Euripides: Suppliant Women.

ADRASTUS: Oh, the stupidity of man! You shoot your arrows beyond the target and, when, as you deserve, troubles crowd around your heads, it is only events that can teach you a lesson, not friends' advice. And you cities who have it in your power to end your sufferings by debate, you reach a conclusion by bloodshed, not parley.

....

CHORUS: O sons, a painful word for your loving mothers to use in their lament, I call to you who are dead.
ADRASTUS: Oh, I lament my woes!
CHORUS: Yes, and I mine.
ADRASTUS: We have suffered, oh...
CHORUS: ...woes outrageous in their pain.
ADRASTUS: Fellow-citizens of Argos, do you not see the doom that is mine?
CHORUS: They see me also in my wretchedness, bereft of my children.
ADRASTUS [Antistrophe]: Bring them to me, bring their blood-stained bodies, ill-fated men slain unworthily by unworthy hands in whose number the struggle was continued to its appointed end.
CHORUS: Give me my sons, that I may clasp them in my arms and fold them to my bosom.
[Adrastus gives the mothers access to their sons.]
ADRASTUS: There you are, there you are; they are yours now.
CHORUS: What is mine is a sufficient burden of woes.
ADRASTUS: Ah, me!
CHORUS: What of us, the mothers, have you nothing to say to us?
ADRASTUS: You hear me.
CHORUS: The suffering you lament is theirs and ours as well.
ADRASTUS: If only the Theban ranks had slain me in the dust!
CHORUS: If only I had never known the embrace of a husband in the marital bed!
ADRASTUS [Epode]: Look upon an ocean of anguish, you mothers of sons, wedded to sorrow.
CHORUS: Our nails have furrowed our cheeks and with dust we have covered our heads.
ADRASTUS: Oh the pain, the pain I feel! May the earth swallow me up, may a storm-blast sweep me off, or Zeus' fiery thunderbolt fall upon my head!

...

ADRASTUS [turning away]: O wretched mankind, why do you equip yourselves with spears and spill each other's blood? Make an end of this! Cease your struggles and live at peace in your cities as tolerant neighbours. Life in such a brief moment; we should pass through it as easily as we can, avoiding pain.
CHORUS [Strophe]: No more am I blessed in children, no more blessed in sons, no share in happiness have I now with the women of Argos who have brought forth sons! No words of favour can the childless now expect from Artemis who assists in childbirth. My life is now no life, and, like a roving cloud, I am driven to and fro by heartless winds.


Tragedy has always been concerned with suffering. Euripides' Suppliant Women is full of it. The direction of Euripides' inquiry, however, is toward the rational. Whereas the characters of Sophocles experience suffering, those of Euripides seem to do little but discuss it.

The innovation of Euripides, it seems, is his investigation of the way in which suffering engenders further suffering still. Evadne, lamenting the loss of her husband as his dead body burns upon the funeral pyre, decides to perform a perverted act of marriage. Unable to live side by side, she instead opts to be wed in death:

EVADNE: Never shall I betray you as you lie beneath the earth by continuing to live. Kindle the wedding torch, begin my nuptials! May posterity in Argos look upon this marriage as worthy and blessed, when ashes of wedded husband unite in the breeze with those of noble wife, a guileless spirit.

But the suffering does not end here. Evadne's father Iphis arrives just in time to see his daughter throw herself into the flames in which her husband's body burns.

IPHIS: Oh, what sorrow! Why is it not possible for men to have a second youth and then be old again? In our homes if any errors are made we can have second thoughts and rectify them, but not so in our lives. If we could be young again and subsequently old again, we would put matters right in our second lives. When I saw other men becoming fathers, I began to desire offspring of my own, and this longing was wasting me away. But if I had reached this state and learned from experience what it is like for a father to lose his child, never would I have plumbed such depths of misery such as this! ....
Oh, take me away at once, take me to my home and there consign me to darkness, where I may waste away and starve to death this old body of mine! What good will it do to wait until I have collected my child's bones?
Old age, you are a wrestler hard to throw! How I hate your grip and how I hate all those who seek to prolong life by using magic foods and potions to channel its course away from death! What they should do, once they have become a burden on earth, is die and be done with it, leaving room for younger men.

Suffering within Euripides indeed appears to take a different status from Aeschylus and Sophocles, as Nietzsche is keen to point out. Euripides identifies the pervasiveness of suffering, ever-present at the fringes of war and conflict. Suffering is inevitable and can no longer be bared. Gone is the double-power of the scapegoat, whose suffering is at once both wretched and holy. Oedipus, stumbling and shuffling along the road to Athens, no longer harbours within him fertility and fortune. Instead, the Euripidean scapegoat no longer holds fascination with suffering - suffering breeds violence, in turn breeding further suffering. Faced with the suffering of life, the best thing is to die: to waste away, starving in darkness.

The Genius of Nostrils

"I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous - a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite....

Revaluation of all values: that is my formula for an act of supreme self-examination on the part of humanity, become flesh and genius in me. It is my fate that I have to be the first decent human being; that I know myself to stand in opposition to the mendaciousness of millennia. - I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies - smelling them out. - My genius is in my nostrils."

-- Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 'Why I am a Destiny, S1.

A Love Supreme

But what is prayer?
To hold all that is human against a vast horizon that melts, dances, shimmers. To look beyond to an idea of a God, barely visible. Distorted.

The prayer-beyond (oh Lord, help me to be) becomes a prayer-to-oneself (oh my good! oh my beautiful! ... I do not falter!). Praying to a beyond, a horizon that shall never fully form but only glitter and move with every step forward. A weeping promise of perfection, deliverance, forgiveness that despite our many-tongued begging of a God initiates from the deepest humanity. God as a perfection that does not exist. The human as a struggle towards a perfection through discipline, through dedication, through a passion that could not be comprehended by any deity.

Coltrane's brilliance as an expression of this - each syllable, each phrase a prayer. But not the prayer we conceive as prostration before a blinding light - instead, the whispered promise to oneself. Staring toward all horizons, we do not see any beyond, but a merging of futures. And the figure we think we perceive striding across the plains, inhabiting the space between the earth and the sky, is not a God but ourselves. The prayer, finding no being who could answer as God, returns to us as a promise.