by Aeschylus
Fragments 172, 177, 185 have been ascribed to the play.
FRAGMENT 33
Athenaeus, Deipnosophists xi. 39. p. 469F.
Where, in the west, is the bowl wrought by Hephaestus, the bowl of thy sire, speeding wherein he crosseth the mighty, swelling stream that girdleth earth, fleeing the gloom of holy night of sable steeds.
To explain the rising of the sun in the east after it had set in the west, Greek fancy invented the myth that the Sun-god possessed a golden bowl, in which he, together with his steeds, was carried during the night across the ocean to the place of his rising. When Heracles was journeying to Erythea to capture the oxen of Geryon (Frag. 37), Helios lent his bowl to the hero; who, in Gerhard’s Auserlesene griechische Vasenbilder, pl. 109, is pictured sitting therein. In the Veda and in Germanic and Lettic myths the sun appears in the form of a golden bowl.
FRAGMENT 34
Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies v. 14. p. 718; cp. Philodemus, On Piety 22.
Zeus is air, Zeus is earth, Zeus is heaven, yea, Zeus is all things and whatsoever trancendeth them.
FRAGMENT 35
Bekker, Anecdota Graeca 346. 10.
And Adria’s daughters shall learn a (new) way of mourning.
Phaëthon was hurled into the Eridanus, which Aeschylus, according to Pliny, Nat. Hist. xxxvii. 31, placed in Iberia and identified with the Rhone, a river confused with the Po, on the banks of which was the city of Adria. Polybius, History ii. 16 and Plutarch, On the Delay of Divine Vengeance 12. p. 557, report that the inhabitants along the Eridanus wore black in mourning for Phaëthon. Knaack, Quaestiones Phaëthonteae 18, refers “the way of mourning” to the tears of amber from the poplars into which the maidens had been transformed.
FRAGMENT 36
Etymologicum Genuinum (cod. Vaticanus Graceus 1818) s.v. aphtonestaton; cp. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists x. 24. p. 424D, Eustathius on Iliad 746. 45, Lexicon Sabbaïticum 2.
Gushed from the spring a more abundant stream.
HÊRAKLEIDAI
Of the personages, action, and scene of The Children of Heracles nothing is known. It is, however, probably that Aeschylus in part anticipated Euripides, who, in his same-named play, represented Athens as the refuge of the fugitives from the persecution of Eurystheus, the willingness of Macaria, the daughter of Heracles, to sacrifice her life as the price of victory over the Argive invaders of Attica, and the triumph of the children under the leadership of the aged Iolaüs, the nephew of Heracles.
The play is entitled Hêrakleidai, except in the Catalogue in the Medicean MS., which has Hêrakleidês.
FRAGMENT 37
Scholiast on Aristeides (cod. Marcianus 423).
Starting thence, when that he had crossed the ocean in a golden bowl, he drave the straight-horned kine from the uttermost parts of the earth, slew the evil herdsmen and their triple-bodied master, who wielded three spears in his (right) hands; in his left, extending three shields, and shaking his three crests, he advanced like unto Ares in his might.
A description of the tenth labour of Heracles – to fetch the kine of Geryon from the island of Erythea, near the ocean, now Cadiz. Geryon had the body of three men grown together and joined in one at the waist, but parted in three from the flanks and thighs (Apollodorus, Library ii. 5. 10). Cp. Agam. 870. For the golden bowl see under Fragment 33.
FRAGMENT 38
Stobaeus, Anthology iv. 54. 2 (Hense v. 1113).
For I shall not suffer any evil greater than this.
THALAMOPOIOI
A play of this name is unknown in the Catalogue in the Medicean MS., and is mentioned only by Pollux, citing Fragment 39. Some suppose that it is an alternative title of the Aiguptioi, and that the name is derived from the carpenters who constructed the bridal chambers in which the Danaïds killed their husbands. Hartung proposed to read Thalamêtoloi “attendants of the bridal chambers.” Welcker rejected connexion with the Danaïd-myth and made the play precede the Iphigeneia and Hiereiai.
To the play have been referred Fragments 162, 163, 178, 189, 206, 238.
FRAGMENT 39
Pollux, Vocabulary 7. 122.
Come! Let some one work out in the ceiling a Lesbian moulding in triangular rhythms.
A ceiling-compartment was formed, at its lower part, by “ladders” (klimakides) laid across the “main beams” (selides). Below the former, in the present case, ran a moulding with swelling above and hollow below (a cyma reversa) and ornamented with a leaf-and-tongue pattern that approximates a triangle. The Lesbian cyma appears in the Tholos at Epidaurus.
THESMOI ê ISTHMIASTAI
The original title was probably Theôroi, The Spectators; to which was added that defining the scene: The Spectators at the Isthmian games.
FRAGMENT 40
Athenaeus, Deipnosophists xiv. 27. p. 629F.
And further these old skôpeumata
Athenaeus defines the form of the skôps-dance as a figure in which people are represented as looking at an object (aposkopountôn) by making an arch over their brows. He has, however, here confused skôps with skopos, which Hesychius, Lexicon 4. 216, describes as a dance in which the dancers shaded their eyes (cp. huposkopon chera, Aeschylus, Frag. 339 Nauck). The screech-owl dance (skôps) got its name, says Athenaeus ix. 45. p. 391A, from the variety of motion displayed by the bird.
THRÊISSAI
The play derives its title from Thracian women, captives of Ajax, who formed the Chorus and had a like function with the sailors from Salamis in Sophocles’ Ajax: to support with their sympathy the hero who has suffered the ignominy of defeat at the hands of Achilles, and after his suicide to bewail his death. Though captives, they even dared to protest against the inhumanity to Menelaüs, who would refuse burial to the body of their master. In Sophocles’ play, Ajax killed himself on the stage and in solitude; in Aeschylus, his suicide was reported by a messenger, an eye-witness of the deed.
See Fragments 159, 194, 264.
FRAGMENT 41
Scholiast on Sophocles, Ajax 833. L. 1 restored by Hermann, 1. 2 (as 1. 1) by Hartung, 1. 3 by Sidgwick. The vial part was ta peri (or kata) tên maschalên according to the Scholiast on Sophocles and to Scholiasts TV on X 404 (cp. Ajax 834).
Back he bent his sword, as when a man bends a bow, for that his body offered no place to murderous death, until at last some goddess appeared and showed him [the vital spot].
The passage has reference to the legend that the body of Ajax, when a babe, having been wrapped by Heracles in his lion-skin, became invulnerable except the spot where Heracles’ quiver prevented the hide from touching it. According to Homer, Ajax was vulnerable, hence the legend was probably derived by Aeschylus from a Cyclic poet; and is certainly due to the desire to make Ajax equally invulnerable with Achilles. The sword with which Ajax slew himself had been given him by Hector.
HIEREIAI
The Priestesses was made by Welcker the third member of a trilogy, whose preceding parts were the Thalamopoioi and the Iphigeneia. By others it has been associated with the Musoi and Têlephos, or with the Têlephos and Iphigeneia. See Fragment 214.
FRAGMENT 42
Macrobius, Saturnalia v. 22. 13, Scholiast on Sophocles, Oedipus Coloneus 793.
Send with all speed; for these are the oracles that Father Zeus dost entrust unto Loxias.
FRAGMENT 43
Aristophanes, Frogs 1274, with Scholiast.
Hold your peace! The bee-keepers are at hand to open the house of Artemis.
From Iphigeneia according to Vater.
The Scholiast on Pindar, Pythian 4. 104 (60) says that “melissai is a term used primarily of the priestesses of Demeter, and by a misuse of language applied to all priestesses because of the purity of the animal.” Coins of the Ephesian Artemis as early as the sixth century, and a Vatican statue of the same goddess, show the bee as an emblem.
IXION
Ixion was famous in Greek tradition as the first man to shed kindred blood (Pindar, Pythian 2. 31, cp. Eumenides 718), and as the fir
st to receive purification from the crime of murder. His father’s name is variously reported, usually as Phlegyas, but Aeschylus made him the son of Antion. His mother was Perimela, the daughter of Amythaon. Under promise of rich wedding-gifts to Eïnoeus (or Deïoneus), the father of Dia, he married her, and by her had a son, Peirithoüs. On his refusal to make over to his father-in-law the wedding-gifts due to him, Eïnoeus took Ixion’s horses as a pledge of payment; whereupon Ixion, pretending that he would submit himself to his good pleasure, sent for Eïoneus and caused him to fall into a fiery pit. For this offence he could obtain purification from neither man nor any god, until Zeus, showing himself a “gracious avenger” (Frag. 92 N.), took compassion on his suppliant, cleansed him of bloodshed, and even raised him to Olympus. There Ixion conceived a made passion for the Queen of Heaven, and having besought her to yield to his desires, Zeus fashioned a cloud in the semblance of Hera. Ixion lay with the cloud, and from this union sprang the centaurs. In punishment for this impious crime, Zeus bound him to a wheel on which he whirls in an eternity of torment. To the above effect, in the main, Diodorus of Sicily, Historical Library iv. 69. 3.
The play probably followed the Perrhaebides, which took its name from the Chorus of women of Perrhaebia in Thessaly, which district, or the city of Gyrton in the same, Ixion had subjected to his rule. The theme of the first play may have been the deception and murder of Eïoneus; that of the Ixion, the purification of the murderer. The third member of the trilogy is unknown.
Fragment 182 has been referred to the Ixion.
FRAGMENT 44
Stobaeus, Anthology iv. 53. 15 (Hense v. 1101), Munich Anthology 134 (cod. Augusanus-Monacensis 429).
Death hath a fairer fame than a life of toil.
Cp. Fragment 229 and Euripides, Women of Troy 637. ponêros, lit. “laborious,” may not yet have acquired the meaning “bad,” “evil.”
FRAGMENT 45
Athenaeus, Deipnosophists iv. 79. p. 182C.
But anon the long flute swallows up the half-holed.
Ixion’s lesser offence – the murder of his father-in-law – is obscured by the enormity of his crime against Hera and against Zeus.
hêmiopoi auloi were the same as those used by boys (paidikoi) and had higher tones than the teleioi. They were half as long as (perhaps) the huperteleioi, which had the lowest pitch, and may have had no more than four holes. See Howard, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology iv. (1898).
IPHIGENEIA
The theme of the play was probably the sacrifice of Iphigeneia at Aulis, to which place she was brought by her mother at the instance of Agamemnon, who alleged his intention of betrothing his daughter to Achilles. The subject may thus have anticipated Sophocles’ Iphigenia and Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis.
See Fragments 43, 130, 214.
FRAGMENT 46
Scholiast on Sophocles, Ajax 722.
Surely it befits not to be reviled by women. How should it?
KABEIROI
This drama, which has its name from the Chorus, is the earliest literary witness to the Cabiri, more often called the Great Gods in Samothrace and Lemnos, the most ancient and famous seats of their worship in the Aegean. Originally pre-Hellenic chthonian divinities, who primal home was Phrygia, Phoenicia, or among the Pelasgians of Greece, their cult gradually accommodated itself to the religion of the peoples with which it came into contact; until in the historical period, the Cabiri appear as daimones who foster vegetative life and protect seafaring folk, and whose Mysteries in course of time spread over the greater part of the Greek world.
Athenaeus, Deipnosophists x. 33 p. 428F, declares that it was Aeschylus, not Euripides (in the Alcestis), who first introduced drunken people to the sight of the spectators of “tragedy”; and that this evil eminence was displayed in his Cabiri, in which play he represented Jason and his companions as drunk. Fragment 48 would seem to refer to the hospitable reception of the Argonauts by the Cabiri, who furnished them with an abundance of wine upon their landing at Lemnos, the first stopping-place of the Argo on its eastward voyage. The introduction of a drunken orgy has caused many scholars to regard the play as satyric rather than tragic. Whether pure tragedy may thus relax its gravity is a question that has been raised also in connexion with the Ostologoi of Aeschylus and the Sundeipnoi of Sophocles.
The Scholiast on Pindar, Pythian 4. 303 (171), states that the names of the heroes of the Argonautic expedition were set forth in the Kabeiroi, as also in the Lêmniai of Sophocles.
Fragment 164 has been referred to this play.
FRAGMENT 47
Athenaeus, Deipnosophists ix. 15. p. 373D.
But I take thee not as an omen of my journey.
FRAGMENT 48
Pollux, Vocabulary 10. 23; cp. Antiattacistes in Bekker, Anecdota Graeca 115. 3.
Jars neither of wine nor of water shall fail in the houses of the rich.
FRAGMENT 49
Plutarch, Table Talk ii. 1. 7. p. 632F.
We shall make he house to be scant of vinegar.
The Cabiri jestingly threaten to produce so excellent, or so abundant, a vintage that either the Argonauts will drink so much that no wine will be kept to make vinegar; or that vinegar shall be poured out from the casks to give place to wine. If oxous means “ordinary wine,” the meaning is that it will have to be thrown away for the better quality.
KARES ê EURÔPÊ
Europe, the protagonist in the drama bearing her name as an alternative title, in Fragment 50 tells of her carrying-off by the bull, of the three sons she bore to Zeus (Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon), and of her anxiety as to the fate of her youngest, Sarpedon, whose warlike spirit has incited him to leave his home for Troy in order to render assistance to the city now attacked by the Achaeans.
The scene was Lycia, whither Europe had come from Crete together with her son. That the Chorus consisted of Carians, though Sarpedon was Prince of Lycia, may be due to the fact that (as Strabo, Geography xiv. 5. p. 675, informs us) the poets often included the Lycians among the Carians, who were the most famous of all the races in south-western Asia Minor. The confusion had the advantage of enabling the poet to reproduce the lamentations over the dead for which the Carians were celebrated.
Popular tradition was inconsistent as to the name of Sarpedon’s mother. Aeschylus followed the Hesiodic version in preference to that of Homer, who calls her Laodamia. Nor was he disturbed by the Homeric genealogy, by which Sarpedon was made the grandson of Bellerophon on the mother’s side. In the poet’s time no one had yet thought, as did the mythographers later, to remove the difficulty, either by assuming two Sarpedons (one the son of Laodamia, the other the son of Europe) or by the notion that there was one Sarpedon, who had been permitted by his father Zeus to live through three generations.
The drama probably dealt with the reception of the news of the hero’s death at the hands of Patroclus and with the arrival of his body in Lycia, borne thither by Sleep and Death (cp. P 682). All other Homeric warriors who fell before Troy were buried in the Troad; Sarpedon alone had burial in his own land.
To this play has been ascribed Fragments 175, 231.
FRAGMENT 50
Weil, Un papyrus inedit de le bibliothèque de M. Ambroise Firmin-Didot (1879) ; cp. Weil, Revue de philologie nouv. Sér. iv. (1880) 10-13, 145-150.
The papyrus is relatively late and exceedingly corrupt. The verses are without word-division.
And a lush meadow gave friendly welcome to the bull. In such wise, biding where he was, did Zeus succeed in his unlaboured theft of me from my aged sire. Why the whole tale? In a few words I recount it all. A mortal woman, united to a god I lost the holiness of maidenhood, but I was joined in wedlock with him who owned his children equally with me. Thrice in childbirth did I endure the pangs of womankind, and the field wherein he sowed complained not to bring forth the seed of a noble sire. First of these mighty implantings that I bare was Minos . . . Second, I brought forth Rhadamanthys, he who of my sons is free from death; yet, though h
e lives, mine eyes behold him not – and to them that love, the absent bring no delight. This was he for whom I am now sore distressed in heart, even Sarpedon; for Ares’ warlike spirit hath laid hold of him. For it is famed abroad that the choicest flower of all Hellas has come, preëminent in valorous strength, and makes loud boast that it will perforce destroy the city of the Trojans. It is for my son I fear, lest, raging with his lance, he may do and suffer some surpassing ill. For slight is this my hope – and it standeth on the razor’s edge – that by the bloody death of my child I may not lose my all.
1. Since Europa declares that Zeus remained “where he was” (namely in Crete), she implies that her carrying-off had been effected by the bull as the agent of the god, and not (as in the ordinary version of the legend) by the god himself transformed into the animal.
2. Phoenix.
3. Since she bore no less than three children to Zeus, her relation to the god is conceived as that of formal marriage founded on his desire for offspring. zunônia paidôn, lit. joint-ownership of children. Cp. koinan tekeôn tuchan, Euripides, Ion 1101.
4. In the lacuna were described the deeds, honours, and death of Minos; but Minos, since Rhadamanthys alone is called immortal, was probably not made the judge of the dead.
5. Rhadamanthys has been translated to the Elysian Field (d563) or to the Islands of the Blest (Pindar, Olympian 2. 73).
6. The desire to employ the favourite antithesis of dran and paschein is responsible for the condensed phrase, in which the emphasis rests on pathê (I fear, lest, as he may work some evil upon his foes, so he may suffer some evil at their hands).
FRAGMENT 51
Stobaeus, Anthology iv. 10. 24 (Hense iv. 333).
But Ares ever loves to pluck all the fairest flower of an armed host.