we cannot say. It seems, however, certain that, unless he falsified
his otherwise consistent conception of Zeus, as the just and wise,
though stern, lord of the universe, and unless he satisfied himself
with a catastrophe which Shelley would have been justified in calling
"feeble," he must, through Herakles, have introduced a factor capable
of solving the problem, by revealing to Prometheus the nature of his
original #hamartia#, and thus rendering it dignified for him to bow to
Zeus.
If this reading of the _Prometheus_ be accepted, it will be seen
that the whole trilogy involved the deepest interests, the mightiest
collision of wills, the most pathetic situations, and the most sublime
of reconciliations. Zeus, in the second drama of the series, is
purposely exposed to misrepresentation in order that his true character
in the climax, as
#ton phronein brotous hodôsanta, ton pathê mathos
thenta kyriôs echein#,[127]
may be established. The divine justice personified in Zeus is displayed
irreconcilably opposed to the natural will personified in Prometheus,
until the hero who partakes of both, the active and unselfish Herakles,
atones them. We are even justified in conjecturing that, as Prometheus
occupied the foreground of the second drama, so Zeus must have been
paramount in the first, and that the two antithetical propositions
having thus been stated, the chief part of the third play was assigned
to Herakles. What strengthens the interpretation now advanced is the
peculiar nature of the punishment of Prometheus. The liver, according
to antique psychology, was the seat of the passions; consequently
Prometheus suffered through the organ of his sin.
That Æschylus intended to describe the protagonist of his trilogy as a
transgressor, though offending in a noble cause, while Zeus was acting
in accordance with real justice, however hard to comprehend, is further
indicated by the series of events which are supposed to have taken
place between the termination of the _Fire-bearer_ and the climax of
the _Unbound_. All this while Prometheus in his obstinacy is suffering
on Caucasus and in the depth of Tartarus; but the way of salvation is
meantime being wrought out on earth. By the commerce of the Olympian
deities with the daughters of men the heroic race is generated; and not
only is the deliverer and reconciler, Herakles, sent forth to purge the
world of monstrous wrong, but the better age of equity and justice,
foreseen by the Titan and ordained by the Fates, is being prepared. The
marriage of Thetis to Peleus is the proper inauguration of the heroic
age; it not only confirms Zeus in his sovereignty, but it also provides
for humanity the greatest actor in the drama of the Trojan war--the
first historical event of Hellas.
If the character ascribed to Zeus in the _Prometheus Bound_ still seems
to offer difficulties; if, in other words, we are not satisfied with
assuming that his conduct must have been justified by the evolution
of events in the _Prometheus Unbound_, the following considerations
may be adduced by way of further explanation. In the first place, at
the supposed time of the _Prometheus Bound_, Zeus was but just seated
on his throne, and had to deal with unruly and insurgent powers. The
punishment of Prometheus was an episode in the Titanomachy. It was the
business, therefore, of Æschylus to exhibit the firmness and force
of government of the new ruler, not to draw the picture of a kind
paternal monarch. In the second place, the speakers who describe Zeus
as despotic belonged by kinship to the old order of the Titans, or were
closely related through friendship to Prometheus. Dramatic propriety
required that they should calumniate the new king, or at least
misunderstand his motives. In the third place, Io, whose fate appeared
so hard, became the mother of a mighty nation, and received tenfold
for all her sufferings at the hand of Zeus.[128] Here, therefore, his
inscrutable ways were in the end proved righteous; nor is it probable
that if Æschylus justified Zeus in his dealings with the unoffending
Io, he would leave his treatment of Prometheus unexplained. In the
fourth place, the theology of the Greeks was not absolute, like that
to which we are accustomed through Christianity. The power ascribed
to their deities was political and economical. Fate and necessity
determined the action of even Zeus, who was himself an outgrowth from
an earlier and ruder order. They also imagined a gradual development in
the moral order of the universe. The intellectual powers of Olympus had
superseded the old nature-forces of the Titanic cosmogony. There was,
therefore, nothing ridiculous to the Greek mind in the notion that Zeus
might be conceived as growing in wisdom and in righteousness. In the
fifth place, we must remember that the Athenian audience, familiar with
the Hesiodic legend of Prometheus, were better prepared than we are,
after listening to the invectives against Zeus in the second drama of
the trilogy, to accept his triumphant justification in the third.
Not only is the trilogy of Æschylus--if, indeed, he composed a
Promethean trilogy at all--now irrecoverable except by hazardous
conjecture, but, what is more unfortunate, the whole mythus on which
it was based has descended to us in hopelessly mutilated fragments.
We can clearly perceive that it enshrined the deepest speculations of
the Greeks concerning the origin of humanity, the relation of deified
intelligence to material nature and to abstract necessity, the kinship
between the human soul and the divine spirit, and the consciousness
of sin, which implies a division between the will and the reason.
Furthermore, there are hints implied in it of purification through
punishment, of ultimate reconciliation, and of vicarious suffering.
But the fabric of the legend is so ruined that to reconstruct these
elements of a theological morality is now impossible. Moreover, the
very conditions under which the mythus flourished tended to divert
the minds of the Greeks themselves away from the underlying meaning
to the romantic presentation. The story could not fail to usurp upon
the doctrine. Like the Glaucus of Greek mythology, whom Plato used as
a parable in the _Republic_, the idea which takes shape in a legend
during the first ages of human speculation gathers an accretion of the
sea-weeds and the shells of fancy round it, lying at the bottom of the
ocean of the human mind through centuries, so that, when it emerges
into the light of critical inquiry, the original lineaments of the
conception are deformed and overgrown, and to strip it bare and see it
clearly is no easy matter. Far more difficult is the task when only the
maimed fragments, the _disjecta membra_, of the myth remain to us.
However freely Æschylus may have dealt with the tale of Prometheus,
however he may have employed it as a vehicle for rational theology,
he cannot have wholly eliminated those qualities which belonged to
it as a Saga rather than a chapter of religious tradition. Indeed,
by dramatizing, he was probably impelled to accentuate the legendary
outline at the expense of philosophical coherence. This consideration
may explain some of the apparent incongruities in his fable, to which
attention has not been yet directed in this essay. One of these
concerns the position of the human race between Zeus, their apparent
oppressor, and Prometheus, their avowed champion. It was for the sake
of mankind that Prometheus disobeyed Zeus; it was through severity
towards mankind that Zeus placed himself at variance with justice. Yet
we find Zeus seeking a mortal bride among the daughters of the men
he had sought to destroy; nor is there any reason why, when he could
crucify their champion, he should not have annihilated the whole race
outright. Perhaps, however, we ought to conjecture that, at this point,
the episode of Deucalion and his restoration of mankind after the
deluge was understood to have intervened.
Other discrepancies may be stated briefly. In the elder version of
the fable presented by Hesiod, Prometheus is almost identified with
humanity, while some later fragments of the legend make him the father
of Deucalion. In Æschylus he is an immortal god, whose sympathy with
men proceeds from generosity and pity. Hesiod describes him as the
son of the Titan Iapetos by Asia. Æschylus places him in the first
rank of Titanic agencies, by making him the son of Earth or Themis;
he is married to Hesione, daughter of Oceanus. Hesiod names his
brother Epimetheus; and herein we trace the remnants of an antique
psychological analysis, whereof Æschylus has made no use. It is clear,
therefore, that the Attic poet dealt freely with the mythus, selecting
for artistic purposes only such points in the Hellenic fable as would
fit the framework of his drama.
The only sure ground, amid so much that is both shifting and uncertain,
is that the race of men had sinned against God, and that Prometheus
was a responsible co-agent in their crime. This in itself is a strong
argument in favor of the view which has been urged throughout this
essay. This view may be resumed in the following positions. First,
it is probable that the _Prometheus Bound_ is only the second drama
of a trilogy. Secondly, the vilification of Zeus as a despot must be
understood in a dramatic sense; it was appropriate to the situation of
the actors, and intended to enhance the pathos of the protagonist's
suffering. Thirdly, if we possessed the trilogy entire, we should see
that Prometheus had been really and gravely in the wrong, and that
his obstinacy was in the highest sense tragic according to the Greek
conception, inasmuch as it displayed the aberration of a sublime
character. Fourthly, the occasion of a worthy reconciliation between
Zeus and Prometheus, wherein the former should forego his anger and
the latter bend the proud neck of his will, was furnished by Herakles,
who held an intermediate position between God and man, and who was
recognized as the redresser of wrongs and savior by the Greeks at large.
The trilogy of the _Oresteia_ is at the same time the masterpiece
of Æschylus as a dramatic poet, and also the surest source that we
possess for forming a theory of his theological opinions. I do not
propose to consider it from the second of these points of view, but
rather to concentrate attention upon its greatness as a connected
poem in three stupendous parts--as "the majestic image of a high and
stately tragedy shutting up and intermingling her solemn scenes and
acts with a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies."
In the _Oresteia_ Æschylus has plucked the last fruit upon the
Upas-tree of crime which flourished in the palace of Mycenæ. The
murder of Agamemnon, after his return in pomp and power from Troy,
forms the subject of the first play. By selecting this point for the
overture to the series, the poet was able to allude in choric songs to
the ancestral curse of the house, and also to the special crimes of
Agamemnon, in his sacrifice of Iphigeneia, in the protracted sufferings
of the Argives before Troy, and in his fatal pride. The vaticinations
of Cassandra opened a terrific vista of the horrors accumulated
upon the family of Thyestes. Thus the past was connected with the
present, and the intolerable account of guilt which Orestes, the chief
actor, was destined in the end, by the help of Heaven, to discharge,
was vividly presented to the minds of the audience. Agamemnon is
murdered, and the tragedy closes with Clytemnestra's pæan of triumph
and defiance. She glories in her act, pretending that she has duly
revenged the death of Iphigeneia, and suppressing her own adultery with
Ægisthus--a criminal motive more than enough to vitiate its character
of retributive justice.
The Chorus, who are hostile to her and her paramour, call upon her, if
she really slew her husband for Iphigeneia's sake, to leave the palace
and seek purification. This was her duty according to Greek etiquette.
But she refuses; and no Furies haunt her for her crime, seeing that the
Furies take account of none but kindred blood, and Clytemnestra killed
a man who was no relative by birth, but only by marriage. Such is the
strange doctrine which the Eumenides themselves, in the third play of
the series, propound before the judgment-seat of Pallas. In a deeper
sense it was artistically fitting that Clytemnestra should remain
unvisited by the dread goddesses. They were the deities of remorse,
and she had steeled her soul against the stings of conscience. Neither
from the blood of a slain husband could they rise; nor was there in
her own heart harborage for their grim choir. But though Clytemnestra
escaped the spiritual visitings of the Erinnyes, she knew what fear
was. Orestes, as the Chorus told her, was still living.
The _Choëphoroe_ continues the tale of blood and vengeance. Orestes
returns to Mycenæ. He recognizes his sister Electra by their father's
tomb, deludes Clytemnestra with a false tale of his own death, and then
succeeds in killing her together with Ægisthus on the spot where they
had murdered Agamemnon. Once more the palace is thrown open; instead of
Agamemnon and Cassandra, Clytemnestra and Ægisthus lie prostrate before
the desecrated altars, and Orestes exhibits to the Argives the robe in
which his father had been caught and tangled ere the axe descended on
his head. Then, when the song of joy is rising from Electra and the
Chorus, while they are crying that the ancient Fury of the house has
been appeased, at that very moment the eyes of Orestes dilate with
horror, his hair bristles, and he trembles with madness. He sees what
none around him may discern. The Erinnyes of his mother are upon him,
and he flies. Like all the middle plays of a trilogy, the _Choëphoroe_
is somewhat stationary in its action. But this closing scene is
tremendous. It powerfully affected the imagination of the Greeks, and
continued, through the period of Græco-Roman art, to form a favorite
subject for sepulchral bass-reliefs. Some of these have been preserved
to us, the finest being one in the Capitoline Museum.
By the termination of the _Choëphoroe_ we are prepared for yet
another tragedy, the last of the series. The _Eumenides_ opens with
a scene which represents the Temple of Phoebus at Delphi. Orestes
has taken refuge with the god who bade him slay his mother, and who
must now purify him. He lies breathless at the altar-steps with the
branch of suppliant woollen-woven olive in his hand. Not far away are
stretched the Furies, hideous, and snorting in their slumber. Phoebus,
while they yet sleep, bids his client rise and speed to Athens, to
await the verdict of Pallas in his case. So much we learn, partly
from the speech of the Pythia, and partly from the lips of the god
himself. Then, when Orestes has started on his way, the phantom of
Clytemnestra appears and bids the sleeping Furies rise. One by one
they start, and groan like hounds disturbed in the midst of dreamings
of the chase. When they see their prey has escaped, they break into
full cry--a brazen-throated chorus, accompanied by brazen-footed
tramplings. Phoebus, however, drives them forth with scorn from his
sun-bright shrine. Why linger they in those hypæthral temple-chambers,
resonant with song and gladdened by the feet of youths and maidens
bearing bays? Their haunts should rather be the charnel-house, the
shambles, the gallows, the torture-chamber of barbarians. The scene
is now changed to Athens, where Pallas presides over the court of
the Areiopagus assembled to decide between the Furies who prosecute
Orestes and Phoebus who defends his suppliant. There is no doubt
about the deed: Clytemnestra was slain by her own son. The question
to settle is, whether circumstance could justify so unnatural an act.
The Furies represent the blind instinct of repulsion for the shedding
of maternal blood, which no _prima facie_ argument can excuse, and
which cannot be covered. Phoebus is the holy and pure power, who will
not suffer moral abominations, like the unpunished insolence of the
murderess Clytemnestra, to abide. Pallas stands for reason, capable
of weighing motives, of disengaging a necessary act of retributive
justice from brute murder. In the breasts of the human judges, these
three faculties--the instinct which condemns matricide, the instinct
which sanctions under any circumstance the punishment of crime, and
the reason which holds the balance of impulses--are active. After much
angry pleading by the advocates on both sides, the votes are taken.
Half decide against Orestes; half acquit him. Pallas, by her casting
vote, determines the verdict in his favor. The Eumenides, disappointed
of their prey, threaten vengeance against Athens; but Pallas appeases
them, and assigns them a place of honor in her city forever.
It is clear that the three plays of this trilogy are closely bound
together, and that their connection is that of thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis. The _Agamemnon_ sets forth the crime of Clytemnestra; the
_Choëphoroe_ exhibits the exceptional conduct of Orestes with regard to
that crime; the _Eumenides_ contains his exculpation. The third play
offers a reconciliation of the agencies at warfare in the first and
second; the curse of the house of Atreus is worked out and set at rest
by the hero whose awful duty it was to revenge a father's murder on a
mother. His justification lay in his submission to the divine will. Had
he taken the matricidal office on himself in haste or anger, he must
have added another link to the chain of crime that hitherto had bound
his family through generations. What he did, however, was done with a
clear conscience; and, though he suffered the maddening anguish of so
terrible an act, he found rest and peace for his soul at last. Thus
a new power, unrealized in the _Agamemnon_ and the _Choëphoroe_, was
needed for the solution presented in the _Eumenides_.
Passing from the internal structure of these dramas to their form, we
may notice how Æschylus provided theatrical variety consistent with
the varying subject. It was requisite that the action of the two first
should take place at Mycenæ; so the scene was not altered, but the
Chorus was changed, in order that the pathos of Electra's situation
might be made more clear in the _Choëphoroe_. The _Eumenides_ admitted
not only of a new Chorus, but also of a total change of scene; it may
be added that this third drama violates the unities alike of place and
time.
Of the three plays of the trilogy, the _Agamemnon_ is unquestionably
the noblest. It is the masterpiece of Æschylus, and to one who has
conquered its difficulties and imbibed its spirit it offers a spectacle
of tragic grandeur not to be surpassed, hardly to be equalled, by
anything which even Shakespeare produced. What some modern critics
might regard as defects--the lengthy choric passages, abstract in their
thought, though splendid in their imagery--the concentration of the
poet's powers on one terrific climax, for every word that Agamemnon,
Clytemnestra, and Cassandra utter leads up to the death-cry of the
king--contribute to the excellence of a drama of this style. If we
lack the variety and subtlety that charm us in a work like _Hamlet_;
if, after reading the play over and over again, and testing it in
many crucibles of critical analysis, we do not, as in the case of
Shakespeare's tragedies, discover new and delicate beauties in the
minor parts, but learn each time, and by each process, to admire the
vigor of the poet's main conception, the godlike energy with which
he has developed it; that may be taken as the strongest proof of its
perfection as a monument of classic art.
There is, in the _Agamemnon_, an oppressive sense of multitudinous
crimes, of sins gathering and swelling to produce a tempest. The air
we breathe is loaded with them. No escape is possible. The marshalled
thunder-clouds roll ever onward, nearer and more near, and far more
swiftly than the foot can flee. At last the accumulated storm bursts
in the murder of Agamemnon, the majestic and unconscious victim felled
like a steer at the stall; in the murder of Cassandra, who foresees her
fate, and goes to meet it with the shrinking of some dumb creature, and
with the helplessness of one who knows that doom may not be shunned; in
the lightning-flash of Clytemnestra's arrogance, who hitherto has been
a glittering hypocrite, but now proclaims herself a fiend incarnate. As
the Chorus cries, the rain of blood, that hitherto has fallen drop by
drop, descends in torrents on the house of Atreus: but the end is not
yet. The whole tragedy becomes yet more sinister when we regard it as
the prelude to ensuing tragedies, as the overture to fresh symphonies
and similar catastrophes. Wave after wave of passion gathers and breaks
in these stupendous scenes; the ninth wave mightier than all, with a
crest whereof the spray is blood, falls foaming; over the outspread
surf of gore and ruin the curtain drops, to rise upon the self-same
theatre of new woes.
The imagery of the _Agamemnon_ most powerfully contributes to heighten
the tragic impression of the plot. At one time the ancestral fury of
the doomed house is likened to a demon leaping on it from above, by
a metaphor which vividly suggests Blake's design of Satan pouring
flame upon the dwelling of Job's sons. At another it is compared to a
cormorant brooding upon its battlements; and yet again, by a stroke of
irony peculiarly impressive to the Greeks, it is likened to a band of
revellers. The repetition of the same class of metaphors, the frequent
references to the net in which Agamemnon was to be caught, to the axe
with which he and Cassandra were to be slaughtered, to the smoke and
scent of blood which was to bathe the altar of the household Zeus with
sacrifice unhallowed, assail the imagination with portentous monotony.
Of all the terrors in this tragedy none is so awful in itself, or so
artistically heightened, as Cassandra's prophecy. Accompanying her
lord and master, she has approached the palace of Mycenæ. Clytemnestra
has greeted the king with a set oration, admirable for its rhetoric,
covering by dark innuendoes her foul thought. Spreading upon the
threshold purple raiment and mantles suited to the service of the
gods--such embroidered garments, we may fancy, as Athenian ladies
wrought for Pallas--she exclaims: "Descend from this thy chariot; nor
set on earth, dread monarch, thy foot that trampled upon Troy." It is
as though a mediæval wife should bid her lord, returning from the East,
to tread on altar-cloths and sacerdotal vestments. Agamemnon shrinks
from the sacrilege, but she overrules his scruples, and he complies.
All this while Cassandra is seated, patient, in her car. Like a statue
sculptured in monumental alabaster, with hands upon her knees, and head
bowed on her breast, she waits unmoved. Then the conqueror is led in to
his doom--a doom which the Chorus, in one of their wild eddying hymns
of woe, seem almost to anticipate. Still Cassandra tarries; and now
Clytemnestra comes again, with taunts and dreadful irony: "Happy are
you, princess though you be, to have such rich and prosperous masters;
enter the palace; the sacrifice is ready at the altar, and to this, as
a slave of the house, you, too, are bidden." But Cassandra will not
move. In her soul, where, though a slave, she still retains the gift of
oracular vision, she foresees her doom. She knows what the riches of
the house of Atreus mean, what the prosperity of Agamemnon really is,
what the sacrifice to which she, too, is bidden will be. Clytemnestra
leaves her, half in scorn and half in anger. Then, at length,
Cassandra lifts her head, and stirs herself, and groans. The first
word she utters is "Apollo! oh! Apollo!" This rouses the Chorus, and
they ask: "What cry of wailing hast thou shrieked about Apollo? He is
not a god to be greeted with dirges." Phoebus was, in truth, the deity
of brightness and music, not of the funeral groan or death lament.
Still Cassandra, with the same ill-omened utterance, reverberates the
name: "Apollo! ah, Apollo! lo, a second time hast thou undone me!" To
Phoebus she had promised her virginity; the promise was not kept, and
he requited her with prophecy that none might heed or understand. No
tragic portion is more piteous than this of her who was the clear-eyed
seer of coming woes, the unwilling mouthpiece of dread oracles, doomed
alike to knowledge worse than ignorance, and to the scorn that falls
on idle babblers. Now, once again, descending on her with the might of
prophecy, the god compels her to predict her own swift-coming fate.
Little by little, at the intercession of the Chorus, Cassandra becomes
more articulate. She calls the house before her "the shambles of a man,
a pavement blood-bedabbled." There stands the stately palace-front; its
marble steps are covered with tapestry, the statues of its protective
gods are crowned with flowers; while the lonely prophetess is
shuddering at so fair a frontispiece to a tragedy within so frightful,
now to be accomplished on her master and herself. Meantime the Chorus
also wait, involved in their own anxiety; the mysterious anguish of
the weird woman, whom they know to have the hand of God laid heavily
upon her, makes them tremble. "What mean you," they exclaim, "by
scenting like a dog for blood upon this royal threshold?" Cassandra
only answers: "Are not these children wailing for their death enough?
Is not their flesh, tasted by their father at their uncle's board,
my witness?" She points to phantoms which the Chorus cannot see, the
ghosts of the children of Thyestes. They reply sullenly, for they know
the story of the house: "We want no soothsayers." Then Cassandra breaks
forth afresh, this time vaticinating imminent calamity: "What is she
plotting, what doom unbearable? and there is none to aid!" The Chorus
take up their strain: "Here, indeed, you are a riddler; what you meant
before was common talk." But Cassandra heeds them not. Her second-sight
pierces the palace-walls, and she shrieks: "Mad woman, are you decking
your husband for the bath? The end draws near. Hand stretches forth
to hand. Is it a net of hell? Keep the ox from the heifer! she hath
caught him in her robe and slays him. I tell you he is falling, falling
in the trough of death." The Chorus are puzzled by these hurried and
ecstatic exclamations; but their very fear seems to keep them from
the apprehension of the truth. Then Cassandra changes her tone, and
bewails her own misfortunes, her coming death, and the crime of Paris
which brought her to this doom, employing throughout these prophecies
a lyric metre suited to their pregnant brevity. At last, when she has
wellnigh worn out the patience of the Chorus, she assumes the regular
iambic of common speech: "Now, then, at length shall the oracle gaze
upon you free from veils like a bride. The Furies are in this house;
blood-surfeited, but not assuaged, they hold perpetual revel here. It
is the crime of Atreus and of Thyestes which they hunt, and woe will
fall on woe." The Chorus can only wonder that she, a foreign princess,
should know the secrets of the fated race; but she tells them the story
of Apollo's love, and how she deceived him, and what he wrought to
punish her. Then, even as she speaks, the pang of inspiration thrills
her. Perhaps the speech that follows, through its ghastly blending of
visions evoked from the past with insight piercing into the immediate
future, affects the imagination more intensely than any other piece of
tragic declamation. Even the sleep-mutterings of Lady Macbeth, though
they form a curious modern counterpart to the broken exclamations of
Cassandra, are less appalling; for hers reveal a guilty conscience
maddened by one crime, while Cassandra's outcry sums up the history of
a whole accursed race, and expresses at the same time the agony of an
innocent victim:
Woe, woe! Ah, ah! what pain!
Again the dreadful pangs oracular
Shoot through me, tempesting my soul with preludes.
See you those children seated on the house-roof?
Babes are they, like unto the shapes of dreams;
Yea, children seem they, slaughtered by their kin,
Whose hands are filled with meat of their own flesh;
Their very hearts and entrails, piteous load,
I see them bear, whereof their father tasted!
Wherefore I say, vengeance for this is plotting.
A lion, thewless, amid pillows lapped,
House-guard, alas! for my returning master--
Mine: for I needs must bear the yoke, a slave.
But he, the admiral, Ilion's overthrower,
Knows not what things the tongue of that lewd bitch
With speeches and with long-drawn fawning fairness, like
A lurking Até, by ill-luck will do.
Thus, then, she dares: she, woman, slays a man;
Yea, slays. What loathsome reptile can I name her,
Nor miss my mark?--foul amphisbæna, Scylla
That dwells in rocks, the ship-borne seaman's bane,
Raging mother of hell, a truceless strife
Belching on friend and kindred! How she shouted
With daring swollen, as when the foemen scatter!
Now of these things I care not if I gain
No credence. What? What will be, comes; and thou
Wilt stand and pity and call me too true prophet.
No translation can do justice to the appalling fury of the original,
since it is only in Greek--a language usually sedate and harmonized
by sense of beauty--that such phrases as #thyousan Aïdou mêter'# have
their full value. The Chorus are shaken from their incredulity, as much
by the intensity of Cassandra's conviction as by the desperate calm of
her last words. Is Agamemnon really to be slain? Yes, she answers, and,
pray or not as you may choose, they there inside the house are slaying.
Then once more the rage of divination seizes her, and the scene of her
own death, like that of Agamemnon's, flames upon her soul. The second
speech has more of pathos than the first, less of fury; but it is
scarcely less awful:
Ah, ah! the fire! lo, how it comes upon me!
Phoebus Lycæan, ho! Ah, woe is me!
She, too, this two-foot lioness that couches
With the wolf, what time the lion is away,
Will slay me, slay me! Like a poison-brewer
She'll mix my death-wage with her broth of hell;
Yea, and she swears, sharpening the knife to slay him,
Her lord shall pay with blood for bringing me.
Why wear I, then, these gauds to laugh me down--
This rod, these necklace-wreaths oracular?
You, ere my death, at least I will destroy:--
Go; fall; away, and perish: I shall follow.
Make rich some other curse of men than me.
Lo, you! Apollo's self is stripping me
Of this prophetic raiment--he who saw me
Even in these robes jeered at mid friends by foemen,
Who scorned in chorus with one voice of vain scorn.
Yea, when I was called beggar, vagabond,
Poor, wretched, starveling, speechless, I endured:
Now he who made me prophetess, the prophet,
Himself hath brought me to these straits of death.
No altar of my fathers waits for me,
But that red block where I must reeking wallow.
Nay, but not unavenged of heaven we perish!
For yet another in our cause shall come,
Avenger, matricide, his father's champion:
Though exiled, wandering from this land a stranger,
He shall return to crown the curse of kindred:
For gods in heaven have sworn a mighty oath
That the sire's prostrate corse shall bring him home.
Why wait I, then, lamenting thus, an alien?--
I, who beheld of old proud Ilion
Fare as she fared, and they who dwelt therein
Receive such measure from the gods of judgment,
I, too, will rise and dare, myself, to perish.
Therefore I greet these gates as gates of Hades,
Praying a full fair stroke may be my due,
That thus with blood that gently flows to waste,
Torn by no death-pangs, I these eyes may close.
The draught of prophecy is now drained to the very dregs. Nothing
remains but for Cassandra to enter the palace-doors of Hades. She
approaches them step by step, bewailing, after the fashion of Greek
tragedy, her own woes, and those of Priam's family. Suddenly she
starts. The scent of blood assails her nostrils, and, like a steer
that shivers at the gory shambles, she draws back. The Chorus say, "It
is only the smell of sacrifice upon the hearth." But the weird woman
discovers a very different odor of coming slaughter: "To me the reek
is like the breath of charnels." Still forward, though shrinking from
the unseen, unavoidable doom, she must advance, invoking the avenger
of herself and Agamemnon, and calling on the all-seeing sun. Her last
words are uttered in the same spirit as Macbeth's soliloquy upon the
point of battle; they intensify and elevate the tragic moment by
drawing the whole destiny of mortals into harmony with her own doom:
Ah, lives of men! When prosperous, they glitter
Like a fair picture; when misfortune comes,
A wet sponge at one blow hath blurred the painting.
Thus, at the last, tranquil and stately, she touches the door,
enters, and it shuts behind her. For a while the Chorus stand alone,
and sing a low, brief chant of terror. The scene is empty, and the
palace-front towers up into calm light. Then, when our nerves have
been strained to the cracking-point of expectation by Cassandra's
prophecy and by the silence that succeeds it, from within the house
is heard the deep-chested cry of Agamemnon: "O me, I am stricken with
a stroke of death!" This shriek is the most terrible incident in all
tragedy, owing to its absolute and awful timeliness, its adequacy to
the situation. The whole dramatic apparatus of the play has been, as
it were, constructed with a view to it; yet, though we expect it, our
heart stops when at last it comes. The stillness, apparently of home
repose, but really of death, which broods upon the house during those
last moments, while every second brings the hero nearer to his fate,
has in it a concentrated awfulness that surpasses even the knocking at
the gate in _Macbeth_. Then comes the cry of Agamemnon, and the whole
structure of terror descends upon us. It is as though an avalanche had
been gathering above our heads and gradually loosening--loosening with
fearfully accelerated ratio of movement as the minutes fly--until a
single word will be enough to make it crumble. That word, uttered from
behind the stately palace-walls, startling the guilty and oppressive
silence, intimating that the workers have done working, that the victim
has been taken in their toils, is nothing less than the shriek of
the smitten king. It sounds once for the death-blow given; and once
again it sounds to mark a second stroke. Then shriek and silence are
alike forgotten in the downfall of the mass of dread. The Chorus are
torn asunder by hurried and conflicting counsels, eddying like dead
leaves caught and tossed in the clutches of a tempest. Horror huddles
upon horror, as the spectacle of slaughter is itself revealed--the
king's corpse smoking in the silver bath, Cassandra motionless in
death beside him. Above them stands Clytemnestra, shouldering her
murderous axe, with open nostrils and dilated eyes, glorying in her
deed, cherishing the blood-drops on her arms and dress and sprinkled
bosom; while, invisible to mortal eyes, the blood-swilled demon of
the house sits eying her as its next victim. Ægisthus--craven, but
spiteful--slinks forth, hyena-like, after the accomplished act, to
trample on the hero and insult his grave.
Some such spectacle as this was revealed to the Athenians by the
rolling back of the eccyclema at the end of the _Agamemnon_. The
triumph of adulterous Clytemnestra and cowardly Ægisthus would,
however, have been far from tragic in its utter moral baseness, did we
not know that this drama was to be succeeded by another which should
right the balance. Perhaps this is the reason why the _Oresteia_ is the
only extant trilogy. Its three parts are so closely interlinked that to
separate them was impossible. The preservers of the _Agamemnon_ were
forced to preserve the _Choëphoroe_; the preservers of the _Choëphoroe_
could not dispense with the _Eumenides_.
The Chorus of the _Agamemnon_ demands separate criticism. The Chorus
in all Greek tragedy performs, it has been often said, the part of an
ideal spectator. It comments on the plot, not daring so much actively
to interfere, as uttering reflections on the conduct of the _dramatis
personæ_, and referring all obscure events to the arbitrament of
heaven. Thus the Chorus is a mirror of the poet's mind, an index to the
moral which he inculcates, an inspired critic of each movement in the
play. The choric odes, introduced at turning-points in the main action,
are lyrical inter-breathings that connect the past and future with
the present. In the plays of Æschylus the Chorus, as I have already
shown, is, moreover, personally interested in the drama. In the case
of the _Agamemnon_ the fortunes of the burghers of Mycenæ are engaged
in the success or failure of Clytemnestra's scheme. At the same time,
knowing the whole dark history of the house of Atreus, they foresee
the perils which their master, as a member of that family, must run.
It follows that their songs embody the moral teaching of the tragedy
itself without lapsing into mere sententiousness. Their sympathies,
antipathies, and interests add a vital importance to their utterance.
The burden of all these odes is that punishment for crime, however long
delayed or tortuous in its operation, is inevitable. The grandeur of
the whole work depends in a great measure on the force with which this
idea is wrought out lyrically, sometimes by bold images, sometimes
by dark innuendoes, repeated like a mystic rede, or tossed upon the
eddies of a wizard chant. From beginning to ending these ancient men
are adverse to the sons of Atreus, gloomily conscious that they cannot
prosper. While recognizing the justice of their cause against Paris,
who had transgressed the laws of hospitable Zeus, they yet remember
Agamemnon's swiftness to shed his daughter's blood, the old Erinnys
which pursues the race, the wholesale slaughter of Achaian citizens
before Troy's walls. These recollections inspire them with uneasiness
before the Messenger appears. Their doubts are confirmed by his news
that the altars of the Trojans had been dishonored, while their
mistrust of Clytemnestra adds yet a deeper hue to their alarm. Then
comes the scene with Cassandra. No more doubt remains; and the only
question is how to act. Even at the last moment the Chorus do not lose
their faith. They defy Clytemnestra, telling her to her face that her
crime must be avenged, that the curse must be worked out to the full,
and that justice cannot fail to triumph. At the very end they rise to
prophecy: you, yourself, unfriended in the end, shall fall; the doer,
when Zeus wills, shall suffer for his deed; remember, therefore, that
Orestes lives.
The choric interludes of the _Agamemnon_, though burdened with the
mystery of sin and fate, and tuned to music stern and lofty, abound in
strains of pathetic and of tender poetry, deep-reaching to the very
fount of tears, unmatched by aught else in the Greek language. The
demiurge who gave a shape to Titans and to Furies mingled tears with
the clay of the men he wrought, and star-fire with the beauty of his
women, and even for the birds of the air and the wild creatures of the
woods he felt a sympathy half human, half divine. In the first Chorus,
Æschylus compares the Atreidæ to eagles robbed of their young, whose
cries are answered by Zeus, Phoebus, or Pan. "Hearing the shrill clamor
of these airy citizens, he sendeth after-vengeance on the robbers."
And, again, Artemis exacts penalty for the hare whom the eagles bore
off to their nests, a prey. "So kindly disposed is the fair goddess
to the tender young of fierce lions, and to the suckling brood of all
beasts that range the field and forest." Thus the large philosophy
of the poet includes justice for all living things, and even dumb
creatures have their rights, which men may not infringe.
The depth of his human pathos no mere plummet-line of scholarship or
criticism can fathom. Before the vision of Iphigeneia at the altar
we must needs be silent: "Letting fall her saffron-colored skirts
to earth, she smote each slayer with a piteous arrow from her eyes,
eloquent as in a picture, desiring speech, since oftentimes beside the
well-spread board within her father's hall she sang, and maidenly,
with chaste voice, honored the pæan raised in happy times at festal
sacrifice of her dear sire." We do not need the sententious moral
of Lucretius uttered four centuries later, _tantum relligio potuit
suadere malorum_, to point the pathos which Æschylus, with a profounder
instinct, draws by one touch from the contrast between then and now. In
the same strain is the description of Menelaus abandoned in his home by
Helen: "She, leaving to her fellow-citizens the din of shielded hosts,
and armings of the fleet with spears, bringing to Ilion destruction
for a dower, went lightly through the doors, dishonorably brave; and
many a sigh was uttered by the bards of the palace, while they sang--O
house! O house, and rulers! O marriage-bed, and pressure on the pillows
of her head who loved her lord! He stands by in silence, dishonored,
but without reproaches, noting with anguish of soul that she is fled.
Yea, in his longing after her who is beyond the sea, a phantom will
seem to rule his house. The grace of goodly statues hath grown irksome
to his gaze, and in his widowhood of weary eyes all beauty fades away.
But dreams that glide in sleep with sorrow visit him, conveying a vain
joy; for vain it is, when one hath seemed to see good things, and lo,
escaping through his hands, the vision flies apace on wings that follow
on the paths of sleep."
To read the Greek aright in this wonderful lyric, so concentrated
in its imagery, and so direct in its conveyance of the very soul of
passion, is no light task; but far more difficult it is to render
it into another language. Yet, even thus, we feel that this poem of
defrauded desire and everlasting farewell, of vain outgoings of the
spirit after vanished joy, is written not merely for Menelaus and the
Greeks, but for all who stretch forth empty hands to clasp the dreams
of dear ones, and then turn away, face-downward on the pillow, from the
dawn, to weep or strain hot eyes that shed no tears. Touched by the
same truth of feeling, which includes all human nature in its sympathy,
is the lament, shortly after uttered by the Chorus, for the numberless
fair men who died before Troy town. Ares, the grim gold-exchanger, who
barters the bodies of men, sends home a little dust shut up within a
narrow urn, and wife and father water this with tears, and cry--Behold,
he perished nobly in a far land, fighting for a woman, for another's
wife. And others there are who come not even thus again to their old
home; but barrows on Troy plain enclose their fair young flesh, and
an alien soil is their sepulchre. This picture of beautiful dead men,
warriors and horsemen, in the prime of manhood, lying stark and cold,
with the dishonor of the grave upon their comely hair, and with the
bruises of the battle on limbs made for love, is not meant merely for
Achaians, but for all--for us, perchance, whose dearest moulder on
Crimean shores or Indian plains, for whom the glorious faces shine no
more; but at best some tokens, locks of hair, or books, or letters,
come to stay our hunger unassuaged. How truly and how faithfully the
Greek poet sang for all ages, and for all manner of men, may be seen by
comparing the strophes of this Chorus with the last rhapsody but one
of the chants outpoured in America by Walt Whitman, to commemorate the
events of the great war. The pathos which unites these poets, otherwise
so different in aim and sentiment, is deep as nature, real as life; but
from this common root of feeling springs in the one verse a spotless
lily of pure Hellenic form, in the other a mystical thick growth of
fancy, where thoughts brood and nestle amid tufted branches; for the
powers of classic and of modern singers upon the same substance of
humanity are diverse.
The _Persæ_ is certainly one of the earliest among the extant tragedies
of Æschylus, since it was produced upon the stage in 473 B.C., seven
years after the battle of Salamis. This drama can scarcely be called a
tragedy in the common sense of the word. It is rather a tragic show,
designed to grace a national festival and to preserve the memory of
a great victory. That purpose it fulfilled effectively; the events
it celebrates were still recent; the author of the play had fought
himself at Salamis, and the whole Athenian people were glowing with
the patriotic impulse that had placed them first among the states of
Hellas. Æschylus was, however, too deeply conscious of the spirit of
his art to let the _Persæ_ sink into the rank of pageantry or triumph.
The defeat of Xerxes and his host supplied him with a splendid tragic
instance of pride humbled, and greatness brought to nothing, through
one man's impiety and pride. The moral that the poet wished to draw
is put into the mouth of Darius, whose ghost, evoked by Atossa and
the Chorus, completes the tale of Persian disasters by predicting the
battle of Platæa. "Swiftly are the oracles accomplished. I looked for
length of days; but when a man hastes, God helps to urge him on. It
was my son's insolence, in chaining the holy Hellespont, and thinking
he could stay the Bosporus, the stream divine, from flowing, which
brought these woes. He thought to make a path for his army, to hold
Poseidon and the powers of Heaven in bondage--he a mortal, and they
gods! Few of his great host shall come again to Susa. In Hellas they
must pay the penalty of arrogance and godless hearts. Coming to that
land, they thought it no shame to rob the statues of the gods and
burn the shrines; the altars were cast down, the temples overthrown.
Therefore, as they did evil, evil shall they suffer. Heaps of dead
upon Platæa's plain shall tell to the third generation, by speechless
signs appealing to the eyes of men, that no man mortal may dare raise
his heart too high. For insolence blooms forth and bears the crop of
disaster, whence one reaps a harvest of tears. Seeing which payment for
these crimes, remember Hellas and Athens. Nor let a man, in scorn of
his own lot, desire another's good, and spill much wealth; for Zeus, in
sooth, stands high above, a grievous schoolmaster, to tame excessive
lifting-up of hearts." Nowhere else, it may be said, has Æschylus
thought fit so decidedly to moralize his dramatic motive, or so clearly
to state in simple words his philosophy of Nemesis. The ghost of
Darius, as may be conjectured from this address, does not belong to the
same race as the Banquos and Hamlets of our stage. He is a political
phantom, a monarch evoked from his mausoleum to give sage counsel, and
well-informed about the affairs of his empire.
By laying the scene of this drama at Susa, the ancient capital of the
Persian kings, Æschylus was enabled to adopt a style of treatment
peculiarly flattering to his Greek audience. The Persians are made
to bewail their own misfortunes, to betray the rottenness of their
vast empire, and to lament the wretchedness of nations subject to
the caprice of irresponsible and selfish princes. Inured to slavery,
they hug their chains; and, though in rags, Xerxes is still to them a
demi-god. The servility of Oriental courtiers, the pomp and pride of
Oriental princes, the obsequious ceremonies and the inflated flatteries
of barbarians, are translated for Greek ears and eyes into gorgeous
forms by the poet, whose own genius had something Asiatic in its tone
and temper. Many occasions for grim irony are afforded by this mode of
handling, whereof the famous speech of Atossa on the clothes of Xerxes,
if that, indeed, be genuine, and the inability of the Chorus, through
servile shyness, to address the ghost of Darius, furnish the most
obvious examples. A finer and subtler note is struck in the dialogue
between Atossa and the Chorus just before the news of the defeat at
Salamis arrives. She asks where Athens may be found:
#keina d' ekmathein thelô,
ô philoi, pou tas Athênas phasin hidrysthai chthonos?#
This offers the poet an opportunity for putting into the mouth of the
Persian coryphæus a flattering account of his own nation: No monarch
have they, few are they, but all men of might, and strong enough to
rout the myriad bowmen of the Persian host with spear and shield. The
_naïveté_ of the description--in itself highly complimentary to the
Athenians--must have made it effective on the stage. We may fancy
how the cheering of the men of Marathon re-echoed from the Dionysian
theatre, and filled Athene's hill "song-wise" with sound, as each
triumphant trochaic leaped forth from the Persian lips. At the same
time the tragic irony is terrible, for the queen is on the point of
hearing from the Messenger that this mere handful of spearmen crushed
her son's host, countless as the stars, in one day upon sea and shore.
The real point of that fierce duel of two nations, which decided the
future of the human race--the contrast between barbarians and men in
whom the spirit was alive, between slaves driven to the fight like
sheep and freemen acting consciously as their own will determined,
between the brute force of multitudes and the inspired courage of a
few heroes--has never been expressed more radiantly than in this play.
No language of criticism can do justice to the incomparable brilliancy
and vigor with which the tale of Salamis is told. We must remember,
in reading the speeches of the Messenger, that this is absolutely
the first page of Greek history. It came before Herodotus, and the
soldier-poet, who had seen what he narrated, was no less conscious
than we are, after all our study, of the real issues, of the momentous
interests at stake. Never elsewhere has contemporary history been
written thus. In these triumphant rheseis Æschylus did not choose to
maintain a bare dramatic propriety. The herald is relating disaster
after disaster; yet the elation of the poet pulses through his speech,
and he cannot be sad. We feel that, while he is dinning into the ears
of the barbarian empress and her courtiers this panegyric of Hellenic
heroism, he is really speaking to an Attic audience. The situation is,
however, sufficiently sustained for theatrical purposes by the dignity
wherewith Atossa meets her ruin. She shows herself a queen in spite
of all, and the front she presents to "the sea of troubles" (#kakôn
pelagos#) breaking over the whole Asian empire is fully adequate to the
magnitude of the calamity. It is difficult to believe that the speech
written for her by Æschylus, when she returns with the libations for
Darius, was not intended, by its grandly decorative style, to convey
the impression of calmness in the midst of sorrow. Atossa is great
enough to be self-possessed, and to dwell with tender thoughtfulness
upon the gifts of nature beloved by the powers of darkness. The lines
are these:
#boos t' aph' hagnês leukon eupoton gala,
tês t' anthemourgou stagma, pamphaes meli,
libasin hydrêlais parthenou pêgês meta;
akêraton te mêtros agrias apo
poton palaias ampelou ganos tode;
tês d' aien en phylloisi thallousês ison
xanthês elaias karpos euôdês para,
anthê te plekta pamphorou gaias tekna.#
This passage is a fair example of the "mighty line" of Æschylus,
employed for purposes of pure adornment. The pomp and circumstance of
tragic style, which he so well knew how to use, gave unrivalled dignity
to his narration. Yet this style, even in the days of Aristophanes,
had come to sound extravagant, while its occasional bombast, as in the
famous periphrasis for dust,
#kasis
pêlou xynouros dipsia konis#,
reminds a modern reader too much of the padding of the actors' chests,
the cothurnus, brazen mouthpiece, and heightened mask required by
the huge size of the Athenian theatre. The phrases invented in the
_Frogs_ to express the peculiarities of the Æschylean exaggeration,
#kompophakelorrhêmona#, or #hippolophôn logôn korythaiola neikê#, or,
again,
#phrixas d' autokomou lophias lasiauchena chaitan
deinon episkynion xynagôn brychômenos hêsei
rhêmata gomphopagê pinakêdon apospôn
gêgenei physêmati#,
very cleverly parody the effect of the more tumid passages. Yet when
Æschylus chose to be simple he combined majesty with grace, strength
with beauty, and speed with volume, in a style which soars higher
and reaches farther than the polished perfection of Sophocles or the
artistic elegance of Euripides. The descriptions of Ionia and Doria
drawing Xerxes' chariot in Atossa's dream, and of the education of
mankind in the _Prometheus_, belong to his more pure and chastened
manner. The famous speech in which Clytemnestra tells of the leaping up
of watchfire after watchfire from Troy to Mycenæ, of Ida flashing the
flame to the Hermæan cliff of Lemnos, of Athos taking it up and sending
it with joy across the gulf to far Makistus, of the Messapian warders
lighting their dry heath and speeding the herald-blaze in brightness
like the moon to Cithæron, and thence, by peak and promontory, over
fen and plain and flickering armlet of the sea, onward to Agamemnon's
palace-tower--this brilliant picture, glittering with the rarest
jewels of imaginative insight, can only be coupled with the Salaminian
speeches of the _Persæ_. They stand in a place apart. Purity, lucidity,
rapidity, energy, elevation, and fiery intensity of style are here
divinely mingled. There is no language and no metre equal to the Greek
and the iambic for such resonant, elastic, leaping periods as these.
The firm grasp upon reality preserved by Æschylus, even in his most
passionate and most imaginative moments, adds force unrivalled to these
descriptive passages.
At the same time he surpassed all the poets of his nation in a certain
Shakespearian concentration of phrase. The invectives uttered by
Cassandra against Clytemnestra, and her broken exclamations, abound in
examples of energetic, almost grotesque, imagery, not to be paralleled
in Greek literature. The whole of the _Seven against Thebes_, and
in particular that choric ode which describes the capture and sack
of a town, might be cited with a similar intention. But perhaps the
strongest instance of this more than Greek vehemence of expression
is the denunciation hurled by Phoebus at the Furies in his Delphian
shrine:
Away, I bid you! Leave my palace halls:
Quit these pure shrines oracular with speed!
Lest haply some winged glistening serpent sent
From the gold-twisted bow-wire bite your flesh,
And ye, pain-stricken, vomit gory froth,
The clotted spilth of man's blood ye have supped.
Nay, these gates are not yours! _There_ is your dwelling,
Where heads are chopped, eyes gouged in savage justice,
Throats cut, and bloom of boys unnamably
Is mangled; there where nose and ears are slithered,
With stonings, and the piteous smothered moan
Of slaves impaled. Hence! Hear ye not whereby,
Loving like ghouls these banquets, ye're become
To gods abominable? Lo, your shape
Bewrays your spirit. Blood-swilled lions' dens
Are fit for you to live in, not the seat
Of sooth oracular, which you pollute.
Go, heifers grazing without herdsman, go!
To herd like yours no face of god is kindly.
Another Shakespearian quality in the Æschylean use of language and of
imagery might be illustrated from his metaphors. He calls the ocean
a forest--#pontion alsos# or #halirrhyton alsos#--as though he would
remind us of the great sea-beasts that roam like wolves or lions down
beneath the waves. The vultures are #oxystomoi Zênos akrageis kynes#.
The eagle is #Dios ptênos kyôn daphoinos#. The Furies of Clytemnestra
are #mêtros enkotoi kynes#. The Argives who poured forth from the
Wooden Horse to plunder Troy are called #Argeion dakos, hippou neossos,
aspidêphoros leôs#. The flame of the thunderbolt becomes #pyros
amphêkês bostrychos#. The beacon-flame on Ægiplanctus is a huge beard,
#phlogos megan pôgôna#. In all these metaphors we trace an imaginative
energy which the Greek poets usually sought to curb. When we speak of
the mighty line of Æschylus, we naturally remember verses like these:
#all' hou karanistêres ophthalmôrychoi#,
and
#phaiochitônes kai peplektanêmenai
pyknois drakousin#,
which carry with them a massive weight, not only of sound and words,
but also of meaning and of imagery. No wonder that Aristophanes
jestingly compared the gravity of the style of Æschylus with that of
Euripides in balances. A single phrase of the former's causes a score
of the latter's to kick the beam; and as the sonorous nouns, flanked
by their polysyllabic epithets, advance, the earth is seen to shake as
though battalions were hurrying to the charge, and squadrons of cavalry
with thundering horses' hoofs and waving plumes were prancing on the
plain.
The difficulty of Æschylus, when it is not due, as in the _Suppliants_
and in the choric odes of the _Agamemnon_, to a ruined text, may be
ascribed to the rapidity of his transition from one thought to another,
to the piling-up of images and metaphors, and to the remote and mystic
nature of the ideas he is seeking for the first time to express in
language. Where even simple prose could scarcely convey his meaning,
he presents a cloud of highly poetic figures to our mind. This kind of
difficulty, however, like that which the student has to meet in Pindar,
is straightforward. You know when you are at fault, and why, and how
alone you can arrive at a solution of the problem. The difficulty of
Sophocles is more insidious. It is possible to think you understand
him, when you really do not; to feel his drift, and yet to find it hard
to construe his language. In this case the difficulty arises from the
poet's desire to convey his meaning in a subtle, many-sided, pregnant,
and yet smooth style. The more you think over it, the more you get from
it. Euripides belonged to an age of facile speech, fixed phraseology,
and critical analysis: it therefore follows that he presents fewer
obvious difficulties to the reader; and this, perhaps, was one reason
for his popularity among the early scholars of the modern age. At any
rate, he does not share with Æschylus the difficulty that arose when a
poet of intense feeling and sublime imagination strove to grapple with
deep and intricate thoughts before language had become a scientific
instrument.
In conclusion I would once again return to that doctrine of
#pathêmata mathêmata#, connected with a definite conception of the
divine government and based upon a well-considered theory of human
responsibility, which may be traced throughout the plays of Æschylus.
To this morality his drama owes its unity and vigor, inasmuch as all
the plots constructed by the poet both presuppose and illustrate it.
The conviction that what a man sows he will reap, and that the world
is not ruled by blind chance, is, in one sense or another, the most
solid ethical acquisition of humanity. Amid so much else that seems to
shift in morals and in religion, it affords firm ground for action.
This vital moral faith the Greeks held as securely, at least, as we do;
and the theology with which their highest teachers--men like Æschylus,
Pindar, Plato--sought to connect it, tended to weaken its effect far
less than any other systems of divinity have done. We are too apt to
forget this, while we fix our attention upon the unrivalled beauty
of Greek art. In reality there are few nations whose fine literature
combines so much æsthetic splendor with direct, sound, moral doctrine;
and this, not because the poets strove to preach, but because their
minds were healthily imbued with human wisdom. Except in the works of
Milton, we English, for example, can show no poetical exposition of a
moral theory at all equal to that of Æschylus. But while Milton sets
forth his doctrine as a portion of divine revelation, and vitiates it
with the dross of dogmatism, Æschylus shows the law implicit in the
history of men and heroes: it is inferred by him intuitively from the
facts of spiritual life, as apprehended by the consciousness of the
Greeks in their best age.
FOOTNOTES:
[125] See line 107.
[126] It should be said that the subject-matter of the _Prometheus
Unbound_ has to be gathered partly from fragments of the play, partly
from prophecies in the _Prometheus Bound_, and partly from later
versions of the legend.
[127] "Him who leads men in the ways of wisdom, who has ordained that
suffering should teach."
[128] See _Supplices_, 524-599.