_ÆSCHYLUS._
Life of Æschylus.--Nature of his Inspiration.--The
Theory of Art in the _Ion_ of Plato.--Æschylus and
Sophocles.--What Æschylus accomplished for the Attic
Drama.--His Demiurgic Genius.--Colossal Scale of his
Work.--Marlowe.--Oriental Imagery.--Absence of Love
as a Motive in his Plays.--The Organic Vitality of
his Art.--Opening Scenes.--Messenger.--Chorus.--His
Theology.--Destiny in Æschylus.--The Domestic Curse.--His
Character-drawing.--Clytemnestra.--Difficulty of Dealing
with the _Prometheus_.--What was his Fault?--How was
Zeus justified?--Shelley's Opinion.--The Last Trilogy
of _Prometheus_.--Middle Plays in Trilogies.--Attempt
to Reconstruct a _Prometheis_.--The Part of
Herakles.--Obscurity of the Promethean Legend.--The
Free Handling of Myths permitted to the Dramatist.--The
_Oresteia_.--Its Subject.--The Structure of the Three
Plays.--The _Agamemnon_.--Its Imagery.--Cassandra.--The
Cry of the King.--The Chorus.--Iphigeneia at the
Altar.--Menelaus abandoned by Helen.--The Dead Soldiers
on the Plains of Troy.--The _Persæ_.--The Crime of
Xerxes.--Irony of the Situation.--Description of the Battle
of Salamis.--The Style of Æschylus.--His Religious Feeling.
Æschylus, son of Euphorion, was born at Eleusis in 525 B.C. When he
was thirty-five years of age, just ten years after the production of
his first tragedy, he fought at Marathon. This fact is significant
in its bearing on his art and on his life. Æschylus belonged to a
family distinguished during the decisive actions of the Persian war by
their personal bravery. Ameinias, his brother, gained the _aristeia_,
or reward for valor, at the battle of Salamis; and there was an old
picture in the theatre of Dionysus at Athens which represented the
great deeds of the poet and his brother Cynægeirus at Marathon. Of his
military achievements he was more proud than of his poetical success;
for he mentions the former and is silent about the latter in the
epitaph he wrote for his own tomb. Of his actual life at Athens, we
only know this much, that he sided with the old aristocratic party.
His retirement to Sicily after his defeat by Sophocles in 468 B.C.
arose probably from the fact that Cimon, who adjudged the prize, was
leader of the democratic opposition, and was felt to have allowed his
political leanings to influence his decision. His second retirement to
Sicily in 453 B.C., after the production of the _Oresteia_, in which
he unsuccessfully supported the Areiopagus against Pericles, was due,
perhaps, in like manner to his disagreement with the rising powers in
the State. That at some period of his career he was publicly accused of
impiety, because he had either divulged the mysteries of Demeter, or
had offended popular taste by his presentation of the _Furies_ on the
stage, rests upon sufficient antique testimony. Such charges were not
uncommon at Athens, as might be proved by the biographies of Anaxagoras
and Socrates. But the exact nature of the prosecution directed against
Æschylus is not known; we cannot connect it with any of his extant
works for certain, or determine how far it affected his action. He died
at Gela, in 456 B.C., aged sixty-nine, having spent his life partly at
Athens and partly at the court of Hiero, pursuing in both places his
profession of tragic poet and chorus-master.
Pausanias tells a story of his early vocation to dramatic art: "When
he was a boy he was set to watch grapes in the country, and there
fell asleep. In his slumber Dionysus appeared to him, and ordered him
to apply himself to tragedy. At daybreak he made the attempt, and
succeeded very easily." There is no reason that this legend should not
have been based on truth. It was the general opinion of antiquity that
Æschylus was a poet possessed by the deity, working less by artistic
method than by immediate inspiration. Athenæus asserts crudely that he
composed his tragedies while drunk with wine: #methyôn goun egraphe tas
tragôidias#; and Sophocles is reported to have told him that "He did
what he ought to do, but did it without knowing." Longinus, in like
manner, after praising Æschylus for the audacity of his imagination
and the heroic grandeur of his conceptions, adds that his plays were
frequently unpolished, unrefined, ill-digested, and rough in style.
Similar expressions of opinion might be quoted from Quintilian, who
describes his style "as sublime and weighty, and grandiloquent often to
a fault, but in most of his compositions rude and wanting in order."
He adds that "the Athenians allowed later poets to correct his dramas
and to bring them into competition under new forms, when many of them
gained prizes." Æschylus seems, therefore, to have impressed critics of
antiquity with the god-intoxicated passion of his genius rather than
with the perfection of his style or the consummate beauty of his art.
It is possible that he received less justice from his fellow-countrymen
than we, who have been educated by the Shakespearian drama, can now pay
him.
Æschylus might be selected to illustrate the artistic psychology of
Plato. In the _Phædrus_ Plato lays down the doctrine that poetic
inspiration is akin to madness--an efflation from the Muses, a divine
mania analogous to love. In the _Ion_ he further develops this
position, and asserts that "all good poets compose their beautiful
poems not as works of art, but because they are inspired and
possessed." The analogy which he selects is drawn from the behavior of
Bacchantes under the influence of Dionysus. He wishes to distinguish
between the mental operations of the poet and the philosopher, to show
that the regions of poetry and science are separate, and to prove that
rule and method are less sure guides than instinct when the work to be
produced is a poem. "The poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and
there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of
his senses, and the mind is no longer in him; when he has not attained
to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles."
The final dictum of the _Ion_ is, "inspiration, not art"--#theion
kai mê technikon#. It is curious to find a Greek of the best age,
himself in early days a poet, and throughout distinguished by genius
allied to the poetic, thus boldly and roundly stating a theory which
corresponds to the vulgar notion that poetry comes by nature, untutored
and untaught, and which seems to contradict the practice and opinion
of supreme authorities like Sophocles and Goethe. The truth is, that
among artists we find two broadly differentiated types. The one kind
produce their best work when all their faculties are simultaneously
excited, and when the generative impulse takes possession of them.
They seem to obey the dictates of a power superior to their ordinary
faculties. The other kind are always conscious of their methods and
their aims; they do nothing, as it were, by accident; they avoid
improvisation, and subordinate their creative faculty to reason. The
laws of art may be just as fully appreciated by the more instinctive
artists, and may have equally determined their choice of form and their
calculation of effects; but at the moment of production these rules are
thrust into the background, whereas they are continually present to the
minds of the deliberate workers. It may be said in passing that this
distinction enables us to understand some phrases which the Italians,
acutely sensitive to artistic conditions, have reserved for passionate
and highly inspired workers; they speak, for instance, of painting a
picture or blocking out a statue _con furia_, when the artist is a
Tintoretto or a Michael Angelo. If there is any truth at all in this
analysis, we are justified in believing that Æschylus belonged to the
former and Sophocles to the latter class of poets, and that this is the
secret of the criticism passed by Sophocles upon his predecessor. The
account which Æschylus himself gave of his tragedies throws no light
upon his method; he is reported to have said that they were "fragments
picked up from the mighty feasts of Homer." The value he attached to
them is proved by his saying that he dedicated what he wrote to Time.
Though the ancients may have been right in regarding Æschylus as
an enthusiastic writer, obeying the impulse of the god within him
rather than the rules of reason, no dramatic poet ever had a higher
sense of the æsthetic unity which tragedy demands. Each of his
masterpieces presents to the imagination a coherent and completely
organized whole; every part is penetrated with the dominant thought
and passion that inspired it. He had, moreover, the strongest sense
of the formal requirements of his art. Tragedy had scarcely passed
beyond the dithyrambic stage when he received it from the hands of
Phrynichus. Æschylus gave it the form which, with comparatively
unimportant alterations, it maintained throughout the brilliant period
of Attic culture. It was he who curtailed the function of the chorus
and developed dialogue, thus expanding the old Thespian elements of
tragedy in accordance with the true spirit of the drama. By adding a
second actor, by attending diligently to the choric songs and dances,
by inventing the cothurnus and the tragic mask, and by devising
machinery and scenes adapted to the large scale of the Athenian stage,
he gave its permanent form to the dramatic art of the Greeks. However
god-possessed he may have been during the art of composition, he was
therefore a wise critic and a potent founder in all matters pertaining
to the theatre. Yet though Æschylus in this way made the drama, the
style in which he worked went out of date in his own lifetime. So
rapid was the evolution of intelligence at Athens that during a single
generation his tragedies became, we will not say old-fashioned, but
archaic. They were duly put upon the stage; a chorus at the public
expense was provided for their representation, and the MS. which
authorized their canon and their text was regarded as a public
treasure. Yet the Athenians already had come to love and respect them
in the same way as the English race love and respect the oratorios of
Handel. They praised them for their unapproachable magnificence; they
knew that no man of the latter days could match them in their own kind;
but they criticised their antique form and obsolete embellishments.
The poet who in his youth had played the part of innovator, and who
had shocked the public by his realistic presentation of the Furies,
depended in the heyday of the fame of Aristophanes upon conservative
support and favor.
Æschylus was essentially the demiurge of ancient art. The purely
creative faculty has never been exhibited upon a greater scale, or
applied to material more utterly beyond the range of feebler poets.
He possessed in the highest degree the power of giving life and form
to the vast, the incorporeal, and the ideal. In his dramas, mountains
were made to speak; Oceanus received shape, conversing face to face
with the Titan Prometheus, while his daughters, nurslings of the waves
and winds, were gathered on the Scythian crags in groups to listen to
their argument. The old intangible, half-mystical, half-superstitious
fears of the Greek conscience became substantial realities in his mind.
Justice and Insolence and Até no longer floated, dream-like, in the
background of religious thought: he gave them a pedigree, connected
them in a terrible series, and established them as ministers of supreme
Zeus. The Eumenides, whom the Greeks before him had not dared to figure
to their fancy, assumed a form more hideous than that of Gorgons or
Harpies. Their symbolic torches, their snake-entwined tresses, their
dreadful eyes, and nostrils snorting fiery breath, were shown for the
first time visibly in the trilogy of _Orestes_. It was a revelation
which Greek art accepted as decisive. Thus the imagination of Æschylus
added new deities to the Athenian Pantheon. The same creative faculty
enabled him to inform elemental substances, fire, water, air, with
personal vitality. The heaven, in his verse, yearns to wound the earth
with love-embraces; the falling rain impregnates the rich soil. The
throes of Ætna are a Titan's groaning. The fire that leaps from Ida to
the Hermæan crags of Lemnos, from Ægiplanctus to the Arachnæan height,
has life within it. There is nothing dead, devoid of soul, in the world
of this arch-mythopoet. Even the ghosts and phantoms, dreams and omens,
on which he loves to dwell, are substantial. Their reality exists
outside the soul they dominate.
As befits a demiurgic nature, Æschylus conceived and executed upon a
stupendous scale. His outlines are huge; his figures are colossal; his
style is broad and sweeping--like a river in its fulness and its might.
Each of his plays might be compared to a gigantic statue, whereof the
several parts, taken separately, are beautiful, while the whole is put
together with majestic harmony. But as the sculptor, in modelling a
colossus, cannot afford to introduce the details which would grace a
chimney ornament, so Æschylus was forced to sacrifice the working-out
of minor motives. His imagination, penetrated through and through with
the spirit of his subject as a whole, was more employed in presenting
a series of great situations, wrought together and combined into a
single action, than in elaborating the minutiæ of characters and plots.
The result has been that those students who delight in detail have
complained of a certain disproportion between his huge design and his
insufficient execution. It has too frequently been implied that he
could rough-hew like a Cyclops, but that he could not finish like a
Praxiteles; that he was more capable of sketching in an outline than of
filling up its parts. Fortunately we possess the means of laying bare
the misconception upon which these complaints are founded. There still
remains one, but only one, of his colossal works entire. The _Oresteia_
is sufficient to prove that we gain no insight into his method as
an artist if we consider only single plays. He thought and wrote in
trilogies. Sophocles, with whom it is usual to compare Æschylus,
somewhat to the disadvantage of the latter, abandoned the large scale,
the uncial letters, of the trilogy. Each separate Sophoclean drama is
a studied whole. In order to do Æschylus the very barest justice, we
ought therefore to contrast, not the _Agamemnon_ alone, but the entire
_Oresteia_ with the _Oedipus_ or the _Antigone_. It will then be seen
that the one poet, designing colossi, gave them the style and finish
and the unity which suit a statue larger than life-size; the other,
restricting himself within more narrow limits, was free to lavish labor
on the slightest details of his model. Such elaboration, on the scale
adopted by Æschylus, would have produced a bewildering and painful
effect of complexity. The vast design, which it was the artist's
object to throw into the utmost possible relief, would inevitably have
suffered from excess of finish.
Few dramatists have ventured, like Æschylus, to wield the chisel of
a Titan, or to knead whole mountains into statues corresponding to
the superhuman grandeur of their thought. Few, indeed, can have felt
that this was their true province, that to this they had the thews and
sinews adequate. He stands alone in his triumphant use of the large
manner, and this solitude is prejudicial to his fame with students
whose taste has been formed in the school of Sophocles. Surveying the
long roll of illustrious tragedians, there is but one, until we come
to Victor Hugo, in whom the Æschylean spirit found fresh incarnation;
and he had fallen upon days disadvantageous to his full development:
his life was cut short in its earliest bloom, and the conditions under
which he had to work, obscure and outcast from society, were adverse
to the highest production. This poet is our own Christopher Marlowe.
Like Æschylus, Marlowe's imagination was at home in the illimitable;
like Æschylus, he apprehended immaterial and elemental forces--lusts,
ambitions, and audacities of soul--as though they were substantial
entities, and gave them shape and form; like Æschylus, he was the
master of a "mighty line," the maker of a new celestial music for
his race, the founder and creator of an art which ruled his century,
the mystagogue of pomps and pageants and things terrible and things
superb in shrines unvisited by earlier poets of his age and clime; like
Æschylus, he stands arraigned of emptiness, extravagance, and "sound
and fury," because the scale on which he wrought was vast, because he
set no verbal limit to the presentation of the passion or the thought
in view. Comparing Æschylus to Marlowe is comparing the monarch of
the pine forest to the sapling fir, the full-grown lion to the lion's
whelp, the achievement of the hero to the promise of the stripling.
Yet Herakles in his cradle, when he strangled Hera's serpents, already
revealed the firm hand and unflinching nerve of him who plucked the
golden fruit of the Hesperides. Even so Marlowe's work betrays the
style and spirit of a youthful Titan; it is the labor of a beardless
Æschylus, the first-fruit of Apollo's laurel-bough untimely burned,
the libation of a consecrated priest who, while a boy, already stood
"chin-deep in the Pierian flood." If we contrast the _Supplices_, which
Æschylus can hardly have written before the age at which Marlowe died,
with _Tamburlaine_, which was certainly produced before Marlowe was
twenty-six, the most immature work of the Greek with the most immature
work of the English dramatist, we obtain a standard for estimating the
height to which the author of _Faustus_ might have grown if he had
lived to write his _Oresteia_ in the fulness of a vigorous maturity.
Much that has been described as Asiatic in the genius of Æschylus may
be referred to what I have called his demiurgic force. No mere citation
of Oriental similes will account for the impression of hugeness left
upon our memory, for the images enormous as those of farthest Ind, yet
shaped with true Hellenic symmetry, for the visions vast as those of
Ezekiel, yet conveyed withal in rich and radiant Greek. The so-called
Asiatic element in Æschylus was something which he held in common with
the poets and prophets of the East--a sense of life more mystic and
more deep, a power to seize it and discover it more real and plastic
than is often given to the nations of the West. This determination
towards the hitherto invisible, unshaped, and unbelieved, to which
he must give form, and for which he would fain win credence, may
possibly help to explain the absence of human love as a main motive
in his tragedies. There is plenty of Ares--too much, indeed, unless
we recollect that the poet was a man of Marathon--but of Aphrodite
nothing in his inspiration. It would seem that this passion, which
formed the theme of Euripides' best work, and which Sophocles in the
_Antigone_ used to enhance the tragic situation brought about through
the self-will of the heroine, had no attraction for Æschylus. Among
the fragments of his plays there is, indeed, one passage in which
he speaks of love as a cosmical force, controlling the elemental
powers of heaven and earth, and producing the flocks and fruits which
sustain mortal life. The lines in question are put into the mouth of
Aphrodite. The lost _Myrmidones_, again, described the love of Achilles
for Patroclus, which Æschylus seems to have portrayed with a strength
of passion that riveted the attention of antiquity. The plot of the
_Supplices_, in like manner, implies the lawless desire of the sons of
Ægyptus for the daughters of Danaus; and the adultery of Clytemnestra
with Ægisthus lies in the background of the _Agamemnon_. But of
love in the more romantic modern sense of the word we find no trace
either in the complete plays or in the fragments of Æschylus. It lay,
perhaps, too close at hand for him to care to choose it as the theme
of tragic poetry; and, had he so selected it, he could hardly have
avoided dwelling on its aberrations. The general feeling of the Greeks
about love, as well as his own temper, would have made this necessary.
It did not occur to the Greeks to separate love in its healthy and
simple manifestations by any sharp line of demarcation from the other
emotions of humanity. The brotherly, filial, and wifely feelings--those
which owe their ascendency to use and to the sanctities of domestic
life--appeared in their eyes more important than the affection of
youth for maid unwedded. When love ceased to be the expression on
the one side of a physical need, and on the other the binding tie
that kept the family together, the Greeks regarded it as a disease, a
madness. Plato, who treated it with seriousness, classed it among the
#maniai#. Euripides portrayed it as a god-sent curse on Phædra. Viewed
in this light, it may be urged that the love of Zeus for Io, in the
_Prometheus_, is an example of a passion which became an unbearable
burden and source of misery to its victim; but of what we understand
by love there is here in reality no question. The tale of Io rather
resembles the survival of some mystic Oriental myth of incarnation.
The organic vitality which Æschylus, by the exercise of his creative
power, communicated to the structure of his tragedies, is further
noticeable in his power of conducting a drama without prologue and
without narration. In Æschylus, the information that is necessary in
order to place the spectators at the proper point of view is conveyed
as part of the action. He does not, like Euripides, compose a formal
and preliminary speech, or, like Shakespeare, introduce two or three
superfluous characters in conversation. In this respect the openings of
the _Prometheus_, the _Agamemnon_, and the _Eumenides_ are masterpieces
of the most consummate art. Not only are we plunged _in medias res_,
without the slightest sacrifice of clearness, but the spectacle
presented to our imagination is stirring in the highest degree. The
fire has leaped from mountain peak to peak until at last it blazes on
the watchman's eyes; Hephæstus and his satellites are actually engaged
in nailing down the Titan to his bed of pain; the Furies are slumbering
within the sacred Delphian shrine, and the ghost of Clytemnestra moves
among them, rousing each in turn from her deep trance. Euripides,
proceeding less by immediate vision than by patient thought, prefixed
a monologue, which contained a programme of preceding events, and
prepared the spectator for what would follow in the play. These
narratives are often frigid, and not unfrequently are placed, without
propriety, in the mouth of one of the actors. We feel that a wholly
detached prologue would have been more artistic.
The same is true about the speeches of the Messenger. The art of
Æschylus was far too highly organized to be obliged to have recourse to
such rude methods. It is true that, when he pleased, as in the _Persæ_,
he gave the principal part to the Messenger. The actors in that play
are little better than spectators; and the same may be said about the
_Seven against Thebes_. But the Messenger, though employed as here for
special purposes, was no integral part of his dramatic machinery; nor
did he ever commit the decisive event of the drama to narration. His
master-stroke as a dramatic poet--the cry of Agamemnon, following close
upon the prophecies of Cassandra, and breaking the silence like a clap
of doom, in that awful moment when the scene is left empty and the
chorus tremble with the apprehension of a coming woe--would probably
have yielded in the hands of Euripides to the speech of a servant. It
was not that the later poet would not willingly have employed every
means in his power for stirring the emotions of his audience; but he
had not the creative imagination of his predecessor; he could not grasp
his subject as a whole so perfectly as to dispense with artificial and
mechanical devices. He fell back, therefore, upon narrative, in which
he was a supreme master.
Equally remarkable from this point of view is the Æschylean treatment
of the Chorus. It is never really separated from the action of the
play. In the _Prometheus_, for example, the Oceanidæ actually share the
doom of the protagonist. In the _Supplices_ the daughters of Danaus may
be termed the protagonist; for upon them converges the whole interest
of the drama. In the _Seven against Thebes_ the participation of the
Chorus in the fate of the chief actors is proved by half of them siding
with Ismene and the other half with Antigone at the conclusion. In the
_Persæ_ they represent the nation which has suffered through the folly
of Xerxes. In the _Agamemnon_ the elders of Mycenæ assume an attitude
directly hostile to Ægisthus and Clytemnestra. In the _Choëphoroe_ the
women who sympathize with Electra further the scheme of Orestes by
putting Ægisthus off the track of danger and sending him unarmed to
meet his murderers. In the _Eumenides_ the Furies play a part at least
equal in importance to that of Orestes. They, like the protagonist,
stand before the judgment-seat of Pallas and accept the verdict of the
Areiopagus. Thus, in each of the extant plays of Æschylus, even the
Chorus, which was subsequently so far separated from the action as to
become a mere commentator and spectator, is vitally important in the
conduct of the drama. Euripides, by formalizing the several elements of
the tragic art, by detaching the Chorus, introducing a prologue, and
expanding the functions of the Messenger, sacrificed that higher kind
of unity which we admire in the harmonious working of complex parts.
What he gained was the opportunity of concentrating attention upon
the conflict of motives, occasions for the psychological analysis of
character, and scope for ethical reflection and rhetorical description.
I have hitherto been occupied by what appear to me the essential
features of the genius of Æschylus--its demiurgic faculty of
creativeness, and its capacity of dealing with heroic rather than
merely human forms. To pass to the consideration of his theology would
at this point be natural and easy. I do not, however, wish to dwell
on what is called the prophetic aspect of his tragedy at present. It
is enough to say that, here, as in the sphere of pure art, he was in
the truest sense creative. Without exactly removing the old landmarks,
he elevated the current conception of Zeus regarded as the supreme
deity, and introduced a novel life and depth of meaning into the moral
fabric of the Greek religion. Much as he rejoiced in the delineation
of Titanic and primeval powers, he paid but slight attention to the
minor gods of the Pantheon; his creed was monotheism detached upon a
pantheistic background, to which the forms of polytheism gave variety
and color. Zeus was all in all for Æschylus far more than for his
predecessors, Homer and Hesiod. The most remarkable point about the
Æschylean theology is that, in spite of its originality, it seems
to have but little affected the substance of serious Greek thought.
Plato, for example, talks of Prometheus in the _Protagoras_ as if no
new conception of his character had been revealed to him by Æschylus.
We are not, therefore, justified in regarding the dramatic poet as in
any strict sense a prophet, and the oracles he uttered are chiefly
valuable as indications of his own peculiar ways of thinking; nor ought
we, even so, perhaps, to demand from Æschylus too much consistency. The
_Supplices_, for instance, cannot without due reservation be used to
illustrate the _Prometheus_; since the dramatic situation in the two
tragedies is so different as to account for any apparent divergence of
opinion.
There is, however, one point in the morality of Æschylus concerning
fate and freewill which calls for special comment, since we run a
danger here of doing real violence to his art by overstating some
one theory about his supposed philosophical intention. I allude, of
course, to his conception of destiny. If we adopt the fatalistic
explanation of Greek tragedy propounded by Schlegel, we can hardly
avoid coarsening and demoralizing fables which owe their interest not
to the asphyxiating force of destiny, but to the action and passion
of human beings. If, on the other hand, we overstrain the theological
doctrine of Nemesis, we run a risk of trying to find sermons in works
of art, and of exaggerating the importance of details which support our
favorite hypothesis. It should never be forgotten that whatever view
we take of the moral and religious purpose of Greek tragedy has been
gained by subsequent analysis. It was not in any case present to the
consciousness of the poet as a necessary condition of his art as art.
His first business was to provide for the dramatic presentation of his
subject: his philosophy, whether ethical or theological, transpired
in the heat and stress of production, not because he sought to give
it deliberate expression, but because it formed an integral part of
the fabric of his mind. Æschylus, in common with the Greeks of his
age, firmly believed in the indissoluble connection between acts and
consequences, and in the continuation of these consequences through
successive generations. "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also
reap," "the fathers have eaten a sour grape and the children's teeth
are set on edge," formed the groundwork of his view of human life. This
sort of fatalism he colored with religious theories adopted from the
antique theology of his race, but strongly moralized and developed in
the light of his own reason. The importance attributed by the Greeks
to hereditary curses, even in the common affairs of life, is proved
by the familiar example of the proclamation by the Spartans against
Pericles in the first year of the Peloponnesian War. Much of elder
superstition, therefore, clings about his ethics, and an awful sense of
guilt and doom attaches to acts in themselves apparently indifferent;
nor can we fail to recognize a belief in fate as fate, #to peprômenon#,
superior to all besides. The realm of tragic terror lies precisely in
this border-land between inexorable reason and unreasoned fear. It
has nothing to do with pure science or pure religion: they speak each
for themselves with their own voice; but it is not the voice of the
dramatist. On the one hand, logical fatalism offers no freedom for the
play of character, no turning-points of choice, no revolutions which
may rouse our sympathy and stir us with the sense of self-determined
ruin. On the other hand, theology, in its methodic form, supplies,
indeed, the text of sermons, admonitions, and commandments, but not the
subject-matter for a work of art. Where the necessity of circumstance
or the will of the Deity is paramount, human action sinks into
insignificance; the canons of inevitable sequence and of obedience
under pain of penalty supersede the casuistry of balanced motives,
and the poet is swallowed up in the divine or the logician. Somewhere
between the two, in the intermediate darkness, or #metaichmios skotos#,
where all the ways of life are perilous, and where no clear light
reveals the pitfalls of fate and the gins of religious duty, lies
the track of the tragedian. His men and women are free; yet their
action is overruled by destiny. They err against the law of heaven
and flourish for a season; but the law pursues them and enacts its
penalty. While terror and pity are stirred by the pervading sense of
human helplessness, scope is still left for the exercise of the moral
judgment; nor is the poet precluded from teaching his audience by
precept and example. These remarks apply to the domestic curse which
played so prominent a part in all Greek tragedy, and especially in
the dramas of Æschylus. It was no mere avalanche of doom falling from
above and crushing the innocent and the criminal alike; nor, again,
can it justly be paralleled by what it most resembles, the taint of
hereditary disease. It partook of the blind force of fate; it was
propagated from generation to generation by laws analogous to those
which govern madness; yet it contained another element, inasmuch as the
transgression of each successive victim was a necessary condition of
its prolongation. Sin alone, however, was not sufficient to establish
its mysterious power; for all men are liable to offend against the
divine law, and yet all families are not afflicted with a curse.
In order to appreciate its nature, all these factors must be taken
into account; their sum total, notwithstanding the exactitude of our
calculation, remains within the realm of mystery. The undiscovered
residuum, or rather the resolution of all these elements in a power
which is all of them and more than all, is fate. Students who are
curious to appreciate the value attached by the Greeks themselves to
the several elements implicit in the notion of domestic Até, should
attentively peruse the longer of the two arguments to the _Seven
against Thebes_, while the play itself sets forth more energetically
than any other the terrible lesson of the Æschylean Nemesis. The
protagonist Eteocles is a curse-intoxicated man, driven by the doom
of his race and by the imprecations of his father on a dreadful shoal
of fate. He walks open-eyed to meet his destiny--to slay his brother
and be slain. Still, helpless as he seems, he is not innocent. His
own rebellious and selfish nature, by rousing the fury of Oedipus,
kindles afresh the smouldering flame of the ancestral Até. Thus the
fate which overwhelms him is compounded of hereditary guilt, personal
transgression, and the courage-quelling terror of a father's curse. But
it is more than all this: it is an irresistible compelling force. He
cannot avoid it, since action has been thrust upon him by the strength
of circumstance. The tragic horror of his situation arises from the
necessity under which he labors of going forward, though he knows that
the next step leads to a bottomless abyss.
In estimating the characters of Æschylus, what has already been said
about his art in general must be taken into account. He was occupied
with the task of exhibiting a great action, a #drama# in the strictest
sense of the Greek phrase; and this action was frequently so colossal
in its relations as to preclude the niceties of merely personal
character. Persons had to become types in order to play their part
efficiently. The underlying moral and religious idea was blended with
the æsthetic purpose of the poet, and penetrated with the interest
pertaining to the clash of conflicting principles: the total effect
produced sometimes seems to defy analysis of character in detail. The
psychology of his chief characters is, therefore, inherent in their
action, and is only calculable in connection with their momentary
environments. We have to infer their specific quality less from what
they say than from their bearing and their conduct in the crises of
the drama. Only after profound study of the situation of each tragedy,
after steeping our imagination in the elementary conditions selected by
the poet, can we realize the fulness of their individuality. In this
respect Æschylus resembles Homer. Like Homer, he repeats the work of
nature, and creates men and women entire. He does not strive to lay
bare the conscious workings of the mind piecemeal. He has none of the
long speeches on which Euripides relied for setting forth the flux and
reflux of contending motives, or for making clear the attitude adopted
by his _dramatis personæ_. There is no revelation of the anatomical
method in his art; nor, again, can we detect the _ars celandi artem_
to which poets of a more reflective age are forced to have recourse.
Everything with Æschylus is organic; each part is subordinated to the
whole which pre-existed in his mind, and which has been evolved in
its essential unity from his imagination. Even the weighty sentences
and gnomic judgments upon human affairs, uttered by his actors, are
necessitated by the straits in which they find themselves. Severed
from their context, they lose half their value; whereas the similar
reflections in Euripides may be detached without injury, and read like
extracts from a commonplace-book. Perhaps sufficient stress has not
been laid by critics upon this quality of absolute creativeness, which
distinguishes the Homeric, Æschylean, and Shakespearian poets from
those who proceed from mental analysis to artistic presentation. It is
easy to render an account of characters that have first been thought
out as ethical specimens and then provided with a suitable exterior.
It is very difficult to dissect those which started into being by an
act of intuitive invention, and which, dissociated from the texture
of circumstance woven round them, appear at first sight to elude our
intellectual grasp. Yet the latter are found in the long run to be cast
in the more vital mould. Once apprehended, they haunt the memory like
real persons, and we may fancy, if we choose, innumerable series of
events through which they would maintain their individuality intact.
They are, in fact, living creatures, and not puppets of the poet's
brain.
Of the characters of Æschylus, those which have been wrought with
the greatest care, and which leave the most profound impression on
the memory, are Clytemnestra and Prometheus. Considering how slight
were the outlines of the Homeric picture of Clytemnestra, it may be
said that Æschylus created her. What is still more remarkable than
his creation of Clytemnestra is that he should have realized her
far more vividly than any of the men whom he has drawn. This proves
that Æschylus, at least among the Attic Greeks, gave a full share
to women in the affairs of the great world of public action. As a
woman, she stands outside the decencies and duties of womanhood,
supporting herself by the sole strength of her powerful nature and
indomitable will. The self-sufficingness of Clytemnestra is the
main point in her portrait. Her force of character is revealed by
the sustained repression of her real feelings and the concealment
of her murderous purpose, which enable her to compass Agamemnon's
death. During the critical moments when she receives her husband
in state, and leads him to the bath within the palace, she remains
calm and collected. The deed that she has plotted must, if ever, be
done at once. A single word from the Chorus, who are aware of her
relations to Ægisthus, would spoil all her preparations. Yet she
shows no fear, and can command the fairest flowers of rhetoric to
greet the king with feigned congratulations. The same strength is
displayed in her treatment of Cassandra, on whom she wastes no words,
expends no irritable energy, although she hates and has the mind to
murder her. Studied craft and cold disdain mark her bearing at the
supreme crisis. When the death-blow has been given to Agamemnon, she
breathes freely; her language reveals the exhilaration of one who
expands his lungs and opens wide his nostrils to snuff the elastic
air of liberty. The blood upon her raiment is as pleasant to her as
a shower of rain on thirsty cornfields; she shouts like soldiers
when the foemen turn to fly. Æschylus has sustained the impression
of her force of character by the radiant speech with which he gifts
her. This splendor of rhetoric belongs by nature to the magnificent
and lawless woman who rejoices in her shame. It is like the superb
colors of a venomous lily. The contrast between the serpent-coils of
her sophistic speech to Agamemnon at the palace-gate and the short
sentences in which she describes his murder--true tiger-leaps of
utterance--is a triumph of dramatic art. As regards her motive for
killing the king, I see no reason to suppose that Æschylus intended
to diverge from the Homeric tradition. Clytemnestra has lived in
adultery with Ægisthus; she dares not face a public discovery of her
fault, nor is she willing to forego her paramour. The passage in the
_Choëphoroe_, where she argues with Orestes before her own murder,
proves that she has no other valid reason to set forth. Her son tells
her she shall be slain and laid by the side of Ægisthus, seeing that
in life she preferred him to her lord. All her answer is: "Child, in
your father's absence I was sorely tried." The same is clear from
the allusions in the _Agamemnon_ to the nerveless lion, who tumbles
in the royal couch, and is a sorry housekeeper for the departed
king. Æschylus, however, with the instinct of a great poet, has not
suffered our minds to dwell wholly upon this adulterous motive. He
makes Clytemnestra put forth other pleas, and intends us to believe
in their validity, as lending her self-confidence in the commission
of her crime, and as suggesting reasons for our sympathy. Revenge for
Iphigeneia's sacrifice, the superstitious sense of the Erinnys of the
house of Atreus, jealousy of Chryseis and Cassandra, mingle with the
master impulse in her mind, and furnish her with specious arguments.
The solidity of Clytemnestra's character is impressed upon us with a
force and a reality of presentation that have never been surpassed. She
maintains the same _aplomb_, the same cold glittering energy of speech,
the same presence of mind and unswerving firmness of nerve, whether
she bandies words of bitter irony with the Chorus, or ceremoniously
receives the king, or curls the lip of scorn at Cassandra, or defies
the Argives after Agamemnon's death. She loves power, and despises
show. When the deed is done, and fair words are no longer needed, her
hypocrisy is cast aside. At the same time she defends herself with a
moral impudence which is only equalled by her intellectual skill, and
rises at last to the sublimity of arrogance when she asserts her right
to be regarded as the incarnate demon of the house. Clytemnestra has
been frequently compared to Lady Macbeth; nor is it easy to think of
the one without being reminded of the other. Clytemnestra, however, is
a less elastic character than Lady Macbeth: she is cast in metal of a
tougher temper, and the springs which move her are more simple. Lady
Macbeth has not in reality so much force and fibre: she does not design
Duncan's death many months beforehand; she acts from overmastering
impulse under the temptation of opportunity, and when her husband
and herself are sunk chin-deep in blood she cannot bear the load of
guilt upon her conscience. Shakespeare has conceived and analyzed a
woman more sensitive, and therefore more liable to nervous failure,
than Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra never breaks down. Her sin feeds and
nourishes her nature, instead of starving and palsying it; her soul
grows fat and prospers, nor does she know what conscience means. She
is never more imposing in her pride of intellectual strength than
when she receives the feigned news of Orestes' death. Just as the
superior nature of Lady Macbeth is enhanced by contrast with her weaker
husband, so Clytemnestra appears to the greatest advantage by the side
of Ægisthus. Ægisthus in the last scene of the _Agamemnon_ brags and
blusters; Clytemnestra utters no superfluous syllable. Ægisthus insults
the corpse of the king; Clytemnestra is satisfied with having slain
him. Nothing shakes her courage or weakens her determination. When
Orestes turns his sword against her in the _Choëphoroe_, her first
impulse is to call aloud: "Reach me with all speed an axe of weight
to tire a man, that we may know at once the issue of this combat."
She will measure weapons with her son. And when his blade is already
at her breasts, she has the nerve to bare them and exclaim: "My son,
behold where thou didst lie; these nipples gave thee milk." There
is no groaning in her last life-struggle. She dies, as she lived,
self-sustained and equal to all emergencies. This terrible personality
endures even in the grave. When she rises in the _Eumenides_, a ghost
from Hades, it is with bitter taunts and a most biting tongue that
she stirs up the Furies to revenge. If we are to seek a parallel for
Clytemnestra in our own dramatic literature, I should be inclined
to look for it in the _Vittoria Corrombona_ of Webster. The modern
poet has not developed his "white devil of Italy" with the care that
Æschylus bestowed on Clytemnestra. Her portrait remains a sketch rather
than a finished picture; and the circumstances of her tragedy are
infinitely less impressive than those which place the Queen of Mycenæ
on so eminent a pinnacle of crime. But Vittoria is cast in the same
mould. Like Clytemnestra, she has the fascination and the force of
sin, self-satisfied and self-contained to face the world with brazen
arrogance, and browbeat truth before the judgment-seat of gods or men.
Of all the masterpieces of Greek tragedy which have been preserved
to us, the _Prometheus_ of Æschylus presents by far the greatest
difficulty, and involves at the same time by far the most enticing
problems. Its paramount interest lies in the fact that the dramatic
action is removed beyond and above the sphere of humanity, and that
the poet, who was also the chief prophet of Hellas in the very prime
of Athenian culture, is dealing with the mystery of God's relation to
the world and man. In the trilogy of the _Oresteia_ he is concerned
with heroes; in the _Prometheus_, with gods, Titans, and demigods. The
_dramatis personæ_ are Prometheus, Hephæstus and his comrade Force,
Hermes, the herald of Zeus, Io, the victim of the love of Zeus, and
Oceanus, the ruler of the streams and seas. The Chorus is composed
of Oceanides, the maiden daughters of the deep, cloud-bearing dews
and mists, who gather round the Scythian crags, where Prometheus lies
chained and exposed to fiery heat by day and freezing cold by night.
The only mortal who visits him is Io; and she bears within her the
child of Zeus. Thus everything in the tragedy is conceived upon a vast
and visionary scale. It is no episode of real or legendary history
which forms the subject-matter of the play. The powers of heaven and
earth are in action. The destinies of Olympian Zeus and of the whole
human race are at stake. In this lofty region of the imagination the
genius of Æschylus moves freely. The scenery of his drama is in harmony
with its stupendous subject. Barren mountain-summits, the sea outspread
beneath, the sky with all its stars above, silently falling snow-flakes
and tempestuous winds, thunder and earthquake and riven precipices are
the images which crowd upon the mind. In like manner the duration of
time is indefinitely extended. Not years, but centuries, measure the
continuance of the struggle between the sovereign will of Zeus and the
stubborn resistance of the Titan.
At the opening of the play Prometheus appears in the midst of the
desert which is destined for his prison-home. Hephæstus and his
satellites chain him down with adamantine rivets, so that he may
neither bend the knee nor rest in slumber, but must cling, crucified
in wakeful torment, to the unyielding rock. While they are at their
work, Prometheus utters not a word or groan. He is gifted with unerring
foresight, and knows surely that his doom must be borne, and also
that his doom must have an end. He defies the power of Zeus in frigid
silence; not sullenly--because, when sympathy has loosed his lips,
he proves that a warm heart beats within his breast--but proudly and
indignantly. Hephæstus and Titanic Force leave him alone in his misery
when their task is finished. Then at last he speaks. It is to the
kindred powers of elemental nature, to the Sun and Sea and nourishing
Earth, his brethren and his mother, that he addresses his complaint:
"See you how I, a god, suffer at the hands of God; and for what
crime?--_for having given fire to mortal man_."
This, then, is the sin of Prometheus. He found humanity abject and
forsaken by the gods. Zeus, who had recently seized upon the empire
of the universe, designed to extirpate men from the world, and to
create a new race after his own heart. Prometheus took pity upon them,
saved them from destruction, gifted them with fire, the mother of all
arts, taught them carpentry and husbandry, revealed to them the stars,
whereby they knew the order of the seasons and recurrences of crops,
instructed them in letters, showed them how to tame the horse and ox,
and how to plough the sea with ships, then taught them medicine and
the cure of wounds, then divination and the sacrifice of victims to
propitiate the gods, and lastly how to smelt the ore contained within
the bowels of the earth. All these good things Prometheus gave to
men. And here, in passing, we may notice how accurately Æschylus has
sketched the primitive conditions of mankind in its emergence from the
state of savagery. The picture is, indeed, poetical; but subsequent
knowledge has only strengthened the outlines and filled them in with
details, not altered or erased them.
Now, however, we ask, In what true sense was Prometheus criminal? What
right had Zeus, who is invariably represented by Æschylus in all his
other dramas as a just and wise ruler, to impose these trials on the
benefactor of the human race? Æschylus, in this play, clearly desires
to rouse our sympathy for Prometheus. He makes all the principal actors
speak of Zeus as a forceful tyrant, newly come to power, which he
abuses for his selfish ends, subverting the old order of the world,
oppressing the old powers, who are his kindred, yet substituting
nothing but his own ill-regulated and capricious will. On the other
hand, Æschylus has indicated that Prometheus is in the wrong; that he
regards his disobedience to Zeus as the cause of merited punishment.
The Chorus points this moral by asserting, in spite of their tender
feeling for the Titan, that they only are sane and righteous who bow
to necessity and accept the law of their superior. Oceanus, in like
manner, advises his kinsman to submit; and reminds him that, though the
rule of Zeus is a novelty, it is not intolerable, and that acquiescence
is always prudent.
The chief difficulty of the play consists, therefore, in understanding
the error of the protagonist, and in reconciling the character of
Zeus, as here depicted, with the theology elsewhere expressed by
Æschylus. The most probable solution of the problem is suggested by
the ideal to which Greek tragedy aspired. It was the object of the
Athenian dramatists not to represent a simple study of character, or
to set forth a merely stirring action, but to depict a hero worthy
of all respect and admirable, exposed to suffering or ruin by some
fault of temperament. We are probably meant to look upon Prometheus
as having erred, though nobly, through self-will, because he would
not obey the ruler of the world for the time being, nor abide the
working-out of the law of fate in patience, but tried to take that
law into his own hands, and to anticipate the evolution of events.
At the same time the play seems to convict supreme Zeus himself of a
tyrannical exercise of a forcefully acquired power: he also, through a
like self-will, appears to be kicking against the pricks of immutable
destiny; and it is prophesied that in his turn he will be superseded
by a more righteous ruler. The secret of the revolution in Olympus,
whereby Zeus will be deposed, is possessed by Prometheus, and withheld
by him from his tormentor. Thus the knowledge of the future enables
the hero of the drama to endure, while Zeus upon his throne suffers
through the consciousness that fate cannot be resisted. Therefore the
_Prometheus_, as we possess it, presents the spectacle of two stubborn
wills in conflict. The action is suspended. The conclusion cannot be
foreseen. Owing to its very excellence as a work of art, it contains
no indication of the ultimate solution; we are only told by Prometheus
that, after he has been liberated, and not till then, he may reveal
the means by which the ruin of Zeus shall be averted. We are left to
conjecture that Æschylus intended to harmonize the wills of the Titan
and his oppressor through the final submission of both alike to the
laws of destiny, which are supreme. Prometheus, when once his pride
has given way, will reveal the secret which he holds, and Zeus, made
acquiescent by the lapse of time, will accept it.
The chief obstacle to the satisfactory interpretation of the
_Prometheus_ springs, as I have hinted, from the difficulty of
understanding how Prometheus was guilty and Zeus justified. The
transgression of the hero, if it deserves the name at all, was
eminently noble. His punishment appears extravagant in its severity.
At first sight we can hardly avoid the conclusion that the final
alliance between the two conflicting actors in this drama was a kind
of political compromise, unworthy of the protagonist. To this judgment
Shelley was led by his hatred of despotism, and by his inability to
imagine a dignified termination to the dispute that enlisted his
sympathies so strongly on the side of the disinterested hero. "I was
averse," he says in the Preface to _Prometheus Unbound_, "from a
catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the
Oppressor of mankind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so
powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus,
would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high
language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary."
Those, however, who have learned to respect the lofty theosophy of
Æschylus, no less than to admire his imperial artistic faculty, will
be slow to accept the conclusion of Shelley, or to believe that the
catastrophe prepared by the Greek poet was feeble. They will rather
mistrust their powers of judgment, or suspect that the key to the
riddle has been lost. The truth is, that we have no means of settling
what the catastrophe really was; and at this point it is necessary to
give some account of the relation of this drama to the entire scheme of
Æschylus.
The _Prometheus Bound_ (#desmôtês#) was probably the second of a
trilogy, or series of three tragedies, of which the first was called
_Prometheus the Fire-bearer_ (#pyrphoros#), and the third _Prometheus
Unbound_ (#lyomenos#). _Prometheus the Fire-bearer_ and _Prometheus
Unbound_ have disappeared; it seems that they were not even known to
the Greek scholiast, for he does not mention them in his argument to
the _Prometheus Bound_. At the same time the argument prefixed to the
_Persæ_ informs us that that play was the second in a series, of which
the _Phineus_ was first, the _Glaucus Potnieus_ third, and a so-called
_Prometheus_ fourth. It has been conjectured that the _Prometheus_
which formed the fourth or satyric drama in this tetralogy was
distinguished by the title _Fire-kindler_ (#pyrkaeus#,), a name which
is mentioned in an obscure passage of Pollux; and that consequently
four plays altogether by Æschylus bore the title of _Prometheus_. It
cannot, however, be proved beyond doubt that the _Fire-kindler_ existed
independent of the _Fire-bearer_; or, if so, that the former was the
last play in the tetralogy of the _Persæ_, the latter the first in
the trilogy of the _Prometheus Bound_. Both arguments to the only
_Prometheus_ we possess entire are unfortunately silent about the plays
which accompanied it; and it is only from allusions to a lost tragedy
called _Prometheus Unbound_ that we are at all justified in assuming
the disappearance of the first drama of the series, and in calling it
the _Fire-bearer_. It should be added that the learned editor of the
Greek Scenic Poets is inclined to identify the _Fire-bearer_ and the
_Fire-kindler_, and to regard this play as the satyric drama attached
to the tetralogy of the _Persæ_. By so doing he leaves the _Prometheus
Bound_ and _Unbound_ without a proper dramatic introduction.
In spite of the uncertainty which surrounds the criticism of this play,
no students familiar with the style of Æschylus will fail to recognize
in the _Prometheus Unbound_ the second drama of a trilogy. It has the
stationary character which belongs to the _Choëphoroe_, the _Persæ_,
and the _Supplices_. The dramatic action is not helped forward in
these second pieces; they develop the situation to which affairs have
been brought by the events of a previous drama, and which in its turn
must lead to the conclusive action of the third piece. It was only in
this way that a series of three dramas on the same subject could be
connected into true artistic unity. The catastrophe of the first play
produced a combination of events which required such expansion in a
second that a new action, involving a final catastrophe, should be
unfolded in the third, and the whole series should in the end be seen
to have coherence. Now the _Prometheus Unbound_ is unintelligible,
except as the result of a preceding action, while its conclusion leaves
the fate of the hero still undetermined: the events which brought the
hero to his dreadful doom, and the events which will deliver him, are
alluded to as things of the past and of the future; in the present
there is no drama, no doing, but only a development of the intermediate
and transitional situation. We have, therefore, the right to assume the
antecedence of a play which must, according to the data given in our
extant tragedy, have turned upon the hero's theft of fire.[125]
We may now attempt to reconstruct the whole trilogy, and see if,
having done so, any new conditions are supplied for the solution
of the difficulty as originally stated. In the _Fire-bearer_, for
the subject-matter of which we have to rely on the allusions of the
_Bound_, Zeus has recently acquired the empire of the universe by
imprisoning his father, Kronos, and by defeating the giants who rose
up in arms against him. Prometheus, knowing, through the inspiration
of his mother, Earth, or Themis, that Zeus will prevail, has taken
his side, and has materially helped him in the conflict. But the
sympathies of Prometheus are less with Zeus than with the race of men,
who, at that primitive period of the world's history, existed in the
lowest state of wretchedness. Zeus, intent on getting his new kingdom
into order, entertains the notion of destroying mankind, and planting
a better stock of mortal beings on the earth. Prometheus opposes
this design, and enables men to raise themselves above their savage
condition into comparative power and comfort. It is just at this point
that the lost drama would probably have revealed the true nature of
his offence, or #hamartia#. In the Hesiodic legend he is punished for
having taught men to deceive the powers of heaven; and though it is
clear that Æschylus did not closely follow that version of the myth,
we may conjecture that he represented the benefactor of humanity as
a rebel against the ruler of Olympus. Against the express command of
Zeus, Prometheus gave men fire; and though this act seems innocent
enough, we must remember that, according to Genesis, Adam lost Eden by
merely plucking an apple. Satisfied with his own sense of justice, and
hardened in his pride by the foreknowledge of the future, Prometheus
resisted a power that he regarded as tyrannical, and had to be treated
by Zeus with the same severity as Atlas or Typhoeus.
In the _Prometheus Bound_ we see the beginning of his punishment. The
Titan, in whose person, as it were, the whole race of mortals suffer,
is crucified on a barren cliff of Scythia. Meanwhile he makes two
prophecies--first, that a descendant of Io is destined to deliver him;
and, secondly, that Zeus will marry and beget a son who shall sway
the universe in his place. At the same time he declares that he knows
how Zeus may avoid this danger. Zeus, anxious to possess this secret,
sends down Hermes, and endeavors to wrest it from his prisoner with
threats; but Prometheus abides, scornful and unyielding; his pain may
be increased, yet it cannot last forever; he is immortal, and Zeus will
in the end be humiliated. To requite his contumacy, Zeus rends the
mountains, hell is opened, and Prometheus descends to the lowest pit of
Tartarus.
It is clear that, whatever may have been the fault of Prometheus
in the _Fire-bearer_, the poet has done all in his power to excite
our sympathy for him in the second drama of the trilogy. He draws
the character of Oceanus as a trimmer and time-server, who inspires
contempt. He introduces Io suffering as a wretched victim of the
selfish love of her almighty master. He makes the Oceanides willing in
the end to share the doom of the Titan; while all the human sympathies
of the audience are powerfully affected by the spectacle of a martyrdom
incurred for their sake. This play is, therefore, the triumph of the
protagonist; his offence is hidden; his heroic resistance is idealized;
we are made to feel sure that, when at last he is reconciled with Zeus,
it will be through no unworthy weakness on his part.
In the third drama of the trilogy, parts of which, translated into
Latin by Cicero, have been preserved to us, Prometheus has been raised
from Tartarus, and is again crucified on Caucasus. A vulture sent by
Zeus daily gnaws his liver, which, daily growing, supplies continually
fresh food for the tormentor. The tension of the situation is still
protracted. Prometheus has not given way. Zeus has not relented.
Meanwhile the seasons have revolved through thirteen generations of the
race of men, and the deliverer appears. It is Herakles who cuts the
Gordian knot. He destroys the vulture, and persuades his father Zeus to
suffer Cheiron, the Centaur, whom he had smitten with a poisoned arrow,
and who is weary of continued life, to take the place of the Titan in
Hades. Then Prometheus is liberated. He declares that Zeus, if he would
avoid the coming doom, must refrain from marriage with Thetis. He binds
the willow of repentance round his forehead, and places the iron ring
of necessity upon his finger. His will is made at last concordant with
that of his enemy. Thetis is given in wedlock to the mortal Peleus, and
Achilles is born.[126]
From this last drama of the trilogy it would appear that the honors
of the whole series were reserved for Herakles. Herakles is the
offspring of Zeus by a mortal woman. He occupies, therefore, a middle
place between the two contending parties, and is able to effect their
reconciliation. We may fairly conclude that herein lay the solution
designed by Æschylus. In order to mediate between Zeus and Prometheus,
a third agency was imperatively demanded. The heroic demi-god, who is
the son of the Olympian, and at the same time a scion of oppressed
humanity, prompted by no decree of his father, but following the
instincts of his generous humanity, will not allow the torments of
Prometheus to continue. By killing the vulture, he resolves the justice
of Zeus in an act of mercy; at the same time, he touches the heart
of the Titan, and draws his secret from him, working a revolution in
the stubborn nature of Prometheus similar to that which Neoptolemus
effected in Philoctetes by his humane uprightness. It is thoroughly
in accordance with the spirit of Greek tragedy that the scales should
thus have fallen from the eyes of Prometheus. He saw at last that Zeus,
though severe, was really justified; and, as a makepeace-offering,
he rendered up the secret which brought the ruler into harmony with
the immutable laws of fate. According to this solution of the plot,
the final concession of Prometheus would have been as noble as his
intermediate resistance; the #peripeteia#, or revolution, which was
imperatively required before the drama could have been conducted to
an issue, would have taken place within the protagonist's soul, while
Herakles, by introducing a new element into the action, furnished the
efficient cause of its conclusion. It may be argued on the other hand
that Prometheus foreknew the advent of Herakles, and prophesied of him
to Io in the second drama of the trilogy. To this I should answer that
he could not then have calculated on the change which would be wrought
in his own character by the deliverer.