Author's Note

prose (non-written)

The ION, with a revised rendering of the poetry, appeared in the translation, ✓ION, (Chatto and Windus) and, the choruses of XENEXAREX/BACCHAE were published in RED ROSES FOR BRONZE (Chatto and Windus).

Pausanius
The essay, PEOPLE OF SPARTA, appeared in the
Bookman.

The PAUSANIUS section
Pausanius' essays and most of the lyric GARLAND
sequence, were written in the autumn of 1920, at
Carmel Highlands, California.

The Euripides section was assembled in part before
XXIX 1918, but was not finished until some years later.

EURIPIDES.

Of a little over thirty plays of the greatest Elizabethan,
none to our knowledge are lost. Euripides, the so to speak,
Shakespear of Greece, has to his credit some eighteen surviving
plays. Of some 92 appearing under his name 75, statistics
state, were held to be genuine by the later Alexandrian critics.
Roughly, to continue our dry resume, we judge Euripides by
about one fifth of his whole output. It is as if Shakespear's
comedies should miss out A Winter's Tale, Two Gentlemen of
Verona, even possibly The Tempest. That is a crude way of
indicating the gaps that must occur in any so-called "profound"
study of the poet. But we must always bear this in mind as
well as the fact that probably his so to speak Hamlet and Lear
are as well missing from his tragedies.

The lost plays may or may not have been the "best" plays.
How can we judge that? One thing is certain: some of
Euripides' most exquisite love-lyrics perished with his great
Love drama, the choruses of which legend for many centuries
stated, were sung by children in the street, such as street
gamins pick up the latest waltz or jazz or popular song-hit
of musical revue or comedy to-day. Those lyrics were stained
with ineffable purity we do know and we may be sure with under-
lying psycho-physical intensity.

2.

Such a play might even have risen to the spiritual-
emotional heights of the Ionians; perhaps Euripides used
some of its earlier matter even as model for his inset chorus-
es. Is it not possible that the later censure that preclu-
ded so many of the most exquisite stanzas of Sappho, in like
manner forbade these? We would like to conjecture just how
and what (to quote one instance) this play was, how many times
it was presented and why the "censure" finally condemned it.
Many of Euripides surviving plays hold outright anti-war
and anti-social protest. But erotic-emotional innovation
is comparatively rare. An interesting point rises, is his
real "personal philosophy" lost, what did these plays contain,
how did they approach life? Surely, in some ultra-modern
spirit if the surviving plays are any clue to the lost ones.
Euripides was "unpopular" during his life as a free_thinker,
and an iconoclast. It is safe to assume that the lost plays
held pertinent "modern" matter.

The great Attic dramatist was caught in a mesh of politi-
cal and social upheaval. Shakespear'd lived, we are always led
to imagine, a little out of the pulse and beat of events.
To begin with, events in Elizabethan England hardly attained
the proportion that 'events had in fifth-century Athens.
To draw an apt comparison, Euripides lived through almost a
modern great-war period. If Shakespear had been born at the

3.

end of the nineteenth century and had come to maturity about 1914, his plays would hardly have been untinged with bitterness, with that especial giant non-partisanship, non-patriotism that creeps into the dramas of Euripides. Take the Trojan Woman for instance. Substitute figures of German and English legend or half-legends for the Priams and Cassandras and Helens of the Greek. Always remember that the Cassandras and Helens took the place in time and sentiment of the Merlins and Gawains of the Arthurian legend or the Brunhilds and Sigfrieds of the "Ring". If this problematic great-war Shakespear had managed his puppets in the same way as Euripides, he would have made Brunhild hurl invective at the Arthurian puppet-equivalent and make clear in no pale half-measure of speech, the authors' ideas of war and subject nations. How would 1917 London have acclaimed such anti-war propaganda? Work that out and you will have some idea of the power and detachment of the Attic dramatist. For we are too apt to pigeon-hole the Attic poets and dramatists, put them B.C. this or that, forget them in our survey of modern life and literature, not realizing that the whole spring of all literature (even of all life) is that one small leaf of an almost-island, that tiny rock among the countries of a world, Hellas.

Greece, on the map, is a sort of leaf, "a plane-leaf," Strabo

4.

says, delicately joined to the mainland, middle and north
Greece, by a stem, the Isthmus of Corinth. The Pelopenisis,
the sort of rock of ages of Greece proper, is a pendant dried
leaf about to fall or a green-leaf growing, depending on the
colour of your map. Look at the map of Greece. Then go
away and come back and look and look and look at it. The
jagged contours stir and inflame the imagination, time riddled
banner of freedom and fiery independence, a rag of a country,
all irregular, with little torn off bits, petals drifting, those
islands, "lily on lily that o'er lace the sea." Look at the
map of Greece. It is a hieroglyph. You will be unable to
read it and go away and come back after years and just begin
to spell out the meaning of its outline. Then you will realize
that you know nothing at all about it and begin all over, learn-
ing a cryptic language. I am never tired of speculating on
the power of just that outline, just the mysterious line of it,
apart from the thing it stands for. That leaf hanging a
pendant to the whole of Europe seems to indicate the living
strength and sap of the thing it derives from. Greece is
indeed the tree of life, the ever present stream, the spring of
living water. There is no/poet, no painter, no sculptor, no
architect of the present or of the Renaissance who is not tirely
indebted to that little rock set in the midst of water.
All civilization has clung to it, begged of its gods, protection

5.

and liberty; rock of ages, indeed the most banal of symbols,
recalling a chromo print hanging on the wall of an illiterate
our tiny Hellenic "rock-of-ages"
parlour maid. But isn't that jet of land just that? Across
it, the forces of the east and west struggled for supremacy until
that latest Sophoclean peripitatic philosopher, the young Graeco-
Judaic teacher, the anointed Christ set the last seal, forever
ritualized its already blessed, eternal language. We must
never forget that the words of Euripides and the writings of the
disciples of the Christ are in the same tongue.

The Greek testament, the plays of Euripides, the works of
Shakespear... how many of us have really conscientiously read
those three? How many of us have read and assimilated their
teaching? The three "poets" are mystics, they live in another
world. They derive their strength from outside forces and they
all alike claim that the kingdom of beauty is within you.
Euripides lived a feverish active life and was finally banished
to the court of Macedon, in those days, a wild and uncouth
country. There Euripides gave us his most exquisite and
passionately mystical writing, the Bacchae, just as Shakespear
at the last, at the turn of his life, returned to fantasy and
truth, the very young symbols of spirit beyond matter, Aëriel
and Miranda in the Tempest. Christ lived his drama in Sopho-
clean purity of action, the beginning, the middle, the end.
No Attic drama of the pure/technical perfection achieved a more
exquisite tragic denoument than that of the Book of Matthew or

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Saint John. We must never forget that the Christ died in order to make sure and invicable all the beauty that proceeded him. The beauty that proceeded and the beauty that followed. Before Sophocles was, before Aeschylus and Euripides, I am. The I am of eternal beauty, of eternal striving toward intellectual and aesthetic achievement.

The men initiate to the kingdom of heaven, that peripatetic young philosopher has told us, brings out of his treasury things new and old. So with us; there is (or should be) with the student of literature, with the creator or the lover of poetry and the drama, no beginning, no end. Shakespear derives from the exquisite stories and romances current among the quattrocento Florentines, Romans and Venetians. The Romans, the Florentines were touched and refined in their love of creation by the Greek words scrawled on edges of manuscripts, from rolls and parchments flung as if by chance into their markets from the opening of the gates of the city of Byzantium. Byzance was a Greek city, the Athens of the east treasuring archives and manuscripts, itself always over-flowered, with later blossoms falling, falling, heavy and abundant riot. The later blossoms of Byzance were a sort of odd graft on the original pure Attic shoot of the Greek mainland. The tree of the plane-leaf, the tiny stem of the Isthmus of Corinth, joins direct at Attica. Athens is the centre of the sturdy white shaft of the exquisite tree of this eternal beauty. Unto that

7.

shaft was grafted Byzance, a half-eastern hybrid with heavy exotic complicated flower-heads. When all the flowers had drifted down from the hybrid graft, the stock of the original tree (perhaps because of centuries of comparative neglect) had gained fresh strength, wild-wood foot-hold, retaining its original sturdy purity, plus something indefinably mellow and exquisite, the rare perfected Spirit. Shoot from this original tree was, so to speak, uprooted, vibrant and living still, by warrior and merchant-master of the Mediterranean, and transferred to Italy. That Attic root sprung again in Florence, re-flowered, gave us the whole of that exquisite quatrocento, painters, poets, sculptures, painters and again and again painters. The figures of the frieze of Gozzoli, of Ghirlandaio live in the pages of the Elizabethans. Viola stepped out of a Ghirlandaio frieze and Florizel was sheer plagary of a Gozzoli pagelet.

So much for Euripides and so little. Nothing at all, really. There are enormous volumes written on Euripides, on his plays, his political opinions, on the terse and all too spiteful jeering of the contemporary satarists on his life, his opinions, his literary innovation and his mother's parenthood. Pages and pages and volumes that no one ever reads or wants to. If you want to understand Euripides, read Shakespear, if you want to understand Shakespear, study the friezes of the

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Ricardi palace or the bronze and silver images in the Bargello at Florence, if you want to understand the friezes of Gozzoli in the Ricardi palace or all the line of intimate Botticelli madonnas and even Piero di Cosimo, go back to the volumes of the Attic dramatists. And through all this runs that ever present Spirit of striving toward beauty and all but impossible aesthetic perfection that preaches "the kingdom within you".

It was not Christ that burnt the odes of Sappho and was responsible for the destruction of some of the most exquisite paintings and sculptures of the Florentine renaissance. The Christian monks did that but it is just as ridiculous to blame the teachings of Christ for that wanton destruction as it would be (and is) ridiculous to blame Christ for the World War.

Ariel and the Thetis of some Euripidean epilogue live with the innocent flowers about the feet of the Madonna-Aphrodite of Botticelli's spring. Spring lives in the name of Thetis, of Eos, of Iris, of Memnon, of Patroclos, of Hyacinth. There is no beginning, no end to light that rises, touching hill-peaks here and there, Phoebos, the god of light, the healer, the king of song. There is no end to light that rises, that is slain like Osiris going to his death to be brought back to life again by the love of Isis, the Egyptian Madonna. The Egyptian, the Greek and the Judaic, the mediaeval, the quatrocento, the Elizabethan mother and son, lover and mistress, king and queen are one and indissoluble. The initiate to the kingdom of

HELEN IN EGYPT.

I.

I visualize this opening scene of the Helen of Euripides
not with stage property and ceremonial of the religious drama,
but as taking place out of doors upon some exquisite sea-shelf.
I do not hear music but a blending of waters (one) the sea at
very low tide almost at rest, yet breaking in small back-drawn
waves, waves that seem, if you can understand how exactly I
imagine it, to break backwards, those waves at very low tide
that run out swiftly, spend their strength in that, and creep
tentatively back.

. The tide is very low. But there is this slight rush of
water. That is the first sound, perhaps grasped first because
most familiar. The other sound (two) is a steady rush, and
silver. It is away to the right. And I know what it is;
though I do not see the river, I can visualize the sand-shelf it
cuts over and the edge of that fresh moving tide, where it lies
clear across the white sand it has scooped out and the backs
of the white shells it has washed so clean of salt.

There are two sounds of waters. The sea at lowest tide and
the Nile flowing over the sand.

The colour everywhere is rose-colour, an intense colour
as if the sunset were no transient thing. It is no transient
thing in this country. A great flamingo steps fastidiously

2.

across the sand. His neck beats a stately measure, as he
balances his light body on its tenuous legs. He turns over a
clump of weeds, jerks forward, flaps his wings and swallows
his crab or little craw-fish.

When he stands he indents the sky-line like another cloud.

The portico that stands at the back of this long slope to
the sea, is built of a brown, rock-like stone, very dark brown,
like the trunks of great trees. These pillars are rather low,
rather stumpy in character. The building almost seems to creep
under the great sand-dunes that back it. The tall sea-grasses
sweep the roof from the bank above. This is the temple-tomb
of Proteus, king of Egypt.

The sunlight scarcely reaches it. The temple is blocked
out of the sun's radiance by the bank behind it.

The great flamingo deigns to turn his head, as a woman
steps from the dark porch, down toward the tide-line. She walks
lightly, swaying lightly. Her small head turns from side to side.
She stretches out her arms as she nears the sea. It seems

3.

(if we could strip off the close-fitting texture of her robe)
we would find another such light soft body as this bird's,
the great gull. The bird looks at her indifferently as he might look
at another bird, another kind of bird, a great gull perhaps.

It is good to meet Helen face to face, for men and poets
have visualized her so crudely. We had come to cloy with her
sweetness, her contours painted for us, as soft and luxurious.
But this face is not sweet nor are the body lines luxurious.

She is young but young like the statues dug from the dazzling
sand in the desert behind the tomb of Proteus. Her face is not
in any Praxitelian sense beautiful. It is white and beautiful
as a skull or a bird's swift, destructive beak is beautiful.

Why must men and poets visualize her as a woman, this Helen?
She is a spirit; she, who was hatched from an egg by Leda the
mistress of God.

## II.

She tells us her story. (The Prologue). We hear the swift
melody of her speech like the great background of water, moving,
moving; the whole story, the whole history of the human spirit
is there. But as in looking upon great water we are forced to
concentrate on the ripples of the surface and small frost-like
dash of spray, so here our minds are held by a word, a phrase.

The story we know already, have heard a thousand times; we
are familiar with it as we are with the great surface of ocean,

4.

yet always we are strangers to it, groping, helpless before its
immensity and depth.

Again we hear of Troy, of man set against man, warrior
mated with warrior, of the first cause of battle, the beginning
of dissention, of God and a white form recumbent on river-reeds
to draw God from heaven; of herself, a name, a prodigy, Helen
child of the union. As of a great sea and the roaring of its
tides, we learn again of goddesses and a jealous contest and
beauty - a shepherd's reward. All this we know, but as a sailor,
sailing from familiar ocean toward an inland sea, suddenly finds
the light changed, the salt luminous, the shore-line decked with
phosphorescence and strange purple weeds, so we as the voice of
Helen continues, find ourselves face to face with another Helen,
and we are transformed by the transformation before us.

This is another Helen yet the same Helen. As the white
snow that melts upon the desert is still the snow though it
rushes, a river toward the sea, this is not Helen, yet still
Helen.

Hera, she tells us, in her anger, sent a cloud, a phantom
to walk upon the walls of Troy. Alexander embracei nothing,
for nothing the Greeks were slain.

Hermes, a friendly agent, caught in his arms, like a lover,
the Helen who wandered in Sparta, at the moment when she was
placing her offering a not (and this seems significant) golden
roses to the golden, laughter-loving Goddess, but scarlet rose-

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buds at the feet of the helmeted Lacedemonian, Athene.

God was not unmindful of his child and for a time all was
well. Helen's self like a spirit snatched from evil, lived in a
sand-swept paradise at the very edge of the world. Behind her
was the desert and the mystery; before her, far out of sight but
someway colouring all her days and hope, the old life, memories
of her father and the yearning for her little girl. But Proteus,
though king of Egypt, was no dweller in the dark desert, an adept
of strange rites and mystic ceremonial. He was an island-dweller,
not different from her own foster-father, Tyndareus, of Sparta.
He was a gentle, benign presence, this Proteus, and Helen gazing
at his gracious face, forgot her marriage and the pain of child-
bearing. She herself was almost a child again, gathering the
strange African shells, and whistling to the rare, bright colour-
ed birds.

But things changed. Proteus this new father of hers died.
His son Theoclymeus reigned in Egypt.

One dawn when the sea merged with the sand-gold, we may imagine
Helen stepping from a white pool across the tangled weeds
(so we re-construct our visual perception) knotting her veils
about her carelessly, with no waiting-women to interrupt her lovely

6.

gesture. Her blue garment clung to the damp salt breasts and the outline of the golden thighs. She was glad to be alone. There was no one, no one. She scooped up a handful of tiny shells and shook out the sand and tore off the sea-grass. She would take them to Proteus, her old father and lay them on the steps of his altar.

Helen, queen of Sparta, child of God, ran unsandalled, with weed-tangled hair across the sand. "Proteus", she called at the dark entrance of the sepulchre but another voice answered her. Theoclymeus, the new king, making devout salutation to the spirit of his dead father, stood before her in the sun-light, ceremonious, satiric.

### III.

He is full of sinister design, this young Theoclymeus, king of Egypt. His youth and his suave, oriental manner, his beauty, so grave and so assured, the gold-wings of his head-dress and the pattern beaten upon his breast-plate, all the attributes of his priesthood and his power, strike powerless upon this western queen with her so unassertive beauty and her undaunted freedom. He has spoken direct with the dead he has assured her, and he calls to his help black superstition and magic to terrify her. But though Helen is terrified she is still Helen, and though Fate rules even Zeus in heaven, it is a Greek fate she will succumb to and no oriental substitute for her own Athene, her Erynnies and Furies.

7.

But she is alone. She knows it now. Behind her in the desert stands the tomb of the kindly Proteus, weaver of tales, who conversed with serpents and dolphins and the flying creatures of the sea. But Proteus is gone. His son, a different, is a worshipper of the dead, familiar brother of the desert jackal.

All this is the visual reconstruction of the early story. bird, As the play actually opens we may imagine that our flamingo, true/ swifter than the half-bird, Helen, stretches out his long neck, clutches the sand to gain balance, snarls one protesting caw, a challenge, and is lifted up, red-down, across the water as the wind takes him. Helen following him for a moment turns to search the cause of his challenging croak and his swift disappearance. A stranger drags across the sand.

He is swift to recognize her, this exiled Grecian, Teucer, who had stood with Ajax and Achilles before the walls of the doomed city, and swiftly he stooped to hurl a stone at this devil, this fury, destroyer of armies. But his arm falls as she interrupts his imprecations with the words "why must you, deserted, outcast, a ship-wrecked sailor, curse me one also ship-wrecked and wretched?"

His arm fall. "Ah lady, I mistook you for a devil, for Helen whom Greece hates. But your voice is gentle. You are no witch."

They converse then, these two, in the familiar manner of the

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Attic dramatists, about people and facts already known to the most ignorant member of that promiscuous Athenian audience. Even we are familiar with all the minute and intimate details of the devastation of the city of the Trojans, with their names, with Achilles, Ajax, Telamon. But here we have Helen pictured as hearing for the first time of the death of her mother, Leda, of the supposed death of her husband Menelaus as he sailed victor from Phrygia, and of the uncanny metamorphosis of her two very dear young brothers, Castor and Pollux, rapt from the playing-grounds to dwell somewhere, somehow as stars or gods in heaven.

The exiled Grecian Teucer (whose introduction by the poet at this point is a purely artificial device as prelude to the appearance of the husband Menelaus) turns to leave her. He states as reason for his lingering on this unfamiliar shore, the desire and necessity of consulting the famous Egyptian prophetess (sister to the young king) on the best route, and oracular advice as to the founding of a little colony on the island Cyprus. Helen warns her country-man to be swift. The king, (brother to the prophetess) is away hunting. He may return at any moment; he has sworn to destroy any chance visitor from the islands or curious Grecian sailor.

IV.

Perhaps in the opening of this study of Helen, I have been carried away too much by my own imagination, been unbalanced,

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intoxicated a little with my own idea, my own game, my toy,
my discovery that the lines of this Greek poet (and all Greek
poets if we have but the clue) are to-day as vivid and as fresh
as they ever were, but vivid and fresh not as literature
(though they are that too) but as portals, as windows, as port-
holes I am tempted to say that look out from our ship, our
world, our restricted lives, on to a sea that moves and changes
and bears us up, and is friendly and vicious in turn. These
words are to me portals, gates. I know that we need scholars
to decipher and interpret the Greek, but we also need poets and
mystics and children to re-discover this Hellenic world, to see
through the words; the word being but the outline, the archi-
tectural structure of that door or window, through which we are
all free, scholar and unlettered alike, to pass. We emerge
from our restricted minds (with all due reverence to them, of
course) into a free, large, clear, vibrant, limitless realm;
sky and sea, and distant islands, and a shore-line such as this
in Egypt and another along the coast of Asia Minor or further
toward the Bosphorus, and again Greece, Hellas, the thousand
intimate little bays, the foaming straits.

The sea is beating on our prow, the wind is hissing shrill,
querulous, petulant, whining song-notes, the islands are just
visible to the west and to the east the sun from under the flat
rim of the world, is tinting the pearls that are scattered

10.

(like little stones on a white beach) from the ledge of the soft, feathery grey clouds.

But we must come back to Helen. We left her standing alone after her talk with Teucer, the Greek soldier. Helen is now articulate, definite, a Greek woman rather than a phantom haunting the shores of Egypt.

She is no more a dream, wandering in a dream-country, she is a woman, an intellect, a Greek. And her cry goes out, not to the far-distant Olympians, but to the intermediate spirits that might so easily be lurking near in some cavern or island promontory.

While Helen has been chanting her woe, a circle of maidens has been silently from the temple-porch and formed the beautiful hieratic semi-circle that custom (a survival of some old religious ceremony) still prescribed to sophisticated fifth-century Athens.

In the old days, a group of girls stood

wild, half-savage beneath great trees that lifted in the dusk points of resinous needles and filled the woods with fragrance.

intense, powerful, like the virgin mind intoxicating

They chanted frenzied paeon to the goddess of ecstacy, heiratic religious drama.

So when she left the stony hills and was set by the poet in some market-place or before some temple, the chorus, the medium of his expression (because of some old implanted law or superstition) still formed this holy ring, this semi-circle that symbolized the goddess, their

11.

identity with the goddess, the thin crescent above the trees.

And still they sang, half-sang, half chanted.

To us to-day the fragments of musical notation, discovered
in the sand, the papyrus with the music of one of his choruses
is perhaps a little disappointing. The thin meagre little
melody, such as we expect to find in some child's five-finger
exercise book, is more or less proved to us that there is one
art which is distinctly the outgrowth of modern Europe.
But again we are baffled. For we know the more intelligent
Greeks had gifts of which we are only vaguely conscious, gifts
of intellectual vision. The poet saw pictures from this beau-
tiful eternal Homeric world. He also heard no doubt voices and
songs. But there were times when he dreamed he could transmute
those sounds, those pictures. Those were the times when he
became most child-like in his technique. I do not mean to
say he could have written the suave and lovely themes of a
Chopin, but he dared to imagine that he could translate his
world into this world, and sometimes he succeeded.

But he succeeded (when he became most impassioned) by ceasing to become personal. He was content to use the old symbols, the old ideas. In fact, the words of the chorus were hardly intelligible to the audience, the rhythms, the metres were most important. So here when these girls answer Helen, they might be saying anything. Yet the poet himself has not written "just anything" for them. The phrases are definite

12.

and clear, the workmanship is exquisite.

The voices that answer Helen in this beautiful dirge are
not wraiths from the tomb or unfamiliar messengers from the waste
regions of the desert, they are Greek voices. They speak of a
Greek world in definite phrase, in some of the loveliest lines
of the poet. The soul of Euripides the young painter, has filled
in these phrases almost with an over-laden brush.

We are to imagine these girls taken captive (in some pirate
skirmish) by an Egyptian trible. How or where we are not told
nor does it matter. They answer Helen as she would have her
Syrens do, woe for woe.

V.

It is true as critics assert, this play, one of the poet's
worst, is full of artificialities, is cold in tone, is meaningless.
It is this, but through all the tedious dialogue, through the
crude mechanism of discovery and recognition, through the trite
and appallingly dull repetitions, Helen the Helen of the world
of poetic reality remains the same, remote, electric, white,
smiling, goddess, bird. The story is silly, wilful almost,
as if the poet mocked himself. But what does it matter? Helen
is there - she is standing on the shore. The white waves
creep up and creep back eternally, over and over.

The play is no doubt trivial. Alseager, the husband, who
seems at best always a stage-property, appears, another ship-

13.

wrecked traveller. That is ridiculous if you will, but his
statement that he has left Helen in a neighbouring cave is
too banal. Helen, our Helen appears, and there is due recogni-
tion and repetition of the old dull facts we have already heard
fifty times. It no longer causes us to shiver when we hear
that Leda, that mistress of a swan has hanged herself, that
those charming brothers have disappeared in the vast heavens,
that the young daughter has no hope of ever getting a respecta-
ble husband. Clap-trap, dull, tinsel, ball-room Hellenes
they appear to us now.

Certainly this play is bad. Meleager having accepted the
Helen before him is in a comic quandary (quite unoriental) —
has he perhaps two wives? His puritanic qualms are quieted
by the arrival of a messenger. The queen, that curse of ar-
mies, has suddenly disappeared from her cave and has been seen
floating to heaven. Our minds instantly recall the pre-war
cinema Beatrice we saw so many years ago, also floating (with wings
and a classic night-dress) toward heaven.

So it proceeds. Helen informs her husband of her plight.
The young Egyptian king desires her love. The stage-husband
brandishes his paste-board sword in the true comic-heroic
manner. His honour? O, that is safe says the wife. "I
have slept since his unsolicited advances here in the straw
before the tomb." This is Egypt indeed, bats and mummies' and

14. General smell of putrefaction of bats not of king for the
king seems now a museum relic and is carefully preserved.

To cut a long story short, Theonoe, the prophetess, the
king's sister appears, is enlisted in their cause and promises
to help them. Helen is to announce the fact of her husband's
drowning, and to ask the young king's consent to his burial.
Ceremonial offerings are to be thrown to his spirit from a boat
far out from shore.

VI.

"If you but had a mind! ah, how sweet, how sweet you were."
Helen explains as, once more alone, she cries out in her prayer
to the child of Dione, "ah, if you had a mind." She leaves
us then and we forget the external trivialities of the play as
the chorus forms its semi-circle once more, across the sand.

Greek girls (and in white robes, I think) call out, not to
the sea, the foam, the unbridled elements or to Dione's child
frantic and uncontrolled, nor do they invoke the dead and
the daemons of the desert. But in the very heart of this
spirit-world, sea and sand and rocks, elemental detachment, ab-
stract, aloof, comforting, destructive, they turn back to the
gentle, familiar, personal region. It is to a bird, they call;
a bird, but not a swooping, swerving gull, or a wide-winged
swan such as went to make Helen's body, but to a small familiar

15.

loving spirit, one whose voice calls them home, back to the
woods, veiling the elements and fire and strength of the earth,
the kind woods, tender as a lover's arms after the fire
and the elemental power of love is scattered.

There is hope of home now, and they dare think of the
woods. And they dare think of other birds now, the beauty of
the cormorants and the herring-gulls is forgotten, is so soon
forgotten when the note of that other, the southern nightingale, is remembered, small, tender, shrill and fine yet as
clear, as enduring as the swoop and thunder and great calls of
that nobler sea-faring race of gulls.

Helen is sister to the gull, but let these others, these
girls, remember how as children they crept, close hidden under
the budding myrtles where the ground beyond spread white with
the first purple streaked friezes, to hear his voice, to capture in their child hearts his song. Helen is child and
sister and mother to the great sea-roaming albatross, but
they would crouch upon the moss, their knees stained with the
green-gold of the moss fronds as once when they bought his
brood-nest or waited at sunset for his cry.

VII.

Now the king of Egypt, Theoclymenus, appears. He sees
signs of disorder about the porch of the temple-tomb. His

16.

first thought is of Helen. He concludes that she is gone. He
calls to his attendants, those tall men, to drop the nets, the
bundles of staves, sharpened from young river-oaks or the
toughened reeds. He commands his chariots and like another
Hippolytus, he would break the white shingles and the blinding
spaces of the unbroken sand with his chariot wheels. But no,
she is there, she stands on the temple-steps and like another
Hippolytus, he drops at her feet the spoils of his desert-hunt,
the great desert-lion and the small, frail gazelles, whose feet
stretch stiff, bound with the knot of grass.

Her black garments bring out the unearthly glamour of her
face. She shines like the goddess Artemis in the night-forest,
and like the goddess, her head lifts strong and boy-like from
her throat, now that she has shorn her hair in mourning as she
tells him, for her king, her husband, the news of whose death
this man, crouching in his stained sailor's jacket there in the
dark corner, has brought to her.

As subtle as he this Grecian woman, and her lies are as in-
genious. She, as is the custom of her people, would sail out
from the shore and with prayers and burnt offering would empty
baskets of fruit, quinoes and wild citron and the apples of the
river-gardens into the sea. So the gods of the sea, the gods
of her drowned husband and of her people should be satisfied.
And Helen of Sparta, adds, as she sees him hesitate, so her
heart would be purified and her spirit freed for another love,

17.

a new king.

This love of ceremony interests him, appeals to him as
fitting for the mate of an Egyptian prince, and he grants her
request. While the chorus, as if the sight of the group
of huntsmen and the slaughtered beasts had inflamed them with
a Dionysic frenzy, call out, when left alone before the temple,
in a song which critics assert to be a most inappropriate fragment from some other lost play, but in face of the huntsmen and the slaughtered beasts, it seems not an unsuitable prayer to those savage gods, their own native daemons of the Lacedonian mountains.

VIII.

They have gone now, the single file of slender boys and
the meagre flute-girls wailing their half-familiar Graeco-
Egyptian dirges across the sand. Menealous has come, with his
head lifting familiar in the sun, gold brown, honey brown,
(what word has ever been discovered in any European language that
can convey that rich gold the Greek named flavus?) Menealous has
passed in his old splendour, his arms snatched up, in rich
robe, fit reward to the messenger from a wrecked Greek by a
future queen of Egypt. The long slow procession, the tall
women with baskets, and the men bearing fuel for the sacri-
ficial fires has passed before us on their way to the Trireme

18.

awaiting the devoted widow. And she the last figure in this
long procession, black and tall, and swathed in the rich Egyptian
garments, strong like a young trunk of ebony, pauses and lifts
her hands in salutation to the temple of the old Proteus.
Perhaps there is regret in her heart at that moment as she re-
members her heart's freedom and the beautiful waste spaces
of the desert she is leaving.

They have all gone. There is the wind and the sea as
usual, and the sand so soon brushed clean as if no foot had
touched it. There is the tomb of Proteus and the blinding sun.
And there is the circle of Greeks again, impersonal, praying for
the safety of the ship, lying ready to depart.

THE OPENING SCENES OF ION.

1.

This play of Euripides opens as is customary, with a long
prologue. The prologue (apart from the beauty of the language)
is in itself a rather tedious affair. As most people who read
Greek a little, start, as is natural, at the beginning of a play,
they are as naturally bored, and usually do not finish the pro-
logue and conclude forever after if they are honest, that a
Greek play is a bore. Or if they continue and finish, they
are depressed throughout the drama, by the memory of the strug-
gle and the weight of that ponderous beginning. The beginning
is meant to be ponderous, it is more or less purposely boring.

The chief characters are named, the plot as in a grand-
opera programme, briefly outlined.

The Athenian playgoer knew then from the start who would
enter, what was about to take place. He came from his house,
his regiment, from civio, social or political duties. "Of
"Nothing, too much." The Athenian citizen was not to be jerked
suddenly from one world to another. Life was to merge with
art. But it was to merge, to be bridged gradually.

The long prologue was this bridge.

Though Attic tragedy was above all religious in purport,
then (as in our own picture-theatres or grand-opera auditoriums)
there must have been whisperings and shuffling and a general
atmosphere of unrest at the beginning of a play.

2.

Although we may visualize the actor, the speaker of the prologue, as having already entered, introducing himself as Hermes, the messenger, son of Maia and of the "greatest daemon, Zeus," the young aristocrat, Caierophon is in no way showing disrespect to the father of gods and men and to Hermes his off-spring, in turning to salute his friend, the soldier Paralus three tiers above him, or in leaning to whisper informally to the companion at his side. "We are at Delphi, I presume."

Unquestionably the row of Doric pillars, set on a raised dais approached by four or five steps, before which the speaker of the prologue is standing, represents the famous temple of Phoebos.

Caierophon scarcely listens to the words. His mind still concerned with some problem of city-revenue, catches a phrase, a name here and there, as one of us, tired and a little bored might still untangle an already familiar motif or leit-motif from an obscure Tristram or Siegfried overture, and at the same time, recall matters of the day, a gown tried on or a tea-party or its masculine equivalent, so and so at the club or I must find a new tailor. We, as Caierophon, must bridge life,art gradually.

Then as Caierophon's ears become accustomed to this melodious rhythm, he bends once more to a whisper, "our Euripides has condescended to the rabble, this fairy-tale is hardly suitable to so great an audience; it veils no doubt, some jibe at our distinguished contemporaries."

3.

So far we may enter into the sophisticated mind of this
most sophisticated and polished gathering the world has ever
known. Then like children, we must follow simply the simple
story outlined by the god Hermes, lord of the caduceus and of
the sandals, "gold, rare, imperishable".

For the god is telling us that Helios, his brother,
loved, as was customary among the Olympians, a maiden. This
girl was Kreusa, descendant of Erechtheus, the mythical found-
er of Athens. She bore a child and in fear of her father,
exposed it on the rocks. The god Helios, not quite ignoble,
sends his brother Hermes to bring the baby, the basket he lies
in, his clothes and little wrappings to the temple at Delphi.
There the child lives as young priest, with certain duties.
Kreusa, his mother, marries Xuthos, a neighbouring prince.
They have no child. The queen and her husband make a pil-
grimage to Delphi (a customary pilgrim journey not unlike that
undertaken in later times on various pretexts to Rome) to en-
quire of the God of prophecy as to their future. Kreusa is
desperate, the old god-like race of Erechthonius ends with
her death.

The voice of the actor rings clear now, whisperings have
died away. The god, he explains, will give this very child
to Xuthos, persuade him that it is his own; the boy shall
enter his mother's palace, obtain his inheritance, yet keep
secret the mystery of his birth.

4.

We know in brief the story of the play, its beginning
and its end.

Toward the back of the stage, half-hidden by the pillars,
a young actor appears.

The speaker of the prologue turns: "but I see Helios' son
approaches to sweep the porch with his laurel-branch." He
steps toward the right. "I - and I first - call him by his
own name - Ion."

II.

The boy comes slowly down the steps. He wears a tunic,
simply folded, embroidered with heavy work of gold thread.
Perhaps as young priest, he wore the tall boots, attribute of
Helios, slayer of death and gloom in the Monster Python. From
the words of the prologue just spoken we know that he carries
a branch or small bundle of laurel-twigs.

At this moment if the Greek drama were grand-opera, the
heavy, more or less ponderous and complex overture, the blending
and pompous notes of many instruments, would evolve itself
into one theme. If we were trained musicians we would have
been aware of the alteration of mood about two-thirds through
the speech of Hermes. But as the god disappears, the notes
become light, easy to follow. The main instruments are
strings, notably the harp or phorminx, adopted by the God,

5.

accompaniment to inspired speech and prophetic utterance.

The boy comes slowly forward and pauses. The two lines of young priests who have entered from opposite sides, join in a single half-circle at the back of the stage below the temple pillars.

Ion lifts his laurel branch.

"Armata men tade lampra tethrippon."

Hail chariot and chariot-driver, God about to step toward us over the untrodden peaks, to step down the mountain-passes toward us, your lovers, your children.

His words, the sound, the subtly accented rhythm, above all the swift bright flow, the movement of the whole, acts upon us, bears the same relation to our nerves, our nervous organism, as music, but is as far above ordinary music, we might be tempted to say, as music is above common speech.

There is no adequate translation for the Greek words and there never will be.

The mere skeleton intensity runs something like this:‡

Helios' chariot
four-abreast,
fagot-torch,
sets fire to earth;
out of the ether,
stars flee from this star
into the holy night;
Parnassus'
unconquered heights
catch light while the sun-disc
swims into mortal sight
with myrrh
above the roof,
smoke/

6.

from dried incense-branch,
while on the Delphic seat
the high priestess waits
to chant the God's will
unto the Greeks.

We see with the eyes of the young actor, not the row of
priests and officials, not the circle above them; writer,
statesman, sculptor, Caierophon and Apollodorus, the whole
body of aristrocratic Athens, the well-born, the spiritually
well-endowed, nor yet the mass of bourgeois, the Gastrons and
Drekons, crowding tier on tier above them. But with the eyes
of a young priest and with the eyes of a poet we see Parnassus,
the mountain that has stood for just a second before actual
dawn, black against the silver-grey of the false-dawn, in just
that second become two peaks, jagged, in exquisite outline,
until every detail becomes suddenly visible, and through the
twin-peaks there pours a fire, pours and swirls upward, and
the whole sky above is mad with the riot, and the runnels and
channels and dried ditches of the rocky mountain are filled
with gold.

The music of the lines, as an accompaniment of strings
following a song may continue with light variation after the
actual song is finished, lingers, for a few beats, after the
boy has finished speaking.

Ion turns. Almost with a sharp voice, almost with the tones
of a chasseur urging forward the hounds, or that of the goal-

7.

keeper at the moment when the charioteers drop their tense
posture of expectancy and the taut reins fall loose on the
flanks of great steeds, almost his voice takes such a clear
deep resonance as he turns to the white row of youthful priests
attending him.

Go,
go Delphic priests,
cleanse and purify your spirits
in Kastalia's silver pool-depth;
wholly purified, come back,
speak as he would have you speak,
word for word the mystic writ,
soothsayers and holy prophets,
unto those who seek
his help.

The boy pauses again, the priests have gone, the pattern,
the frieze one might almost say against which he has been stand-
ing, is changed to another. The precise posture of the row
of attending youths (even although we have been but half-
conscious of their presence) has had the same effect upon our
nerves, as a plaque in low relief against which some fine
statue of a duodemonos or young athlete might stand. But we
become conscious of the fine vigour of this basso-relievo only
when the boy turns, only when he himself notices it, perhaps
most when the stage is emptied of it, leaving the single fi-
gure slight, intense and frail against the great, ribbed pillar
of the temple-portico.

He continues in a lower voice, as if explaining half to
himself, his position, his relative worth and his insignificance

8.

in face of the emblems of worship surrounding him.

This is my work:
even as a slight youth,
with chaplet of flowers
and laurel in new leaf,
I made fragrant the steps
and the threshold of Helios:
I sprinkled the pavement,
showering water-drops;
and with my swift darts
frightened the bird-flocks,
that would perch on the temple-gifts.
I put them to sudden flight:
fatherless, motherless,
alone in the temple-gates,
I praise Helios,
my source of life.

Then as if the god himself had touched him, as he rings
from his own phorminx his own most lovely music, the boy is caught
torn from his quiet worship. He has become enraptured, one with
the God, merged into him, fire of song, spark of a greater fire.
He is Hyacinth whom the god loved. We close our eyes to shut
out sound and the vision of our fellow-beings dark beside us,
inert and stagnant, in their circle of stone-benches. But most
of all to escape this vision, the boy caught, struggling, a
white bird in a great wind, a flower, exposed to the sun.

Come, laurel,
beloved, most sweet,
(Oh shoot, leaf and new-leaf
and flower, beautiful to sweep
beneath altar, across pavement)
from flower-slopes
where gods walk;
where crystal streams;
swift water-paths
feed the roots
of holy myrtle-plants,

10.

Ion lifts the jar, holds it in the curve of one arm.
With stiff, precise movements (perfect in rhythm with the
turn of the head) he scatters spray on spray of water into
the open porch of the temple and across the steps below him.

Now I must finish this,
drop my laurel-branch,
take the pitcher,
this golden flask of water,
fresh as when the earth
sprayed it from Kastalias rocks;
I, a spirit, unharassed,
scattering the sacred drops,
pray: Helios, may I never cease
this service but for gracious death.

What is this note of death? It seems from the bright
exultation of the boy's voice to refer to some knowledge, to
hint of some joy, guessed at or actually experienced in the
mysteries of the inner worship to which he has perhaps gained
admittance, sanctioned as foster-child and favourite of the
priests and of the god.

But we have not time to speculate on this for the boy
starts from his reverie, places his jar once more upon the
step and with a sudden movement reaches for a tall bow standing
against the pillar.

With a shout he bounds down the steps. Is some Python
about to rear a black head from among the bays where Hermes
has lately hid himself, or some barbarian, enemy to beauty,
rush out from the bushes? But no, we gather from the movement

11.

of the fine head and the bending of the slender throat that
it is something in the air above that has startled Ion.

Birds,
you dart from Parnassus,
then back to Parnassus;
you rest on the roof,
the roof-peak, the gold cornice;
ah legate of Zeus,
tyrant of small flocks:
this match for my claw and beak
my arrow threatens -
swift, be off!

O swan,
O slow-drifting next,
O bird of the scarlet feet,
is no other place fair enough,
but this, but his holiest,
no marsh-land,
no field of Delos?

Ah swift,
for the song-note,
tuned to the god's bright phorminx,
cannot heal, O bird,
a blood-stained throat.

With fluttering,
a new bird this,
and she, actually she rests,
with wisps of straw
beneath the cornice;
my bow repeats the threat,
be off, lest grass and twigs
should litter up
the offerings set about the porch;
my arrow warns you;
rather hatch your brood
along the river Alpheus,
or further yet;
in Isthmian thickets.

12.

Be off - I must do my work,
my duty to the god and priests.

But birds, birds,
how can I hurt
you, messengers,
God's voice on earth.

We seem to hear through the movement and power of the
Greek words, the whirr of swift arrows, the fluttering of
many wings. And we wonder what birds these are that the boy
sees in his imagination; this "new bird" that he speaks of,
was it some rare crane or ibis flying from Egypt across the
desert and the Corinthian-gulf, that had once startled the poet.
with blue-black gleam of its velvet throat and its spotted
wings, as he visited Delphi, and as a child perhaps, escaped
from the temple to follow the flare of colour against the
mountain, to watch the flight of some flamingo-like bird, fire
against the pinnacle of fire?

### III.

The boy rests on an upper step beneath one of the great
side-pillars and we lose sight of him momentarily, as a group
of women enter from the opposite side.

These ladies are not inmates of the temple. We judge
from the elaborate blending of gold and silver ornaments, the
fine braiding of hair, the well-chosen and costly garments,
that they are women of some worldly standing. From the first

13.

words of the speaker we learn that they are Athenians.

Not in Athens where the gods walk,
are the porches set about,
pillar by pillar
with more beautiful work,
nor shrines before the highways
take their worship:
but here, too at the seat
of the God-prophet, Latona begot,
light strikes beauty
from twin-wrought temple-fronts.

They are astonished at the beauty of the temple. They
separate, two by two, or one wanders alone to examine closely
the paintings beyond the pillars, set, we are led to believe,
in the inner porch. We cannot see these pictures but from
the informal conversation of these women, we can almost recon-
struct line from line the paintings, perhaps imagined of the
poet (himself a painter in youth) or else graphically described
from sketches seen in the atelier of some friend or from the
finished work intended to stand in the Parthenon (as yet unre-
covered from the attack of the Persians) still in the hands of
architect and sculptor.

Here, see the son of Zeus,
look - my friend - bend close -
threatens with golden knife
the snake of the Lernian marsh.

These stately women become eager, excited - "see - see",
drawing attention to this, to that detail as they recall early
friezes perhaps remembered as children in some small rustic
temple in the environs of Athens, or some detail of a god's

14.

life they stitched as young girls in Athene's temple-porches.

Yes, yes, and near it,
another lifts a bright torch,
who is it - I have wrought
his deeds across my distaff -
ah, he who took the gods hurt
sharing his dire grief,
the spearsman, Iolaus.

Ah this - but see this,
a youth on a winged horse,
is slaying a monstrous beast
three-bodied with fiery breath

We gaze about - see -
across the walls of rock,
the rout of the earth-born giants.

So they pass from picture to picture. And I should be
inclined to believe that the poet had in mind some series,
highly decorative, in low relief - rather than paintings - for
we notice he has not once employed that so marvellous word
kuaneas, the Greek blue, nor any hint of saffron nor purple-
black shadows such as Pindar, for example, uses in his famous
passage, descriptive of the birth of this very Ion. But
there is everywhere gold. We follow the gesture of the
Athenian woman, surprising in each inset, some glitter of gold-
leaf or ornament of dark gold. From the metallic gleam of
Heraules' somitar, our eyes trace the intricate, decorative
twisting of the dragon and with the slash of its tail are led

15.

upward to gold again, the torch held aloft by the young hero,
Iolaus. Perhaps dripping of gold sparks leads our eyes down
again to wonder at the head of the next beast, "fire-breathing";
once more the fire is gold.

We note this -

She shakes an aegis,
dragon-wrought,
threatening Enkeladous.

Ah, Pallas, my goddess'

Fire this and fire-bolt,
in the far-reaching hands of Zeus.

So from the gold or brass, gleaming, we may imagine, from
the barbaric bracelets on the fore-arms of the giants, we are
drawn from a raised fore-arm to the circle of the great shield
which the mighty Titaness brandishes, Athene, the goddess.

The shield-rim is set in gold and there is gold again in
the lightning-spears of Zeus and a gold head-band, we might
imagine, about the head of the peaceful Dionysus. They pause
together before the last picture.

With his fire-shaft he strikes,
shattering the giant, Mimos,
and Bromios, the glad heart,
with ivy-staff (not meant for this)
slays another child of earth.

Then, turning, they find the boy Ion seated on the steps.

16.

V.

He has risen now and stands.

He, as servant of the temple is accustomed to the sight
of strangers, the drift of pilgrims of all classes and all
countries. And he regards the leader of the band as she
steps forward, calmly without special interest.

She asks him if they may enter the temple.

"No," he says and adds, "it is not customary."

"May we not converse then, with you, one of the temple
servants?"

"That, yes - what is it?"

"Is it true that Helios' temple really does rest on the very
heart of the earth?"

He answers "indeed yes" - fragrant with garlands - offerings of scented flowers, laurels and azaleas and great mass and spike of flowers from mountain-bush and tree - and he adds - "dragons watch it".

"Such was the common tale", the Athenian lady answers, anxious now that the boy should realise them as not quite ignorant of the temple and temple-myth.

He sees now that these are no ordinary sight-seers and
he unbends a little, telling them of the custom of sacrificing
before entering the temple, bloodless sacrifice, the archaic
wheatgn, honey and oil-cake, but after, real blood-sacrifice is

17.

required if they intend to visit the inner-shrine.

The woman thanks him, saying they will transgress no
sacred custom, but wait outside and examine further the beau-
tiful detail of the porches.

"Do so, by all means," and the woman answers that their
mistress has always wanted them to see this.

"Of what house are you called servants?"

"Our mistress is of Athens;
the porches of Pallas are her court -
you ask of her - she is present."

VI.

She has entered unnoticed this tall woman, Kreusa, child
of Erechtheus, queen of Athens. And she stands, motionless, a
statue almost wrought of lapis, we might think, so intense a
blue is her robe, falling in straight folds to her feet.

The boy moves toward her, but she does not speak.

The attendant-women scatter silently through the porches
and disappear.

Again the boy moves, wondering at the strange, intense
beauty of this face. And still she does not speak or turn,
her eyes on the temple-porch.

"O noble, of most noble birth" the boy begins, he, the
child and fosterling of the temple, nameless, humble before
this presence, falters, waits and then:

18.

O noble of birth,
beautiful in appearance,
you have that look,
whoever you are, O woman,
that most men, seeing your face
would know
you were sprung of a great people;
but what is this -
it comes as a shock to me,
those half-shut eyes, staining with tears
that proud face,
even after you have looked
at the white altar of Helios.

Oh lady,
with what thought do you approach,
for most, seeing the god's house,
laugh out - only you
weep at the sight.

She turns, the rapt face softens, the statue's face changed
into a woman's as she becomes conscious of this other, its
youth and austere charm. As if speaking aloud her thoughts,
she answers, impelled by some unquestionable power, some
strange rapport between them.

Fair lad,
it is not misplaced
that you wonder seeing me weep,
but as I look upon this, Helios' house,
old memory stabs afresh,
and though standing here,
I am, as it were, alone
in my own place,
and I think:

19.

how wretched, how miserable we women are,
what sport for fate - yet what of this?
how can we expect man's justice,
we who perish by the god's injustice
and their hate.

He, accustomed to tales of sorrow, confidence of pilgrim
and invalid seeking consolation in the famous shrine of the
god of healing, easily enters into her mood and would soften
her bitterness.

He draws near and inquires simply: "why are you hurt, torture
and sad?"

## VII.

As I had intended to outline only the opening chorus of the
Ion, I should have concluded with the last words of the waiting
women before the entrance of the queen. For the whole character
of the play alters after her coming. The boy's faith is shadow-
ed. We are plunged into political discussions, religious
doubts and curious rather crude plot and counter-plot.

But it was hard to turn away. The queen was standing there
a moment ago, in her blue garments. All of his queens are
beautiful and there are others of Euripides' women that are
robed in blue. Thetis especially I see, as she appears in the
last scene of the Andromeda. But her robe is another blue, a
gentian or hyacinth-blue, an unworldly, unearthly colour.
But Kreusa, queen of Athens, wears the blue of stones, lapis-
blue, the blue of the fire on the earth, a blue that seems to

THE BACCHAE.

Dionysius is one of the most fascinating of the Greek gods and he makes his appearance in the *Bacchae* of Euripides, in one of his most fascinating guises. He comes to his own and his own emphatically "receive him not". This is before the walls of Thebes, the home of his mother, where his mother's sisters have spread blasphemy, "our sister Semele was not the mistress of God, but loved a mortal and in order to hide her infamy, spread abroad shallow doctrine". The daughters of his grandfather, the sisters of his mother, these less than mortals shall pay heavily and in no short space, for their defamation of God's mother. He himself, the God, disguised as a mortal, will spread his fire among the citizens and the royal personages of the house of Cadmus, king of Thebes. These will admit in delirium what they denied in sanity. Namely, that God now and again stoops to a mortal and that now and again, God arises and claims his heritage. My woman can attend to this, says the God, Lydians and Phrygians who have trailed after me, intoxicated by my presence, followers in delirium, drunk with divinity. I myself will wander back to the mountains and the Maenads and leave these my particular singing-women to their ritual.

So Dionysius having acted as prologue to his own play,

5.

rousing the wandering wild pack,
enchanting them with glad shouts,
tossing his glorious hair loose;
he chants,
he cries,
O, O forth
golden
as gold-decked Tmolos,
Bacchantes beat deep drum-note,
with Phrygian chant,
sing Evios,
with sacred flute
and sweet notes
incite,
incite our wild dance
from hill
to distant hill-peak.
So hearing him,
Bacchantes
leap out,
and as the wild colt
in meadows
rounds its mare's feet,
they beat
estatic dance-beat.

The ecstacy and religious fervour of the singing Lydian
and Phrygian women lures first the prophet. The old, old
sooth-sayer, blind Tiresias enters, drawn from his altars and
his bird-auguries as an old, old branch toward premature
winter sun-light and miraculous flowering. I am old, he says
to the Oldmos, the king who enters almost simultaneously, but
not too old to feel the miracle of returning joy, of youth,
the sweeter for its late, late-coming. We are old, they
cry to one another, but not too old to greet god, not too
old to recognize divinity. There is a vibration, a stirring
of old bodies, the young course of the electric fervour of

6.

the vinegod spreads vitality, old, old branches may feel the
golden sap course through gnarled and knotted fibre. So
these. We are old, we are old they cry, and we will look
ridiculous decked in ivy, waving the staff of the god, but
let them laugh. God is with us, god is in us, they cry to
one another, we alone in Thebes are ready to acknowledge god.

And their winter-flowering is struck as with blighting hail
or sudden sullen rain as the young prince enters. Pentheas
stands before them and we can feel their old reviving bodies
oringe in anticipation before the ridicule and inevitable
lashing irony.

Well, what's all this about, Pentheas begins in easy
retrospective manner," while I was away, things began to
happen, have been going on happening, are going on from bad
to much, much worse. People have been telling me about it and
I've caught some of them actually at it. Got them, tied them
up too. They'll get what's coming to them. As to the rest,
you wait. There they are, high up on the mountains, think
they'll hide, do they? Gathered together, singing, and
spreading their robes on the ground, god knows what else.
Hidden in clusters, perverse practices and there's this
charlatan, musician sort of thing from Asia. He takes each
one of them and initiates them to his mysteries, he calls
them. Well, this is no state for a respectable town. Thebes

7.

has its tradition. What anyhow do you mean, you two old
fools, do you really imagine, Tiresias that you'll get more
by turning your old bird-altar into this new wine-cult? Stick
to your first job. Nobody is going to pay you anything for
telling them fortunes à la Lydia. Don't imagine for one
moment this thing (now I'm back) will go on much longer. I'm
positively ashamed of you, my own grandfather, decked out like
a madman. Ivy-wreaths, imperial staffs, the thyrsus. For
your own sakes, have some respect for the city if you haven't
a grain of any personal self-respect between you.

They had been waiting for just this, poor old priest and
priest-king. Tiresias and Oadmos, mythical creatures, still
near enough the old course of worship, demi-gods almost, are
harangued by the materialist and the provincial autocrat, the
upholder of respectability and retrogressive policy. But the
chorus sways forward;

alas ingrate,
who would neglect,
who would deflect
God?

and old Tiresias, encouraged by their support, steps forward.

O you do not know what you say, he proclaims, you with
your brilliant speech and facile diction, there is intelligence
beyond dogma that dares not deny divinity. Look, there are
two gods, no matter what you may call them, on whom all life

8.

depends. You cannot live without bread, you cannot live without wine. Bread feeds, nourishes, Ceres is great, perhaps greatest. But wine not only nourishes but it leads to forgetfulness of ugliness and evil; it strengthens the poet's facility, the prophet even is lightened and uplifted under the holy influence of the vine-god. God himself, God, I tell you has condescended to Thebes, for it was a Theban princess who gave him life, Semele, bride of Zeus. Do not blaspheme. Some women are mad with the outward frenzy but not all. The innately intellectual and sanctified are not corrupted, O no, no, you understand nothing. There is a divine mystery about which there can be no possible argument. Cadmos and I must dance, for god's command and god's ecstasy is mightier than a man's presumption. And as the choros cried, Helios himself is gladdened by your words, Bromios is honoured and you are wise with great wisdom, the other, the old king, too gains courage, even in the midst of ridicule, to defy his grandson.

But Pentheas maddened with the afflatus of respectability, still defies them. Get out. Don't touch me, he cries to the old grandfather, I'll get even with this old man who put you up to all this nonsense. Knock down old Tiresias' altars, he commands the attendants, scatter all his hocus-pocus, his wreaths and leaves and herbs and stones. That desecration of his so-called magic will unsettle the two of them more than