Saturday, 19 June 2010

One-handed Aeschylus

Landor seems to have thought Aeschylus only had one hand. In the posthumously published verse dialogue ‘The Trial of Æschylos’ (in Heroic Idyls: with Additional Poems [1863]). Landor’s Æschylos is accused in court of profaning the mysteries of Eleusis by writing them into his plays. His defence is that he fought the Persians at Salamis, and as the judge notes that the punishment for this crime is death, Æschylos’s brother Amyntos ‘rushes forward and bares his brother’s scars’:
What have these merited? These wounds he won
From Persia, nothing else. Let others show
The purple vestures, stript from satraps slains,
He slew them, and left those for weaker hands
To gather up, and to adorn their wives.

Amyntos is my brother, so are ye,
But why display my ragged white-faced scar?
Why show the place where one arm was, if one
Keeps yet its own? This left can wield the sword.

Fling not thy cloak about thee, nor turn round,
Nay, brother, thou shalt not conceal the scars
With that one hand yet left thee. [57]
Landor gets this from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics [Book 3, 1111a8-10], and from Aelian. But Aelian is clear that it is Aeschylus’s brother (whom Aelian calls ‘Ameinias’) who lost a hand at Salamis. Why Landor amputates the more famous brother’s hand is not clear.

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