“A mischief in his house,
A man reared, not on milk.”
Home-reared lions seem to have been common as pets, both among Greeks
and Latins (Arist., _Hist. Anim._ ix. 31; Plutarch, _de Cohib. irâ_, §
14, p. 822), sometimes, as in Martial's Epigram, ii. 25, with fatal
consequences. The text shows the practice to have been common enough
in the time of Pericles to supply a similitude.
Footnote 326:
There may, possibly, be a half allusion here to the passage in the
_Iliad_ (vv. 154-160), which describes the fascination which the
beauty of Helen exercised on the Troïan elders.
Footnote 327:
The poet becomes a prophet, and asserts what it has been given him to
know of the righteous government of God. The dominant creed of Greece
at the time was, that the Gods were envious of man's prosperity, that
this alone, apart from moral evil, was enough to draw down their
wrath, and bring a curse upon the prosperous house. So, _e.g._, Amasis
tells Polycrates (Herod. iii. 40) that the unseen Divinity that rules
the world is envious, that power and glory are inevitably the
precursors of destruction. Comp. also the speech of Artabanos (Herod.
vii. 10, 46). Against this, in the tone of one who speaks singlehanded
for the truth, Æschylos, through the Chorus, enters his protest.
Footnote 328:
_Sc._, Agamemnon, by the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, had induced his
troops to persevere in an expedition from which, in their inmost
hearts, they shrank back with strong dislike. A conjectural reading
gives,
“By the sacrifice he offered
Giving death-doomed men false boldness.”
Footnote 329:
The tone of ambiguous irony mingles, it will be seen, even here, with
the praises of the Chorus.
Footnote 330:
Possibly an allusion to Pandora's box. Here, too, Hope alone was left,
but it only came up to where the curve of the rim began, not to its
top. The imagery is drawn from the older method of voting, in which
(as in _Eumenides_, v. 678) the votes for condemnation and acquittal
were cast into separate urns.
Footnote 331:
The lion, as the symbol of the house of Atreus, still seen in the
sculptures of Mykenæ; the horse, in allusion to the stratagem by which
Troïa had been taken.
Footnote 332:
At the end of autumn, and therefore at a season when a storm like that
described by the herald would be a probable incident enough.
Footnote 333: