“A shadow might o'erturn it.”
Footnote 379:
Her own doom, hard as it was, touches her less than the common lot of
human suffering and mutability.
Footnote 380:
So far the dialogue has been sustained by the Coryphæos, or leader of
the Chorus. Now each member of it speaks and gives his counsel.
Footnote 381:
The Coryphæos again takes up his part, sums up, and pronounces his
decision.
Footnote 382:
_i.e._, He had had his triumph over her when, forgetful of her
mother's feelings, he had sacrificed Iphigeneia. She has now repaid
him to the full.
Footnote 383:
The third libation at all feasts was to Zeus, as the Preserver or
Guardian Deity. Clytæmnestra boasts that her third blow was as an
offering to a God of other kind, to Him who had in his keeping not the
living, but the dead.
Footnote 384:
So in the _Choëphori_ (vv. 351, 476), the custom of pouring libations
on the burial-place of the dead is recognised as an element of their
blessedness or shame in Hades, and Agamemnon is represented as lacking
the honour which comes from them till he receives it at the hand of
Orestes.
Footnote 385:
Incense was placed on the head of the victim. The Chorus tell
Clytæmnestra that she has brought upon her own head the incense, not
of praise and admiration, but of hatred and wrath, as though some
poison had driven her mad.
Footnote 386:
The species of swan referred to is said to be the _Cygnus Musicus_.
Aristotle (_Hist. Anim._ ix. 12) describes swans of some kind as
having been heard by sailors near the coast of Libya, “singing with a
lamentable cry.” Mrs. Somerville (_Phys. Geog._, c. xxxiii. 3)
describes their note as “like that of a violin.” The same fact is
reported of the swans of Iceland and other regions of the far North.
The strange, tender beauty of the passage in the _Phædo_ of Plato (p.
85, a), which speaks of them as singing when at the point of death,
has done more than anything else to make the illustration one of the
commonplaces of rhetoric and poetry.
Footnote 387:
The structure of the lyrical dialogue that follows is rather
complicated, and different editors have adopted different
arrangements. I have followed Paley's.
Footnote 388:
Several lines seem to have dropped out by some accident of
transcription.
Footnote 389:
Agamemnon and Menelaos, as descended from Tantalos, the father of
Pelops.
Footnote 390:
In each case women, Helen and Clytæmnestra, had been the unconscious
instruments of the divine Nemesis, to which the Chorus traces the ruin
of the house of Atreus.
Footnote 391: