Stasimon 5
[Episode]
Woe, woe! It was for thee, only for thee,
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LEADER
I must have gone, O Help and Majesty,
That time with message that the fires were burning.
Mine eye was keen; I swear by Simois river,
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It never drooped nor slumbered, never, never,
My master, verily, I am innocent utterly,
Build not such wrath against me, Lord, nor harden
Thy heart; let Time be judge; and if in deed
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Or word I have offended, let me bleed!
Bury me here alive! I ask no pardon.
THRACIAN.
Why threaten them? Art thou a Greek to blind
My barbarous wit so nimbly, in a wind
Of words? This work was thine. And no man’s head
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Is asked by us, the wounded and the dead,
Save thine. It needs more play, and better feigned,
To hide from me that thou hast slain thy friend
By craft, to steal his horses.—That is why
He stabs his friends. He prays them earnestly,
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Prays them to come; they came and they are dead.
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A cleaner man was Paris, when he fled
With his host’s wife. He was no murderer.
Profess not thou that any Greek was there
To fall on us. What Greek could pass the screen
Of Trojan posts in front of us, unseen?
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Thyself was stationed there, and all thy men.
What man of yours was slain or wounded when
Your Greek spies came? Not one; ’tis we, behind,
Are wounded, and some worse than wounded, blind
Forever to the sunlight. When we seek
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Our vengeance, we shall go not to the Greek.
What stranger in that darkness could have trod
Straight to where Rhesus lay—unless some God
Pointed his path? They knew not, whispered not,
Rhesus had ever come. . . . ’Tis all a plot.
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HECTOR
Good allies I have had since first the Greek
Set foot in Troy, and never heard them speak
Complaint of Hector. Thou wilt be the first.
I have not, by God’s mercy, such a thirst
For horses as to murder for their sake.
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Odysseus! Yet again Odysseus! Take
All the Greek armies, is there one but he
Could have devised, or dared, this devilry?
I fear him; yea, fear in mine own despite,
Lest Dolon may have crossed him in the night
And perished; ’tis so long he cometh not.
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THRACIAN.
I know not who Odysseus is, nor what.
I know it was no Greek that wounded us.
HECTOR.
To think thus pleasures thee? Well, have it thus.
THRACIAN.
Home, home! To die at home and rest my head!
HECTOR.
Nay, die not, friend. We have enough of dead.
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THRACIAN.
How can I live? Lost, and my master slain.
HECTOR.
My house will shelter thee and heal thy pain.
THRACIAN.
Thy house? Will murderers’ nursing give me peace?
HECTOR.
Still the same tale! This man will never cease.
THRACIAN.
My curse rest—not on Hector, but on those
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Who stabbed us, as thou say’st.—Ah, Justice knows!P. 48, 1. 876, Justice knows.]—It is a clever touch to leave the Thracian still only half-convinced and grumbling.
HECTOR.
There, lift him.—Bear him to my house. Take pains,
If care can do it, that the man complains
No more of Troy.—Ye others, bear withal
To Priam and the Elders of the Wall
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My charge, that, where the cart-road from the plain
Branches, they make due burial for our slain.
CHORUS.
Back from the heights of happiness,
Back, back, to labour and distress
Some god that is not ours doth lead
Troy and her sons; He sows the seed,
My king, what cometh? There appears
Some Spirit, like a mist of tears;
And in her arms a man lieth,
So young, so wearied unto death;
To see such vision presageth
MUSE.
Nay, look your fill, ye Trojans. It is I,
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The many-sistered Muse, of worship high
In wise men’s hearts, who come to mourn mine own
Most pitifully loved, most injured, son,
For whose shed blood Odysseus yet shall pay
Vengeance, who crawled and stabbed him where he lay.
With a dirge of the Thracian mountains,P. 50,1. 895 ff. and 1. 906 ff., A dirge of the Thracian mountains.]—Such dirges must have struck the Greeks as the fragments of Ossian struck the Lowlanders among us. I have found that the dirge here goes naturally into a sort of Ossianic rhythm.
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I mourn for thee, O my son.
For a mother’s weeping, for a galley’s launching, for
A sad going, and watched by spirits of evil.
His mother chid him to stay, but he rose and went.
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His father besought him to stay, but he went in anger.
Ah, woe is me for thee, thou dear face,
LEADER.
Goddess, if tears for such as thee may run
In our low eyes, I weep for thy dead son.
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MUSE.
I say to thee: Curse Odysseus,
For they made me childless, and forlorn for ever, of
Yea, curse Helen, who left the houses of Hellas.
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She knew her lover, she feared not the ships and sea.
She called thee, called thee, to die for the sake of Paris,
Belovèd, and a thousand cities
She made empty of good men.
O conquered Thamyris, is this thy baneP. 51, 1. 915. The speech of the Muse seems like the writing of a poet who is, for the moment, tired of mere drama, and wishes to get back into his own element. Such passages are characteristic of Euripides.—The death of Rhesus seems to the Muse like an act of vengeance from the dead Thamyris, the Thracian bard who had blasphemied the Muses and challenged them to a contest of song. They conquered him and left him blind, but still a poet. The story in Homer is more terrible, though more civilised: They in wrath made him a maimed man, they took away his heavenly song and made him forget his harping.
Thamyris, the bard who defied Heaven; Orpheus, the bard, saint, lover, whose severed head still cried for his lost Eurydice; Musaeus, the bard of mystic wisdom and initiations—are the three great legendary figures of this Northern mountain minstrelsy.
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Returned from death to pierce my heart again?
Thy pride it was, and bitter challenge cast
’Gainst all the Muses, did my flesh abase
To bearing of this Child, what time I passed
Through the deep stream and looked on Strymon’s face,
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And felt his great arms clasp me, when to old
Pangaion and the earth of hoarded gold
We Sisters came with lutes and psalteries,
Provoked to meet in bitter strife of song
That mountain wizard, and made dark the eyes
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Of Thamyris, who wrought sweet music wrong.
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I bore thee, Child; and then, in shame before
My sisterhood, my dear virginity,
I stood again upon thy Father’s shore
And cast thee to the deeps of him; and he
Received and to no mortal nursing gave
His child, but to the Maidens of the Wave.
And well they nursed thee, and a king thou wast
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And first of Thrace in war; yea, far and near
Through thine own hills thy bloody chariot passed,
Thy battered helm flashed, and I had no fear;
Only to Troy I charged thee not to go:
I knew the fated end: but Hector’s cry,
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Borne overseas by embassies of woe,
Called thee to battle for thy friends and die.
And thou, Athena—nothing was the deed
Odysseus wrought this night nor Diomede—
’Tis thine, all thine; dream not thy cruel hand
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Is hid from me! Yet ever on thy land
The Muse hath smiled; we gave it praise above
All cities, yea, fulfilled it with our love.
The light of thy great Mysteries was shed
By Orpheus, very cousin of this dead
Whom thou hast slain; and thine high citizen
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Musaeus, wisest of the tribes of men,
We and Apollo guided all his way:
For which long love behold the gift ye pay!
I wreathe him in my arms; I wail his wrong
Alone, and ask no other mourner’s song.
LEADER.
Hector, thou hearest. We were guiltless here,P. 52, l. 950. These short speeches between Hector and the Leader of the Guard make a jarring note in the midst of the Muse’s lament. Perhaps it would not be so if we knew how the play was produced, but at present this seems like one of several marks of comparative crudity in technique which mark the play, amid all its daring and inventiveness.
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And falsely spake that Thracian charioteer.
HECTOR.
Always I knew it. Had we any need
Of seers to tell this was Odysseus’ deed?
For me, what could I else, when I beheld
The hosts of Argos camped upon this field,
What but with prayers and heralds bid my friend
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Come forth and fight for Ilion ere the end?
He owed me that.—Yet, now my friend is slain,
His sorrow is my sorrow. On this plain
I will uplift a wondrous sepulchre,
And burn about it gifts beyond compare
Of robes and frankincense. To Troy’s relief
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He came in love and parteth in great grief.
MUSE.
My son shall not be laid in any graveP. 52, 1. 962 ff., My son shall not be laid in any grave.]—Like other Northern barbaric princes, such as Orpheus (1. 972 below) and Zalmoxis (Herodotus, iv. 95) and Holgar the Dane, Rhesus lies in a hidden chamber beneath the earth, watching, apparently, for the day of uttermost need when he must rise to help his people. There is no other passage in Greek tragedy where such a fate is attributed to a hero, though the position of Darius in the Persae and Agamemnon in the Choephori or the Electra is in some ways analogous.
The last lines of the Muse have a very Euripidean ring: cf. Medea, l. 1090 (p. 61, My thoughts have roamed a cloudy land), Alcestis, 1. 882.
Of darkness; thus much guerdon will I crave
Of Death’s eternal bride, the heavenly-born
Maid of Demeter, Life of fruits and corn,
To set this one soul free. She owes me yet,
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For Orpheus widowed, an abiding debt.
To me he still must be—that know I well—
As one in death, who sees not. Where I dwell
He must not come, nor see his mother’s face.
Alone for ever, in a caverned place
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Of silver-veinèd earth, hid from men’s sight,
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A Man yet Spirit, he shall live in light:
As under far Pangaion Orpheus lies,
Priest of great light and worshipped of the wise.
Howbeit an easier anguish even to me
Falls than to Thetis in her azure sea;
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For her son too shall die; and sorrowing,
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First on the hills our band for thee shall sing,
Then for Achilles by the weeping wave.
Pallas could murder thee, but shall not save
Thy foe; too swift Apollo’s bolt shall fly.
O fleshly loves of sad mortality,
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O bitter motherhood of these that die,
She that hath wisdom will endure her doom,
The days of emptiness, the fruitless womb;
Not love, not bear love’s children to the tomb.
LEADER.
The dead man sleepeth in his mother’s care;P. 54, 11. 983-end. This curious and moving end—not in death or peace but in a girding of tired men to greater toil—reminds one of the last words of The Trojan Women: Forth to the long Greek ships And the sea’s foaming, and the last words of the Chanson de Roland there quoted. The Trojans evidently go forth under the shadow of disaster, though with firmness and courage. The stage direction is of course purely conjectural. If Diomedes left some sign of Dolon’s death for Hector to see, as he probably must have done, then Hector must at some time or other see it. If so, this seems to be the place.
But we who battle still—behold, the glare
Of dawn that rises. Doth thy purpose hold,
Hector, our arms are ready as of old.
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HECTOR.
March on; and bid the allies with all speed
Be armed, bind fast the yoke upon the steed,
Then wait with torches burning, till we sound
The Tuscan trump.—This day we shall confound,
God tells me, their Greek phalanx, break their high
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Rampart and fire the galleys where they lie.
Yon first red arrow of the Sun, that brings
The dawn to Troy, hath freedom on his wings.
CHORUS.
The Chief hath spoken: let his will
Be law, ye Trojans.—Raise the cry
To Arms! To Arms! and down the line
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Of allies pass the battle-sign.
The God of Ilion liveth still;
And men may conquer ere they die.