Æschylus is incommensurate. There is in him something of India. The
wild majesty of his stature recalls those vast poems of the Ganges
which walk through art with the steps of a mammoth, and which have,
among the Iliads and the Odysseys, the appearance of hippopotami among
lions. Æschylus, a thorough Greek, is yet something else besides a
Greek. He has the Oriental immensity.
Saumaise declares that he is full of Hebraisms and Syrianisms.[1]
Æschylus makes the Winds carry Jupiter's throne, as the Bible makes
the Cherubim carry Jehovah's throne, as the Rig-Veda makes the Marouts
carry the throne of Indra. The winds, the cherubim, and the marouts are
the same beings,--the Breezes. Saumaise is right. The double-meaning
words so frequent in the Phœnician language, abound in Æschylus.
He plays, for instance, in reference to Jupiter and Europa, on the
Phœnician word _ilpha_, which has the double meaning of "ship" and
"bull." He loves that language of Tyre and Sidon, and at times he
borrows the strange gleams of its style; the metaphor, "Xerxes with
the dragon eyes," seems an inspiration from the Ninevite dialect, in
which the word _draka_ meant at the same time dragon and clear-sighted.
He has Phœnician heresies. His heifer Io is rather the cow of Isis;
he believes, like the priests of Sidon, that the temple of Delphi was
built by Apollo with a paste made of wax and bees'-wings. In his exile
in Sicily he often drank religiously at the fountain of Arethusa,
and never did the shepherds who watched him hear him name Arethusa
otherwise than by this mysterious name, _Alphaga_,--an Assyrian word
signifying "source surrounded with willows."
Æschylus is, in the whole Hellenic literature, the sole example of
the Athenian mind with a mixture of Egypt and Asia. These depths were
repugnant to the Greek intelligence. Corinth, Epidaurus, Œdepsus,
Gythium, Cheronea, which was to be the birth-place of Plutarch, Thebes,
where Pindar's house was, Mantinea, where the glory of Epaminondas
shone,--all these golden towns repudiated the Unknown, a glimpse of
which was seen like a cloud behind the Caucasus. It seemed as though
the sun was Greek. The sun, used to the Parthenon, was not made
to enter the diluvian forests of Grand Tartary under the gigantic
mouldiness of the monocotyledons under the lofty ferns of five hundred
cubits, where swarmed all the first dreadful models of Nature, and
under whose shadows existed unknown, shapeless cities, such as that
fabulous Anarodgurro, the existence of which was denied until it sent
an embassy to Claudius. Gagasmira, Sambulaca, Maliarpha, Barygaza,
Cavenpatnam Sochoth-Benoth, Theglath-Phalazar, Tana-Serim--all these
almost hideous names affrighted Greece when they came to be reported
by the adventurers on their return first by those with Jason, then by
those of Alexander. Æschylus had no such horror. He loved the Caucasus.
It was there he had made the acquaintance of Prometheus. One almost
feels in reading Æschylus that he had haunted the vast primitive
thickets now become coal mines, and that he has taken huge strides
over the roots, snake-like and half-living, of the ancient vegetable
monsters. Æschylus is a kind of behemoth among geniuses.
Let us say, however, that the affinity of Greece with the East, an
affinity hated by the Greeks, was real. The letters of the Greek
alphabet are nothing else but the letters of the Phœnician alphabet
reversed. Æschylus was all the more Greek from the fact of his being a
little of a Phœnician.
This powerful mind, at times apparently crude on account of his very
grandeur, has the Titanic gayety and affability. He indulges in
quibbles on the names of Prometheus, Polynices, Helen, Apollo, Ilion,
on the cock and the sun, imitating in this respect Homer, who made on
the olive that famous pun which caused Diogenes to throw away his plate
of olives and eat a tart.
The father of Æschylus, Euphorion, was a disciple of Pythagoras. The
soul of Pythagoras, that philosopher half magian and half brahmin,
seemed to have entered through Euphorion into Æschylus. We have said
already that in the dark and mysterious quarrel between the celestial
and the terrestrial gods, the intestinal war of Paganism, Æschylus
was terrestrial. He belonged to the faction of the gods of earth. The
Cyclops had worked for Jupiter; he rejected them as we would reject a
corporation of workers who had turned traitors, and he preferred to
them the Cabyri. He adored Ceres. "O thou, Ceres, nurse of my soul!"
and Ceres is Demeter, is Gemeter, is the mother-earth. Hence his
veneration for Asia. It seemed then as though Earth was rather in Asia
than elsewhere. Asia is, in reality, compared with Europe, a kind of
block almost without capes and gulfs, and little penetrated by the
sea. The Minerva of Æschylus says, "Great Asia." "The sacred soil of
Asia," says the chorus of the Oceanides. In his epitaph, graven on his
tomb at Gela and written by himself, Æschylus attests "the Mede with
long hair." He makes the chorus celebrate "Susicanes and Pegastagon,
born in Egypt, and the chief of Memphis, the sacred city." Like the
Phœnicians, he gives the name of "Oncea" to Minerva. In the "Etna" he
celebrates the Sicilian Dioscuri, the Palici, those twin gods whose
worship, connected with the local worship of Vulcan, had reached Asia
through Sarepta and Tyre. He calls them "the venerable Palici." Three
of his trilogies are entitled the "Persians," the "Ethiopid," the
"Egyptians." In the geography of Æschylus, Egypt was Asia, as well as
Arabia. Prometheus says, "the dower of Arabia, the heroes of Caucasus."
Æschylus was, in geography, very peculiar. He had a Gorgonian city
Cysthenes, which he placed in Asia, as well as a river Pluto, rolling
gold, and defended by men with a single eye,--the Arimaspes. The
pirates to whom he makes allusion somewhere are, according to all
appearance, the pirates of Angria who inhabited the rock Vizindruk. He
could see distinctly beyond the Pas-du-Nil, in the mountains of Byblos,
the source of the Nile, still unknown to-day. He knew the precise
spot where Prometheus had stolen the fire, and he designated without
hesitation Mount Mosychlus in the neighbourhood of Lemnos.
When this geography ceases to be fanciful, it is exact as an itinerary.
It becomes true and remains without measure. Nothing more real than
that splendid transmission of the news of the capture of Troy in one
night by bonfires lighted one after the other and corresponding from
mountain to mountain,--from Mount Ida to the promontory of Hermes,
from the promontory of Hermes to Mount Athos, from Mount Athos to
Mount Macispe, from the Macispe to the Messapius, from Mount Messapius
over the river Asopus to Mount Cytheron, from Mount Cytheron over the
morass of Gorgopis to Mount Egiplanctus, from Mount Egiplanctus to Cape
Saronica (later Spireum); from Cape Saronica to Mount Arachne, from
Mount Arachne to Argos. You may follow on the map that train of fire
announcing Agamemnon to Clytemnestra.
This bewildering geography is mingled with an extraordinary tragedy, in
which you hear dialogues more than human:--
_Prometheus._ "Alas!"
_Mercury._ "This is a word that Jupiter speaks not."
And where Gerontes is the Ocean. "To look a fool," says the Ocean
to Prometheus, "is the secret of the sage,"--saying as deep as the
sea. Who knows the mental reservations of the tempest? And the Power
exclaims, "There is but one free god; it is Jupiter."
Æschylus has his own geography; he has also his own fauna.
This fauna, which strikes as fabulous, is enigmatical rather than
chimerical. The author of these lines has discovered and authenticated
at the Hague, in a glass in the Japanese Museum, the impossible serpent
in the "Orestias," having two heads attached to its two extremities.
There are, it may be added, in that glass several specimens of
bestiality that might belong to another world, at all events strange
and not accounted for, as we are little disposed to admit, for our
part, the absurd hypothesis of the Japanese stitchers of monsters.
Æschylus at moments sees Nature with simplifications stamped with a
mysterious disdain. Here the Pythagorician disappears, and the magian
shows himself. All beasts are the beast. Æschylus seems to see in the
animal kingdom only a dog. The griffin is a "dumb dog;" the eagle is a
"winged dog,"--"The winged dog of Jupiter," says Prometheus.
We have just pronounced the word _magian._ In fact, Æschylus officiates
at times like Job. One would suppose that he exercises over Nature,
over human creatures, and even over gods, a kind of magianism. He
upbraids animals for their voracity. A vulture which seizes, even
while running, a doe-hare with young, and feeds on it, "eats a whole
race stopped in its flight." He calls on the dust and on the smoke; to
the one he says, "Thirsty sister of mire!" to the other, "Black sister
of fire!" He insults the dreaded bay of Salmydessus: "Hard-hearted
mother of vessels."
He brings down to dwarfish proportions the Greeks, conquerors of Troy
by treachery; he shows them brought forth by an implement of war,--he
calls them "these young of a horse." As for the gods, he goes so far as
to incorporate Apollo with Jupiter. He magnificently calls Apollo "the
conscience of Jupiter."
His familiar boldness is absolute, characteristic of sovereignty. He
makes the sacrificer take Iphigenia "as a she-goat" A queen who is a
faithful spouse is for him "the good house-bitch." As for Orestes, he
has seen him when quite a child, and he speaks of him as "wetting his
swaddling-cloths,"--_humectatio ex urina._ He even goes beyond this
Latin. The expression, which we do not repeat here, is to be found in
"Les Plaideurs," act III. scene 3. If you are bent upon reading the
word which we hesitate to write, apply to Racine.
The whole is immense and mournful. The profound despair of fate is in
Æschylus. He shows in terrible lines "the impotence which chains down,
as in a dream, the blind living creatures." His tragedy is nothing
but the old Orphean dithyrambic suddenly launching into tears and
lamentations over man.
[Footnote 1: "Hebraïsmis et Syrianismis."]