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     The tiny pool of molten gold in the crucible of Athens, or bitter herbs crushed in its mortar and pestle? The thirty-one surviving tragedies of fifth-century Greece are exalted cultural glories – the best books in the Alexandrian library, the first link in a chain through the New Comedy, to Plautus and Seneca, to Shakespeare, to Robert Bolt or David Hare. They are also administered as social medicine, for instance by the Belfast voices of Heaney’s The Cure at Troy (Sophocles’s Philoctetes), in the forlorn hope that they retain some of their mimetic power for civil disturbance or persuasion in turbulent times. These two views meet when the plays are invoked as touchstones of wisdom, as in Rattigan’s The Browning Version (1948), where a weak, indecisive husband with an ungovernable, unhappy wife is evidently Agamemnon to her Clytemnestra, and where it is Robert Browning’s translation (1877) which alone offers a bleak consolation of certainty. Almost as an afterthought, a good half of these dramatic poems remain plays still worth staging; it has been the classicist poets who have most vigorously written for actors and not readers, as with Louis MacNeice’s Agamemnon (1936) or Tony Harrison’s Oresteia (1982). Regardless of quality, nobody’s Oresteia lasts long in rep, because there are always new translators eager to take a crack at it, and this year, rather than revive their celebrated Harrison, the National Theatre commissioned Hughes.

     A. E. Housman, perhaps best qualified of all (“I know very little Greek – scarcely more than the professors”), left only a merciless parody (1883), but one with something to tell us about the difficulties of rendering the densely-imaged question and answer passages which are a hallmark of Attic drama:

Alcmaeon:       I journeyed hither a Boeotian road.
Chorus:           Sailing on horseback or with feet for oars?
Alcmaeon:       Plying by turns my partnership of legs.
Chorus:           Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?
Alcmaeon:       Mud’s sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.

Here, at the boundaries joining their long, almost lecture-like speeches to their equally long, pensive silences, the chorus are at their most dynamic, elucidating motive and action, or proving a point, or getting the facts on the record, or – or whatever it is they do, for Greek chorus remains a most mysterious narrator. Even in Aeschylus (c.525–456 BC), earliest and supposedly clearest of the three Greek tragedians, moral verdicts brought in by the chorus are anything but clear and the playgoer often returns satisfied but, on reflection, confused. After the soundbites – Man must suffer to learn – should, or should not, a wife stab her husband in the bath?

     In the Eumenides, surely the oldest courtroom drama, the goddess Athena convenes an ancient court to try Agamemnon’s son Orestes for killing his mother to avenge that stabbing. In the event her casting vote is required but in future, it seems, the court must manage on their own. Hughes translates Athena’s creation of constitutional justice as though she were founding English common law: “From today every homicide/ Shall be tried before this jury/ Of twelve Athenians”. But the text (Eu. 683-5) is more like “This court of judges shall preside over the Aegean peoples forever”, and earlier she had hand-picked them from “the best” Athenians (Eu. 485-9: Hughes gives “wisest”). This same court, for it is explicitly named, was in the year of Aeschylus’s audience a reactionary and interfering check by the aristocracy on a barely-rooted democracy. Imagine a play about the barons signing Magna Carta, written by somebody like Bernard Shaw and put on amid the general election after the House of Lords defeated Lloyd George’s socialist budget of 1909: only someone from another world, or another millennium, could mistake it for a historical pageant. Where comparison with a polemicist like Shaw breaks down is that Aeschylus seems stubbornly moderate. Athena’s speech – unhelpfully instructing commoners to respect the court and vice versa – has been taken both as supporting the court’s abolition and as opposing it. Playwrights were born among “the best” and their producers were often politicians-to-be, buying a direct connection to the people; so was Aeschylus a decent but unquestioning member of his class, or a radical constrained to reactionary form? We do not know.

     Today’s audience need not be told any of this, but Hughes does an injustice when he suppresses the nuances by which Aeschylus conveys the difficulty of reaching an ethical society. The final speeches of Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus as they declare their reign (Ag. 1662-73) are given a more simplistic, absolutist ring than in the original. When Orestes decides that Clytemnestra’s nightmare means that fate wants him to kill her, Hughes’s chorus replies “Your logic has the temper of bronze”, which bears little resemblance to the original (Ch. 551) in which the populace says that it chooses Orestes’ interpretation, not that it is correct. It is as if Hughes takes the hauntingly ironic ending of MacNeice’s Autumn Journal IX (1938), about teaching the classics under an England overshadowed by fascism, at face value: “And how one can imagine oneself among them/ I do not know;/ It was all so unimaginably different/ And all so long ago”.

     The Oresteia, often called complete if somewhat tattered in the Choephori, once ended with a satyr play called Proteus which is lost altogether; but other fragments show that Aeschylus was as accomplished at knob-jokes as the next farceur. His mythological backdrop was as convoluted as anything in the Star Trek universe and has attracted pretty much the same trainspotting scholarship, but each episode spells out anything you really need to know. He was a famous choreographer and showman, probably wrote the music as well and knew how to please a crowd of 15000 with a spectacle they would remember long after the nuance of the words – such as the arrival of Agamemnon’s chariot, or the vastly triumphalist processions at the trilogy’s end, like the almost demented number of C Major bars at the end of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. The shows fell on solemn and sacred festivals; but in a society without electric light and founded on manual labour, is this so surprising? For that matter, BBC repeats of The Sound of Music correspond very well with Christmas, but they are secular fun just the same. We must always remember that the Greek tragedies were an entertainment, because all we have left is the equivalent of a tenth-generation bootleg audio tape of the serious bits, with many dropouts and indistinct voices.

     In the comically literal Loeb edition crib (1926), Clytemnestra stalks off magnificently (Ag. 612), declaring that she knows no more of adultery than of dyeing bronze, whereupon the Herald remarks to the Chorus that: “Boast like to this, laden to the full with truth, misbeseems not the speech of a noble wife”. MacNeice among others thinks these two lines are Clytemnestra’s: “Such is my boast, bearing a load of truth,/ A boast that need not disgrace a noble wife”. In Hughes’s version, she claims ignorance not of “dyeing bronze” but of “wearing weapons” – a pity, because it loses the echo when Cassandra prophesies a bronze blade stained with Agamemnon’s blood (Ag. 1265), a blade which Clytemnestra will expertly wield — and the delicate reservation expressed by the double-negative is rather crudely spelled out:

Herald:       Are such words necessary?
                  A Queen boasting so strangely?
                  Why should she trouble us
                  With such denials?

We shall never know whether Herald or Queen spoke these lines, on a wooden open-air stage one morning in 458 BC. The poignant sense of tragedy which accompanies the Greek plays in today’s culture is as much for the thought of all their lost sisters as for their own mood. Of 80 titles attributed to Aeschylus, some doubtless wrongly or in duplication, we have just seven, or six if Prometheus is an imitation rather than hack-work. Ever since Aristophanes’s parodic critique The Frogs — which, because both acute and uniquely placed, is the source of most opinions ancient and modern — Aeschylus has been the gruff spirit of the good old days when men were honest, who put his money where his mouth was by fighting at Marathon and probably Salamis and Plataea as well (so, both against and alongside the Spartans). This too makes him a tragic figure, because entreating all sides to act in good faith is always a lost cause. The polity he wrote for was to collapse amid a groundswell of xenophobia which, we like to think, he would have despised.

     According to Aristotle, who was over-fond of systematic explanations, Sophocles and Euripides were more sophisticated dramatists because they were allowed three masked actors on stage at once, plus chorus, where Aeschylus had only two. The same glib reasoning might be turned to say that he uses the chorus better, as we see perhaps in the climax to Agamemnon, where onlookers to a struggle of kings are suddenly caught in the cross-fire. Yet even if Aeschylus is the least as dramatist, he is the greatest as poet, and of all the poems embedded in Greek drama none are so vivid as Aeschylus’s accounts of events cascading across whole countries, in great cataracts of nouns – the relay of mountain-top beacon fires from the fall of Troy in Agamemnon; the messenger’s report to the court of the Persians. These are the best parts of Hughes’s text, too, but then they are the part least needing him; despite which he rewrites.  Plain “urns and ashes” become, marvellously, “little clay jars/ Full of sharp cinders” (Ag. 436) but the distinctive image of flowering rendered by Peter Levi as “I have seen the corpses blossom on the sea” (Ag. 659-60) is, for Hughes, simply “an ocean clogged...with men”.

     Hughes finds the superficialities of these plays to his taste, with their prophecies written in dreams, their dooms and portents. He does everything to make their spillings of blood still bloodier, for instance having Orestes disembowel Aegisthus and cut out his heart. Now Orestes is not the Hollywood kind of hero, as the cat-and-mouse dialogue with his mother, prolonging her wait to be murdered, makes abundantly clear. Nevertheless he kills Aegisthus quickly with a sword, nothing more (Ch. 870-4). Hughes also knew more than anyone would want about family suffering – which is not a nice point to raise, but Iphigenia’s death cannot but recall Sylvia Plath (“Daddy!, she screamed, Daddy!”) and Hughes has also freely translated Euripides’s Alcestis, a story alluded to by Aeschylus (Eu. 723-4) in which a wife suicides to save her husband. But this Oresteia shows no unique insight, and is not one of the late fruits of Hughes’s Indian summer. It reads as a hasty first draft, with all of the sound and fury but little of the significance.