{37}
OF all that rich variety of Epic materials with which the early
minstrel-literature of Greece supplied the drama of a future age, there
was no more notable cycle among the ancients than that which went by the
popular name of Νόστοι, or the _Returns_; comprehending an account
of the adventures that befell the various Hellenic heroes of the Trojan
war in their return home. To this cycle, in its most general
acceptation, the Odyssey itself belongs; though the name of
Νόστοι, according to the traditions of the ancient grammarians, is
more properly confined to a legendary Epic, composed by an old poet,
Agias of Troezene, of which the return of Agamemnon and Menelaus forms
the principal subject. Of this Epos the grammarian Proclus[f1]
gives us the following abstract:--
"Athena raises a strife between Agamemnon and Menelaus concerning their
voyage homeward. Agamemnon remains behind, in order to pacify the wrath
of Athena; but Diomede and Nestor depart, and return in safety to their
own country. After them Menelaus sails, and arrives with five ships in
Egypt; the rest of his vessels having been lost in a storm. Meanwhile,
Calchas and Leonteus and Polypœtes go to Colophon, and celebrate the
funeral obsequies of Tiresias, who had died there. There is then
introduced the shade of Achilles appearing to Agamemnon, and warning him
of the dangers that he was about to encounter. Then follows a storm as
the fleet is passing the Capharean rocks, at the south promontory of
Eubœa, on which occasion the Locrian Ajax is destroyed by the wrath of
Athena, whom he had offended. Neoptolemus, on the other hand, under the
protection of Thetis, makes his way overland through Thrace (where he
encounters Ulysses in Maronea), to his native country, and proceeding to
the country of the Molossi, is there recognised by his grandfather, the
aged Peleus, the father of Achilles. The poem then concludes with an
account of the murder of Agamemnon by Ægisthus and Clytemnestra, of the
revenge taken on her by Orestes and Pylades, and of the return of
Menelaus to Lacedæmon."[f2]
{38} The last sentence of this curious notice contains the Epic germ of
which the famous trilogy--the Agamemnon, the Choephorœ, and the
Eumenides of Æschylus--present the dramatic expansion. The celebrity
of the legends with regard to the return of the mighty Atridan arose
naturally from the prominent situation in which he stood as the admiral
of the famous thousand-masted fleet; and, besides, the passage from the
old Troezenian minstrel just quoted, is sufficiently attested by various
passages--some of considerable length--in the Odyssey, which will
readily present themselves to the memory of those who are familiar
with the productions of the great Ionic Epopœist. In the very opening
of that poem, for instance, occur the following remarkable lines:--
"Strange, O strange, that mortal men immortal gods will still be
blaming,
Saying that the source of evil lies with us; while they, in sooth,
More than Fate would have infatuate with sharp sorrows pierce
themselves!
Thus even now Ægisthus, working sorrow more than Fate would have,
The Atridan's wife hath wedded, and himself returning slain,
Knowing well the steep destruction that awaits him; for ourselves
Sent the sharp-eyed Argus-slayer, Hermes, to proclaim our will,
That nor him he dare to murder, nor his wedded wife to woo.
Thus spoke Hermes well and wisely; but thy reckless wit, Ægisthus,
Moved he not; full richly therefore now thy folly's fine thou payest."
And the same subject is reverted to in the Third Book (v. 194), where
old Nestor, in Pylos, gives an account to Telemachus, first of his own
safe return, and then of the fate of the other Greeks, so far as he
knew; and, again, in the Fourth Book (v. 535) where Menelaus is informed
of his brother's sad fate (slain "like a bull in a stall") by the old
prophetic Proteus, the sea harlequin of the African coast; and, also, in
the Eleventh Book (v. 405), where Ulysses, in Hades, hears the sad
recital from the injured shade of the royal Atridan himself.
The tragic events by which Agamemnon and his family have acquired such a
celebrity in the epic and dramatic annals of Greece, are but the sequel
and consummation of a series of similar events commencing with the great
ancestor of the family; all which hang together in the chain of popular
tradition by the great moral principle so often enunciated in the course
of these dramas, that sin has always a tendency to propagate its like,
and a root of bitterness once planted in a family, will grow up and
branch out luxuriantly, till, in the fulness of time, it bears those
bloody blossoms, and fruits of perdition that are its natural product.
The guilty ancestor, in the present case, is the {39} well-known
Tantalus, the peculiar style of whose punishment in the infernal regions
has been stereotyped, for the modern memory, in the shape of one of the
most common and most expressive words in the English language. Tantalus,
a son of Jove, a native of Sipylos in Phrygia, and who had been admitted
to the table of the gods, thinking it a small matter to know the divine
counsels, if he did not, at the same time, gratify his vanity by making
a public parade of his knowledge before profane ears, was punished in
the pit of Tartarus by those tortures of ever reborn and never gratified
desire which every schoolboy knows. His son, Pelops, an exile from his
native country, comes with great wealth to Pisa; and having, by
stratagem, won, in a chariot race, Hippodamia, the daughter of
Oernomaus, king of that place, himself succeeded to the kingdom, and
became so famous, according to the legend, as to lend a new name to the
southern peninsula of Greece which was the theatre of his
exploits.[f3] In his career also, however, the traces of blood
are not wanting, which soil so darkly the path of his no less famous
descendants. Pelops slew Myrtilus, the charioteer by whose aid he had
won the race that was the beginning of his greatness; and it was the
Fury of this Myrtilus--or "his blood crying to Heaven," as in Christian
style we should express it--that, according to one poet (Eurip. Orest.
981), gave rise to the terrible retributions of blood by which the
history of the Pelopidan family is marked. Of Pelops, according to the
common account, Atreus and Thyestes were the sons. These having murdered
their stepbrother, Chrysippus, were obliged to flee for safety to
Mycenæ, in Argolis, where, in the course of events, they afterwards
established themselves, and became famous for their wealth and for their
crimes. The bloody story of these hostile brothers commences with the
seduction, by Thyestes, of Aerope, the wife of Atreus; in revenge for
which insult, Atreus recalls his banished brother, and, pretending
reconciliation, offers that horrid feast of human flesh--the blood of
the children to the lips of the father--from which the sun turned away
his face in horror. The effect of this deed of blood was to entail,
between the two families of Thyestes and Atreus, a hereditary hostility,
the fruits of which appeared afterwards in the person of Ægisthus, the
son of the former, who is found, in this first play of the trilogy,
engaged with Clytemnestra in a treacherous plot to avenge his father's
wrongs, by the murder of his uncle's son.
Agamemnon, the son, or, according to a less common account (for which
see Schol. ad Iliad II. 249), the grandson of Atreus, being {40}
distinguished above the other Hellenic princes for wealth and power, was
either by special election appointed, or by that sort of irregular
kingship common among half-civilized nations, allowed to conduct the
famous expedition against Troy that in early times foreshadowed the
conquests of Alexander the Great, and the influence of the Greek
language and letters in the East. Such a distant expedition as this,
like the crusades in the middle ages, was not only a natural living Epos
in itself, but would necessarily give rise to that intense glow of
popular sympathy, and that excited state of the popular imagination,
which enable the wandering poets of the people to make the best poetic
use of the various dramatic incidents that the realities of a highly
potentiated history present. Accordingly we find, in the very outset of
the expedition, the fleet, storm-bound in the harbour of Aulis, opposite
Eubœa, enabled to pursue its course, under good omens, only by the
sacrifice of the fairest daughter of the chief. This event--a sad
memorial of the barbarous practice of human sacrifice, even among the
polished Greeks--formed the subject of a special play, perhaps a
trilogic series of plays,[f4] by Æschylus. This performance,
however, has been unfortunately lost; and we can only imagine what it
may have been by the description in the opening chorus of the present
play, and by the beautiful, though certainly far from Æschylean,
tragedy of Euripides. For our present purpose, it is sufficient to note
that, in the Agamemnon, special reference is made to the sacrifice of
Iphigenia, both as an unrighteous deed on the part of the father, for
which some retribution was naturally to be expected, and as the origin
of a special grudge in the mind of the mother, which she afterwards
gratifies by the murder of her husband.
As to that deed of blood itself, and its special adaptation for dramatic
purposes, there can be no doubt; as little that Æschylus has used his
materials in the present play in a fashion that satisfies the highest
demands both of lyric and dramatic poetry, as executed by the first
masters of both. The calm majesty and modest dignity of the much-tried
monarch; the cool self-possession, and the smooth front of specious
politeness that mark the character of the royal murderess: the
obstreperous bullying of the cowardly braggart, who does the deed with
his heart, not with his hand; the half-wild, half-tender ravings of the
horror-haunted Trojan prophetess; these together contain a combination
of highly wrought dramatic elements, {41} such as is scarcely excelled
even in the all-embracing pages of our own Shakespere. As far removed
from common-place are the lyrical--in Æschylus never the
secondary--elements of the piece. The sublime outbreak of Cassandra's
prophetic horror is, as the case demanded, made to exhibit itself as
much under the lyric as in the declamatory form; while the other choral
parts, remarkable for length and variety, are marked not only by that
mighty power of intense moral feeling which is so peculiarly Æschylean,
but by the pictorial beauty and dramatic reality that distinguish the
workmanship of a great lyric master from that of the vulgar dealer in
inflated sentiment and sonorous sentences.