Ἄλλοις ἄν ἐι δή. τουτ᾽ ἂρ (ὀ)ιδ ὃπη τελ(ε)ι.
PEILE.
Note 72 (p. 129).
"With soft-wreathed wool, and precatory branch."
These insignia of suppliants are familiar to every reader of the
Classics. I shall only recall two of the most familiar instances. In the
opening scene of the Iliad the priest of Apollo appears before
Agamemnon, and
"In his hand he held the chaplet of the distant-darting Phœbus
On a golden rod."
And in the opening lines of the Œdipus Tyrannus, the old King asks the
Chorus--
"Why swarm ye here around the seats of the gods,
With branches furnished such as suppliants bear?"
Note 73 (p. 129).
". . . navel of earth, where burns the flame
Of fire immortal."
As the old astronomers made Earth the centre of the planetary system,
and as men are everywhere, and at all times, apt to consider their own
position and point of view as of more importance in the great whole of
things than it really is; so the Greeks, in their ignorant vanity,
considered their own Delphi to be the navel, or central point of Earth.
As to the immortal fire, STAN. quotes here from Plutarch, who, in his
life of Numa (c. ix.), describing the institution of the Vestal Virgins,
takes occasion to mention the sacred fire kept alive in Greece at two
places, Delphi and Athens, which, if extinguished, was always rekindled
from no earthly spark, but from the Sun.
Note 74 (p. 130).
"There is atonement."
Ἐισιν καθαρμόι, SCHÜTZ, PAL.; (ε)᾽ σται καθαρμός, BOTHE. Either of
these seems preferable to the vulgate ἐισω. FRANZ has ῟Εις σοι
καθαρμὸς. _Eins bleibt Dir Sühnung._
{372}
Note 75 (p. 130).
"Ye see them not. I see them."
Ghosts and gods are never visible to the bystander, but only to the
person or persons who may be under their special influence at the
moment of their appearance--so in the Iliad (I. 197), Pallas Athena--
"There behind him stood, and by the yellow hair she seized Pelides,
Seen to him alone; the others saw not where the goddess stood."
and so in a thousand places of the poet. To the spectator, however, in
the theatre, spiritual beings must be visible, because (as Müller,
Eumen. 3, properly remarks) they are the very persons from before whose
eyes it is the business of the poet to remove the veil that interposes
between our everyday life and the spiritual world. That the Furies of
the following piece were seen bodily at this part of the present play,
and are not supposed to exist merely in the brain of Orestes, is only
what a decent regard for common poetical consistency on the part of a
great tragic poet seems to imply.
Note 76 (p. 130).
". . . the god whose eyes in love behold thee!"
What god is not said, but the word θεός is used indefinitely without
the article. The Greeks had an indefinite style when talking of the
divine providence--_a god_, or _some god_, or _the god_, or _the
gods_--a style which arose naturally out of the Polytheistic form of
celestial government. Examples of all the different kinds of phraseology
are frequent in Homer. Sometimes, in that author, the expression, though
indefinite in itself, has a special allusion, plain enough from the
context; and in the present passage I see no harm in supposing an
allusion to Apollo, under whose immediate patronage Orestes acts through
the whole of this piece and that which follows.