Æschylos Tragedies and Fragments. Aeschylus

Shall his bride hurl him from his throne of might?

      Prom. Yea; she shall bear child mightier than his sire.

      Io. Has he no way to turn aside that doom?

      Prom. No, none; unless I from my bonds be loosed.184

      Io. Who then shall loose thee 'gainst the will of Zeus?

      Prom. It must be one of thy posterity.

      Io. What, shall a child of mine free thee from ills?

      Prom. Yea, the third generation after ten.185

      Io. No more thine oracles are clear to me.

      Prom. Nay, seek not thou thine own drear fate to know.

      Io. Do not, a boon presenting, then withdraw it.

      Prom. Of two alternatives, I'll give thee choice.

      Io. Tell me of what, then give me leave to choose.

      Prom. I give it then. Choose, or that I should tell

      Thy woes to come, or who shall set me free.

      Chor. Of these be willing one request to grant

      To her, and one to me; nor scorn my words:

      Tell her what yet of wanderings she must bear,

      And me who shall release thee. This I crave.

      Prom. Since ye are eager, I will not refuse

      To utter fully all that ye desire.

      Thee, Io, first I'll tell thy wanderings wild,

      Thou, write it in the tablets of thy mind.

      When thou shalt cross the straits, of continents

      The boundary,186 take thou the onward path

      On to the fiery-hued and sun-tracked East.

      [And first of all, to frozen Northern blasts

      Thou'lt come, and there beware the rushing whirl,

      Lest it should come upon thee suddenly,

      And sweep thee onward with the cloud-rack wild;]187

      Crossing the sea-surf till thou come at last

      Unto Kisthene's Gorgoneian plains,

      Where dwell the grey-haired virgin Phorkides,188

      Three, swan-shaped, with one eye between them all

      And but one tooth; whom nor the sun beholds

      With radiant beams, nor yet the moon by night:

      And near them are their wingèd sisters three,

      The Gorgons, serpent-tressed, and hating men,

      Whom mortal wight may not behold and live.

      Such is one ill I bid thee guard against;

      Now hear another monstrous sight: Beware

      The sharp-beaked hounds of Zeus that never bark,189

      The Gryphons, and the one-eyed, mounted host

      Of Arimaspians, who around the stream

      That flows o'er gold, the ford of Pluto, dwell:190

      Draw not thou nigh to them. But distant land

      Thou shalt approach, the swarthy tribes who dwell

      By the sun's fountain,191 Æthiopia's stream:

      By its banks wend thy way until thou come

      To that great fall where from the Bybline hills

      The Neilos pours its pure and holy flood;

      And it shall guide thee to Neilotic land,

      Three-angled, where, O Io, 'tis decreed

      For thee and for thy progeny to found

      A far-off colony. And if of this

      Aught seem to thee as stammering speech obscure,

      Ask yet again and learn it thoroughly:

      Far more of leisure have I than I like.

      Chor. If thou hast aught to add, aught left untold

      Of her sore-wasting wanderings, speak it out;

      But if thou hast said all, then grant to us

      The boon we asked. Thou dost not, sure, forget it.

      Prom. The whole course of her journeying she hath heard,

      And that she know she hath not heard in vain

      I will tell out what troubles she hath borne

      Before she came here, giving her sure proof

      Of these my words. The greater bulk of things

      I will pass o'er, and to the very goal

      Of all thy wanderings go. For when thou cam'st

      To the Molossian plains, and by the grove192

      Of lofty-ridged Dodona, and the shrine

      Oracular of Zeus Thesprotian,

      And the strange portent of the talking oaks,

      By which full clearly, not in riddle dark,

      Thou wast addressed as noble spouse of Zeus, —

      If aught of pleasure such things give to thee, —

      Thence strung to frenzy, thou did'st rush along

      The sea-coast's path to Rhea's mighty gulf,193

      In backward way from whence thou now art vexed,

      And for all time to come that reach of sea,

      Know well, from thee Ionian shall be called,

      To all men record of thy journeyings.

      These then are tokens to thee that my mind

      Sees somewhat more than that is manifest.

      What follows (to the Chorus) I will speak to you and her

      In common, on the track of former words

      Returning once again. A city stands,

      Canôbos, at its country's furthest bound,

      Hard by the mouth and silt-bank of the Nile;

      There Zeus shall give thee back thy mind again,194

      With hand that works no terror touching thee, —

      Touch only – and thou then shalt bear a child

      Of Zeus begotten, Epaphos, “Touch-born,”

      Swarthy of hue, whose lot shall be to reap

      The whole plain watered by the broad-streamed Neilos:

      And in the generation fifth from him

      A household numbering fifty shall return

      Against their will to Argos, in their flight

      From wedlock with their cousins.195 And they too,

      (Kites but a little space behind the doves)

      With

184

The lines refer to the story that Zeus loved Thetis the daughter of Nereus, and followed her to Caucasos, but abstained from marriage with her because Prometheus warned him that the child born of that union should overthrow his father. Here the future is used of what was still contingent only. In the lost play of the Trilogy the myth was possibly brought to its conclusion and connected with the release of Prometheus.

185

Heracles, whose genealogy was traced through Alcmena, Perseus, Danae, Danaos and seven other names, to Epaphos and Io.

186

Probably the Kimmerian Bosporos. The Tanais or Phasis has, however, been conjectured.

187

The history of the passage in brackets is curious enough to call for a note. They are not in any extant MS., but they are found in a passage quoted by Galen (v. p. 454), as from the Prometheus Bound, and are inserted here by Mr. Paley.

188

Kisthene belongs to the geography of legend, lying somewhere on the shore of the great ocean-river in Lybia or Æthiopia, at the end of the world, a great mountain in the far West, beyond the Hesperides, the dwelling-place, as here, of the Gorgons, the daughters of Phorkys. Those first-named are the Graiæ.

189

Here, like the “wingèd hound” of v. 1043, for the eagles that are the messengers of Zeus.

190

We are carried back again from the fabled West to the fabled East. The Arimaspians, with one eye, and the Grypes or Gryphons (the griffins of mediæval heraldry), quadrupeds with the wings and beaks of eagles, were placed by most writers (Herod. iv. 13, 27) in the north of Europe, in or beyond the terra incognita of Skythia. The mention of the “ford of Pluto” and Æthiopia, however, may possibly imply (if we identify it, as Mr. Paley does, with the Tartessos of Spain, or Bœtis —Guadalquivir) that Æschylos followed another legend which placed them in the West. There is possibly a paronomasia between Pluto, the God of Hades, and Plutos, the ideal God of riches.

191

The name was applied by later writers (Quintus Curtius, iv. 7, 22; Lucretius, vi. 848) to the fountain in the temple of Jupiter Ammon in the great Oasis. The “river Æthiops” may be purely imaginary, but it may also suggest the possibility of some vague knowledge of the Niger, or more probably of the Nile itself in the upper regions of its course. The “Bybline hills” carry the name Byblos, which we only read of as belonging to a town in the Delta, to the Second Cataract.

192

Comp. Sophocles, Trachin., v. 1168.

193

The Adriatic or Ionian Gulf.

194

In the Suppliants, Zeus is said to have soothed her, and restored her to her human consciousness by his “divine breathings.” The thought underlying the legend may be taken either as a distortion of some primitive tradition, or as one of the “unconscious prophecies” of heathenism. The deliverer is not to be born after the common manner of men, and is to have a divine as well as a human parentage.

195

See the argument of the Suppliants, who, as the daughters of Danaos, descended from Epaphos, are here referred to. The passage is noticeable as showing that the theme of that tragedy was already present to the poet's thoughts.