her virgin crown?...
TALTHYBIUS.
He loved her for that same strange holiness.
HECUBA.
Daughter, away, away,
Cast all away,
The haunted Keys[15], the lonely stole's array
That kept thy body like a sacred place!
TALTHYBIUS.
Is't not rare fortune that the King hath smiled
On such a maid?
HECUBA.
What of that other child
Ye reft from me but now?
TALTHYBIUS (_speaking with some constraint_).
Polyxena? Or what child meanest thou?
HECUBA.
The same. What man now hath her, or what doom?
TALTHYBIUS.
She rests apart, to watch Achilles' tomb.
HECUBA.
To watch a tomb? My daughter? What is this?...
Speak, Friend? What fashion of the laws of Greece?
TALTHYBIUS.
Count thy maid happy! She hath naught of ill
To fear....
HECUBA.
What meanest thou? She liveth still?
TALTHYBIUS.
I mean, she hath one toil[16] that holds her free
From all toil else.
HECUBA.
What of Andromache,
Wife of mine iron-hearted Hector, where
Journeyeth she?
TALTHYBIUS.
Pyrrhus, Achilles' son, hath taken her.
HECUBA.
And I, whose slave am I,
The shaken head, the arm that creepeth by,
Staff-crutched, like to fall?
TALTHYBIUS.
Odysseus[17], Ithaca's king, hath thee for thrall.
HECUBA.
Beat, beat the crownless head:
Rend the cheek till the tears run red!
A lying man and a pitiless
Shall be lord of me, a heart full-flown
With scorn of righteousness:
O heart of a beast where law is none,
Where all things change so that lust be fed,
The oath and the deed, the right and the wrong,
Even the hate of the forked tongue:
Even the hate turns and is cold,
False as the love that was false of old!
O Women of Troy, weep for me!
Yea, I am gone: I am gone my ways.
Mine is the crown of misery,
The bitterest day of all our days.
LEADER.
Thy fate thou knowest, Queen: but I know not
What lord of South or North has won my lot.
TALTHYBIUS.
Go, seek Cassandra, men! Make your best speed,
That I may leave her with the King, and lead
These others to their divers lords.... Ha, there!
What means that sudden light? Is it the flare
Of torches?
[_Light is seen shining through the crevices of the second hut on the
right. He moves towards it._
Would they fire their prison rooms,
Or how, these dames of Troy?--'Fore God, the dooms
Are known, and now they burn themselves and die[18]
Rather than sail with us! How savagely
In days like these a free neck chafes beneath
Its burden!... Open! Open quick! Such death
Were bliss to them, it may be: but 'twill bring
Much wrath, and leave me shamed before the King!
HECUBA.
There is no fire, no peril: 'tis my child,
Cassandra, by the breath of God made wild.