AESCHYLUS: My poetry hasn’t died with me—
it’s still alive up there,
whereas his is as moribund as he.
Still, if that’s what you want, I don’t care.
DIONYSUS: Will someone go and get the incense and the fire
and I’ll begin this display of supererogation with a prayer
that my decisions in this contest will be fair.
Meanwhile will the Chorus invoke the Muses with a hymn.
MEN AND WOMEN:
Come, you holy maidens of Zeus,
You Muses nine, who activate the decisions and the minds
Of men along wonderfully clear and luminous lines
When they are pitted against each other in tough and abstruse
Debate, we invite you to come and admire the vigor and prowess
Of this couple of speakers, each of which is a master
Of handling enormous slabs of verb
As well as piddling chips of syllable. Look and observe
The mighty minds that are about to commence.
DIONYSUS: Both of you now offer up a prayer before you say your piece.
AESCHYLUS: Great Demeter, who sustains my faculties,
let me be worthy of your Mysteries.
DIONYSUS: You now, Euripides.
Present your incense, make your prayer.
EURIPIDES: Thanks, but I pray to a different set of deities.
DIONYSUS: Your own personal ones? Brand-new, of course?
EURIPIDES: Sure.
DIONYSUS: Go on then. Have recourse to those personal gods of yours.
EURIPIDES: Ether—you, my grazing pastures
As well as Nous and Nosey Parker
Arm me with the words for argument.
STROPHE806
MEN: Now we’re all agog to hear
Two literary geniuses at work
Who have decided to go to war
In a duel of words.
The tongues of both will go berserk.
Their spirits are not short of valor
Nor are their minds short of vigor.
So we may safely assume that soon
One will utter something smart,
Whetted, and keen,
The other score with a brilliant thrust
And reasons torn up by the roots
Scattering words in a cloud of dust.
LEADER: Very well, begin your speechifying at once.
Don’t fail to make it clever, but not pretentious
or commonplace with silly riddles.
EURIPIDES: Good, but before I tell you the kind of creative writer I am
let me make clear what an impostor and sham my adversary is.
What he did was set himself up to diddle
the audiences he inherited from Phrynichus,807
Who were already pretty far gone in imbecility.
His Prologues always begin with some solitary soul,
an Achilles, say, or a Niobe,
all muffled up so you can’t see their faces
and not uttering a syllable.
Quite a travesty, I’d say, of dramatic tragedy.
DIONYSUS: Yes, you’ve got it exactly.
EURIPIDES: And while they sit there mute as dummies,
the Chorus lets go in a litany
of nonstop choral baloney.
DIONYSUS: All the same, I quite enjoyed his silences.
They weren’t as bad as today’s babbling histrionics.
EURIPIDES: That’s because you’re easily taken in.
DIONYSUS: Perhaps you’re right, but how else could he have written?
EURIPIDES: Nevertheless, it’s sheer chicanery.
He wants the audience to sit there interminably,
all ears cocked for the moment Niobe
utters a whimper. Meanwhile the play drags on.
DIONYSUS: The rascal, he took me in! Aeschylus, I’ll thank you to stop fidgeting.
EURIPIDES: It’s because I’m showing him up. . . .
Then after he’s bumbled along like this till the play’s almost done,
he lets fly with a volley of words
as formidable as a beribboned bull
flaunting crests and a shaggy scowl,
which is followed by a whole string of scarecrow weirdies
designed to make your flesh crawl.
AESCHYLUS: How cruel!
EURIPIDES: And never does he utter a word that makes sense.
DIONYSUS: Aeschylus, do stop grinding your molars.
EURIPIDES: It’s all river-Scamanders,
fosses and bronze-bossed bucklers
emblazoned with eagle-griffins
and great rough-hewn declarations
for which there are never explanations.
DIONYSUS: Don’t I know it! “I’ve lain awake all through the long leviathan of the night,” trying to tell what is meant by a swooping hippocockerell.808
AESCHYLUS: It’s the figurehead painted on our ships at Troy, you cretin.
DIONYSUS: And I was imagining it to be Eryxis, son of Philoxenus.809
EURIPIDES: But honestly
do we really have to have cockerells in high tragedy?
AESCHYLUS: All right, you god-detested,
in what sort of themes have you invested?
EURIPIDES: Well, for a start,
no hippocockerells and not a single stag crossed with a goat,
the kind of freak you might expect to see
on a strip of Persian tapestry.
None of that!
When you passed on to me the tragic art
the poor thing was loaded to the ground with bombast and fat.
Immediately, I put her on a diet
and got her weight down by a course of long walks
and little mouthfuls of syllables in fricassee.
I also fed her chopped repartee
and a concoction of verbal juice pressed out of books.
Then as a pick-me-up I dosed her with a tincture
of monodies from Cephisophon.810
I never shambled along like you
with the first thing that entered my noggin,
or plunged ahead leaving the audience in a stew.
The first character to walk on
explained the nature of the play and—
AESCHYLUS: A better nature than yours, any day!
EURIPIDES: [ignoring the interruption] . . . from the opening lines I got all the characters going: wife speaking, servant speaking, and of course the boss and young girl, not to mention the old crone.
AESCHYLUS: Such vulgarity! It calls for the death penalty.
EURIPIDES: Not so. It’s straightforward democracy.
DIONYSUS: Be that as it may, pal,
but that’s a topic I’d keep off if I were you.
EURIPIDES: [gesturing to the audience] And I taught you people
the art of conversation and—
AESCHYLUS: I’ll say you did, and in my view
you should have been sliced down the middle.
EURIPIDES: . . . some of the nicer subtleties
like how to make words tell;
how to think and observe and decide;
how to be quick off the mark and shrewd;
how to expect the worst and face reality in the round—
AESCHYLUS: I’ll say you did!
EURIPIDES: . . . by re-creating the workaday world we know
and things that are part of our living,
things I couldn’t sham without being shown up as a fraud
because they’re common knowledge. So
I never tried to bamboozle them by fibbing
or by bombast and persiflage.
I never tried to frighten them with brutes like your Cycnus and
your Memnon811
careering about in chariots with bells clanging.
And just look at the difference between his devotees and mine;
he’s got Pussy-Beard Phormisius812 and Sidekick Megaenetus813
ri
p-’em-uppers-treetrunk-twisters
and bushy-bearded-bugle-blowing lancers
whereas I’ve got Cleitophon814 and the clever Theramenes.815
DIONYSUS: Theramenes? Yes, he’s supersmart,
surmounts every crisis and on the brink of disaster
always manages to land on his feet.
Whatever the fix, he always throws a six.
EURIPIDES: That’s exactly what I meant, Teaching people how to think, Putting logic into art And making it a rational thing Which enables them to grasp And manage almost everything Better than they’ve ever done, Especially matters in the home, Asking “Is everything all right?” “What happened to this?” “Oh, damn! Who the deuce went off with that?”
DIONYSUS: Ye gods, you’re right!
When an Athenian comes home now
He starts to bawl the servants out:
“What’s happened to that cooking pot?”
“Who bit the head off that sprat?”
“The basin I bought last year is shot.”
“Where’s the garlic? Do you know?”
“Who’s been getting at the olives?” . . .
Whereas before Euripides
They sat like gawking dummies half alive.
ANTISTROPHE817
WOMEN: “Renowned Achilles, do you behold this?”816 How will you respond to it?
Will you lose that famous temper?
Do take care.
And not go running amok.
His gibes certainly are no joke,
So, good sir, do take care.
Do not be consumed with bile,
Furl the canvas, slacken sheets,
Shorten sail.
Slowly, slowly cruise along
Till the breeze blows soft and strong
And bears you steadily along.
LEADER: [to AESCHYLUS] You, first of Greeks to raise pinnacles of
praise to adorn all tragic waffle, open up your throttle.
AESCHYLUS: I’m furious matters have come to this. My stomach
turns
that I have to demean myself by arguing with this man’s
pretensions, but I must because otherwise
he’ll say that I’m reduced to silence. . . . So tell me this:
What are the attributes that make a poet famous?
EURIPIDES: Skill and common sense, by which we are able to make
ordinary people better members of the State.
AESCHYLUS: And say you’ve done the opposite—made honest folk
into libertines—what punishment would you merit?
DIONYSUS: Don’t ask him—death.
AESCHYLUS: Just give a thought to what they were like
when they came from my hand:
six-foot heroes all of them who never shirked,
unlike your loafers and your useless jerks,
these latter-day washouts we have now.
Those others were men of spears, men of darts, the very breath
of white-plumed helmets waving and ox-hide hearts.
DIONYSUS: Heavens, it’s helmets now! He’ll wear me out.
EURIPIDES: What method did you use to make them so elite?
DIONYSUS: Come on, Aeschylus, lay off being aloof.
AESCHYLUS: I did it by shoving Ares into everything.
DIONYSUS: Exactly how?
AESCHYLUS: In my Seven Against Thebes . . . I contrived
to make every male who saw it hot for war.
DIONYSUS: Not very nice to have connived
in making Thebans braver in battle than us Athenians!818
You ought to be chastised.
AESCHYLUS: I think not. You Athenians could have had the same training but you didn’t think it worth it. . . . Then, when I produced my Persians, it sent them raving to annihilate the enemy. So you see, in the end I didn’t come off too badly.819
DIONYSUS: I love the part when they heard that Darius was no more,
and they couldn’t celebrate enough, clapping their hands and
shouting,
“Hurrah! Hurrah!”
AESCHYLUS: This is the sort of thing that poets should celebrate,
and this, you may remember, is what one finds
among the best of poets from earliest times.
Orpheus revealed to us the mysteries,
and also taught us to abhor murder as a crime.
Musaeus made us aware of things like clairvoyance
and also how to cure diseases.
Hesiod taught us how to work the land, when to plow,
when to sow; and as to Homer, the divine,
did he not earn his fame and undying renown
by giving us lessons on how to esteem
military training, armory, and the discipline of men?
DIONYSUS: That may be so but all the same
he did pretty dismally with that airhead Pantacles820
who only yesterday made a fool of himself on parade
trying to fix the plumes of his helmet while he had it on his head.
AESCHYLUS: I know, but surely he did inspire other brave men,
for instance, the indomitable Lamachus,821
who was for me the role model in courage, like Patroclus822
and the lion-hearted Teucer823—the role model for all of us,
inspiring valor and giving us courage to emulate them whenever
the bugle for battle blew. . . . I never did create
strumpets like Phaedra or Stheneboea, like you.‡
You’ll never find anywhere in anything I wrote
a lascivious bitch.
EURIPIDES: Don’t I know it! You left poor Aphrodite out.
AESCHYLUS: I should think so, whereas you
have let her squash you and your whole household flat.
DIONYSUS: He’s got you there, Euripides, for you’ve been hit by the
same fate you invented for other people’s wives.§
EURIPIDES: [ignoring the insult] You tiresome man,
what harm to the community was ever done
by my Stheneboea?
AESCHYLUS: You put decent women married to decent men
in a situation like that of Bellerephon
that drives them to suicide.
EURIPIDES: All right, but I didn’t invent the plot of Phaedra.
AESCHYLUS: Worse luck, no! But the poet shouldn’t side
with what is evil and display it on the stage like a demonstration.
Children may have teachers but adults have the poet
and the poet ought to keep things on a higher plane.
EURIPIDES: [sarcastically] As high as Mount Lycabettus, no doubt, or
lofty
Parnassus, and they’re to be our instructors in the good?
My word! Can’t you do your teaching in the language of men?
AESCHYLUS: Listen, you miserable heel, the lofty thought and the
high ideal
call for a language to match,
and if the deities are clothed in rare attire
their language, too, should be out of the ordinary.
This is where I blazed a trail,
which you’ve managed to undermine.
EURIPIDES: How have I?
AESCHYLUS: For a start, by the way you dress your royalty. They’re all in rags like any pitiful wretch.
EURIPIDES: But whom do I hurt by that?
AESCHYLUS: Well, to begin with,
it tempts the rich to shirk their responsibility:
a wealthy tycoon evades the funding of a warship
by dressing up in rags and whimpering about his poverty.824
DIONYSUS: Yes, underneath the rags, by Demeter,
he’s in lovely fleecy underwear
and you see him splashing out on fish in the market square.
AESCHYLUS: What’s more, you’ve taught people to prattle and gab,
emptying the wrestling schools and turning the young men’s
bottoms into flab
as t
hey prattle away—and you’ve encouraged the crew
of the Paralus to answer their officers back.825
But in the old days when I was alive all they knew
was how to clamor for their grub
and shout “Ship ahoy” and “Heave-to.”
DIONYSUS: That’s exactly it, by Apollo. Now they fart in the bottom bencher’s face shit on their messmates and go off with people’s clothes when on shore. What’s more, they give lip to their commanders and refuse to row, so the ship goes drifting to and fro.
AESCHYLUS: What bad behavior is he not responsible for? Showing us a woman acting as a pander,826 Or producing a baby in the very temple,827 And others even coupling with their brothers828
And saying that “something living’s not alive,”829
The consequences naturally are simple:
A society swamped by lawyers’ clerks
And buffoons lying their heads off to the people,
And, because nobody takes any exercise,
When it comes to running with a torch, no one tries.
DIONYSUS: You couldn’t be righter. I almost doubled up
At the Panathenaea laughing when
A slow coach of a booby thumped along,
Stooped, white as a sheet, fat.
And when he got to the Gates by the potter’s field
People whacked him on his belly and butt
And ribs and sides and all his miserable hide.
As he scurried along he began to fart
With gas enough to keep his torch alight.
STROPHE
MEN: Great is the struggle, grand the tussle, The war’s now under way. One of them lands a hefty biff. The other ducks with a swing In counterattack. It’s hard to say Which of them will win. . . . Hey, you two, you’ve not fought enough, Many more buffetings are due And plenty of cerebral stuff. Whatever it is you’re fighting about Go at it hard and argue it out. Flense the old and strip for the new. Get down to the nitty-gritty And something erudite.
ANTISTROPHE
WOMEN: And if you’re afraid that people won’t know What it is all about And have no inkling, are unable to follow The twists of an argument, Don’t give it a thought; as a matter of fact Things are different today. Everyone’s an expert now And knows his book of rules by heart And every nicety Is fully briefed and clever as well, And sharply honed, as we all know, So that’s not something to worry about. Don’t be afraid—enjoy it all. People are primed to the hilt.
EURIPIDES: Very well then, we’ll look at his Prologues first
and see how this famous poet begins his tragedies,
because their plots are far from clear.