Lowell's Aeschylus

...In Euripedes' three plays, he appears.as a perverted killer...

...To this, the new "fair-minded ones" reply with ancient wisdom, "Singing for some, for others a life of tears...

...Electra and her brother are ciphers beside the ravaged grandeur of Clytemnestra, as she bares her breasts to her children in an effort to avert the cycle of bloody killings...

...In History (1973), he included five poems identifying his own family with the House of Atreus...

...The Libation Bearers compares unfavorably to Agamemnon, too...

...On one side, the ancient chthonic goddesses, representing "the mind of the past," insist on their right to extract "new suffering for old wrong...

...Lowell drops the reference to a strange god, and blames Agamemnon directly for taking "our lovely children" and changing them "to dust in the urns...

...Writers &Writing LOWELL'S AESCHYLUS BY PHOEBE PETTINGEL he poet of today cannot write in such a mood of exultation as seemed to have possessed Athenians of the time of Aeschylus," noted Maud Bodkin in The Quest for Salvation...

...No modern rendition can hope to recapture the full dramatic impact of the last scene: the goddess of the city gesturing from her place on the great stage of the theater of Dionysius toward the rock of the Acropolis to remind the Athenian audience of its heritage And it took the late Robert Lowell about 10 years to devise a version he found satisfactory...

...The Furies will have more power as venerable spirits inspiring a fear of crimes against the law, than they did as anarchic demons of blind retribution...

...How many rot far off in the Asia they hated and conquered...

...One need only compare the opening lines of any familiar translation with Lowell's to see what has been gained—it is, indeed, as if Marlowe or Milton were wresting English from dim paraphrases of the Greek...

...Sophocles saw Orestes as the honorable son of a military hero...

...Thus are the old daughters of night, chaos and irrational vengeance, transformed into guardians of civilization...

...He himself appeared as Orestes, torn between conflicting loyalties to military father and unsatisfied mother...

...Athena can solve this tangle only by establishing trial-by-jury, which compensates everybody...

...I've watched the stars...

...However, the authority of the language beats other versions hollow...

...As Clytemnestra attempts to lure Agamemnon into walking on the crimson carpets that will insure his downfall, she insists that Priam would have done so...

...Lowell, though, has vividly delineated this uncomfortable squabbling between divine forces...

...For the glory of the drama is, in fact, its choruses: They initiate the action and remind Orestes that, despite his personal ruin, he is still "the savior...

...That being the case, and with a contemporary audience in view, he has tried to "trim, cut, and be direct enough to satisfy my own mind...

...Robert Lowell's imagination was more impersonal...

...Athena's greatest eulogy is for the marriage of primitive impulses to intellectual beauty: "Only these spirits hard to soften/can be trusted to manage man's life./Ancient crimes shall drag the criminal before the furies—his voice is still loud, but the verdict silent...

...It is a pity that this important concept is lost in Lowell's version, as it is that he chose to omit the lovely closing chorus: "Where shall the fury of fate/be stilled to sleep, be done with...

...On the other, the "cruel young" Olympians stand for civilized punishment, but remain vulnerable to the Furies' charge that "the justice of the gods is ambition...

...The Oresteia is, among many other things, a complex consideration of the moral deterioration a nation suffers while its leaders are engaged in a foreign war...

...Athens will become the model of the just state throughout all time...

...edited by his long-time friend, Frank Bidart, it has now been published as The Oresteria of Aeschylus (Farrar Straus Gi-roux, 129 pp., $8.95...

...The Greek play she was referring to, of course, is Aeschylus' The Eumenides—the third of The Oresteia trilogy—in which Athena persuades the Furies who have haunted Orestes to become instead the "fair-minded ones," patrons of fertility and abundance...

...Nevertheless, such expressions as "respite," "watchtime," "dogwise," "burdened with winter" manage to sound hackneyed and peculiar at the same time...

...In the meeting of their minds, we, as modern readers, must once again confront the tragedy of a people driven by forces they cannot control, but we are also illuminated by the young goddess who can sweet-talk elemental powers into gracing her city...

...The last sentence is very freely rendered, and it could be argued that Lowell has clarified an idea that was never there...

...It is his greatest mistake...

...Eliot, Robinson Jeffers and Eugene O'Neill) have tried to modernize The Oresteria by emphasizing the quest for personal redemption...

...Orestes must be forgiven so that he can bring peace to Argos for the first time since the Trojan War began...

...Their poet could shape his drama to reveal to his fellow citizens and celebrate with them the greatness of their city's achievement...

...The advance of the human spirit accomplished by Athens leads our thought forward today to the greater advance—conceived by us but still far from achievement—of some tribunal, or center of government, that should replace violence by equity...

...Here is Lowell: / Vt> lain a year, crouching like u dog on one elbow, and begged the gods to end my watch...

...Ordered by Apollo to avenge his father, he is driven insane by matriarchal Furies when he does so...

...In the last year of his life, he finally completed his poetic redaction of the trilogy...

...Many writers (including T.S...

...Behind the title lies the irony that only a repetition of the crime, with the murderer herself as victim, and her children as murderers, can satisfy the gods, though this will merely continue the cycle of vengeance...

...the bringers of winter and bringers of summer...

...The parallel to Vietnam comes so irresistibly to mind that the instinctive reaction is to attribute it to Lowell...

...Like Bodkin, Lowell felt that any modern version of The Oresteia, "even a very great one such as Marlowe or Milton might have written," would inevitably diminish the original...

...In most translations, it is easy to bog down under Aeschylus' legal arguments...

...Interestingly, heretitles The Libation Bearers, Orestes, and omits many of the choral passages to increase the importance of the ill-fated son...

...Yet Aeschylus does repeatedly emphasize that Ilium is Asia, and that its barbaric Eastern manners contrast sharply with Aegean austerity...

...as Athena promises, "If you stand by law, you shall have a bulwark no land can match...

...Here is the watchman's opening speech from the thorough Richard Lattimore text: / ask the gods some respite from the weariness of this walchtime measured by years I lie awake elbowed upon the Atreidae's roof dogwise to mark the grand processionals of the stars of night burdened with winter and again with heat for men, dynasties in their shining blazoned on the air, these stars, upon their wane and when the rest arise...

...Lattimore...

...Confronting Aeschylus, he recognized a kindred spirit for whom the dichotomy between man and society had not yet become corrosive...

...This remains close to the sense of the Greek...

...Each new ship brought us a cargo of urns...

...The result is a three-act play, rather than three separate works, with many references eliminated and choruses shortened, but with the cumulative effect heightened for present tastes...

...Lowell is able to quietly dispose of many references that make Agamemnon a period piece for the casual reader...

...Nor is it written in the turgid, lifeless prose 19th-century scholars adopted for classical works...

...a he Libation Bearers," the title of the second play, refers to those offerings Electra and her companions bring from Clytemnestra to placate Agamemnon's spirit...

...The stars burn with power, and rule their empty spaces like kings...

...For Aeschylus, though, Orestes is crippled by circumstance, helpless against the demands of different gods...

...The Argive ruler snaps, impatiently, "I won't be softened...

...We wept and said: "They were good at dying, but they died for another man's wife...

...When the citizens of Argos lament the loss of their sons in the Trojan War, they mutter against Agamemnon's obsession with avenging the theft of Helen, but the brunt of their anger is expressed against the god, Ares, for "packing smooth the urns/with ashes that once were men" (Latti-more...

...Lowell fully redeems himself with The Eumenides...

...But at this dark hour of the world's fortunes, if a poet of ours fashions a myth of achieved deliverance, it is individual and spiritual triumph only his symbol can reflect...

...I know their comings and goings...

...1 am the King of a small Greek city, not an Asiatic despot" (Lowell), though his own military impatience with trifles soon spoils his resolution...

...Nonetheless, it is the second play that appears to have spoken most deeply to Lowell...

...Considered as a Freudian "family drama," The Libation Bearers compares unfavorably with later versions of the story that can better sustain the illusion of psychological motivation...