Preface

The Choëphoroe, or Libation-Bearers, is the second play in the only trilogy preserved to us from the Athenian stage: Agamemnon, Choëphoroe, Eumenides. The first gives the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aigisthos; the second the vengeance of Orestes, helped by his sister Electra; the third deals with the ultimate solution of the problem of Sin and Punishment, the purification of Orestes from the murder of his mother and the conversion of the spirits of Punishment from Furies to Beneficent Beings, from “Erinyes” to “Eumenides.”

The vengeance of Orestes was made the subject of plays by all three tragedians. All the plays are in their ways masterpieces, and each highly characteristic of its writer. Euripides realizes and psychologizes the horror of the story; Sophocles, apparently from a deliberate adoption of the “Homeric” tone, suppresses the religious problem and concentrates on the elements of direct passion. Aeschylus, as I have said elsewhere, “though steeped in the glory of the world of legend, would not lightly accept its judgment upon religious and moral questions, and above all would not, in that region, play at make-believe. He would not elude the horror of this story by simply not mentioning it, like Homer, or by pretending that an evil act was a good one, like Sophocles. He faces the horror; realizes it; and tries to surmount it on the sweep of a great wave of religious emotion. The mother-murder, even if done by a god’s command, is a sin; a sin to be expiated by unfathomable suffering. Yet, since the god cannot have commanded evil, it is a duty also. It is a sin that must be committed.” The crucial difference is that the Choëphoroe is not self-contained, while the other plays are. They are concerned with a particular story; it is part of a trilogy dealing with the great problem which lies at the centre of Greek religion—Hubris, Dike, Soteria or Crime, Punishment and Deliverance. (I may refer the reader to my introductions to the Agamemnon and to Euripides’ Electra.)

Thus, though to the Greek student this is perhaps, of all extant tragedies, the most obscure in detail of language, to the English reader it is not hard to understand. The atmosphere indeed is very ancient: it demands imaginative effort: but the sympathy goes as we would wish it to go and the story tells itself. Only two points call for special comment.

The first is the name of the play.1 The other two plays are called Electra, after the chief character: this is called Choëpheroe, or Libation-Bearers, after the Chorus. For in truth the subjects are not, artistically speaking, quite the same. The main interest of the other plays is to describe how the woman Electra felt and acted with regard to the murder of her mother and stepfather; in this play it is to narrate how Agamemnon, the long dead, was awakened to help his children to avenge him. The ghosts in Homer could not speak till they had drunk the blood of sacrifice. Somewhat in the same way the dead Agamemnon here cannot gather his dim senses till the drink-offerings have sunk into his grave. The wine and milk and honey reach his parched lips. He stirs in his sleep, and in that one moment of hesitating consciousness there are crowded upon him all those appeals that have most power to rouse and sting. The first words spoken in prayer at his neglected tomb; the call for vengeance sent, as it were, unknowingly by the murderess; the repeated story of his old wrongs and the outrage done upon his body; above all, the voices of his desolate children crying to him for that which he himself craves. There is no visible apparition from the tomb, as there is, for instance, in the Persae. But as the great litany grows in intensity of longing, the dead seem to draw nearer to the living, and conviction comes to the mourners, one after another, that he who was once King of Kings is in power among them. Where in all literature, except Aeschylus, could one find this union of primitive ghostliness with high intellectual passion? One hand seems to reach out to the African or Polynesian, while the other clasps that of Milton or Goethe.

Another point which the hasty reader might overlook is the psychological treatment of Orestes. At the end of the play, of course, he goes mad. That is in the legend. But from quite the early scenes—much of the prologue happens to be lost—the shadow of the coming darkness begins to show itself. And the occasion for it is always the same, the conflict between two horrors which are also duties: the murder of his mother on one side, and on the other disobedience to the command of God.

Here, as in most cases, the development of Greek tragedy moves almost straight from Aeschylus to Euripides, with Sophocles standing aside. The character of Orestes, in particular, contains here in germ just the ideas that are so subtly developed in Euripides. The first study is grander, tenderer, and more heroic; the second, of course, more detailed and varied and more finely poignant. There is a typical difference between the two poets in the way in which Orestes’ last scruples are overcome. In Euripides a whole scene is given up to it. Orestes is shaken by the first sight of his mother in the distance, and actually rebels against the god or devil who has commanded him to kill her, till he is overborne by the scorn and passion of Electra’s more bitter nature. In Aeschylus Orestes’ scruple breaks out in the midst of the Invocation and is swept away, not specially by Electra, but by the whole great swelling rhythm of that litany of revenge.

Of the other characters, Electra in Euripides bears the main weight of the tragedy on her own shoulders. In Aeschylus she is much less minutely and without doubt less cruelly studied: almost all her words are beautiful, and she keeps a kind of tenderness even in her prayers of hate. She hates her oppressors and her father’s enemies; but the hate is based on love, and it has not eaten into her nor left her poisoned. Clytemnestra, though she appears only for two short scenes, preserves still the almost superhuman grandeur which was hers in the Agamemnon. Her simplest word has power to arrest the attention; and while she is present other people seem small and their emotions ordinary. Her own emotions lie deep and complex, fold behind fold. It is shallow to dismiss her as a hypocrite, feigning grief at the death of the son whom she fears. The hypocrisy is there, but so is the sorrow; so are all kinds of unspoken memories and hopes and depths of experience. Always the thing she says, fine as it is, leaves the impression that there is something greater that she does not care to say. Even when she calls for the axe of battle to face her son, she has room for a thought beyond the immediate fight for dear life: “To that meseemeth we are come, we two!” That touch is like Euripides, but on the whole this heroine was a figure not in Euripides’ style and perhaps not within his range. He made a Clytemnestra deliberately and utterly different.

The date of Sophocles’ play is unknown. But the Choëphoroe was produced in 458 BC, and Euripides’ Electra in 413. The forty-five years that separate them were years of very rapid artistic development. The Choëphoroe has both an archaic beauty and a stark grimness of speech which divide it from its two companions. There are fewer details, and attention is never long distracted from the central horror. At point after point of the action it is easy to show how the two later poets refined and developed the plain lines of Aeschylus, and exerted themselves to make the story more human and more probable. The comparison tempts one to reflect how little such technical improvements really matter, and how dangerously near to nothingness, in the last resort, are the ingenuities of realism. This play produces its illusion quite sufficiently by its mere grandeur and intensity. Yet, judged on its own archaic level, it shows remarkable skill in construction, just as, amid its story of relentless revenge, it conveys a great sense of compassion. The prologue itself is very skilful. With the last lines of the Agamemnon still ringing in our minds we see, as the play opens, a young man standing with shorn hair beside a grave mound; and half the story is told in a flash. Nor, apart from the marvellous invocation scene itself, would it be easy to find in Greek drama another play with such varied moments as the prayer of Electra, the entry of the poor, loving, half-ridiculous Nurse, the sudden onrush of the single terrified slave calling for help to the Women’s House; above all, the amazing scene at the end with the bloodstained robe, the gathering of the unseen Furies, the last struggle of Orestes’ reason, and the flight of the would-be Saviour as one Accursed, never to rest again. The final words of the Chorus ask the question which is to be answered, or at least attempted, in the Eumenides.

G. M.

Dramatis Personae

The Libation Bearers

The scene represents the Grave of Agamemnon, a mound of earth in a desolate expanse. The time is afternoon. Orestes and Pylades in the garb of travellers, with swords at their sides, are discovered. Orestes’ hair is cut short, that of Pylades streams down his back. Both look grim and travel-stained. Orestes holds a long tress of hair in his hand.2

O Warder Hermês of the world beneath,
Son of the Father who is Lord of Death;
Saviour, be thou my saviour; Help in War,3
Help me! I am returned from lands afar
To claim mine own. And on this headland steep
Of death, I call my Father o’er the deep
To hearken, to give ear.—Behold, I bring
Out of my poverty one little thing,
To adorn thy grave, though who can touch the dead
Or wake from sleep that unuplifted head?
Yet long ago in Phôkis, where I lay
With Strophius in the hills, being cast away
In childhood, plundered by mine enemies,
And friendless, save for this man, Pylades,
I sware an oath which should for ever set
In memory those they taught me to forget:
If once I came to manhood, so I sware,
In tresses twain I would divide mine hair,
One tress for Inachos4 river, by whose grace
I live, and one for mourning at this place.
Which oath I here fulfil. He lays the tress of hair upon the upper part of the grave mound. O Herald, lay
Before his sight the gift I bring this day,
Who stood not by to mourn him as he fell,
Nor reached mine arms to bid the dead farewell. As he turns, he sees the Libation-Bearers approaching.
Ha!
What sight is this? What stricken multitude
Of women here in raiment sable-hued
Far-gleameth? How shall I interpret it?
Hath some new death upon my lineage lit?
Or is it to my father’s grave they go
With offerings, to appease the wrath below?
It must be. Surely ’tis Electra there,
My sister, moves alone, none like to her
In sorrow. Zeus, Oh, grant to me this day
My vengeance, and be near me in the fray!
Come, Pylades, stand further, till we know
More sure, what means this embassy of woe. Orestes and Pylades withdraw, as Electra with the Chorus of women bearing offerings for the Grave enters from the other side.

Strophe 1

Driven, yea, driven
I come: I bear Peace-offering to the dead,
Mine hands as blades that tear, my tresses riven,
And cheek ploughed red.
But all my years, before this day as after,
Have been fed full with weeping as with bread.
And this dumb cry of linen, as in pain,
Deep rent about my bosom, speaketh plain
Of a life long since wounded, where no laughter
Sounds nor shall sound again.

Antistrophe 1

Dread, very dread,6
And hair upstarting and the wrath that streams
From the heart of sleep, have first interpreted
What manner of dreams
This house hath dreamed; a voice of terror, blasting
The midnight, up from the inmost place it grew,
Shaking the women’s chambers; and the Seer,
Being sworn of God, made answer, there is here
Anger of dead men wronged, and hate outlasting
Death, against them that slew.

Strophe 2

Craving to fly that curse
With graceless gift hither she urgeth me
—O Earth, Mother and Nurse!—
She whom God hateth. But my spirit fears
To speak the word it bears.
When blood is spilt, how shall a gift set free?
O hearthstone wet with tears!
O pillars of a house broken in twain!
Without sun, without love,
Murk in the heart thereof and mist above,
For a lord slain!

Antistrophe 2

The reverence of old years
Is gone, which not by battle nor by strife,
Stealing through charmèd ears,
Lifted the people’s hearts to love their King;
Gone, yet the land still fears.
For Fortune is a god and rules men’s life.
Who knows the great Wheel’s swing,7
How one is smitten swift in the eyes of light;
For one affliction cries
Slow from the border of sunset; and one lies
In deedless night?

Strophe 3

Has Earth once drunk withal
The blood of her child, Man, the avenging stain
Hardens, nor flows again.
A blind pain draweth the slayer, draweth him,
On, on, till he is filled even to the brim
With sickness of the soul to atone for all.

Antistrophe 3

The shrine of maidenhood
Once broken ne’er may be unbroke again.
And where man’s life hath flowed,
All the world’s rivers in their multitude
Rolling shall strive in vain
To clean from a brother’s hand that ancient blood.

For me, God in far days
Laid hand upon my city, and herded me
From my old home to the House of Slavery,
Where all is violence, and I needs must praise,
Just or unjust,
The pleasure of them that rule, and speechless hold
The ache of a heart that rageth in the dust.
Only behind the fold
Of this still veil for a little I hide my face
And weep for the blind doings of this race,
And secret tears are in my heart, ice-cold.

Ye thrallèd women, tirers of the bower,8
Since ye are with me in this suppliant hour,
Your escort giving, give your counsel too.
What speech have I for utterance, when I sue
With offerings to the dead? What word of love,
What prayer to reach my father from above?
“To dear Lord,” shall I say, “due gifts I bear
From loving mistress” … when they come from her?
I dare not. And I cannot find the word
To speak, when offerings like these are poured …
Or shall I pray him, as men’s custom is,
To send to them who pay these offices
Requital due … for murder and for pride?
Or, as in silence and in shame he died,
In shame and silence shall I pour this urn
Of offering to the dust, and pouring turn,
As men cast out some foulness they abhor,
And fling the cup, and fly, and look no more?

Share with me, Friends, this burden of strange thought.
One hate doth make us one. Oh, hide not aught
For fear of what may fall us! Destiny
Waiteth alike for them that men call free,
And them by others mastered. At thine ease
Speak, if thou knowest of wiser words than these.

As at God’s altar, since so fain thou art,
Before this Tomb I will unveil my heart.

Speak, by his grave and in the fear thereof.

Pray as thou pourest: To all hearts of love …

And who is such of all around us, who?