In the _Frogs_ of Aristophanes, Aeschylus is made to declare that he
had never introduced a woman in love into any of his plays--[Greek:
ouk oid' oudeis haentin erosan popt' epoiaesa gunaika]. He certainly
has not done so in any one of the seven plays which have survived of
the ninety that he wrote, according to Suidas; and Aristophanes would
not have put that expression in his mouth had it not been true of the
others, too. To us it seems extraordinary that an author should boast
of having kept out of his writings the element which constitutes the
greatest fascination of modern literature; but after reading his seven
surviving tragedies we do not wonder that Aeschylus should not have
introduced a woman in love, or a man either, in plays wherewith he
competed for the state prize on the solemn occasions of the great
festivals at Athens; for love of an exalted kind, worthy of such an
occasion, could not have existed in a community where such ideas
prevailed about women as Aeschylus unfolds in the few places where he
condescends to notice such inferior beings. The only kind of sexual
love of which he shows any knowledge is that referred to in the
remarks of Prometheus and Io regarding the designs of Zeus on the
latter.
An apparent exception seems at first sight to exist in the cordial
reception Clytaemnestra accords to her husband, King Agamemnon, when
he returns from the Trojan war. She calls the day of his return the
most joyous of her life, asserts her complete fidelity to him during
his long absence, declares she is not ashamed to tell her fond
feelings for her spouse in public, and adds that she has wept for him
till the gushing fountains of her eyes have been exhausted. Indeed,
she goes so far in her homage that Agamemnon protests and exclaims,
"Pamper me not after the fashion of women, nor as though I were a
barbaric monarch.... I bid thee reverence me as a man, not a god." But
ere long we discover (as in the case of Achilles), that all this fine
talk of Clytaemnestra is mere verbiage, and worse--deadly hypocrisy.
In reality she has been living with a paramour, and the genuineness
and intensity of her "fond feelings" for her husband may be inferred
from the fact that hardly has he returned when she makes a murderous
assault on him by throwing an artfully woven circular garment over
him, while he is taking a bath, and smiting him till he falls dead.
"And I glory in the deed" she afterwards declares, adding that it "has
long since been meditated."
Agamemnon, for his part, not only brought back with him from Troy a
new concubine, Cassandra, and installed her in his home with the usual
Greek indifference to the feelings of his legitimate wife, but he
really was no better than his murderous wife, since he had been
willing to kill her daughter and his own, Iphigenia, to please his
brother, curb a storm, and expedite the Trojan war. In the words of
the Chorus,
"Thus he dared to become the sacrificer of his daughter
to promote a war undertaken for the avenging of a
woman, and as a first offering for the fleet: and the
chieftains, eager for the fight, set at naught her
supplications and her cries to her father, and her
maiden age. But after prayer her father bade the
ministering priests with all zeal, to lift, like a kid,
high above the altar, her who lay prostrate wrapped in
her robes, and to put a check upon her beauteous mouth,
a voice of curses upon the house, by force of muzzles
and strength which allowed no vent to her cry."
The barbarous sacrifice of an innocent maiden is of course a myth, but
it is a myth which doubtless had many counterparts in Greek life.
Aeschylus did not live so very long after Homer, and in his age it was
still a favorite pastime of the Greeks to ravage cities, a process of
which Aeschylus gives us a vivid picture in a few lines, in his _Seven
against Thebes_:
"And for its women to be dragged away captives, alas!
alas! both the young and the aged, like horses by their
hair, while their vestments are rent about their
persons. And the emptied city cries aloud, while its
booty is wasted amid confused clamors.... And the cries
of children at the breast all bloody resound, and there
is rapine, sister of pell-mell confusion ... And young
female slaves have new sorrows ... so that they hope
for life's gloomy close to come, a guardian against
these all-mournful sorrows."
For women of rank alone is there any consideration--so long as they
are not among the captives; yet even queens are not honored as women,
but only as queens, that is, as the mothers or wives of kings. In _The
Persians_ the Chorus salutes Atossa in terms every one of which
emphasizes this point: "O queen, supreme of Persia's deep-waisted
matrons, aged mother of Xerxes, hail to thee! spouse to Darius,
consort of the Persians, god and mother of a god thou art," while
Clytaemnestra is saluted by the chorus in _Agamemnon_ in these words:
"I have came revering thy majesty, Clytaemnestra; for it is right to
honor the consort of a chieftain hero, when the monarch's throne has
been left empty."
We read in these plays of such unsympathetic things as a
"man-detesting host of Amazons;" of fifty virgins fleeing from
incestuous wedlock and all but one of them cutting their husbands'
throats at night with a sword; of the folly of marrying out of one's
own rank. In all Aeschylus there is on the other hand only one
noticeable reference to a genuine womanly quality--the injunction of
Danaus to his daughters to honor modesty more than life while they are
travelling among covetous men; an admonition much needed, since, as
Danaus adds--characterizing the coarseness and lack of chivalry of the
men--violence is sure to threaten them everywhere, "and on the
fair-formed beauty of virgins everyone that passes by sends forth a
melting dart from his eyes, overcome by desire." Masculine coarseness
and lack of chivalry are also revealed in such abuse of woman as
Aeschylus--in the favorite Greek manner, puts in the mouth of
Eteocles:
"O ye abominations of the wise. Neither in woes nor in
welcome prosperity may I be associated with woman-kind;
for when woman prevails, her audacity is more than one
can live with; and when affrighted she is still a
greater mischief to her home and city."