Translator's Note

The play known as Hiketides in Greek is traditionally translated as (The) Suppliants or (The) Suppliant Women – or even, in one version from the early twentieth century, The Suppliant Maidens. In modern English, ‘suppliant’ is a word that has mostly fallen out of use, and when used it often carries an air of old-fashioned beseeching. But for Aeschylus, hiketides (and their male counterparts, hiketai) were real people that he is likely to have encountered and engaged with often. And while we no longer call them ‘suppliants’, our world is full – perhaps now more than ever – of people, many of them young, who have been compelled by circumstance to abandon their homes and possessions and throw themselves on the mercy of people they have never met. Today, we might call these people ‘asylum seekers’.

The claim that a particular Greek tragedy has ‘contemporary resonances’ has become cliché, but even among such competition this play seems strikingly, almost anachronistically, relevant to our present moment. For the first time, the number of people displaced across the globe has surpassed 100 million, a truly staggering figure. When I began work on this translation in early 2018, I was teaching in a refugee camp in Lesvos, which served families displaced as a result of ongoing conflict in the Middle East. On the first page of the Greek text, one place name in particular leapt out at me: Συρίᾳ (Syria, the very place so many of the residents of that camp had come from). Once dismissed as the earliest, most ‘primitive’ of Aeschylus’s works, Hiketides is now increasingly recognized for the contemporary relevance not just of its portrayal of the refugee experience, but also for its treatment of gendered violence, political deception and racial discrimination. 

The play is set in the mythological world of the Greek Bronze Age, and begins shortly after a king named Danaos and his fifty daughters (known as the Danaids) have arrived in Argos, a coastal city on the Greek mainland. They have fled from Egypt in order to avoid being forced to marry their cousins, the fifty sons of Danaos’s twin brother, the king of Egypt—whose name is, confusingly, also ‘Egypt’ (Αἴγυπτος). Danaos and his brother Egypt claim descent from Zeus via their great-grandfather Touch, Zeus’s son by Io, a princess of Argos. 

Zeus — Io  |  Touch  |  Libya  |  Belos  _______|_______  Danaos                             Egypt  |                                      |  daughters of Danaos          sons of Egypt

But what are the descendants of a Greek princess doing in Egypt? The answer is found in the myth of Io, which features as a near-constant background to this play. That story starts, as Greek myths so often do, with Zeus becoming sexually attracted to the young woman. This incurs the jealousy of Zeus’s wife, Hera, who transforms Io into a cow as punishment. To further enact her revenge, Hera sets a hundred-eyed monster called Argus to watch over her and sends a biting fly (often described as a ‘gadfly’) to harass her incessantly, driving her from her home in Greece all the way around the outside of the Mediterranean. On the way, she meets Prometheus chained to a mountain in the Caucasus and creates an etymology for the Bosporus (Greek for ‘cow-crossing’). Finally, she arrives in Egypt, where Zeus, by the ‘touch’ (epaphē) of his hand, both restores her human form and makes her pregnant with a son, whose name, Epaphos (in my translation, ‘Touch’), memorialises the god’s action. As a young woman who suffers great injustice because of male sexual desire, Io features as an obvious analogue for the daughters of her descendent Danaos. As a person displaced by conflict beyond her control, she can also be seen as the archetypal refugee. 

As refugees, the daughters of Danaos must perform the Greek ritual of hiketeia (‘supplication’). There were a number of ways of doing this, but in this play, the refugees perform two key actions: they sit in a sacred place (the sanctuary of the twelve Olympian gods, imagined as being on a hill outside the city), and they carry branches of olive wood wrapped in white wool, a symbol of supplication known throughout the Greek world. Although there was no specific obligation to accept the requests of people who performed these actions, failure to take them seriously and treat them with respect was considered a major offence (something like shooting at medical personnel in a war zone). Though the particular  rituals may seem foreign to us, the practice of seeking asylum was then, as it is today, fundamentally a means of appealing to universal human decency. Modern refugees make their appeals from a greater remove with forms and paperwork, through interpreters and courts. Perhaps if we could see refugees installed in our most treasured spaces, symbols of peace in hand, we would find them harder to ignore. 

Despite contemporary relevance of its themes, it is important to remember that Aeschylus’ plays existed completely outside our modern, theatrical tradition. Greek tragedy was a fundamentally stylised, formal genre and it would be a shame to brush this fact under the rug as an inconvenient historical detail). This is one reason that I have made more formal use of metre than is usual in modern translations of ancient drama. In the Greek original, choral passages were composed in precisely corresponding pairs of stanzas. Because we have no real equivalent in modern (non-musical) theatre, this convention, and the staging possibilities it offers, are generally ignored in contemporary translations. Presenting Aeschylus’s paired stanzas side by side helps both to bring out some of the wonderful echoes that exist in the Greek original and to suggest ways in which they might come to life on stage.

All of the passages translated in this excerpt are choral passages sung by the Danaids themselves. By presenting them directly, without any of the intervening dialogue, I hope to give voice to a forgotten group, with a plausible claim to being among the first refugees represented in western literature.

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Dan Byam Shaw