Three Greek Plays by Edith Hamilton

Author:Edith Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

* Shelley’s adjective is the perfect translation. Anything else would be less exact and less like Aeschylus.

† This line of Keats is the exact translation.

VII

AN APOLOGIA

A LARGE PART OF a Greek tragedy consists of poems written in a way that is completely foreign to English poetry and, indeed, to the poetry of any other language of the Western world. There is nothing like it even in Latin poetry. In the Agamemnon, of the 1,673 lines of the play, 900 are dialogue, the rest is made up of these strange poems. They marked the division of the play into scenes, as a curtain does with us. In all probability they were not spoken but sung. The performers, whom the Greeks called the chorus– the primary meaning of the word in Greek means dance–were not on the stage, but in front of it, and they took, as a rule, little or no part in the action of the play. Their lines, however, usually bore upon the action and were often a kind of commentary on what was happening. In contrast to the dialogue, which was always written in a six-foot measure, felt by the Greeks, according to Aristotle, to be “better adapted for being spoken” than any other, the choral poems were never written in a fixed measure, but in most varying meters that changed constantly within a single verse, often from line to line. We have no parallel to this in our poetry and the sound falls strangely on our ears. An English poem always has the same rhythmic movement. It would offend us to have a poem that began in the measure of

There is sweet music here that softer fallsswing into that of

It was many and many a year ago–

The Greek found such changes natural and completely consonant with poetic melody:

Now is she mad of mood and by some God possessed.

Her words–wild they ring,

as for her fate she mourns. So wails

ever the bird with wings of brown, musical nightingale.

No–but a house God hates.

Murders and strangling deaths.

Kin–striking down kin. Oh, they kill men here.

House that knows evil and evil. The floor drips red.

On the printed page these lines have the look of free verse. There is no regularity in the length of line any more than in the accents, but the resemblance to our own free verse ends there. Greatly as the lines given above vary, each has its own strongly marked rhythm. Here is no question of subtle cadences which to many a reader give only the effect of prose. They are unmistakably metrical. Furthermore, the Greek choruses are written in sets of similar verses and the two that belong to the same set must correspond in the most meticulous way. The poet was free to do what he wanted with the first verse. Every line might be in a different meter. But the second verse had to follow the irregularity of the first, line for line and syllable for syllable. Each line had to have not only exactly the

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