by Aeschylus
When the king is away one must honor the queen.
So you got good news?
You’re optimistic?
Tell me, unless you don’t want to.
KLYTAIMESTRA : Good news. Joy surpassing all your hopes!
The Greeks have captured Priam’s town!
CHORUS : What do you say? I can’t take it in!
KLYTAIMESTRA : Troy belongs to us! Clear?
CHORUS : My tears fall for joy.
KLYTAIMESTRA : Your eye is loyal.
CHORUS : And is there proof? Have you evidence?
KLYTAIMESTRA : I have. Unless some god fooled me.
CHORUS : You’re persuaded by visions in dreams?
KLYTAIMESTRA : I would not trust a mind asleep.
CHORUS : Some rumor then?
KLYTAIMESTRA : You think me a child?
CHORUS : When was the city destroyed?
KLYTAIMESTRA : In the night, this past night.
CHORUS : What messenger could come so fast?
KLYTAIMESTRA : Hephaistos, god of fire! He sped forth a blazing flame from Ida!
Beacon after beacon as the fire messenger moved from Ida to the rock of Lemnos to the crag of Athos third, and skimming high above the sea it shot across like joy, the burning pine torch as another sun, to the watcher on Makistos, who delayed not, nor was he asleep, so the beacon sent its sign to sentinels of Messapion who lit a heap of heather and sped the message on. Not yet growing dim
it leapt the plain of Asopos right as a moon to the cliff of Kithairon and roused a successor of sending flame, which the watchers did not ignore but made an even bigger blaze that flashed over the Gorgon’s lake and reached Mount Aigiplanktos urging the mandate of fire further.
Then they kindled a huge beard of flame that overleapt the Saronic Gulf and swooped down bright upon the peak of Arachnaios, nextdoor neighbor to us here, and plunged at last onto the roof of Atreus—this fire
that traveled all the way from Ida.
This was my lightbringing strategy, torch to torch over the entire course.
Victory for both the first and the last.
Such is the proof and evidence I offer you, sent by my husband from Troy to me personally.
CHORUS : To the gods I will give thanks, lady, later. But tell me your whole story uninterrupted. I am amazed.
KLYTAIMESTRA : Troy is ours on this day. Within that city, I imagine, sounds a cry that does not blend—oil and water poured together do not like each other, you could say, they stand aloof.
So the voices of vanquished and victor are distinct upon the ear.
Some fall on the bodies of their husbands, fathers, brothers and cry out grief from throats no longer free.
The others, famished after allnight battle, search for any breakfast they can find. No billets, no order, just chance.
But quartered now in captured Trojan homes, escaped from frost and dew, they’ll sleep like happy men the whole night through without a watch.
And if only they reverence the gods and temples of that city these captors will not fall captive in turn.
Let no mad impulse strike the army to ravish what they should not, overcome by greed. They’re not home yet.
Yet even if they make it home without offending gods the agony of those who died may wake again—I pray no sudden shift to evil.
Such are my woman words.
May the good prevail.
Unambiguously.
I’m ready for blessings, many blessings.
CHORUS : Woman, you talk like a sensible man.
Now that I’ve heard your proofs—and they’re good proofs—I shall address the gods with gratitude for our success.
O Zeus king, O night of glory you have thrown over the towers of Troy a net so vast no man could overleap it, a dragnet of allenveloping doom.
I reverence great Zeus, the god of host and guest who bent his bow against Paris and did not miss.
People talk about “the stroke of Zeus.”
Trace the meaning.
Zeus acts as Zeus ordains.
Do you think the gods ignore a man who steps on holy things?
That man is impious whose daring goes beyond justice, who packs his house with wealth in excess.
Now me, I’m a moderate person.
But a man of excess has no shelter.
He kicks the altar of Justice out of sight.
Persuasion drives him on—she is child of ruin.
There is no cure. The damage is plain—it shines like bad bronze, black on the touchstone.
Like a boy lost in dreams such a man brings disgrace on his city.
No god hears his prayers and if you befriend him, Justice will take you down.
Such a man is Paris, who came to the house of Atreus and outraged his host by stealing his wife—
Helen who bequeathed to her people clang of shields, press of spears, throng of ships.
Helen who brought ruin to Troy instead of a dowry.
Lightly, lightly, she went through the gates and the seers wailed aloud:
Alas for the house! Alas for the house and the men of the house!
Alas for the marriage bed and the way she loved her husband once!
There is silence there: he sits alone, dishonored, baffled, mute.
In his longing for what is gone across the sea a phantom seems to rule his house.
Any image of her is hateful to him. Without her eyes all Aphrodite is gone.
Dreams bring him grief or delusional joy—dreamvisible she slips through his hands and never comes back down the paths of sleep.
Such is the sorrow throughout that house.
But grief sits at the hearth of every house where a man sailed off to war.
Many things pierce a woman’s heart: in place of the man she sent out she knows she’ll get back a handful of ash.
Ares who exchanges bodies for gold, Ares who holds the scales of war, sends home to the wife the dust of her man packed in an easy little urn.
And the lament goes: What a master of battle he was!
How beautifully he died! while some people snarl under their breath All for the sake of another man’s wife!
in resentment against the Atreidai, those champions of justice.
And what about those who lie over there—under the ground at Troy, planted in enemy soil?
The citizens’ talk is heavy with anger. They want to see a penalty paid.
I’m anxious—I’m not sure what lurks in the dark.
Certainly the gods see all this killing.
And the Furies destroy a man who prospers unjustly, they grind his life away to nothing.
Dangerous to be big or famous—there strikes the thunderbolt of Zeus!
I prefer to remain obscure.
I’m no sacker of cities!
Let me keep my little life to myself.
But this beacon sends rumor racing through the town.
Is it true? Who knows? Some lie sent by gods?
What man is so childish or daft that his mind takes fire at news of a beacon then falls to despair if a word is changed?
On the other hand isn’t it just like a woman to want to rejoice before anything is clear.
The female skin is much too porous.
And her gossip dies in a day.
Well, soon we’ll know about these lights and fires and beacons, whether they’re true or just some fantasy.
But look, I see a messenger coming from the shore, branches of olive on his head.
Covered in thirsty dust.
This man will make things clear—using words, not fire and smoke.
He’ll tell us whether to celebrate or—or what I don’t like to say.
[Enter MESSENGER.]
MESSENGER : I greet you, ground of my fathers, land of Argos.
In this tenth-year light I come to you.
Many hopes are shattered, one is left:
I never dreamed that at my death I’d be buried in the place I love best.
Rejoice my
homeland, rejoice light of the sun, and you highest Zeus and you Pythian Apollo—may you launch no more arrows against us.
You were hostile enough on the banks of Skamander, Apollo, now our savior!
I greet all the gods here, especially Hermes patron of messengers.
You who sent us out, welcome us home, this remnant of the army.
O royal halls, O beloved roof, O holy seats and gods that face the sun, receive your king with glad eyes at last.
He is come, bringing light in darkness, Agamemnon.
Welcome him well for he deserves it, he has dug up Troy with the shovel of Zeus, the shovel of Justice.
The soil of Troy is worked down to nothing.
Her altars are vanished, her temples are gone.
The seed of the land is utterly desolate.
Such a yoke did our king throw around Troy!
And now he is home, a blessed man, worthy of honor beyond all the living.
Neither Paris nor Troy can boast their deed was greater than their suffering.
That rapist-robber lost his plunder and razed his father’s house to the ground.
Double the price did the sons of Priam pay for their crime.
CHORUS : Glad welcome to you, messenger of the army.
MESSENGER : Glad indeed. If gods want me to die, I’m ready now.
CHORUS : Did longing for your home afflict you there?
MESSENGER : Oh yes, oh yes, so that my eyes are filled with tears.
CHORUS : A sweet affliction then.
MESSENGER : How so?
CHORUS : The feeling was reciprocal.
MESSENGER : You mean you longed for the army?
CHORUS : Oh often we sighed from a dark heart.
MESSENGER : Why dark?
CHORUS : Silence is the only safe answer to that.
MESSENGER : You’ve come to fear someone?
CHORUS : Let me borrow your words: I’m ready to die.
MESSENGER : Yes, but it’s over now.
And as for all that happened all those years—some of it happy, some of it not—well, who is free from suffering except the gods?
Were I to tell you our hardships—the miserable quarters, narrow gangways, lousy beds and how we groaned on days there was no food!—but it was worse onshore.
Our beds right up against the enemy walls. Rain from the sky, dew from the ground soaking us perpetually, rotting our clothes, filling our hair with vermin.
I could tell you stories of winter so cold it killed the birds in the air.
Or summer heat when the sea at noon lay without a crease—
but why bewail this? Our toil is past. Over.
The dead do not care to rise again.
Why should I count them?
Why pick at old wounds? Goodbye grief!
For us, this remnant of army, it feels like a victory!
So here is our boast: we took Troy finally and nailed plunder to the walls of Greece to glorify our gods.
Praise the city and the generals, you who hear this.
And the grace of Zeus that brought the thing to pass.
That’s my whole story.
CHORUS : You prove me wrong, I don’t deny.
Never too old to learn.
But all this concerns Klytaimestra most.
KLYTAIMESTRA : I raised my shout of joy a while ago, when the fire first blazed through the night, announcing Troy’s fall.
There were of course those who rebuked me saying,
“You’ve convinced yourself that Troy is sacked because of a beacon!
How like a woman!” They called me insane.
Well, I went on with my offerings:
all through the city women raised the women’s cry of jubilation in the temples of the gods, throwing spices on the flames. And now, what need for you to tell me more?
From the king himself I shall learn everything—how best to welcome him oh I’m excited—
what day is sweeter for a wife than when she runs to open the door for her husband back from war?—
bring him this message: come with all speed, you darling of the city.
You’ll find your loyal wife just as you left her, guarding the house like a good dog, enemy to your enemies, quite unchanged.
She broke no seal while you were away.
And she knows no more of secret sex or scandal than she does of dipping bronze.
This is my boast.
It’s one hundred percent true and worthy of a king’s wife.
CHORUS : That’s how she talks. You may need an intepreter.
But tell me, messenger, what of Menelaos?
Did he come back safe with you?
MESSENGER : Would that I could lie!
CHORUS : Would the truth were happy!
MESSENGER : He vanished from the army, he and his ship too.
CHORUS : You saw him leave Troy? Or did some storm snatch him?
MESSENGER : That’s it, you hit the mark.
CHORUS : And they call him alive or dead?
MESSENGER : No one knows.
CHORUS : Describe the storm.
MESSENGER : I don’t like to mar a joyful day with unwelcome news.
It’s like mixing two different gods.
When a longfaced messenger comes to a city bringing tales of its army fallen, of a wound cut into the flesh of the people, of men from every house thrown onto the bloody prong of Ares, it’s appropriate he sings out a hymn to the Furies.
But when he comes bringing victory to a city of joy—how can I mix evil into that?
How tell of the storm that fell on the Argives from angry gods?
For Fire and Water swore an oath—eternal enemies before—to wreck our fleet.
Steep ruinous oceans rose by night, winds lunged out of Thrace and dashed the ships on one another.
The water went wild. Ships simply vanished.
Like sheep lost to a floundering shepherd.
When dawn came we saw the Aigian Sea abloom with bodies and pieces of wreck.
Some devious god kept us and our hull intact, some forgiving god, with a nudge of the tiller.
Salvation took its seat on our boat and we did not go under, nor run up onshore.
No—we swept out of death into sudden bright daylight scarcely trusting our luck, then took account of a new cataclysm—our fleet in shreds.
If any man of them still breathes, of course he thinks us lost, as we do him.
May it turn out well!
As for Menelaos, expect him.
Some ray of light may find that man alive, if Zeus is not yet inclined to wipe out his family, there’s hope he’ll come home.
That’s the truth.
CHORUS : Who can have named her so perfectly?
What prophetic mind?
Who was it gave to that bride of blood, that wife of strife, the name Helen? For the woman is hell to ships, hell to men, hell to cities.
She vanished out the veils of her bedroom on a western wind and in her wake came men with shields tracking her all the way to the shore of Troy. They beached in blood.
Trouble came to Troy. It had the name wedding, it had the name funeral.
It began in dishonoring Zeus, god of the feast where her wedding song was sung.
Wrongfully sung.
Then Troy grew old overnight. Troy changed its tune to one of sorrow. Paris became the bridegroom of doom.
And Helen made misery and death for her people just by living among them.
A man reared a lion cub once in his house.
It was new at the breast, a young gentle thing, tumbling and playing with children, delighting the old. The man took it up in his arms like an infant, nuzzling his hand when its belly was empty.
But time passed. It started to show its lion nature—
made an uninvited feast of slaughtered sheep, spilling blood and havoc from room to room.
That thing was a priest of ruin. Bred in the house. Sent by god.
At first, I think, there came to Troy a spiri
t of windless calm.
An ornament—a pretty glance, little sting to the heart.
But she swerved aside to a marriage of murder and tears.
She harmed the place, she harmed the people, she was sent by Zeus to the city of Priam: bride as disaster. Bride as Fury.
You know the old saying—Great wealth gives birth to great woe.
Now here is my own opinion:
One unholy deed breeds another unholy deed.
A righteous house has righteous children.
Old hybris makes new hybris.
In the hour of crisis you cannot resist her, you cannot fight back—
an utter unholy recklessness will take you and curse you and ruin your house.
Like mother, like child.
