1 It must not be thought that I imply that quantity and stress are the same thing, they are not, but because it is not so much sound that differentiates them but silences and pauses, and because in Greek, Latin, and English the natural value of words takes precedence over quantity, the overall effect is the same.
2 Sir Arthur Packard Cambridge in his monumental The Dramatic Festivals of Athens goes so far as to say that the audience could probably have followed the action of the play by watching the chorus alone. It mimed throughout.
3 myrtle: a fragrant evergreen shrub; a very different plant from the periwinkle
(Vinca), a trailing plant which came to be called myrtle in America.
4 River of Sorrows: the river Acheron—one of the five rivers flowing through the underworld.
5 quick: in the sense of “the quick and the dead.”
6 bride of Hades: Persephone.
7 porridge: Euripides uses the word pelanos, a kind of gruel which was a mixture of meal, honey, and oil offered to the gods.
8 land of Pandion: Attica.
9 It was considered dangerous to name the “august goddesses,” the Erinyes or Furies, who were later renamed the Eumenides (Kindly Ones).
10 Erechtheus’ scion: Theseus.
11 Her mother was Pasiphaë, on the island of Crete, who fell in love with a bull and gave birth to the Minotaur—half man, half beast.
12 These lines are omitted from some mss. as seeming to promote the match. There is no need to omit them. They are illustrations of Euripides’ subtlety in delineating character. The Nurse is playing a Machiavellian game. She has cleverly called her charm a thelktēria erōtos, which I have correctly translated “love-drug.” She knows that Phaedra will take this to mean an antidote to love, whereas she means something that will promote love. The fact that she doesn’t even know whether her love-drug is an ointment or a potion suggests that she intends to use much more direct methods to stir up some enthusiasm from Hippolytus. This is in line with her earlier encouragement of the match and it also explains why she rebukes her mistress for asking questions.
13 In this instance the Chanted Dialogue on p. 60 stands in for the First Choral Lyric.
14 Orpheus: poet, magician (as well as musician), and master of the Orphic mysteries, is said to have encouraged an ascetic diet free of animal flesh.
15 Loxias: Loxias, Phoebus, and Apollo are all the same.
16 The sea god Poseidon was also the patron of earthquakes.
18 This line is missing from many mss.
19 Ion means “going” or “coming.”
20 This remark is probably sarcastic. Aeolia in northeastern Greece was remote and, to the Athenians, uncivilized. So the Old Man is saying: “He should have gone and got a woman from the sticks.” Also, Aeolia was where Xuthus came from.
21 Aegis: aigis, from aïssō, to rush, move violently, charge. There is a play on words impossible to reproduce in English, unless perhaps “chargeplate.”
22 I.e., Enodia and Demeter.
23 Cephisus, here a synonym for Athens (Creusa’s town), was the chief river of the Athenian plain.
24 Gorgon-killer: Pallas Athena.
25 land of Cecrops: i.e., Athens.
26 This antistrophe does not correspond in number of lines with the strophe.
27 Euripides seems to have forgotten that he has just described her hair as cropped.
28 Euripides seems uncertain about the instrument. Sometimes it is an ax,
sometimes a two-edged sword.
29 The seat of a famous oracle of Zeus.
30 The Greek has “. . . an athlete coming from the banks of Alpheus.” See glossary
for a fascinating note about Olympia.
31 I was very tempted to omit lines 1097-1101 (in both Greek and English).
They smack to me (and to others) of interpolation. On the stage they should
certainly be omitted: they wreck the edge between Clytemnestra and
Electra.
32 The tenth day after a child’s delivery, invitations were sent out to family and friends to a sacrifice and a banquet, at which the infant was given its name.
33 Two lines are missing from Strophe I.
34 Because he’d decided that there were too many human beings.
35 Pylades came from Phocis in northern Greece.
36 Euripides ends both this speech and the envoi of the CHORUS with rhyming triplets. A rare occurrence, perhaps unique, in Greek drama.
37 Letters were often incised in a waxed tablet with a stylus.
38 One must presume that Old Retainer had been watching Agamemnon before retiring to his hut.
39 I have divided up the lines of the ode to be chanted severally.
40 This is one of the rare occasions when the number of lines in the antistrophe does not match the strophe. I have followed Euripides in this. Of course, it could mean that the text is uncertain.
41 Artemis was patroness of unmarried girls and of childbirth: the irony here is
painful.
42 Clasping the knee was an accepted gesture of supplication.
43 The antistrophe has only seventeen lines instead of the eighteen of the strophe because line 1062 is missing.
45 this man: she means Achilles.
46 Ten Plays by Euripides, trans. Moses Hadas and John McLean (New York: Bantam Books, 1960), p. 241.
47 Not Pisa in Italy but Pisa in the Peloponnese, famous for its horses.
48 Brother-in-law of Agamemnon, father of Pylades, friend of Orestes.
49 Euripides’ geography is somewhat awry. He makes the narrow passage of
the Bosphorus known as the Symplegades one with that leading into the
Euxine or Black Sea.
50 The maidens are thinking especially of the vine and the olive: supreme symbols
of civilization contrasted with the wild forests of Scythia.
51 The offering of a lock of hair was typical of the funeral rite.
52 When Atreus and Thyestes disputed the throne of Argos, a lamb with golden
fleece appeared among the flocks of Atreus, signifying his victory. His wife,
Aerope, however, stole it and gave it to her lover, Thyestes. Atreus retaliated
by throwing Aerope into the sea, killing Thyestes’ sons, and serving them up
to him in a banquet.
53 The Greek of lines 258-59 is ambiguous. It has been translated as “After all this time we’ve never had any Greek blood” etc., but line 347 makes clear that this rendering is incorrect.
54 The costly dye of purple, which was confined to royalty, was extracted from a shellfish, the porphura (genus Murex).
55 It must be remembered that Orestes had yet to be cured of the recurrent madness that dogged him after the murder of his mother. Reason could suddenly collapse into frenzy and hallucination, as in schizophrenia.
56 The text of this passage is doubtful and there are several variant readings. It
seems certain that a line or lines are missing.
57 The unusual meters of these choruses are based on Euripides’ own, which in
my translations I generally attempt.
58 The Captive Maidens probably don’t know yet that the Trojan War is over.
59 The stone statue of Artemis standing in the courtyard is not to be confused with the wooden effigy that Orestes has come to get.
60 It must be remembered that the ten-year war with Troy was only just over.
61 Not Iphigenia, who Orestes thinks is dead, but her sister Electra.
62 It was Calchas who told Agamemnon that the only way to get a favorable breeze for his armada to set sail for Troy was to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. (See Iphigenia at Aulis.)
63 With the death of Agamemnon, Orestes is in fact king of Argos. If he died, the royal heritage would fall to his sister, Electra, and her husband, Pylades, would become king.
64 Letters could be written on parchment or papyrus, and also on tablets incised with a stylus. Euripides seems to be ambivalent. In lines 641, 727, 756, and 787 he refers to the letter as deltoi, or tablets, but in line 727 he calls it poluthuroi, which means “many-leaved.” Are we to suppose (with Witter Bynner) that the letter is “safe within these folds”? But poluthuroi does not mean that, though it can mean “many-doored.” In which case Pylades would be carrying a whole casket of wax tablets.
65 son of the son of Pelops: Agamemnon.
67 The nuptial bath was an important feature of the marriage ceremony. The bride bathed on the morning of her wedding in water taken from the sacred spring of her town or birthplace.
68 The murder of Clytemnestra was perpetrated by Orestes, Pylades, and Electra in concert.
69 This baffling sentence translates literally “They forced and pushed a bloody thing into my mouth,” which is often rendered as “They forced a bit between my teeth.” Could this then be an idiom meaning “They tried to curb me”? I like Witter Bynner’s guess and have stolen his paraphrase.
70 Nameless Ones: a euphemism for the Furies (Erinyes). Euripides seems not to mind that in fact he has already named them in line 94I.
71 During all this dialogue there is no word from Pylades. One must suppose that after the impassioned embraces of brother and sister he discreetly withdrew out of hearing.
72 I.e., a different Artemis from the cruel Artemis of Tauria. Artemis was the goddess both of virginity and of childbirth.
73 I wonder who started the ridiculous belief that swans could sing!
74 Towers of what town? We are never told who these Captive Maidens are. They sound like Trojans at the fall of Troy but they speak of Hellas as their fatherland. No towers, however, were toppled in Athens, nor prisoners taken. Perhaps these niggling observations are annulled if one thinks of the maidens and the falling towers merely as symbols.
75 The significance in this ode of the antistrophe is that Apollo’s oracle was
proved right (that Orestes was alive) and Iphigenia’s dream wrong (that he
was dead), so that henceforward the ancient clairvoyance by dreams was to be
abolished in favor of that by the Oracle at Delphi.
76 This reference to Ilium seems to me a strong indication that Tauria was an ally of Troy, and perhaps even that the captive Greek maidens came into its possession during the war.
77 I am indebted to the late Professor Moses Hadas for this observation.
78 Lines 40-43 in the Greek are bracketed by many editors as doubtful, and I
have not included them.
79 my brother: Medea slew her brother Absyrtus when she escaped with Jason,
and tossed him in pieces over the side of the ship, knowing that their pursuers
would stop to pick the pieces up.
80 Euxine: The Black Sea (between northern Turkey and the Crimea).
81 Cypris: another name for Aphrodite, born out of the foam near the island of Cyprus.
82 A wineskin was the complete skin of a goat, one of whose feet was used for the spigot. The meaning is: Do not have sexual intercourse until . . .
83 With many editors, I omit lines 1062 and 1063 as a melodramatic interpolation:
“. . . and since they must, let it be by the hands of her who gave them life.”
Line numbers refer to the Greek text in the Loeb Classical edition.
84 Euripides here follows the alternative story about her brother Absyrtus, who in the other version she kills on board the Argo.
85 fennel: the thyrsus. Actually the thyrsus was undoubtedly a stalk not of fennel but of the stronger hogweed or cow parsnip.
86 Evoë: a cry used by worshipers in either exultation or supplication.
87 see-er: a play on words in the Greek. Cadmus jests that on this occasion he, not Tiresias, is the seer.
88 bird-watching: Prophets and seers interpreted anguries from the movement
of birds.
89 embodied: It is possible only to paraphrase lines 293-95. A crucial line (or
lines) is missing, and there is, moreover, no equivalent English for the play on
words on which the exegesis turns.
90 Tiresias implies that the mystical gifts of Dionysus are worthy of Apollo,
god of clairvoyance and prophecy.
91 The name Pentheus is from penthos, meaning grief or sorrow.
92 Dirce: here a synonym for Thebes.
93 Euripides renders lines 604 to 640 in trochaic tetrameter (-u-u-u-/-u-u-u-u), in which I follow suit. The only other instance I can think of where Euripides casts dialogue and narrative in trochees are lines 444 to 461 in The Trojan Women, when Cassandra makes her great speech prophesying her own death and the murder of Agamemnon. It is a meter that draws attention to liveliness of feeling. Line numbers refer to the Greek text in the Loeb Classics edition.
94 This line makes clear that the herdsman was present during Pentheus’ earlier
intransigent speech and took note of what he said (lines 220-25).
95 There is probably a sentence missing here. E. R. Dodds suggests: “Nothing resisted their assault, not bolted doors, not bronze, not iron.” It is not likely that the Maenads would have wanted to carry away pots and pans. The Bacchae , ed. E. R. Dodds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).
96 Electran Gate: one of the seven gates of Thebes.
97 This is the turning point of the play. Up till now Dionysus has genuinely wanted to save Pentheus. Now he sees that he refuses to grow and must be destroyed.
98 John Keats knew his Euripides!
99 The Bacchae, ed. E. R. Dodds, p. 192.
100 Euripides’ words are ai e pot ēstha thēr? Tetaurōsai gar oun. Professor
Dodds comments: “The dragging rhythm . . . due to the strong pause of the
third foot, suggests the King’s slow bewildered utterance” (p. 193, note
920-22). I make a similar pause after the word “changed.” It is possible that
Pentheus sees another figure behind the Stranger: his double but with horns—
Dionysus in his beast incarnation. A sinister effect could be had by the use of
two actors, one bull-headed and one speaking the more ominous lines.
101 Lines 925-70 are a reversal of the ridicule that Pentheus attempted to heap
on Dionysus earlier in lines 453-506.
102 This line is missing in the Greek. I have conjectured it for the sake of coherence.
103 This line does not appear in the Greek. I have conjectured it to supply the
connection of some three missing lines of Agave’s.
104 After this line there follows a gap of about fifty lines in the extant manuscripts. They include Agave’s lament and the farewell to her son; also, the first part of Dionysus’ speech. From various sources and some twenty-one papyrus fragments recently discovered, we can form a general picture of the contents of the lacuna. I have translated these fragments and fitted them into the framework of the reconstructed scene. Agave, flung in a moment from ecstasy to despair, and conscious of being a polluted creature, begs permission to lay out the body for burial and to bid it a last farewell. Cadmus consents, warning her of the conditions. Over the body she accuses herself and moves the audience to pity, kissing each limb in turn and lamenting over it.
105 This chorus is not in any of the extant manuscripts, but there must have been a chorus at the end of the Fifth Episode. For the sake of balance and completion and relying on my sense of context, I have presumed to compose one.
106 The first thirteen lines of Dionysus’ speech are among the papyrus fragments recently recovered. With this line we are back with the extant text. If I were directing this play I would be tempted to end the performance at this line, Agave’s “Father, you see how everything for me is overturned.” The ex machina appearance of Dionysus and the whole of the Denouement is something of an anticlimax. I think Euripides is saying: “The play is over, but I know you people won’t be content without your dose of mythology and bad theology—so here it is.”
107 “This bizarre prediction has puzzled mythologists no less than it startles the common reader. The story bears traces of having been put together at a relatively late date out of heterogeneous older elements.” Thus E. R. Dodds, who gives a detailed exegesis of its original character in his notes to line 1330, p. 235. I see no point in distracting a modern audience with a fairy-tale story that has nothing to do with the essence of this masterful play.
108 A lot of ink has needlessly been spilt over this image by scholars. The whole point is that Agave is not offering protection but seeking it.
109 No one knows why Euripides uses the plural here, when we have been led to
believe that Cassandra was brandishing a single torch. Perhaps some of the
women surrounding Cassandra also carried torches and Hecuba would like to
get rid of the lot.
110 The chain of atrocities that Cassandra will only hint at comprises Clytemnestra’s
adultery with Aegisthus, leading to her murder of her husband,
Agamemnon, and of Cassandra; the murder of Clytemnestra by her son
Orestes; and the subsequent madness of Orestes.
111 Iphigenia, whom Agamemnon sacrificed at Aulis to solicit favorable winds
for the Greek armada to sail to Troy.
112 Cassandra is thinking of the sexual scandals taking place in Argos, headed by
the queen herself. During the ten years of war, wives and daughters would be
an easy prey to crops of unenlisted young men growing up since the war began.
113 daughter of Zeus: Helen.
114 Cassandra, for having refused the sexual overtures of Apollo, was fated by him always to prophesy the truth but never to be believed.
115 good woman’s: i.e., Penelope’s, she being Odysseus’ wife.
116 Euripides heightens the dramatic emotion of Cassandra’s next seventeen lines in the Greek by adopting a trochaic line of eight beats. I follow with a looser trochaic meter of four to six beats (allowing for the faster pace of the Greek).
117 my beloved god: Apollo.
118 my prophet king: also Apollo.
119 Paris as a baby was exposed on Mount Ida but saved by shepherds.
120 son of Achilles: Neoptolemus.
121 One must bear in mind how essential the Greeks regarded burial. The mere ritual of sprinkling earth on a corpse was a kind of sacrament ensuring the deceased a better life in the next world.
122 In return for saving Hesione, daughter of Laomedon, king of Troy, from a monster, Heracles was to be given a team of horses. However, after Heracles had rescued Hesione, Laomedon reneged on his promise. Hence Heracles’ rage against Troy.
123 He has already spoken her name once (line 861) and is to do so again (line 877 in the Greek). This is no slip on the part of Euripides the master ironist but a subtle hint of Menelaus’ peculiar “thickness.” Line numbers refer to the Greek text in the Loeb Classics edition.
125 Helen means that if Pallas Athena had won the contest, Paris would have
been given Greece, which would have been conquered by Troy. If Hera had
won, Greece would have come under the suzerainty of a European empire.
126 Deïphobus: Son of Priam and Hecuba, who married Helen after raping her.
127 Achilles’ son: Neoptolemus.
128 house of Pelius: in Sparta.
129 This phrase in the Greek is capable of two readings: aroumen doru means either raise a spear or (possibly) raise a mast. I prefer the first, for I know no other instance when doru, which can mean a plank of timber, is used for the mast of a ship. Moreover, the masts of galleys and triremes were fixed—already raised. If we adopt the second reading (which most translators have done) it makes the last line of Talthybius’ speech redundant.
130 Odysseus, for his services, was awarded the arms of Achilles by the Greeks. These he hung up for display in the temple of Athena in Phthia, the town in Thessaly (northern Greece) where Achilles was born. Euripides’ allusion, however, in the mouth of Hecuba is something of an anachronism. It would be many years before Odysseus was anywhere near Phthia.
131 Cronos’ son, lord of Phrygia: Zeus.
132 Malea, on the island of Lesbos, was where Silenus was born.
133 Althaea, the mother of Meleager, became the patroness of goats. Silenus is
referring sarcastically to the Cyclops’ cave, where the goats are penned.
134 Louis Meridier in the scholarly French edition of the play insists, on insuffi-
cient evidence it seems to me, that lines 41-54 refer to sheep, not goats. In the
Odyssey they are definitely goats. Perhaps we should assume that there are
both sheep and goats. (When line numbers are given in the notes, they refer to
the Greek text in the Loeb Classics edition.)
135 This is a rare example of an antistrophe not following the full pattern of the
strophe.
136 Odysseus met Maron in North Africa when he touched upon the coast.
137 Leucadia was an island in the Ionian Sea (northern Greece) whose rocky
promontory was a famous site for suicides.
138 sikinnis: the characteristic dance of the satyr play.
139 The entire epode, invoking the imagery of a wedding, is a metaphor for the destruction of the Cyclops. The joyous anticipation of the bridegroom is the satyrs’ expectation of liberation, the lit lamps are the firebrand, the crown of a myriad hues is the Cyclops’ visage scorched and reddened.
140 Dardanus: founder of Troy and father of Ganymede, the beautiful youth whom Zeus abducted to be his cup-bearer.