AESCHYLUS For here I come and hither I return.
DIONYSUS Any fault there?
EURIPIDES A dozen faults and more..
DIONYSUS Eh! why the lines are only three in all.
EURIPIDES But every one contains a score of faults.
DIONYSUS Now Aeschylus, keep silént; if you don’t You won’t get off with three iambic lines.
AESCHYLUS Silent for him!
DIONYSUS If my advice you’ll take.
EURIPIDES Why, at first starting here’s a fault skyhigh.
AESCHYLUS (To Dio.) You see your folly?
DIONYSUS Have your way; I care not.
AESCHYLUS (To Eur.) What is my fault?
EURIPIDES Begin the lines again.
AESCHYLUS Grave Hermes, witnessing a father’s power—
EURIPIDES And this beside his murdered father’s grave Orestes speaks?
AESCHYLUS I say not otherwise.
EURIPIDES Then does he mean that when his father fell By craft-and violence at a woman’s hand, The god of craft was witnessing the deed?
AESCHYLUS It was not he: it was the Helper Hermes
AESCHYLUS He called the grave: and this he showed by adding It was his sire’s prerogative he held.
EURIPIDES Why this is worse than all. If from his father He held this office grave, why then—
DIONYSUS He was A graveyard rifler on his father’s side.
AESCHYLUS Bacchus, the wine you drink is stale and fusty.
DIONYSUS Give him another: (To Eur.) you, look out for faults.
AESCHYLUS Be thou my saviour and mine aid to-day, For here I come, and hither I return.
EURIPIDES The same thing twice says clever Aeschylus.
DIONYSUS How twice?
EURIPIDES Why, just consider: I’ll explain. “I come,” says he; and “I return,” says he: It’s the same thing, to ‘‘come” and to “return.”
DIONYSUS Aye, just as if you said, “Good fellow, lend me A kneading trough: likewise, a trough to knead in.”
AESCHYLUS It is not so, you everlasting talker, They’re not the same, the words are right enough.
DIONYSUS How so? inform me how you use the words.
AESCHYLUS A man, not banished from his home, may “come” To any land, with no especial chance. A home-bound exile both “returns” and “comes.”
DIONYSUS O good, by Apollo! What do you say, Euripides, to that?
EURIPIDES I say Orestes never did “return.” He came in secret’: nobody recalled him.
DIONYSUS O good, by Hermes! (Aside.) I’ve not the least suspicion what he means.
EURIPIDES Repeat another line.
DIONYSUS Ay, Aeschylus, Repeat one instantly: you, mark what’s wrong.
AESCHYLUS Now on this funeral mound I call my father To hear, to hearken.
EURIPIDES There he is again. To “hear,” to “hearken”; the same thing, exactly.
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