On the literary and dramatic qualities of Aeschylean tragedy, the plays can be allowed to speak for themselves; but a few words are in order about the conventions of my translation.
The verse of Aeschylus’ plays can be divided into four categories according to metre and mode of delivery:
(1) Iambic trimeters (lines of six feet, normally twelve syllables), the normal metre of dialogue, spoken without any musical accompaniment;
(2) Trochaic tetrameters (lines of eight feet, normally fifteen syllables), spoken or chanted in a stricter rhythm and accompanied (as were (3) and (4) below) by a single musician playing the double reed-pipe (aulos). In the plays contained in this volume, this type of verse occurs only in The Persians (lines 155–75, 215–48, 697–9, 703–58); it then disappeared almost completely from tragedy for over half a century (except for a short passage at the end of Agamemnon) but was extensively revived by Euripides from about 417 onwards;
(3) Anapaests, with a strong and very strict 4/4 rhythm; these are often called ‘marching anapaests’ and in Aeschylus are regularly used by the Chorus at its first entrance (though not in Seven Against Thebes, where they enter in a panic and probably in no regular formation);
(4) Sung lyrics, most often performed by the Chorus but sometimes taking the form of a lyric dialogue (amoibaion) between the Chorus and one or more actors (as with Xerxes at the end of The Persians); in Prometheus Bound Prometheus and Io both have solo songs (‘monodies’), a feature that has often been regarded as indicating a late date. A very wide range of metrical patterns can be used, and in principle every song is metrically (and, one presumes, musically) unique. Lyrics are usually organized in paired stanzas, the two stanzas in each pair (the strophe and antistrophe, meaning ‘turn’ and ‘counterturn’) being metrically identical and, if their names are any guide, mirror-images of each other in their choreography. Compared with all the other modes, lyrics were delivered in a different form of Greek, with some vowels pronounced differently (in what is conventionally called ‘choral Doric’1) and a higher proportion of rare and archaic vocabulary.
In this translation, iambic trimeters and trochaic tetrameters are both rendered as prose, while anapaests and lyrics are both rendered as free verse. It should also be noted that where lines that I have rendered as prose are assigned to ‘Chorus’, they were probably in fact spoken or chanted by the leader of the Chorus alone, who thus functioned in effect as an additional actor. Like David Raeburn in his recent Penguin Classics translation of four plays of Sophocles, I have usually simply transliterated, rather than attempting to translate, the semi-articulate cries of sorrow or distress which abound in Greek tragedy and mostly have no natural English equivalent.
The stage directions inserted in the translation are not found in the Greek text; the movements and actions they specify are inferred from the words of the text and from the other information we possess about classical Athenian theatrical performance. To take two examples from early in The Persians: (1) A direction I give at the beginning of the play states that ‘twelve chairs are set out for a meeting of the royal council’. There is no mention of these chairs in the Greek text; but (a) the Chorus later decide to ‘sit down in this ancient building’ (141), (b) we know that in the early theatre a character who was to be imagined as sitting indoors could be seen seated on stage,2 and (c) according to the ancient headnote (‘Hypothesis’) to The Persians, in a play by Phrynichus on the same theme the opening speaker had been a eunuch preparing chairs for a meeting of the state council. (2) The stage direction (after line 149) that the Queen arrives in a carriage, ‘magnificently attired and attended’, is based not on anything in that passage itself but on the Queen’s own statement, when she returns later in the play (607–8), that this time she has come ‘without my carriage and without my former luxury’. None of my stage directions, therefore, should be regarded, or cited, as if they were primary-source evidence.
Line numbers are given in the margin at every fifth line of the Greek text, and also to indicate when a section of text has been editorially transposed because it appears to have become displaced in the manuscript tradition. Sometimes, because of the requirements of English word and phrase order, the translation cannot render the lines sequentially; in such cases the marginal numbers are placed at the beginning of a stretch of two or three lines that has been translated as a unit (e.g. at Persians 4–5).
1. Actually the vowel qualities in question were common to most dialects of Greek other than that of Athens (Attic) and its close cousin Ionic.
2. Aristophanes, Frogs 911–12 (Achilles); several vase paintings show a seated, muffled Achilles approached by envoys from the Greek army (compare General Introduction note 2). Later, after the creation of the skene, a character could be shown sitting indoors only by means of the ekkyklema (e.g. Ajax sitting among the beasts he has slaughtered, in the Sophoclean play bearing his name).