A search for Aeschylus in English is deadly, accursed, mind-rending.
Browning has "done" the Agamemnon, or "done the Agamemnon in the eye" as
the critic may choose to consider. He has written a modest and an
apparently intelligent preface:
"I should hardly look for an impossible transmission of the reputed
magniloquence and sonority of the Greek; and this with the less regret,
inasmuch as there is abundant musicality elsewhere, but nowhere else
than in his poem the ideas of the poet."
He quotes Matthew Arnold on the Greeks: "their expression is so
excellent, because it is so simple and so well subordinated, because it
draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it
conveys ... not a word wasted, not a sentiment capriciously thrown in,
stroke on stroke."
He is reasonable about the Greek spelling. He points out that _γόνον
ἰδὼν κάλλιστον ἀνδρῶν_ sounds very poorly as "Seeing her son the fairest
of men" but is outshouted in "Remirando il figliuolo bellissimo degli
uomini," and protests his fidelity to the meaning of Aeschylus.
His weakness in this work is where it essentially lay in all of his
expression, it rests in the term "ideas"--"Thought" as Browning
understood it--"ideas" as the term is current, are poor two dimensional
stuff, a scant, scratch covering. "Damn ideas, anyhow." An idea is only
an imperfect induction from fact.
The solid, the "last atom of force verging off into the first atom of
matter" is the force, the emotion, the objective sight of the poet. In
the Agamemnon it is the whole rush of the action, the whole wildness of
Kassandra's continual shrieking, the flash of the beacon fires burning
unstinted wood, the outburst of
_Τροιάν Αχαιῶν οὖσαν_,
or the later
_Τροίαν Ἀχαιοὶ τήδ' ἔχουσ' ἐν ἡπέρα._
"Troy is the greeks'." Even Rossetti has it better than Browning:
"Troy's down, tall Troy's on fire," anything, literally anything that
can be shouted, that can be shouted uncontrolledly and hysterically.
"Troy is the Greeks'" is an ambiguity for the ear. "Know that our men
are in Ilion."