by Sophocles
where the stones have been pulled loose from the wall.
Go where the cavern opens out. Tell me
the truth—is that Haimon’s voice I’m hearing, 1350
or have the gods played some trick on my ears?”
Following orders from our despondent
master, we stared in. At the tomb’s far end
there she was, hanging by the neck, a noose
of finely woven linen holding her aloft.
Haimon fell against her, hugging her waist,
grieving for the bride he’d lost to Hades,
for his father’s acts, for his own doomed love.
When Kreon saw all this he stepped inside,
groaned horribly, and called out to his son: 1360
“My desperate child! What have you done? What
did you think you were doing? When did the gods
destroy your reason? Come out of there, son.
I beg you.”
His son then glared straight at him
with savage eyes, spat in his face, spoke not
one word in answer, but drew his two-edged sword.
His father leapt back. Haimon missed his thrust.
Then this raging youth—with no warning—turned
on himself, tensed his body to the sword,
and drove half its length deep into his side. 1370
Still conscious, he clung to her with limp arms,
gasping for breath, spurts of his blood pulsing
onto her white cheek.
Then he lay there, his dead
body embracing hers, married at last,
poor man—not up here, but somewhere
in Hades—proving that of all mankind’s
evils, thoughtless violence is the worst.
Exit EURYDIKE.
LEADER
What do you make of that? She turns and leaves
without saying one word, brave or bitter.
MESSENGER
I don’t like it. I hope that having heard 1380
the sorry way her son died, she won’t grieve
for him in public. Maybe she’s gone
to ask her maids to mourn him in the house.
This woman never loses her composure.
LEADER
I’m not so sure. To me this strange silence
seems ominous as an outburst of grief.
MESSENGER
I’ll go in and find out.
She could have disguised the real
intent of her impassioned heart.
But I agree: her silence is alarming. 1390
Exit MESSENGER into the palace; KREON enters carrying the body of HAIMON wrapped in cloth; his Men follow, bringing a bier on which KREON will lay his son in due course.
LEADER
Here comes our king, burdened
with a message all too clear:
this wasn’t caused by anyone’s vengeance—
may I say it?—but by his own father’s blunders.
KREON
Oh, what errors of the mind I have made!
Deadly, bullheaded blunders.
You all see it—the man
who murdered, and the son
who’s dead. What I did
was blind and wrong! 1400
You died so young, my son.
Your death happened so fast!
Your life was cut short
not through your mad acts,
but through mine.
LEADER
You saw the right course of action
but took it far too late.
KREON
I’ve learned that lesson now—
in all its bitterness.
Sometime back, a god struck 1410
my head an immense blow,
it drove me
to act in brutal ways,
ways that stamped out
all my happiness.
What burdens and what pain
men suffer and endure.
Enter MESSENGER from the palace.
MESSENGER
Master, your hands are full of sorrow,
you bear its full weight.
But other sorrows are in store— 1420
you’ll face them soon, inside your house.
KREON
Can any new
calamity make
what’s happened worse?
MESSENGER
Your wife is dead—so much
a loving mother to your son,
poor woman, that she died
of wounds just now inflicted.
KREON
Oh Hades, you are hard
to appease! We flood 1430
your harbor. You want more.
Why are you trying
to destroy me?
(turning to MESSENGER)
What have you to tell me
this time?—you who bring
nothing but deadly news.
I was hardly alive, and now, my young friend,
you’ve come back to kill me again.
Son, what are you telling me?
What is this newest message 1440
—the palace doors open; EURYDIKE’s corpse is revealed; KREON sighs—
that buries me? My wife is dead.
Slaughter after slaughter.
LEADER
Now you see it. Your house no longer hides it.
KREON
I see one more violent death. With what
else can Fate punish me? I have
just held my dead son in my arms—
now I see another dear body.
Ahhh. Unhappy mother, oh my son.
MESSENGER
There, at the altar, she pierced
herself with a sharp blade. 1450
Her eyes went quietly dark
and she closed them.
She had first mourned aloud
the empty marriage bed
of her dead son Megareus.
Then with her last breath
she cursed you, Kreon,
killer of your own son.
KREON
Ahhh! That sends fear
surging through me. 1460
Why hasn’t someone
driven a two-edged
sword through my heart?
I’m a wretched coward,
awash with terror.
MESSENGER
The woman whose corpse you see
condemns you for the deaths of her sons.
KREON
Tell me how she did it.
MESSENGER
She drove the blade below her liver,
so she could suffer the same wound 1470
that killed Haimon, for whom she mourns.
KREON
There’s no one I can blame,
no other mortal.
I am the only one.
KREON looks at and touches the body of HAIMON as his Men assemble to escort him offstage.
I killed you, that’s the reality.
Men, take me inside.
I’m less than nothing now.
LEADER
You are doing what’s right,
if any right can be found
among all these misfortunes. 1480
Better to say little
in the face of evil.
KREON
Let it come, let it happen now—
let my own kindest fate
make this my final day on earth.
That would be kindness itself.
Let it happen, let it come.
Never let me see
tomorrow’s dawn.
LEADER
That’s in the future. We 1490
must deal with the present.
The future will be shaped
by those who control it.
KREON
My deepest desires are in that prayer.
LEADER
Stop your prayers.
No human being
evades calamity
once it has s
truck.
KREON puts his hand on HAIMON’s corpse.
KREON
Take me from this place.
A foolish, impulsive man 1500
who killed you, my son, mindlessly,
killed you as well, my wife.
I’m truly cursed! I don’t know
where to rest my eyes,
or on whose shoulders
I can lean my weight.
My hands warp
all they touch.
KREON, still touching HAIMON’s corpse, looks toward EURYDIKE’s, then lifts his hand and moves off toward the palace.
And over there,
Fate’s avalanche 1510
pounds my head.
LEADER
Good sense is crucial
to human happiness.
Never fail to respect the gods,
for the huge claims of proud men
are always hugely punished—
by blows that, as the proud grow old,
pound wisdom through their minds.
ALL leave.
NOTES TO THE PLAYS
AIAS
TEKMESSA concubine/wife of Aias Nominally Tekmessa is Aias’s concubine, a “spear-taken” woman, but substantively she is his wife.
7 where all is saved or lost Literally, “the post at the end of the line.” The outermost posts, being most vulnerable, are key. At Troy they were held by Achilles and by Aias.
25 I can’t see you Athena is invisible to Odysseus, as Odysseus is invisible to Aias. Aias does see Athena, however.
28 like a bronze-mouthed trumpet “. . . the trumpet was invented for the Etruscans by Athena” (Garvie, 126).
151–152 That foxfucker you ask me / about him? The Greek kinados is a ‘coarse’ Sicilian word for fox. It is not gender specific. The epithet not only characterizes Odysseus but registers Aias’s revulsion at the mere mention of his name. “Fox,” in itself, carries some of the meaning but little of the weight, and even less the edge, of the original—nor do conventional qualifications such as “stinking,” “cunning,” “slippery,” or “villainous.” The key circumstance is that Aias is out of his mind, “screaming curses so awful no man could think them,” as Tekmessa reports, adding that it must have been “a god came wailing through him” (308–312). Foxfucker has a suitably infamous aural lineage, the dead metaphor of “motherfucker” having metastasized into (or been metastasized from) like-sounding toxic epithets.
189 Son of Telamon, rock of Salamis Telamon, the father of Aias, was the first Greek warrior to scale the walls of Troy during the earlier expedition led by Herakles. Salamis is an island near Athens.
212 only the great they envy after “After” traces the submerged metaphor of the original Greek, where envy “creeps.”
226–227 as when the huge / bearded vulture The Greek is “vulture.” Yet vultures, as scavengers, eat only carrion, which here doesn’t make sense. Some have conjectured that “most probably the Greeks made no clear distinction between vultures and eagles” (Garvie, 141–142). Others take the vulture to be a lammergeier, or bearded vulture, which is not a true vulture but a raptor. “Bearded vulture” seems sufficiently ominous—also, not likely to raise dramatically irrelevant questions as to how a scavenger could possibly threaten live Greek warriors.
230–232 That mother of a rumor . . . Artemis riding a bull Artemis Tauropolis, the bull rider, often associated with madness. Aias, as a hunter, has of course slaughtered animals, including bulls.
238 and you gave nothing back? Speculation that Aias may have cheated Artemis—either not giving her a share of the war spoil, or withholding her share of game he had gotten while hunting.
239 bronze-armored War God Ares. Speculation that Aias is being punished for not having acknowledged the help Ares gave him in battle.
284 Carcass corpses He has killed animals (carcasses) under the delusion that they were human beings (corpses). This gloss, of what is only implicit in the Greek, highlights the enormity of Aias’s crime. The slaughter is a transgression not only of social and political order—as a Greek hero, by definition individualistic, Aias has destroyed the common property of the entire Greek army—but of the far greater natural order he will invoke later as he contemplates the bind he is in. If “Great natural forces know their place / in the greater scheme of things,” he asks, why can’t he do the same? (816–817)
457 Go find somewhere else! Literally, “Go off back again as to your foot to pasture.” i.e., Go graze in some other pasture. To preclude contemporary misreadings of this idiomatic phrase (Aias is not dismissing Tekmessa as a metaphorical cow) the present translation cuts the line to its essence.
464 noble goats Literal translation. Aias, in the depths of self-degradation, has a heightened sense of the dignity of these animals.
522 River Skamander One of the two main rivers in the Troad, the area around Troy, which is today the northwestern part of Anatolia, Turkey.
522–523 River Skamander, so kindly unkind / to all the Greeks The Skamander’s affective relation to the Greeks has been translated in mutually exclusive ways. Positive: (a) “so kindly to the Argives,” (b) “kindly to the Greeks,” (c) “Friendly Skamander / river we love!” Negative: (a) “hostile to the Greeks,” (b) “inimical to the Greeks,” (c) “river that hates all Greeks.” Yet another translation has it that the Skamander is “kinder to other Greeks” than it is to Aias himself. The present translation joins the difference—if only because, dramatically, it makes both objective and subjective sense. The Skamander has been “kindly unkind” in that it is the Skamander, the river of an enemy territory the Greeks are bogged down in, and yet the river as river has served them in various ways, not least as drinking water. Here the Skamander is the mirror in which Aias sees, memorializes, and takes leave of himself.
523 this is one soldier Speaking of himself in the third person, Aias already sees himself as a dead man.
533–539 Aiai! My very name, Aias, / is a cry . . . my name in pieces Much is made of Aias’s name. Here he refers it back to AI, AI, the letters of lament marking the petals of the hyacinth, the flower that sprang from the blood of Hyacinthus, beloved of Apollo, when he was killed by the jealous wind god Zephyrus.
550 procured them He accuses Agamemnon and Menelaos of buying the votes by which Odysseus was awarded Achilles’ armor.
555–556 hustled / away from Literally, “rushed away from.” In being rushed away from his intended human targets, he has been hustled (rushed plus deceived, as in a scam) by Athena into attacking and destroying the war spoil of the Greeks.
558–559 yet the stone-eyed / look of the unbending daughter of Zeus Athena. Literally, “Gorgon-eyed.” Whoever looked on the Gorgon Medusa was turned to stone. “Unbending”: the Greek could read as “unconquerable” or “unwedded.”
658 When I had that . . . problem? Or what? Aias and Tekmessa, usually so direct about their realities and anxieties, tread lightly when referring to Eurysakes. Neither knows how far Aias’s madness might have taken him.
675–677 trained / in the savage discipline . . . his nature It’s customary to translate “savage discipline” euphemistically. “Savage” becomes “rugged,” “rough,” or “harsh” and so loses its edge. “Discipline” settles down into “ways.” But the Greek ômos means “savage,” with all the rawness and cruelty that word implies. And what are called “ways,” as though this were simply habitual, is the more purposeful nomos. Nomos could mean “ways,” but the greater part of its semantic range is explicitly socially conditioned, referring to law, custom (habitual or self-consciously chosen mores), or rule. In a military context, it may refer to a discipline. That Eurysakes must be broken in, “trained” to become as his father, indicates that the warrior way of being is not simply a matter of temperament, nor something one happens to fall into. In Aias’s world, one is trained in a discipline until it becomes his nature. That’s why Aias can say to Tekmessa: “Isn’t it foolish to think / you can teach me, now, to change my n
ature?” (738–739) The key word is “now.”
729 Don’t worry at me! Aias is really annoyed, hence the “at.” Originally, “worrying” was what dogs or wolves did to sheep (from the Middle English wirien, to harass). In modern usage, “worry” in and of itself, without further emphasis, isn’t strong enough to communicate the hair-trigger intensity of Aias’s reaction to Tekmessa’s persistence in challenging him.
845 Ooo I’ve got goose bumps; I’m so The Greek describes “the prickling or shuddering of the flesh under strong emotion” followed by “the soaring effect of that emotion” (Garvie, 192).
861 Ares dissolves his blood-dark threat! Ares, the god of war, allows for peace when he ceases to destroy. The image is of a cloud-darkened sky breaking up.
865–866 Aias . . . goes, in good faith They think he will reaffirm the oath by which he committed himself to go to Troy, making a sacrifice to the gods. They do not anticipate that the sacrifice will be Aias himself.
894 He wasn’t to be let go out The onus is on Aias’s allies. Yet any attempt to restrain Aias from doing what he wants to do would be impossible to enforce.
945 whose life is misery! Cf. 637ff. Tekmessa: “All I have is you. With nowhere / to turn to. Backed by fate your spear . . .”
1006–1008 the deathless virgins . . . the dread / ever-overtaking Furies The Furies, or Erinyes. Goddesses of vengeance, relentless and merciless, who pursue justice not only through this world but on into the next. They are also called Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, either to mollify them or to acknowledge that by punishing offenses against the foundations of human society they become benefactors of society.
1015 Helios, chariot wheels climbing the sky The sun.
1069ff. Nooo! We’ll never get home! The Chorus’s first concern is how Aias’s death will affect them. The same holds for everyone who has depended on Aias, including Tekmessa, when Aias is contemplating suicide, and Teukros, when he arrives on the scene of Aias’s death. It testifies to the extraordinary web of relations and lives—including those of the Greek army and its commanders—that have depended on the towering figure of Aias.
1086 the blood gasping up through his nostrils Usually the blood is described as “spurting,” i.e., pumped by the heart. But Aias is dead. His heart is stopped. The phrase must refer, then, to the postmortem pressure of gases and fluids set loose in the thorax as the body, on its own, resettles into itself. “Gasping” also intimates what expiring gases mingled with blood sound like. A related case has been made, on linguistic grounds, that the language here “resembles that at Aeschylus, Eumenides 248–9, where . . . Orestes, the prey of the Furies, gasps out his guts” (Garvie, 212).