CHORUS LEADER: O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots
Head of a traveler, wherefore seeking whom
Whence by what way how purposed art thou come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?
My object in inquiring is to know.
But if you happen to be deaf and dumb
And do not understand a word I say,
Then wave your hand, to signify as much.

ALCMAEON: I journeyed hither a Boeotian road.

CHORUS LEADER: Sailing on horseback, or with feet for oars?

ALCMAEON: Plying with speed my partnership of legs.

CHORUS: Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?

ALCMAEON: Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.

CHORUS LEADER: To learn your name would not displease me much.

ALCMAEON: Not all that men desire do they obtain.

CHORUS LEADER: Might I then hear at what thy presence shoots.

ALCMAEON: A shepherd's questioned mouth informed me that--

CHORUS LEADER: What? for I know not yet what you will say.

ALCMAEON: Nor will you ever, if you interrupt.

CHORUS LEADER: Proceed, and I will hold my speechless tongue.

ALCMAEON: This house was Eriphyle's, no one else's.

CHORUS LEADER: Nor did he shame his throat with shameful lies.

ALCMAEON: May I then enter, passing through the door?

CHORUS LEADER: Go chase into the house a lucky foot.
And, O my son, be, on the one hand, good,
And do not, on the other hand, be bad;
For that is much the safest plan.

ALCMAEON: I go into the house with heels and speed.

CHORUS

Strophe

In speculation
I would not willingly acquire a name
For ill-digested thought;
But after pondering much
To this conclusion I at last have come:
LIFE IS UNCERTAIN.

This truth I have written deep
In my reflective midriff
On tablets not of wax,
Nor with a pen did I inscribe it there,
For many reasons: LIFE, I say, IS NOT
A STRANGER TO UNCERTAINTY.

Not from the flight of omen-yelling fowls
This fact did I discover,
Nor did the Delphine tripod bark it out,
Nor yet Dodona.
Its native ingenuity sufficed
My self-taught diaphragm.

Antistrophe

Why should I mention
The Inachean daughter, loved of Zeus?
Her whom of old the gods,
More provident than kind,
Provided with four hoofs, two horns, one tail,
A gift not asked for,
And sent her forth to learn
The unfamiliar science
Of how to chew the cud.

She therefore, all about the Argive fields,
Went cropping pale green grass and nettle-tops,
Nor did they disagree with her.
But yet, howe'er nutritious, such repasts
I do not hanker after:
Never may Cypris for her seat select
My dappled liver!

Why should I mention Io? Why indeed?
I have no notion why.

Epode

But now does my boding heart,
Unhired, unaccompanied, sing
A strain not meet for the dance.
Yes even the palace appears
To my yoke of circular eyes
(The right, nor omit I the left)
Like a slaughterhouse, so to speak,
Garnished with woolly deaths
And many shipwrecks of cows.
I therefore in a Cissian strain lament:
And to the rapid
Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest
Resounds in concert
The battering of my unlucky head.

ERIPHYLE (within): O, I am smitten with a hatchet's jaw;
And that in deed and not in word alone.

CHORUS LEADER: I thought I heard a sound within the house
Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy.

ERIPHYLE: He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,
Once more: he purposes to kill me dead.

CHORUS LEADER: I would not be reputed rash, but yet
I doubt if all be gay within the house.

ERIPHYLE: O! O! another stroke! that makes the third.
He stabs me to the heart against my wish.

CHORUS LEADER: If that be so, thy state of health is poor;
But thine arithmetic is quite correct.

Terribly Informative Notes

A. E. Housman (1859-1936) was a famous poet and an excellent classicist, noted for his pungent attacks on less able scholars. Among his better-known poems are "To an Athlete Dying Young" and "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now." Paradoxically, given his wit, his poetry often strikes a contemporary ear as sentimental.

FRAGMENT. Much of Greek literature is known to us only through fragments, but this one is entirely the responsibility of Mr. Housman, who had clearly read too much Greek Tragedy, and heard it translated badly too often, the poor man.

Head. In tragedy one can use the word head (kara) as a metaphorical way of refering to a person. Too bad it doesn't work in English.

Alcmaeon , an Argive, was the son of Eriphyle (mom) and Amphiaraus (dad). Amphiaraus had died as one of the Seven Against Thebes, an army led by the Theban Polynices, son of the famous Oedipus, who was attempting to reclaim the throne of Thebes from his brother Eteocles. It is this Polynices who is buried by Antigone in the play by Sophocles that bears her name. Amphiaraus, a seer, had foreseen that the campaign would be a failure and that he would die, and, being no dummy, didn't want to go and fight. But the king of Argos, Adrastus, was gung-ho about the war; the two men agreed to have Eriphyle, who was Adrastus' daughter in addition to being Amphiaraus' wife, decide the matter. Confused yet? Polynices then bribed Eriphyle with a golden necklace, and she decided in favor of the war, dooming her husband. But before he left, Amphiaraus told his son Alcmaeon to avenge his death by killing his mother. Alcmaeon himself fought as one of the Epigoni who finally took Thebes--his mother having been bribed yet again, this time with a swell robe. Now he's back, and he's not thinking nice thoughts about his dear old mom, who effectively killed his father and who tried to get him killed.

Sailing on horseback. Such forced metaphors are not uncommon in Greek poetry. Agamemnon line 52 speaks, in the Greek, of the oars of the wings. But nowhere, I believe, is such a mass of transportation metaphor smashed together as here.

shining or a rainy Zeus. Zeus here is the sky, and these convoluted lines banter about the weather. The oppositions (rain or shine, mud or mud's sister, dust) are called, in fancy lingo, antitheses; Greek is fond of them, and Housman, here, drunk on them. But he's hardly exaggerating the Greek: compare Agamemnon line 494-5 (in Lattimore's translation). The Herald is spotted returning from Troy:

and upon his feet
the dust, dry sister of the mire . . .

the safest plan. Much of the humor in the chorus' part results from their tendency, shared with many a real Greek chorus, to say the blandest things possible in the most convoluted language known to man.

Strophe. Choral odes are sometimes divided into a strophe, in which the chorus dances one way, an antistrophe, which is the same length and in the same meter, in which the chours presumably dances back the other way, and a final epode in a different meter.

Delphine tripod. The tripod (a three-legged stand holding a large cauldron) from which Apollo's priestess delivered oracles at Delphi. Dodona in the next line was a site of an oracle of Zeus.

The Inachean daughter. Greek choruses have a habit of alluding mysteriously to myths with no obvious connection to the plot. Io, daughter of Inachus, an Argive river, was unlucky enough to be lusted after by Zeus. In one version of the myth, Zeus changed her into a cow when his jealous wife, Hera, spotted the two together, hoping this would throw Hera off the scent. In another it is Hera who gives the poor girl her bovine form in order to reduce her appeal to Zeus. Io is then chased by a particularly annoying fly and guarded by a guard with 100 eyes (Argus), lest Zeus as punishment for being the object of Zeus' extramarital attention; Zeus sends Hermes to kill the guard (lulling all 100 eyes asleep by playing his lyre), but the fly chases Io through much of the mythologically known world until she ends up in Egypt. There she gives birth to a line of heroes who eventually return to Greece.

Cypris. Aphrodite. She strikes in the liver in the next line as the liver was often considered the source of emotions in early Greek thought.

shipwrecks of cows. Another ridiculous metaphor, here for dead cows; the "wolly deaths" of the previous line will be dead sheep. Cattle and sheep were among the more impressive sacrifices made by the Greeks; often images of the slaughter of animals in sacrifice accompany scenes of human slaughter, as when Agamemnon is murdered. Compare Agamemnon 1309-1311 (Lattimore's translation).

Chorus: What foulness then, unless some horror in the mind?
Cassandra: The room within reeks with blood like a slaughter house.
Chorus: What then? Only these victims butchered at the hearth.
Cassandra: There is a breath about it like an open grave.

Compare also lines 1056-58; 1278.

But now does my boding heart, etc. Compare Agamemnon lines 975-978

Why must this persistent fear
beat its wings so ceaselessly
and so close against my mantic heart?
Why this strain unwanted, unrepaid, thus prophetic?

Cissian. Cissian ought to mean "having to do with ivy." Dionysus, god of ecstacy and music, was oft crowned by ivy, but just what a Cissian strain is suppossed to be I don't know. Which is probably the point.

the third. Three, being an archtypal number (and the toast that was given to Zeus), is the number of blows it takes to kill Agamemnon and Clytemnestra as well. That witty Housman makes use of it here for his mathematical joke. For Agamemnon compare lines 1343 and following.