AESCHYLUS AGAMEMNON EDITED BY THE LATE JOHN DEWAR DENNISTON LITT.D., F.B.A. AN~ DENYSPAGE M.A., F.B.A. REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK, AND FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE CLARENDON PRESS· OXFORD This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard specification in order to ensure its continuing availability OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover And you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 978-0-19-872130-7 Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Eastbourne PREFACE AMONGth e papers left by the late John Denniston was the draft of a commentary on Aeschylus' Agamemnon, written in his own hand and dated at the end 'August 1947'. It was known at that time that Professor Fraenkel's major edition of the play would be published before very long; and Den niston's intention was to wait, and to take Professor Fraenkel's work fully into consideration before making a final version of his own commentary. This was the position at the time of his death in May 1949. In the autumn of that year Mrs. Denniston suggested to me that I should prepare the edition for publication ; and I need say no more about my reasons for agreeing to do so than that Denniston had left me in no doubt that this would be his wish if he should leave the work undone. There is a special reason why I should have found it a difficult and lengthy task. Professor Fraenkel's edition of the play was published in the summer of 1950-;a nd it was at once obvious that there could be no question of merely making additions and subtractions in Denniston's draft. I do not intend to go into much detail about this. Professor Fraenkel's commentary is very long and very learned: the differences between him and Denniston were very numeroUJ; and there was an immense amount of information and argu ment to be considered and judged. I had to decide what Denniston himself would have done: and I have never seriously doubted what. that would have been. He would have reconsidered everything afresh, from the first line to the last, in the light of the enormously extensive reaearches . embodied in Professor Fraenkel's book; and he woul,d have rewritten his own draft accordingly, of course with fullest acknowledgement of his obligations and candid expression of his disagreements. My duty, which has taken five years to discharge, was to lv PREFACE undertake that reconsideration and rewriting. It follows that I am responsible for a considerable measure of the form and substance of the completed work. I do not see how it could have been otherwise; and I should find it very dis tasteful, even if it were possible, to enter upon any more detailed definition of what is Denniston's, what is mine, and what is a blend of the two. I would add this only: it has been a source of constant anxiety to me, that I should have taken upon myself the responsibility of using Denniston's work in this way. Few scholars in our time have been so much at home a.-.D enniston in Greek literature and the Greek lan guage; his reputation does not at all depend on anything I may do or leave undone, but I shall never be quite rid of the feeling that I have given myself too free a hand, and that I may not have completed his work in a way that would have met with his approval. It was inevitable from the start that the present edition should quite often assail positions held or supported by Professor Fraenkel. I have the strongest personal reasons for regretting this : but a glance at any ten pages of his commentary will show that Professor Fraenkel will be the first to agree that it is not possible to edit this play without taking up arms from time to time against eminent prede cessors. There is nothing surprising if 812 pages of com mentary provide material for a few dozen instances of strongest disagreement; and I have no doubt, si pan,a lied componerem agnis, that the next editor will react in the same way to the present book. 8pd.ua.VT1,r a.8Ei", .,./Hy1P'»p" ,OIJos .,.~ ~"': and little by little our understanding of the play improves. I am particularly sorry that the severe limitations of space deliberately imposed on this edition preclude the fuller discussioo which such differences of judgement usually deserve, and enforce a disagreeably dogmatic-looking brev ity ; but I reflect that nobody can fail to notice how lightly the disagreements weigh in the scales against the debts. Since both editors had c,overed, over a long period of time, a great deal of the same ground, it follows that in a number PREFACE V of places they had drawn similar conclusions or made similar observations or quoted the same evidence. In such cases, wherever an acknowledgement of priority was due to Pro fessor Fraenkel, I have taken much care to make that acknowledgement, as I am sure ~iston would have done; and quite frequently, w~ere the discussion appeared to ex tend beyond the immediate needs of this edition, I have simply referred the reader to the fuller commentary. Denniston's work was primarily designed for use by stu dents at Universities; though he hoped (and so of course do I) that it might also meet the requirements of the higher forms in schools. One of the most serious problems which confronted him--a problem still more serious for me, who had Professor Fraenkel's immense commentary to take into account-was the need for compression. It is a task of the utmost difficulty to limit a commentary of this kind on this play to these dimensions without defeating its purpose: let those who have tried, even for fifty lines, be judges in this matter. I ruefully reflect, on notes in this edition, extending to half-a-dozen lines of print, which represent the mere summary and conclusion of elaborate essays extending to half as many thousand words. Among many economies I mention one in particular: although Denniston systematic ally explored all previous editions and all periodicals an~ the like, he did not as a rule include in his notes references to works generally inaccessible to his potential readers, or written in languages with which they were likely to be unfamiliar. 1 This fact, that so many of the references to modem researches are to works written in English, gives a false impression not only .of the amo~nt of work which we have done, but also of the obligation which any editor of this play must owe to Continental scholarship. I have ad hered to Denniston's policy in this respect, especially since 1 He did, however, refer the reader very frequently to the great German work on Greek Grammar, Kahner-Blau and Kalmer-Gerth (abbreviated throughout to K.-B. and K.-G.); and in this I have fol- lowedh im. . PREFACE vi the deficiency is so amply supplied by Professor Fraenkel's commentary. Denniston left no text or introduction of his own : these I have therefore supplied. The introduction is not of a con ventional type: it sketches, without elaboration, a portrait of Aeschylus different from that which is apparently popular in this country nowadays; though Walther Kranz and Her bert Weir Smyth would have recognized it quickly enough. There is surely need for a fresh examination of this poet's aims and achievements, and I have long wondered whether I ought to make this short and summary introduction more elaborate and erudite: in refraining from doing so I am guided by the opinion of students in more than one Uni versity who have already heard it read. I have to acknowledge a particular obligation to Professor J. A. J. Beattie, Mr. P.H. Lloyd-Jones, and Mr. G. S. Kirk. For two years we met weekly for two hours or more during term, and studied the play (and also Professor Fraenkel's commentary) from start to finish. I learnt and unleamt much during those sessions, and I have an uneasy feeling that my friends will recognize property of their own in corporated in this work. I am deeply indebted also to Pro fessor K. J. Dover, who mad the commentary in manuscript and made a considerable number of suggestions, none of which I could afford to ignore and most of which I thank fully adopted. Finally, I have been so fortunate as to ob tain the advice of Professor Paul Maas on many passages in manusaipt; and Mr. Lloyd-Jones has applied great learning and ingenuity to the reading of the first proofs; he has most generously permitted me to incorporate a large number of improvements, most of which could not, at that stage, conveniently be ascribed to their author by name. D. L. P. Tritlily Collqe Ctlffl6ritlte CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Aeschylusa nd Agam,,,.,,on ix xxm The Transmissiono f the Text TEXT AND APPARATUS CRITICUS 1 COMMENTARY ~ THE METRES 224 APPENDIX ON A GA.M. 239f . 239 NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS In general I have /ollouJedt he example of the Liddell-S~oU-Jones Lexicon; but among the abbreTJiationws hich differ from it there is one if which may p,ove ubscu,e not explained, 'E.H.' - 'Euripides' Herakles' INTRODUCTION AESCHYLUS AND AGAMEMNON AESCHYLUwSa s born in a year not far removed from 525 B.c., when Athens was still governed by a Tyrant, an absolute ruler of a type to which many states in Greece owed much of their prosperity and progress in the sixth century ; but already old-fashioned, doomed to early extinction in most of the great cities of Hellas and Asia Minor. When Aeschylus was about ten years old, the long-awaited revolution came. During the next six years he witnessed the greatest social and political upheaval in the history of Athens: the assassination of the tyrant's brother (514 B.c.); the expulsion of the tyrant (510 B.C.); the arrival at Athens of a Spartan king (5o8 B.c.), with sword in one hand and a new constitution for Athens in the oth~; the surrounding of the Spartan and his soldiers on the Acropolis; their sur render and ignominious retreat. And then the social and political reforms of Cleisthenes, the earliest structure of Athenian democracy (but not its foundation ; that had been laid by Solon, and by no means dismantled by Peisistratus) ; whereby not a person in the state of Attica but was required to abandon, at a word, his primary allegiance, sanctified by immemorial time, to the ties of family and clan, and to look in future, for the centre of his loyalties and the source of his rights, to an artificial and complicated network of parishes. Aeschylus grew to manhood in the midst of overthrown traditions; this was the beginning of a brave new world, destined to a brief season on the heights of human achieve ment. And this great change, this liberation of the people, came only just in time. For in 490 B.c., when Aeschylus was about thirty-five years of age, the King of Kings, Darius, sent a great expedition from Persia across the sea to destroy the INTRODUCTION X city of Athens; and then, as later, it was the new-founded spirit and confidence of Athens which saved the day. Aeschylus was one of that devoted band of whom it was long remembered how they charged in full armour down the hill at Marathon ; who, through their own valour and the superior tactical skill of their commander, Miltiades, routed sea. the Persians on the shore and drove them back into the Aeschylus' brother was among the heroes of that great vic tory; his own courage was commemorated in the epitaph on his tomb far away in Sicilian Gela, where he died some thirty-five years later. But soon there was talk of a much greater Persian host assembling; of a bridge thrown over the Hellespont; of a channel dug through the peninsula of Mount Athos; of hJQ million men in arms advancing by land, and twelve hundred ships at sea. In 48o B.C. (in whatever numbers) they were come : the pass of Thermopylae was turned; the Athenians left their city and lay in their fteet off Salamis, waiting for the dawn that meant destruction-if democracy· had not built two hundred ships few years ago, and if its leader ;1, were not the craftiest statesman of his day, Themistocles. Out of ~e Persian wars arose the Athenian Empire, the command of a confederation of Hellenic states; an.d out of her fteet arose the more radical democracy of Aeschylus' later years. The Persian wars proved that the safety of Hellas depended on two things above all: first, the ability of the greatest maritime state to control the rest, so tha~ a large fteet might at any time be assembled and properly commanded; and secondly, on the skill and loyalty of the men who rowed the ships. Now the men who rowed the cmuns, ships for Athens were (for the most part) of a class lower and more numerous than those hitherto admitted to full rights and powers in the state. An enormous number of able-bodied citizens were henceforth to be employed in the making and maintenance of the fteet, working in the har bours, and rowing the shi11so n which the safety of the state depended. A new political force bad .b een created, and