The only serious charge that, to my knowledge, has ever been made against the morality of the Greek drama, is that in it “an innocent person, one in the main of a virtuous character, through no crime of his own, nay not by the vices of others, but through mere Fatality and Blind Chance, is involved in the greatest of all human miseries.” This is the critical judgment of Dr. Blair (lecture xlvi.) in reference to the famous Labdacidan story of Œdipus.¹⁷ Now, though the personal history of Œdipus contains many incidents that expose it justly to criticism, especially when brought upon the stage in a modernized dress by modern French or other poets (which abuse the learned Doctor no doubt had principally in view); yet, as applied to the whole Labdacidan story, or to the subjects of the Greek drama generally, the allegation is either extremely shallow, or altogether false. There is no destiny or fatality of any kind in the Æschylean drama, other than that which, according to the Mosaic record, drove Adam out of Paradise; that destiny which a divine decree, seeing the end in the beginning, has prepared, and that fatality which makes a guilty man not merely the necessary architect of his own misery, but the propagator of a moral contagion, more or less, to the offspring that inherits his pollution and his curse. On this subject I need make no lengthened observations here, as I have brought it and other points of moral and religious feeling prominently forward, both in the introductory observations to the separate plays, and in various places of the notes. I shall only say that the reader who does not find a high moral purpose and a deep religious meaning in the specimens of ancient Greek worship now submitted to his inspection, has no eye for what is best in these pages, and had better throw the book down. The Germans, who look deeper into these matters than we have either time, inclination, or, in the general case, capacity to do, have written volumes on the subject.¹⁸ To me it has seemed more suitable to the genius of the English reader merely to hint the existence of this rich mine of moral wealth, leaving to the quiet thinker where, amid our various political and ecclesiastical clamour, he may have found a corner, to work out the vein with devout spade and mattock for himself.

A few words must now be said on the Dance, as an essential part of the lyrical element of the Greek tragedy. Our sober British, stern Protestant, and precise Presbyterian notions, make it very difficult for us to realize this peculiarity. Even the old Heathen Roman could say, “Nemo fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit”;¹⁹ much more must it be hard for a modern Presbyterian Christian to recognise, in the twinkling-footed celerity of the merry dance, an exercise which a pious old Dorian could look upon as an indispensable part of an act of public worship. To read the weighty moral sentences of a solemn Æschylean Chorus, and then figure to ourselves their author as a dancing-master, is an unnatural and almost painful transition of thought to a Christian man in these times; and yet Athenæus tells us, that the author of the Prometheus really was a professor of the orchestric art, and a very cunning one too.²⁰ The fundamental truth of the case is, that the religion of the Greeks was not, like ours, a religion only of moral emotions and theological principles, but a religion of the whole man, with rather too decided a tendency, in some parts, it must be confessed, towards a disturbance of the equipoise on the side of the senses. But, whatever may be thought of Bacchic orgies and other associate rites, with regard to dancing, there is plainly nothing in the exercise, when decorously conducted, inconsistent either with dignity, or with piety; and the feelings of ancient Romans and modern Presbyterians on the subject, must be regarded as the mere products of arbitrary association. Certain it is, that all the Greek philosophers looked upon dancing as an essential element, not only in the education of a gentleman, but in the performance of public worship; nay, even among the severe Jews, we read that David, on occasion of a great religious festival, danced before the Lord; and only an idle woman called him an idle fellow for doing so. We need not be surprised, therefore, if among the merry Greeks, professing a religion fully as much of physical enjoyment as of moral culture, orchestric evolutions, along with sacred hymns, formed an essential part of the tragic exhibitions belonging to the feasts of the great god Dionysus. On the details of this matter, we are sadly wanting in satisfactory information; but that the fact was so, there can be no doubt.²¹ The only point with regard to which there is room for a serious difference of opinion is, whether every performance of the Chorus in full band included dancing, or whether it was only introduced occasionally, as the ballet in our modern operas. On this point, the greatest authority in Greek Literature at present living has declared strongly in favour of the latter view; and, in doing so, he has been followed by one of the first philologers of our own country;²² and as I have not been led, in the course of my studies, to make any particular examination of this subject, I am loath to contradict anything proceeding from such an authoritative quarter. One great branch of the evidence, I presume, on which this view is supported, lies in the words of the old Scholiast to the choral chaunt in the Phœnissae of Euripides, beginning with these words, Τύριον (ὀ)ιδμα λιπῦσ῎ ἔβαν. “This chaunt,” says the annotator, “is what is called a στάσιμον, or standing chorus; for when the Chorus, after the πάροδος, remaining motionless, sings a hymn arising out of the subject of the play, this song is called a στάσιμον. A πάροδος, on the other hand, is a song sung as they are marching into the orchestra on the first entrance.”²³ Now, no doubt, if this matter be taken with a literal exactitude, the expression, ἀκίνητος, or without moving, will exclude dancing; but if we merely take it generally, as opposed to the great sweeping evolutions of the Chorus, and as implying only a permanent occupation of the same ground in the centre of the orchestra, by the band, as a whole, while the individual members might change their places in the most graceful and beautiful variety of forms, we are thus saved from the harshness of giving to the orchestric element, in many plays, a subordinate position, equally at variance with the original character of the Chorus, and with the place which the dance held as a prominent part of Greek social life.²⁴ With regard to Æschylus, in particular, I do not see how I should be acting in consistency with the testimony of Athenæus just quoted, if I were to assign such a small proportion of the choric performances to orchestric accompaniment, as Boeckh and Donaldson have done in their editions of the play of Sophocles, which the genius of Miss Faucit has rendered so dear to the friends of the drama in this country. It would be easy to show, from internal evidence such as Boeckh finds in what he calls the Orchestric Chorus, or ἐμμέλεια of the Antigone, that certain choruses of Æschylus are more adapted for violent and extensive orchestric movements than others. But I have thought it more prudent, considering the general uncertainty that surrounds this matter, not to make any allusion to dancing in any one performance of the Chorus more than another; contenting myself with carefully distinguishing everywhere between the anapæstic parts where the Chorus is plainly making extensive movements, and the Choral Hymn with regular Strophe and Antistrophe, which is sung when they are placed in their proper position in a square band round the Thymele (θυμέλη), or Bacchic altar, in the centre of the orchestra.²⁵

Having said so much with regard both to the form and substance of the lyric portion of the Æschylean drama, I have said almost all that I was anxious to say; for, in stating this matter clearly, I have brushed out of the way the principal part of that host of modern associations which is so apt to disturb our sympathetic enjoyment of the great masterpieces of Hellenic art. Anything that might be said in detail on the iambic or dialogic part of ancient tragedy would only serve to set in a yet stronger light the grand fact which has been urged, that the strength of the Greek drama lies in the singing, and not in the acting. It were easy to show by an extensive analysis, that the classical “goat-singers” had but very imperfect notions on the subject of stage dialogue; and that it was a light thing for them to deal at large in mere epic description, or rhetorical declamation, without offending the taste of a fastidious audience, or sinning grossly against the understood laws of the sort of composition which they exhibited.²⁶ Notwithstanding Aristotle’s nicely-drawn distinction, the narrated, or purely epic parts of the Greek tragedy, are often the best. This is the case not seldom even with Æschylus, whose native dramatic power the voice of a master has judged to be first-rate.²⁷ But with him the infant state of the art, and the insufficient supply of actors,²⁸ combined with a radical faultiness of structure, produced, in not a few instances, the same anti-dramatic results as the want of dramatic genius in Euripides. Further, to use the language of Mr. Donaldson—“the narrowness and distance of the stage rendered any (free and complex) grouping unadvisable. The arrangement of the actors was that of a processional bas relief. Their movements were slow, their gesticulations abrupt and angular, and their delivery a sort of loud and deep-drawn sing-song, which resounded throughout the immense theatre. They probably neglected everything like by-play and making points, which are so effective on the English stage. The distance at which the spectators were placed would prevent them from seeing those little movements and hearing those low tones which have made the fortune of many a modern actor. The mask, too, precluded all attempts at varied expression, and it is probable that nothing more was expected from the performer than was looked for from his predecessor, the rhapsode—viz., good recitation.” These observations, flowing from a realization of the known circumstances of the case, will sufficiently explain to the modern reader the extreme stiffness and formality which distinguishes the tragic dialogue of the Greeks from that dexterous and various play of verbal interchange which delights us so much in Shakespere and the other masters of English tragedy. Every view, in short, that we can take, tends to fix our attention on the musical and the religious elements, as on the life-blood and vital soul of the Hellenic τραγῳδία; forces us to the conclusion that, with a due regard to organic principle, its proper designation is sacred opera,²⁹ and not tragedy, in the modern sense of the word at all; and leads us to look on the dramatic art altogether in the hands of Æschylus, not as an infant Hercules strangling serpents, but as a Titan, like his own Prometheus, chained to a rock, whom only, after many ages, a strong Saxon Shakespere could unbind.

To conclude. If these observations shall seem to any conceived in a style too depreciatory of the masterpieces of Hellenic art, such persons will observe, that what has been here said of a negative character has reference only to the form of these productions as works of art, and not to their poetic contents. An unfortunate external arrangement is often, as in the case of the German writer Richter, united in intimate amalgamation with the richest and most exuberant energy of intellectual and moral life. However imperfect the Greek “tragedies” are as forms of artistic exhibition, they are not the less admirable, for the mass of healthy poetic life of which they are the embodiment, and the grand combination of artistic elements which they present. As among the world’s notable men there are some who are great rather by a harmonious combination of the great healthy elements of humanity, than by the gigantic development of any one faculty, so in literature there are phenomena which must be measured by the mass of inward life which they concentrate, not by the structural perfection of form which they exhibit. The lyrical tragedy of the Greeks presents, in a combination elsewhere unexampled, the best elements of our serious drama, our opera, our oratorio, our public worship, and our festal recreations. The people who prepared and enjoyed such an intellectual banquet were not base-minded. Had their stability been equal to their susceptibility, the world had never seen their equal. As it is, they are like to remain for ages the great Hierophants of the intellectual world, whose influence will always be felt even by those who are ignorant or impudent enough to despise them; and among the various branches of art and science which owed a felicitous culture to their dexterous and subtle genius, there is certainly no phenomenon in the wide history of imaginative manifestation more imposing and more significant than that which bears on its face the signature of the rude god of wine, and his band of shaggy and goat-footed revellers.

THE LIFE OF ÆSCHYLUS

The richest heritage that a great dramatic poet can receive from the past, is a various store of legendary tradition, in the shape of ballads or popular epos; the greatest present blessing that can happen to him from Heaven, is to live in an age when every mighty thought to which he can give utterance finds a ready response in the hearts of the people, urged by the memory of great deeds recently achieved, to aspire after greater yet to come. Both these blessings were enjoyed by the founder of the serious lyrical drama of the Greeks. In Homer, Æschylus recognised his heritage from the past.¹ Marathon and Salamis were the first sublime motions of those strong popular breezes by which the flight of his eagle muse was sustained.

The Parian marble, more trustworthy than the discordant statements of ill-informed, or ill-transcribed lexicographers and scholiasts, enables us to fix the date of Æschylus, in the year 525 before Christ. Born an Athenian, in the deme of Eleusis, of an ancient and noble family, he had ample opportunity, by the contagion of the place, in his boyish days, of brooding over those lofty religious ideas which formed the characteristic inspiration of his drama,² Pausanias (I. 21) relates of him that, on one occasion, when he was watching the vineyards as a mere boy, Dionysus appeared to him and ordered him to write dramas. Of this story, we may say that it either is true, literally, or invented to symbolize something that must have been true. The next authentic fact in the life of the poet, testified by Suidas, is that in his twenty-fifth year (499, B.C.), the same in which Sardes was burnt by the Ionians, he first appeared as a competitor for the tragic prize. But, as the strongest intellectual genius is often that which, like the oak, grows slowest, we do not find him registered as having actually gained the prize in such a competition till the lapse of sixteen years. Meanwhile, the soul of Greece had been called out at Marathon to prepare the world, as it were, for that brilliant display of self-dependence which was afterwards made at Salamis. At both these victories, which belonged to the world as much as to Greece, Æschylus was present, as also, according to some accounts, at Artemisium and Platæae—learning in all these encounters how much more noble it is to act poetry than to sing it, and borrowing from them certain high trumpet-notes of martial inspiration that stirred the soul deeper than any that could have been fetched from the fountains of Helicon, or the double peak of Parnassus. Braced in this best school of manhood, he continued his exertions as a dramatic poet, bringing gradually to firmness and maturity the dim broodings of his early years, till, in the year 484, according to the marble already quoted, he was publicly declared victor in that species of composition, of which, from the great improvement he made in it, he was afterwards to be celebrated as the father. In a few years after this, he, with his brother Ameinias, performed a distinguished part at the battle of Salamis; and this victory he eight years afterwards celebrated in his play of the Persians, the earliest of his extant productions, of which the date is certainly known.³ The next mention that we find of the poet, among the few stray and comparatively unimportant notices that remain, is that some time between the year 478, that is, two years after the battle of Salamis, and the year 467, he paid a visit to Sicily, and along with Pindar, Bacchylides, Simonides, and other famous poets, was hospitably entertained by Hieron the famous tyrant of Syracuse. The two dates mentioned are those which mark the beginning and the end of the reign of that ruler; within which period, of course, the visit to Sicily must have taken place. Plutarch, in his life of Cimon (c. 8), connects Æschylus’ departure for Sicily with the first tragic victory gained by the young Sophocles in the year preceding the death of Hiero; but it is possible that this precise date may have no other foundation than the story which attributed the Sicilian journey of the elder bard to his envy of the rising greatness of the younger; an instance of that sort of impertinence in which small wits constantly indulge when they busy themselves to assign motives for the actions of great ones. But the precise period is of small moment. When in Sicily, we are told that Æschylus re-exhibited his play of the Persians,⁴ and also wrote a play called the Aetneans, to celebrate the foundation of the new city of Etna by his patron. This event, we are informed by Diodorus (xi. 49), took place in the year 476, a date which would require the presence of the poet in Sicily six years before the date mentioned by Plutarch. Connected with Sicily, there is worthy of mention also, in a life of Æschylus, the notable eruption of Etna, which took place in the year 479—the same in which the battle of Platæae took place⁵—because there is a distinct allusion to this in the Prometheus Bound (p. 192), which enables us to say that this famous drama could not have been written before the forty-seventh year of the poet’s life—that is to say, the full maturity of his powers. The next date in the life of the poet, according to the recently discovered διδασκαλία to the Seven against Thebes,⁶ is the representation of the great Oedipodean tetralogy in the year 467; and the next date is a yet more important one, the year of the representation of that famous trilogy, still extant, which has always been looked on as his masterpiece. The argument of the Agamemnon fixes the exhibition of the trilogy of which it is the first piece, to the year of the archonship of Philocles, B.C. 458. It is known, also, that the poet died at Gela, in Sicily, two years afterwards, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, the date being given in the marble; and there can be little doubt that the cause of this, his final retirement to that island, must have been a growing distance between him and the Athenian public, arising from diversity of political feeling, and the state of parties in the Attic capital. In that city, democracy had been in steady advance from the time of Cleisthenes (B.C. 509), and was now ebullient under the popular inspiration of the recent Persian wars, and glorified by the captainship of Pericles. The tendencies of the poet of the Eumenides (as explained in the introduction to that play) were all aristocratic; and it is in the highest degree probable that the reception given by democratic spectators to his eulogy of the aristocratic Court of the Areopagus, in the play just mentioned, may have been such as to induce him to consult his own comfort, if not his safety, by withdrawing altogether from a scene where his continual presence might only tend to irritate those whom it could not alter.

After his death the Athenians testified their esteem for his character by decreeing—what was quite an extraordinary privilege according to their stage practice—that his dramas might be exhibited at the great Dionysiac festivals, when their author could be no longer a competitor for the prize.⁷ The people of Gela, justly proud that the bones of so great a man should repose in their soil, erected a monument to his memory with the following inscription:—

With regard to the great merits of Æschylus both as a poet and as the creator of the tragic stage, there is but one testimony among the writers of antiquity. He not only introduced, as we have elsewhere stated, a second, and afterwards a third actor—without which there was no scope for the proper representation of an action—but he made the greatest improvements in the whole machinery and decorations of the stage, gave dignity to the actors by a minute attention to their masks, dresses, and buskins,⁸ besides attending specially to the graceful culture of the dance, according to the testimony of Athenæus above quoted. As a dramatist he is distinguished by peculiar loftiness of conception and grandeur of phraseology. His style is sometimes harsh and abrupt, but it is always manly and vigorous; his metaphors are bold and striking, with something at times almost oriental in their cast; and, though not free from the offence of mixing incongruous metaphors—the natural sin of an imagination at once fearless and fertile—I do not think he can be fairly charged with turgidity and bombast; for, as Aristophanes remarks, in the Frogs, there is a superhuman grandeur about his characters which demands a more than common elevation of phrase.⁹ As to the obscurity with which he has been charged, the comparative clearness of those plays which have been most frequently transcribed is a plain indication that this fault proceeds more from the carelessness of stupid copyists, than from confusion of thought or inadequate power of expression in the writer. In some cases, as in the prophecy of Calchas in the opening scene of the Agamemnon, the obscurity is studied and most appropriate. Poetry, like painting, will have its shade. But the great excellence of Æschylus, as a poet, is the bracing tone of thorough manhood, noble morality, and profound piety which pervades his works. Among those who are celebrated by Virgil as walking with Orpheus and Musæus in blissful Elysium—

the poet of the Eumenides deserves the first rank. There is a tradition current, in various shapes, among the ancient writers that he was brought before the Court of the Areopagus (so nobly eulogised by himself), on the charge of impiety, but that he was acquitted. That the Athenians might have taken offence at the freedom and boldness with which he handled religious, as other topics, is possible, though certainly by no means probable, considering how little of fixed doctrine there was in their imaginative theology; but it is more like the truth, according to the accounts which we have, that the offence which he gave consisted in some purely accidental allusion occurring in one of his plays, to some points that were, or seemed to be connected with the awful Eleusinian mysteries.¹⁰ Certain it is that no writer could be less justly charged with impiety or irreligion. In his writings, religion is the key-note; and the noblest moral sentiments spring everywhere from the profoundest faith in a system of retribution carried on by the various personages of the great celestial aristocracy, of which Jove is the all-powerful and the all-wise head. So sublime, indeed, is the Æschylean theology, that certain modern writers, as if unwilling to think that such pure notions could co-exist with a belief in the popular religion, have concluded that the poet, like Euripides afterwards, must have been a free-thinker; and have imagined that they have found sure indications to this effect in his writings. But, though Æschylus was a Pythagorean (Cic. Tusc. II. 10), we have no proof that the Pythagoreans, any more than their successors, the Platonists, were given to scepticism. The seriousness of a poetic mind like that of Æschylus is, at all times, naturally inclined to faith; and the multiform polytheism of the Greeks was as pliable in the hands of pure men for pure purposes, as in the hands of gross men, to give a delusive ideality to their grossness.¹¹

AGAMEMNON

PERSONS

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

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

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:—

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 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 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, 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.

AGAMEMNON

Watchman.

I pray the gods a respite from these toils,

This long year’s watch that, dog-like, I have kept,

High on the Atridan’s battlements,ⁿ¹ beholding

The nightly council of the stars, the circling

Of the celestial signs, and those bright regents,

High-swung in ether, that bring mortal men

Summer and winter. Here I watch the torch,

The appointed flame that wings a voice from Troy,

Telling of capture; thus I serve her hopes,

The masculine-minded who is sovereign here.ⁿ²

And when night-wandering shades encompass round

My dew-sprent dreamless couch (for fear doth sit

In slumber’s chair, and holds my lids apart),

I chaunt some dolorous ditty, making song,

Sleep’s substitute, surgeon my nightly care,

And the misfortunes of this house I weep,

Not now, as erst, by prudent counsels swayed.

Oh! soon may the wished for sign relieve my toils,

Thrice-welcome herald, gleaming through the night!

[The beacon is seen shining.]

All hail thou cresset of the dark! fair gleam

Of day through midnight shed, all hail! bright father

Of joy and dance, in Argos, hail! all hail!

Hillo! hilloa!

I will go tell the wife of Agamemnon

To shake dull sleep away, and lift high-voicedⁿ³

The jubilant shout well-omened, to salute

This welcome beacon, if, indeed, old Troy

Hath fallen—as flames this courier torch to tell.

Myself will dance the prelude to this joy.

My master’s house hath had a lucky throw,

And thrice six falls to me,ⁿ⁴ thanks to the flame!

Soon may he see his home; and soon may I

Carry my dear-loved master’s hand in mine!

The rest I whisper not, for on my tongue

Is laid a seal.ⁿ⁵ These walls, if they could speak,

Would say strange things. Myself to those that know

Am free of speech, to whoso knows not dumb. [Exit.

Enter Chorus in procession. March time.

Chorus.

Nine years have rolled, the tenth is rolling,

Since the strong Atridan pair,

Menelaus and Agamemnon,

Sceptred kings by Jove’s high grace,ⁿ⁶

With a host of sworn alliance,

With a thousand triremes rare,

With a righteous strong defiance,

Sailed for Troy. From furious breast

Loud they clanged the peal of battle;

Like the cry of vultures wild

O’er the lone paths fitful-wheeling,ⁿ⁷

With their plumy oarage oaring

Over the nest by the spoiler spoiled,

The nest dispeopled now and bare,

Their long but fruitless care.

But the gods see it: some Apollo,

Pan or Jove, the wrong hath noted,

Heard the sharp and piercing cry

Of the startled birds, shrill-throated

Tenants of the sky;

And the late-chastising Furyⁿ⁸

Sent from above to track the spoiler,

Hovers vengeful nigh.

Thus great Jove, the high protector

Of the hospitable laws,ⁿ⁹

’Gainst Alexander sends the Atridans,

Harnessed in a woman’s cause,

The many-lorded fair.

Toils on toils shall come uncounted,

(Jove hath willed it so);

Limb-outwearying hard endeavour,

Where the strong knees press the dust,

Where the spear-shafts split and shiver,

Trojan and Greek shall know.

But things are as they are: the chain

Of Fate doth brad them; sighs are vain,

Tears, libations, fruitless flow,

To divert from purposed ire

The powers whose altars know no fire.ⁿ¹⁰

But we behind that martial train

Inglorious left remain,

Old and frail, and feebly leaning

Strength as of childhood on a staff.

Yea! even as life’s first unripe marrow

In the tender bones are we,

From war’s harsh service free.

For hoary Eld, life’s leaf up-shrunken,

Totters, his three-footed way

Feebly feeling, weak as childhood,

Like a dream that walks by day.

But what is this? what wandering word,

Clytemnestra queen, hath reached thee?

What hast seen? or what hast heard

That from street to street swift flies

Thy word, commanding sacrifice?

All the altars of all the gods

That keep the city, gods supernal,

Gods Olympian, gods infernal,

Gods of the Forum, blaze with gifts;

Right and left the flame mounts high,

Spiring to the sky,

With the gentle soothings cherished

Of the oil that knows no malice,ⁿ¹¹

And the sacred cake that smokes

From the queen’s chamber in the palace.

What thou canst and may’st, declare;

Be the healer of the care

That bodes black harm within me; change it

To the bright and hopeful ray,

Which from the altar riseth, chasing

From the heart the sateless sorrow

That eats vexed life away.

[The Chorus, having now arranged themselves into a regular band in the middle of the Orchestra, sing the First choral hymn.

CHORAL HYMN.
STROPHE.

I’ll voice the strain.ⁿ¹² What though the arm be weak

That once was strong,

The suasive breath of Heaven-sent memories stirs

The old man’s breast with song.

My age hath virtue left

To sing what fateful omens strangely beckoned

The twin kings to the fray,

What time to Troy concentuous marched

The embattled Greek array.

Jove’s swooping bird, king of all birds,^f5 led on

The kings of the fleet with spear and vengeful hand:

By the way-side from shining seats serene,

Close by the palace, on the spear-hand seen,^f6

Two eagles flapped the air,

One black, the other silver-tipt behind,

And with keen talons seized a timorous hare,

Whose strength could run no more,

Itself, and the live burden which it bore.

Sing woe and well-a-day! But still

May the good omens shame the ill.

ANTISTROPHE.

The wise diviner of the host^f7 beheld,

And knew the sign;

The hare-devouring birds with diverse wings

Typed the Atridan pair,

The diverse-minded kings;ⁿ¹³

And thus the fate he chaunted:—Not in vain

Ye march this march to-day;

Old Troy shall surely fall, but not

Till moons on moons away

Have lingering rolled. Rich stores by labour massed

Clean-sweeping Fate shall plunder. Grant the gods,

While this strong bit for Troy we forge with gladness,

No heavenly might in jealous wrath o’ercast

Our mounting hope with sadness.

For the chaste Artemis^f8 a sore grudge nurses

Against the kings; Jove’s winged hounds she curses,ⁿ¹⁴

The fierce war-birds that tore

The fearful hare, with the young brood it bore.

Sing woe and well-a-day! but still

May the good omens shame the ill.

EPODE.

The lion’s fresh-dropt younglings, and each whelp

That sucks wild milk, and through the forest roves,

Live not unfriended; them the fair goddess loves,ⁿ¹⁵

And lends her ready help.

The vision of the birds shall work its end

In bliss, but dashed not lightly with black bane;^f9

I pray thee, Pæan, may she never sendⁿ¹⁶

Contrarious blasts dark-lowering, to detain

The Argive fleet.

Ah! ne’er may she desire to feast her eyes

On an unblest unholy sacrifice,

From festal use abhorrent, mother of strife,

And sundering from her lawful lord the wife.^f10

Stern-purposed waits the child-avenging wrathⁿ¹⁷

About the fore-doomed halls,

Weaving dark wiles, while with sure-memoried sting

Fury to Fury calls.

Thus hymned the seer, the doom, in dubious chaunt

Bliss to the chiefs dark-mingling with the bane,

From the way-haunting birds; and we

Respondent to the strain,

Sing woe and well-a-day! but still

May the good omens shame the ill.

STROPHE I.

Jove, or what other nameⁿ¹⁸

The god that reigns supreme delights to claim,

Him I invoke; him of all powers that be,

Alone I find,

Who from this bootless load of doubt can free

My labouring mind.

ANTISTROPHE I.

Who was so great of yore,

With all-defiant valour brimming o’er,ⁿ¹⁹

Is mute; and who came next by a stronger arm

Thrice-vanquished fell;

But thou hymn victor Jove: so in thy heart

His truth shall dwell

STROPHE II.

For Jove doth teach men wisdom, sternly wins

To virtue by the tutoring of their sins;

Yea! drops of torturing recollection chill

The sleeper’s heart; ’gainst man’s rebellious will

Jove works the wise remorse:

Dread Powers, on awful seats enthroned, compel

Our hearts with gracious force.ⁿ²⁰

ANTISTROPHE II.

The elder chief, the leader of the ships,

Heard the dire doom, nor dared to ope his lips

Against the seer, and feared alone to stand

’Gainst buffeting fate, what time the Chalcian strand^f11

Saw the vexed Argive masts

In Aulis tides hoarse-refluent,ⁿ²¹ idly chained

By the fierce Borean blasts;

STROPHE III.

Blasts from Strymon^f12 adverse braying,

Harbour-vexing, ship-delaying,

Snapping cables, shattering oars,

Wasting time, consuming stores,

With vain-wandering expectation,

And with long-drawn slow vexation

Wasting Argive bloom.

At length the seer forth-clanged the doom,

A remedy strong to sway the breeze,

And direful Artemis to appease,

But to the chiefs severe:

The Atridans with their sceptres struck the ground,

Nor could restrain the tear.

ANTISTROPHE III.

Then spake the elder. To deny,

How hard! still harder to comply!

My daughter dear, my joy, my life,

To slay with sacrificial knife,

And with life’s purple-gushing tide,

Imbrue a father’s hand, beside

The altar of the gods.

This way or that is ill: for how

Shall I despise my federate vow?

How leave the ships? That all conspire

Thus hotly to desire

The virgin’s blood—wind-soothing sacrifice—

Is the gods’ right. So be it.ⁿ²²

STROPHE IV.

Thus to necessity’s harsh yoke he bared

His patient neck. Unblissful blew the gale

That turned the father’s heartⁿ²³

To horrid thoughts unholy, thoughts that dared

The extreme of daring. Sin from its primal spring

Mads the ill-counsel’d heart, and arms the hand

With reckless strength. Thus he

Gave his own daughter’s blood, his life, his joy,

To speed a woman’s war, and consecrateⁿ²⁴

His ships for Troy.

ANTISTROPHE IV.

In vain with prayers, in vain she beats dull ears

With a father’s name; the war-delighting chiefs

Heed not her virgin years.

The father stood; and when the priests had prayed,

Take her, he said; in her loose robes enfolden,

Where prone and spent she lies,ⁿ²⁵ so lift the maid;

Even as a kid is laid,

So lay her on the altar; with dumb force

Her beauteous^f13 mouth gag, lest it breathe a voice

Of curse to Argos.

STROPHE V.

And as they led the maid, her saffron robeⁿ²⁶

Sweeping the ground, with pity-moving dart

She smote each from her eye,

Even as a picture beautiful, fain to speak,

But could not. Well that voice they knew of yore;

Oft at her father’s festive board,

With gallant banqueters ringed cheerly round,

The virgin strain they heardⁿ²⁷

That did so sweetly pour

Her father’s praise, whom Heaven had richly crowned

With bounty brimming o’er.

ANTISTROPHE V.

The rest I know not, nor will vainly pry;

But Calchas was a seer not wont to lie.

Justice doth wait to teach

Wisdom by suffering. Fate will have its way.

The quickest ear is pricked in vain to-day,

To catch to-morrow’s note. What boots

To forecast woe, which, on no wavering wing,ⁿ²⁸

The burthen’d hour shall bring.

But we, a chosen band,

Left here sole guardians of the Apian land,^f14

Pray Heaven, all good betide!

Enter Clytemnestra.

Chorus.

Hail Clytemnestra! honour to thy sceptre!

When her lord’s throne is vacant, the wife claims

His honour meetly. Queen, if thou hast heard

Good news, or to the hope of good that shall be,

With festal sacrifice dost fill the city,

I fain would know; but nothing grudge thy silence.

Clytemnestra.

Bearing blithe tidings, saith the ancient saw,

Fair Morn be gendered from boon mother Night!

News thou shalt hear beyond thy topmost hope;

The Greeks have ta’en old Priam’s city.

Chorus.

How!

Troy taken! the word drops from my faithless ear.

Clytemnestra.

The Greeks have taken Troy. Can I speak plainer?

Chorus.

Joy o’er my heart creeps, and provokes the tear.

Clytemnestra.

Thine eye accuses thee that thou art kind.

Chorus.

What warrant of such news? What certain sign?

Clytemnestra.

Both sign and seal, unless some god deceive me.

Chorus.

Dreams sometimes speak; did suasive visions move thee?

Clytemnestra.

Where the soul sleeps, and the sense slumbers, there

Shall the wise ask for reasons?

Chorus.

Ever swift

Though wingless, Fame,ⁿ²⁹ with tidings fair hath cheered thee.

Clytemnestra.

Thou speak’st as one who mocks a simple girl.