Clytaemestra to Agamemnon, 958-974
(all excerpts in RealAudio. Text: H. Weir Smyth, Loeb Classical Library)It is common these days to lament the fact that we have only the texts of the Greek plays, without the music, choreography, and other elements that must have made them so compelling to watch. Older classical scholars were by and large content with the words, thinking the rest superfluous or even distracting, like bright colors applied to white marble. My own view is that the plays of course need to be performed, in any way that will bring them to life. But since that mostly means translation and adaptation, we do risk losing sight of what was, after all, the core of the ancient dramatic art: the poetry.
The four excerpts from the Agamemnon recited here might give some idea of the rhythmic variety and potency of that core. The first is chanted by the chorus of Argive elders as they enter, immediately after the watchman's prologue. The meter is anapestic, a marching rhythm in Greek, which was often used for choral entrances and exits, and in this case suits the martial subject as well.
The second excerpt, sung later in the same parodos,
or opening chorus, is the famous "Hymn to Zeus." Like several of the other
choral songs in the play, metrically the hymn consists of variations on a seven-syllable rhythmic pattern called
a lekuthion, which goes: dum-ti-dum-ti-dum-ti-dum (with dum
representing long and ti representing short).
The third excerpt is Clytaemestra's speech to the returning Agamemnon as she leads him barefoot up the carpet of blood-red garments into the house to murder him. He has chided her for wasting the house's costly Tyrian-dyed cloth on such a gesture, and this is her reply. The speech - like virtually all of the purely spoken parts of Greek drama - is in a meter resembling English blank verse.
The final excerpt is the beginning of the choral song immediately following, after Agamemnon has been led into the house. Unlike that smug king, who takes his wife's bitter tribute at face value, the chorus is filled with foreboding, though they still have no idea what she is going to do. The rhythm is again mainly lekuthia, placed back-to-back, giving a syncopated effect. Even just spoken, the song has a lovely quavering rhythm.
Naturally a purely spoken rendition of verses that were chanted or sung can't really recreate the total effect. What it can do is give a sense of the music already latent in the ancient poet's words. In opera the libretto is a sort of mannequin, clothed in glorious sounds. The words of a Greek play are not so self-effacing: they are what gave form and movement to the music and dance (which the poet himself composed), and you can be sure that their musical and choreographic clothing left their own profound shapeliness and rhythmic vitality very much in evidence.
We don't know how well the music and dances of these plays were remembered in the first few centuries after they were performed, but we do know that the plays themselves were still read. And reading then, and for a long time after, meant reading aloud. It was only the slow growth of silent reading, along with a complete change in the rhythm of spoken Greek, that finally made the words of these wonderful old plays what they have mostly remained since, mere text on a page.