But the force of the Greek images is regularly blunted. When a sense of guilt rouses the Furies to pursue the murderer Orestes over vast tracts of earth, it goads them on like a charioteer spurring horses. As it staggers at the plough. Plow animals will never catch the speeding Orestes. Even ''voice'' strikes a wrong note here.
Guilt acts wordlessly in Aeschylus.
Hughes associates words and calls and voices with the Furies, while Aeschylus contrasts their inarticulate physicality with the persuasive words of Athena that prevail in the final play. The murdered Clytemnestra urges the Furies to shrivel up Orestes ''with vapor that breathes from your flaming wombs,'' a mother's devastatingly apt curse on a matricide. Hughes tells the Furies, instead, to deafen the man with words from their wombs. Speaking wombs are less horrible than horribly funny. The problem is not that Hughes adapts or adds to the poem.