In all these ten years past, behold a crime
So horrible, so barbarous? Whose loss
Must I first weep, with what I have to tell –
Yours, aged mother? Or yours?
HECUBA: Choose as you will –
In all you weep for mine. While each of these
Has her one grief to bear, the grief of all
Lies on my heart. Their deaths are all my deaths;
All weeping women are Hecuba’s sorrowing daughters.
MESSENGER: The girl is slain; the boy thrown from the walls.
Each suffered bravely.
ANDROMACHE: Tell us how they died.
Tell all the circumstances of this act
Of double evil. Sorrow loves to dwell
On every detail of its woe. Tell all –
Leave nothing out.
MESSENGER: All that is left of Troy
Is one great tower, at whose high battlements
Priam was wont to sit, watching his troops
And ordering the conduct of the war.
Here on this tower’s top he would embrace
His little grandson in his gentle arms,
And, when great Hector’s fire and sword sent Greeks
Flying in panic-stricken rout, would draw
The child’s attention to his father’s prowess.
This once so famous tower, the masterpiece
Of our defences, now, a dangerous crag,
Stands out alone. Hither from every side
Crowds had assembled; leaders and lower ranks,
The whole Greek multitude had left their ships
And gathered here. Some were on higher ground
Near by, which overlooked the open space;
Some on a spur of rock, pressed close together
And balanced tiptoe on its edge. Tall trees –
Laurel and pine and beech – provided perches,
Till the whole forest swayed with clinging bodies.
One chose a vantage-point on some high hill,
Another on a charred roof-top, or stood
Poised on the leaning cornice of a ruin.
One heartless onlooker was bold enough
To take his seat on Hector’s monument.1
At length, across the space between the crowds
The Ithacan advanced, with solemn steps,
Leading the old king’s grandson by the hand.
The little boy marched boldly to the tower,
Climbed to its summit, and there stood, his eyes
Glancing this way and that, quite unafraid.
There, in the grip of hostile hands, the boy
Stood, as defiant as a lion’s cub
Which, yet unarmed with formidable teeth,
Small and defenceless though it be, shows fight,
Snapping with rage and ineffectual jaws.
The crowd was touched with pity; even the leaders,
Even Ulysses. Tears were in the eyes
Of all, except the one for whom they wept.
Ulysses called on the avenging gods
To accept the sacrifice, but while he prayed
And spoke again the sentence of the prophet,
The boy himself leapt from the tower’s height
To fall, there in the heart of Priam’s city.
ANDROMACHE: Ah, when was ever such a sin committed
By any Colchian, any wandering Scythian?
What barbarous people of the Caspian sea
Would dare such wickedness? The fierce Busiris
Would not shed children’s blood upon his altars,
Nor Diomede feed his beasts on infants’ flesh.1
Who will take up my dear son’s broken body
And lay it in a tomb?
MESSENGER: From that sheer fall
What body can remain? The bones were smashed
And scattered by the impact; every trace
Of his fair person, every lineament,
The princely likeness of his father, crushed
To nothing by the body’s plunge to ground.
His neck was broken as it struck the rock,
The brains spilled from the shattered skull. He lies
A shapeless corpse.
ANDROMACHE: His father’s likeness still!
MESSENGER: The boy had fallen from the tower, and now
The assembled Greeks, when they had wept their full
For their own sin, turned to the second outrage
And to Achilles’ tomb. Its farther edge
Touches the gentle waters of Rhoeteum;
Encircled by a gently rising slope,
A theatre, to which the crowd converged
Till every place was filled. The thoughts of some
Were with their shore-bound fleet, to be released
By this last execution; some rejoiced
At the destruction of the enemy stock;
Most of the careless multitude remained
Watching, while loathing, the outrageous act.
And Trojans too were gathered here, to mourn
At this, their own last funeral, to tremble
At this last moment of the fall of Troy.
Then suddenly the marriage train appeared,
With torches at the head, Helen herself
Attending on the bride, but bowed with grief.
‘Give such a wedding to Hermione!’
The Trojans cry. ‘Let Helen for her sins
Be reunited with her husband thus!’
Trojan and Greek alike were held amazed.
The girl came on with humbly lowered face;
But in that face a radiant beauty shone
Even more brightly in its hour of death –
A sun more splendid in its dying fall
Before the stars take up their offices
And night treads on the heels of weakening day.
The multitude was rapt; none could forbear
To admire a sight soon to be lost for ever.
Some marked her beauty, some her innocent youth,
Some thought upon the strange vicissitudes
Of human fate. Not one remained unmoved
By such staunch courage in the face of death.
Behind her Pyrrhus walked. Now every heart
Was struck with terror, wonderment, and pity.
The young man reached the summit of the mound
And stood on the high platform of the tomb
In which his father lay. The girl, unflinching,
Never withdrew a step, but faced the sword
With grim defiance. Such great courage shocked
Every spectator; and, beyond belief,
Even Pyrrhus paused before the stroke of death.
At last his hand went to his sword and thrust
The blade in to the hilt. Her death was swift;
Blood spurted from the mortal wound; and still,
In the act of death, her courage never left her.
She seemed to fling herself with angry force
Upon the ground, as if to pound the earth
Over Achilles’ head. Then, friend or foe,
The people wept; but the lament of Troy
Was timid, while the victors cried aloud.
The sacrifice was done. The pool of blood
Neither stood still nor flowed over the ground;
It quickly sank, drunk by the thirsty soil
Of that inexorable tomb.
HECUBA: Go now,
Go, Greeks! Go home, now all is safe for you.
You have no more to fear. Now let your fleet
Hoist sail and cross the waters that you long for.
A young child and an innocent girl have died;
The war is over. Where shall I now weep?
Where will they let my aged mouth spit out
This lingering taste of death? Daughter, or grandson,
Husband, or country – which desires my tears?
Must I still weep for all, or for myself?
O death, for which alone I pray, can you
So swiftly come to children, and to maidens
So sharply, when you will, yet hold your hand
From me alone? Have I not looked for you
’Mid swords and spears and firebrands in the night?
I have desired you and you have not come.
Enemy, fire, and fall, have not destroyed me;
Was it for this I stood at Priam’s side?
MESSENGER: Now, prisoners, you must hurry to the sea.
Sails are unfurled on every ship, the fleet
Is ready to depart.
Exeunt
OEDIPUS
WHEN Oedipus, supposedly the son of King Polybus of Corinth, came as a voluntary fugitive from his own country to Thebes, he found that her king Laius had just died in an unpremeditated fight with a traveller on a lonely road. The city was also under the domination of the half-human half-bestial creature, the Sphinx, whose threats were couched in the form of a riddle. Oedipus answered the riddle, destroyed the Sphinx, and was made king in the place of Laius and, as custom required, husband to the widowed queen Jocasta.
Some years later, at the point at which the play begins, the city is in the grip of a pestilence for which neither cause nor remedy can be found. Oedipus determines to use all means to rid the city of this plague, and in so doing uncovers the ugly secrets of his own identity and the acts to which he has been driven by the malignity of fate.
Seneca’s drama follows very closely the line of its far superior prototype, the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, though digressing into circumstantial details of the occult rituals conducted by Tiresias, and by compression weakening the suspense and impact of the king’s discovery of his past.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
OEDIPUS, King of Thebes
JOCASTA, his wife
CREON, brother to Jocasta
TIRESIAS, a blind prophet
MANTO, his daughter
AN OLD MAN, messenger from Corinth
PHORBAS, an old shepherd
MESSENGER
CHORUS of Theban elders
*
Scene: the palace at Thebes
ACT ONE
Oedipus, Jocasta
OEDIPUS: The night is at an end; but dimly yet
The Lord Sun shows his face – a dull glow rising
Out of a dusky cloud. It is a torch
Of evil omen, this pale fire he brings
With which to scan our plague-polluted homes.
Day will reveal the havoc of the night.
What king is happy on his throne? False joy,1
How many ills thy smiling face conceals!
As the high peak takes all the winds’ assault
And sharp cliffs jutting upon open seas
Are pounded even by the lightest waves,
So are the heights of royalty exposed
To Fortune’s blast. How happy was the day
On which I came, escaped from the domain
Of Polybus my father, free in exile,
A fearless vagabond – so help me, gods! –
To stumble upon a kingdom. Now I fear
A fate unspeakable: to kill my father.
This is the warning of the oracle
In Delphi’s laurel grove. And worse, another,
A greater crime is put into my hand.
O filial love, doomed love! I am ashamed
To utter what has been foretold of me.
Apollo bids me fear… my mother’s bed
(This to her son!), a marriage bed of shame,
Unlawful and incestuous matrimony!
This terror drove me from my father’s kingdom;
Not by compulsion banished from the hearth,
But fearful of myself, I sought to put
The law of nature safe beyond the chance
Of violation. He that goes in dread
Of some great evil, cannot choose but fear
Even what seems impossible. I see
Disaster everywhere. I doubt myself.
Fate is preparing, even while I speak,
Some blow for me. Why else, when all my people
Suffer this pestilence, when havoc walks
Through all this land, am I alone unscathed?
For what worse punishment am I preserved?
Amid the city’s ruin, lamentations
Ever renewed, unceasing funerals,
A massacre of men – I stand untouched…
To answer at Apollo’s judgement seat;
Why else? Who could expect a sinful man
To be rewarded with a healthy kingdom?
The air of heaven is tainted by my presence.
There is no gentle breeze to cool the breasts
Of fevered sufferers; no kind winds blow here.
The Dog-Star scorches and the Lord Sun’s fire
Blows hot upon the Lion’s heels. No water
Runs in the rivers, fields are colourless.
Dirce is dry, Ismenus thinly creeps,
A shrunk stream barely moistening the sand.
Apollo’s sister, Moon, drifts hardly seen
Across the sky; day, overcast with clouds,
Reveals a pale dull world; the silent night
Is dark, without a star; fog, dense and black,
Broods over all the land; the murk of hell
Has swallowed up the heavenly citadels,
The mansions of the gods on high. The corn,
That should be ripe for harvest, bears no fruit;
The golden ears that sway on springing stalks
Soon wither and the barren crop falls dead.
No section of the people has escaped
The killing plague; death pays no heed to age
Or sex; young men and old, fathers and sons –
The mortal pestilence makes no distinction.
Husband and wife await one funeral pyre,
And there are no more tears to mourn the dead,
None left to weep; the very magnitude
Of our ordeal has dried up every eye;
As ever in the extreme of misery,
Tears perish at their source. Here you will see
An anguished father bear his burden out
To the consuming fire; a stricken mother there;
And back she hurries for the second victim
Which she must carry to the same death-pyre.
One grief is stricken by a second grief;
Mourners around the dead fall to be mourned.
Some have been known to steal each others’ fire,
Fling their own dead upon another’s ashes;
Misery knows no shame. There are no tombs
For hallowed bones to rest in; to be burnt
Is boon enough – and few are those that have it.
Now there is no more earth for burial mounds,
No wood for pyres. And for the stricken ones
No art or prayer can find a remedy.
Healers fall sick; the plague defeats all aid.
Here at the altar bowed, with suppliant hands
I pray, that Fate will quickly come to me,
That I may not outlive my country’s death,
Not be the last to fall, not be the last,
Of all the people whom I rule, to die.
O gods too pitiless, O heavy fate!
Can death still be denied, although so near,
To me alone? Then I must turn my back
On this doomed kingdom, which my touch of death
Has blighted – leave these wakes and funerals,
This air polluted with the pestilence,
The curse my own unhappy coming brought –
Leave all behind, begone without delay…
Even to my parents’ home.
JOCASTA: Why do you choose,
Dear husband, thus to make your misery worse
By lamentation? I believe a king
Should g
rasp misfortune with a steady hand;
The more unsure his state, more imminent
His fall from sovereignty, so much the more
Should he be resolute to stand upright.
He is no man who turns his back on fate.
OEDIPUS: No man can brand me with the name of coward.
My heart is innocent of craven fears.
Against drawn swords, against the might of Giants,
Against the fiercest rage of Mars himself
I would march boldly forward. Did I run
From the enchantment of the riddling Sphinx?
I faced the damned witch, though her jaws dripped blood
And all the ground beneath was white with bones.
There, as she sat upon her rocky seat,
Waiting to seize her prey, with wings outspread
And lashing tail, a lion in her wrath,
I asked ‘What is your riddle?’ She replied,
Shrieking above me with a voice of doom,
Snapping her jaws and clawing at the stones,
Impatient to tear out my living heart.
Then came the cryptic words, the baited trap;
The monstrous bird had asked her fatal riddle,
And I had answered it!… Fool that I am,
Why should I now be praying for my death?…
You could have had it then! And here you have
This crown for your reward; you are well paid
For the destruction of the Sphinx – whose dust,
That subtle creature’s dust, now rises up
To fight against you. She, the accursed pest
Whom I destroyed, is now destroying Thebes!…
None other but Apollo now can show
If there be any way to our salvation.
CHORUS
Fallen is the noble race of Cadmus, his city utterly fallen.
Alas for Thebes, her lands bereft of workers!
Death takes toll of the men of Bacchus,1 whom he led to the farthest Indies;
The men who boldly scoured the eastern plains,
And planted his banners where the world begins.
They saw the Arabs in their lush cinnamon groves,
And the Parthian riders in retreat –
Treacherous retreat, for there was danger in their backs.2
They marched to the shores of the ruby sea, the gate
Whence Phoebus rises to bring back the day,
Scorching the naked Indians on whom his fire first falls.
Now the heirs of the undefeated are dying,
Caught in the clutch of a relentless fate.
Hour by hour the procession of death is renewed;
The train of mourners troops to the place of burial,