Chapter III: The Works of æschylus (2)

The plot of the third play, the EUMENIDES[243] (Εὐμενίδες, “the Kindly Ones,” an euphemistic name of the Furies) is as follows. Outside the shrine at Delphi, the Pythian priestess utters a prayer to all the deities connected with the spot, after which she enters the sanctuary. Almost instantly she returns in horror, and tells how she has seen a blood-stained man seated upon the _Omphalos_ and round him a band of sleeping females, loathly to the sight. She departs. From the temple the god appears[244] with his suppliant Orestes, whom he encourages and sends forth (led by the god Hermes) on his wanderings, which are to end in peace at Athens. When the two have disappeared, the ghost of Clytæmnestra rises and awakens the sleeping Furies. They burst forth from the temple in frenzy at the escape of their victim. In the midst of the clamour Apollo, with words of contemptuous hatred, bids them begone. The scene now changes to Athens, where Orestes throws himself upon the protection of the goddess Athena, whose statue he clasps. In a moment the chorus of Furies enter in pursuit; they discover Orestes and describe the horrible doom which he must suffer. He defies them and calls upon the absent Athena. But they circle about him chanting their fearful “binding-song”—the proclamation of their office and rights as the implacable avengers of bloodshed and every other sin. As their strains die away Athena enters. She hears the dispute in outline, the Furies insisting that for matricide there can be no pardon, Orestes declaring that he has been purified ritually by Apollo who urged him to his deed. The goddess determines that the suit shall be tried by a court of her own citizens. Meanwhile the Furies sing of the danger to righteousness which must result if their prerogatives are withdrawn: “terror _has_ a rightful place and must sit for ever watching over the soul”.[245] The court of justice is now assembled on the Areopagus. Athena presides; with her are the jurymen (generally supposed to number twelve); before her are the Furies and Orestes; behind is a great crowd of Athenian citizens. A trumpet blast announces the opening of the session, and Apollo enters to aid Orestes. The trial begins with a cross-examination of Orestes by the Furies, in which he is by no means triumphant. Apollo takes his place and gives justification for the matricide, under three heads: (i) it was the command of Zeus; (ii) Agamemnon was a great king; (iii) the real parent of a child is the father, the mother being only the nurse. To prove this last point Apollo instances the president herself, Athena, born of no mother but from the head of Zeus. He ends by promising that Orestes, if acquitted, will be a firm and useful ally to Athens. The goddess now declares the pleading at an end, but before the vote is taken she delivers a speech to the jury, proclaiming that she now and hereby founds the Areopagite Court which shall for ever keep watch over the welfare of Athens by the repression of crime. The judges advance one by one and vote secretly; but before the votes are counted Athena gives her ruling that if an equal number are cast on either side Orestes shall be acquitted, for she gives her casting vote in his favour.[246] The votes are counted and found equal, and the goddess proclaims that Orestes is free. Apollo departs, and Orestes breaks forth into thanksgiving and promises that Argos shall ever be the friend of Athens. He leaves Athena and her citizens confronted by the Furies, who raise cries of frantic indignation, turning their rage upon Athens and threatening to blight the soil, the flocks, and the people. Athena seeks to placate them by offering a habitation and worship in Attica. For a time they refuse to listen, but after their fourth song of vengeance they relent. Athena promises that they are to become kindly earth-deities[247] domiciled in Attica, blessing the increase of crops, of herds, and of the family. The citizens, with torches in their hands, form a procession led by Athena, and conduct the new divinities to their dwelling in a cave beneath the Acropolis.

It remains to deal with the literary and religious aspects of the play. The poet sketches Orestes in but a rudimentary style. There is, indeed, hardly any character-drawing in him; he is simply any brave, sensitive, religious man. The “human interest” is almost confined to the gods, without our forgetting that they are surrounded by human auditors. Athena and the Furies are made to live by a few noble sweeping strokes; Athena, the majestic presentment of Olympian wisdom and the visible head of her favoured city; the Furies majestic in their rage, unanswerable in their claim that punishment of crime cannot be done away if the world is to endure. Apollo is a curious study, less sublime than we expected. His manner under cross-examination by the Furies is a little too human; indeed he loses his temper. The fact is that, though Æschylus has no desire to treat Apollo irreverently, he is by no means concerned to depict a perfect being; and for two reasons. Firstly, he insists on reminding us that Apollo is but the minister of Zeus; it is Zeus only whom he is bent on exalting. Secondly, he knows well that his audience, as between the Furies and Apollo, have a strong bias in favour of the latter. The poet does acquit Orestes, but it is of the deepest importance in his eyes that we should not complacently regard the Furies as mere malicious fiends, routed by a gloriously contemptuous Olympian; the Furies may be wrong, perhaps, but _prima facie_ they have a terribly strong case. Therefore in the scene of the pleadings they at least hold their own. Apollo may be more right than they; he is emphatically not their superior, his personal fiat is not a spiritual sanction profounder than theirs. Neither party has got to the root of things. The Furies say: “This man shed the blood of a kinswoman; he must be for ever damned”. Apollo says: “He has not sinned, for Zeus bade him act thus”. The acquittal of Orestes is not the solution of this disagreement, it is but the beginning; we can hardly understand the dispute as yet.

We thus come to the religious aspect of the _Eumenides_. Æschylus is of course too sincere to be satisfied, or to allow us to be satisfied, with the fact that Orestes actually escapes. His pursuers attack not the Argive prince only; much of their language is an indictment of Apollo, and ultimately of Zeus. It is very well for Apollo to revile them as “beasts detested by the gods,”[248] but the gods are themselves arraigned. The earth-powers stand for the principle that sin, especially bloodshed, must be punished; this demand is recognized as just by Athena,[249] and is not repudiated by Apollo. Yet Zeus, the Sovereign of all things, extends his hand over the man who has fallen under their sway by his act. How shall these claims be reconciled?

The solution of Æschylus is not unlike that which (it appears) he offered at the end of the Prometheus-trilogy. We are to imagine that we witness the events of a time when Zeus himself has not attained to full stature. His face is set towards the perfection of righteousness, but development awaits even him. In the instance of Orestes, the jar between Furies and Apollo, or more ultimately between the earth-powers and Zeus, shows that neither party is perfectly right. None the less, it is essential that there should be but one master of the universe, and the Furies are compelled to submit. But Æschylus does not lay down his pen at this point; nothing does he avoid more carefully than an ending which might appear as desirable as obvious to a vulgar playwright, some showy tableau of grovelling fiends and triumphant goddess. The Furies themselves look for nothing less than moral annihilation[250] as the result of defeat. But something of which they have never dreamed—of which, probably, no Greek in the theatre has dreamed—is in store for them; neither victory nor defeat, but recognition by the power to which they have been forced to bow, assimilation to that religion from which they have kept themselves so jealously sundered. They are still to be mighty powers of earth, yet their function is to be cursing no more, but blessing only.

But is this a solution at all? Is it enough to hint at the thunderbolt, to offer a bribe of power and worship that the Furies may forget their rage against Attica?[251] What is to become of their function as inflexible champions of righteousness, which has been the moral safeguard of men? This duty the goddesses leave as a legacy to the newly-formed court of chosen Athenians:—[252]

τὸ μήτ’ ἄναρχον μήτε δεσποτούμενον
ἀστοῖς περιστέλλουσι βουλεύω σέβειν
καὶ μὴ τὸ δεινὸν πᾶν πόλεως ἔξω βαλεῖν.[253]

“Loyalty and worship do I urge upon my citizens for a polity neither anarchic nor tyrannical; fear must not be banished utterly from the State.” These are the words of Athena; they are also the words of Æschylus—a solemn warning to his fellow-citizens; finally, they are the words of the Furies themselves—the very phrases which they have used are here borrowed—and go far to explain why they consent to relinquish their prerogative. First they have regarded the Areopagus with misgiving as a possibly hostile tribunal; then with hatred as an enemy; at the last they look upon it with benevolence as their heir to those stern duties which must not be suffered, under whatever ruler of the world, to fall into oblivion. It is true at the same time that the poet wished, for reasons of contemporary politics, to impress upon his countrymen the sacredness of this ancient court, then threatened with curtailment of its powers and prestige at the hands of the popular party led by Pericles and Ephialtes; and the manner in which he weaves this consideration of temporal interests into the fabric of a vast religious poem is magnificently conceived. What in a smaller man would have been merely a vulgar dexterity is sanctified by religious genius. It is not the degradation of religion, but the apotheosis of politics. The close of the _Eumenides_ is anything but an anti-climax. It is closely knit to the body of the whole trilogy, showing the manner in which the playwright supposes the necessary reconciliation between Zeus and the Furies to be made possible and acceptable. The King of Heaven is mystically identified now and for ever with Fate.[254] The joyful procession of προπομποί is the sign not only that the moral government of the world has been set at last upon a sure basis, but also that this government is already in operation and sanctifying human institutions.

* * * * *

These seven plays are all that survive complete of the eighty[255] tragedies and satyric dramas written by Æschylus. Our knowledge of the lost works rests upon some hundreds of fragments and scattered mention or comment in ancient writers.

Most interesting and important are those plays which were associated with the extant dramas; these have been already discussed. Next in attractiveness is the _Lycurgea_ (Λυκουργεία, or trilogy of Lycurgus), to which the _Bacchæ_ of Euripides had close affinity in subject. Lycurgus was a king of the Edoni, a Thracian people, who opposed the religion of Dionysus when it entered his realm, and was punished with death. The first play, the _Edoni_ (Ἠδωνοί), depicted the collision between Dionysus and his enemy. There was an interview in which Lycurgus taunted the god with his effeminate looks,[256] and which apparently closed with the overthrow of his palace by the might of the god.[257] The longest fragment gives an interesting account of the instruments of music used in the bacchic orgies. The name of the second play is not certain; it was either _Bassarides_ (Βασσαρίδες) or _Bassaræ_ (Βασσάραι)—the _Women of the Fawn-Skin_. Here the anger of Dionysus fell upon Orpheus the musician, who neglected the new deity and devoted himself to Apollo. He was torn to pieces by the Bacchantes and the Muses gathered his remains, to which they gave sepulture in Lesbos. The _Youths_ (Νεανίσκοι) formed the last piece of the trilogy; practically nothing is known of it. It was the chorus which gave its name to the play in all three cases. The satyric drama was called _Lycurgus_; if we may judge from one of the three fragments the tragic treatment of wine was transformed into a comic discussion of beer.[258]

Another celebrated trilogy had for its theme the tale of Troy. The _Myrmidons_ (Μυρμιδόνες), named from the followers of Achilles who formed the chorus, dealt with the death of Patroclus. Achilles, withdrawn from battle because of his quarrel with Agamemnon, is adjured by the chorus to pity the defeat of the Greeks. He allows Patroclus, his friend, to go forth against the Trojans. After doing valiantly, Patroclus is slain by Hector. The news is brought by Antilochus to Achilles, who gives himself up to passionate lament. This play was a favourite of Aristophanes, who quotes from it repeatedly. In this drama occurred the celebrated simile of the eagle struck to death with an arrow winged by his own feathers, which was cited throughout antiquity and which Byron paraphrased in one of his most majestic passages.[259] The story was apparently continued in the _Nereides_ (Νηρηίδες). Achilles determined to revenge Patroclus. The magic armour made for him by Hephæstus was brought by his mother Thetis, accompanied by her sisters, the sea-nymphs, daughters of Nereus, who formed the chorus. The last play was the _Phrygians_ (Φρύγες) or _Ransom of Hector_ (Ἕκτορος Λύτρα) in which Priam prevailed upon Achilles to give up the corpse of Hector for burial. It appears likely that in the two preceding plays Æschylus followed Homer somewhat closely. But in the _Ransom_ he did not. Besides the detail to which Aristophanes[260] makes allusion, that Achilles sat for a long time in complete silence, no doubt while the chorus and Priam offered piteous and lengthy appeals, there are differences of conception. In Homer, one of the most moving features of the story is that Priam goes to the Trojan camp practically alone. He is met by the God Hermes who conducts him to the tent of Achilles. Then, solitary among his foes, he throws himself upon the mercy of his son’s destroyer. No such effect was to be found in Æschylus. The chorus of Phrygians accompanied their king, and we find in a fragment of Aristophanes[261] a hint of much posturing and stage-managed supplication.

The _Women of Etna_ (Αἰτναῖαι) was produced in Sicily at the foundation of Hiero’s new city. In the _Men of Eleusis_ (Ἐλευσίνιοι) Æschylus dealt with the earliest struggle of Athens—the war with Eleusis, his own birth-place. More ambitious in its topic was the _Daughters of the Sun_ (Ἡλιάδες) which dealt with the fall of Phaethon. A pretty fragment alludes to that “bowl of the Sun” so brilliantly described by Mimnermus, in which the god travels back by night from West to East. It seems that the geographical enumerations prominent in the Prometheus-trilogy were found here also, tinged less with grimness and more with romance. In the _Thracian Women_ (Θρῇσσαι) Æschylus treated the same theme as Sophocles in the _Ajax_. It is significant that the death of the hero was announced by a messenger. Possibly, then, it was a desire for novelty which caused the younger playwright to diverge so strikingly from custom as to depict the actual suicide. The _Cabiri_ (Κάβειροι) was the first tragedy to portray men intoxicated. In the _Niobe_ (Νιόβη) occurred splendid lines quoted with approbation by Plato:—

Close kin of heavenly powers,
Men near to Zeus, who upon Ida’s peak
Beneath the sky their Father’s altar serve,
Their veins yet quickened with the blood of gods.[262]

The _Philoctetes_ is the subject of an interesting essay by Dio Chrysostom.[263] All the three great tragedians wrote plays[264] of this name, and Dio offers a comparison. Naturally, but for us unfortunately, he assumes a knowledge of these works in his readers; still, certain facts emerge about the Æschylean work. Men of Lemnos—the island on which Philoctetes had been marooned—constituted the chorus. To them the hero narrated the story of his desertion by the Greeks, and his wretched life afterwards. Odysseus persuaded him to come and help the Greeks at Troy by a long recital of Hector’s victory and false reports of the death of Agamemnon and Odysseus. Neither Neoptolemus nor Heracles (important characters in Sophocles) seems to have been introduced by Æschylus. Dio comments on the style and characterization. The primitive grandeur of Æschylus, he remarks, the austerity of his thought and diction, appear appropriate to the spirit of tragedy and to the manners of the heroic age. Odysseus is indeed clever and crafty, but “far removed from present-day rascality”; in fact he seems “absolutely patriarchal when compared with the modern school”. That the play is named after one of the persons and not the chorus, leads one to attribute it to a comparatively late period in the poet’s life. Finally, the _Weighing of the Souls_ (Ψυχοστασία) is remarkable for the scene in Heaven, modelled upon a passage in the _Iliad_, where Zeus, with Thetis, mother of Achilles, on one hand, and Eos, mother of Memnon, on the other, weighed in a balance the souls or lives of the two heroes about to engage in fight before Troy.

* * * * *

In attempting a general appreciation of this poet one should avoid making the error of judging him practically by the _Agamemnon_ alone. Otherwise we cannot hope to understand the feeling of fifth century Athens towards him. Most of his work has vanished, but the collection we possess seems fairly representative of his development; if we give weight to his comparatively inferior plays we may understand the feeling of two such different men as Aristophanes and Euripides. Incredible as it may seem, by the end of that century Æschylus was looked on as half-obsolete. Euripides thought of him much as Mr. Bernard Shaw now thinks of Shakespeare; Aristophanes, lover of the old order as he was, seems to have felt for the man who wrote the _Agamemnon_ a breezy half-patronizing affection; while putting him forward in the _Frogs_ to discomfit Euripides, he handles the older poet only less severely than he handles the younger. He and his contemporaries viewed Æschylus as a whole, not fixing their eyes exclusively on his final trilogy.

Let us consider him first as a purely literary artist, a master of language, leaving his strictly dramatic qualities on one side. We find that his three great notes are grandeur, simplicity, and picturesqueness. To describe the grandeur of Æschylus is a hopeless task; some notion of it may be drawn from the account of his individual works just given, but the only true method is of course direct study of his writings. The lyrics, from the _Supplices_ to the _Eumenides_, touch the very height of solemn inspiration and moral dignity; as it has been often said, his only peers are the prophets of Israel. The non-lyrical portions of his work, stiff with gorgeous embroidery, are less like the conversations of men and women than the august communings of gods; that majestic poem which has for auditors the Sun himself, the rivers, the mountains, and the sea, and for background the whole race of man, is not merely written about Prometheus: it might have been written by Prometheus. But such magnificence has its perils. The mere bombast for which Kyd and even Marlowe are celebrated, and which has given us such things as

The golden sun salutes the morn
And, having gilt the ocean with his beams,
Gallops the zodiac in his glistering coach,[265]

was not unknown to Æschylus, as his wayward supporter Aristophanes with much relish demonstrates. It seems that such extravagances, “the beefy words, all frowns and crests, the frightful bogey-language,”[266] occurred entirely in the lost plays. But in those which survive we have much bombast of phrase, if not of words; the “thirsty dust, sister and neighbour of mud,”[267] Zeus, “chairman of the immortals,”[268]

Typhos, who belcheth from fire-reeking mouth
Black fume, the eddying sister of the flame,[269]

“drill these words through thine ears with the quiet pace of thy mind,”[270] “breathe upon him the gale of blood and wither him with the reeking fire of thine entrails”.[271] Æschylus, indeed, like all poets, understood the majesty of sounding words, apart from their meaning. As Milton gloried in the use of magnificent proper names, so does the Athenian delight in thunderous elaboration. Therefore, not possessing the chastity of Sophocles, he is occasionally barbarous and noisy; Aristophanes[272] jests at his lyrics for their frequent exhibition of sound without sense.

Oddly combined with this occasional savagery of phrase is the second quality of simplicity. Æschylus, so far as we know, was the creator of tragic diction. However greatly his successors improved upon him in flexibility, grace, and subtlety, it was he who first worked the mine of spoken language, strove to purify the ore, and forged the metal into an instrument of terror and delight. But even the creator needed practice in its use. He has a giant’s strength, and at times uses it like a giant, not like a gymnast. In his earlier work he seems muscle-bound, clumsy in the use of his new-found powers. He wields the pen as one more familiar with the spear; the warrior of Marathon does fierce battle with particles and phrases; he strains ideas to his breast and wrestles with elusive perfection; we seem to hear his panting when at last he erects as trophy some noble speech or miraculous lyric. This stiffness of execution persists faintly even in the _Oresteia_. The earlier tragedies, both in the characters and in the language, are rough-hewn, for all their glory. In the _Supplices_ this stark simplicity is actually the chief note. Here, more than elsewhere, the poet has a strange way of writing Greek at times as if it were some other language. The opening words of the Egyptian herald—σοῦσθε σοῦσθ’ ἐπὶ βᾶριν ὅπως ποδῶν[273]—can only be described as barbaric mouthing. Throughout this play the complete absence of lightness and speed, the crude beginnings of greatness, a certain bleak amplitude, are all typical of a new art-form not yet completely evolved. The poet, himself the beginner of a new epoch, fills us with an uncanny impression of persons standing on the threshold of history with little behind them but the Deluge. In the _Persæ_ and the _Septem_ there is the same instinct for spaciousness, but the canvas shows more colour and less of the bare sky, for we are now more conscious of background, the overthrow of Persia and the operations of human sin.

The third characteristic, picturesqueness, is the most obvious of all. The few instances of bombastic diction noted above are but the necessary failures of a supreme craftsman. Homer does not stay to embroider his language with metaphor, which belongs to a more reflective age; Pindar’s tropes are splendid and elaborate, a calculated jog to the attention. For Æschylus, metaphor seems the natural speech, unmetaphorical language a subtlety which requires practice. Danaus in his perplexity ponders “at the chess-board”;[274] when the assembly votes, “heaven bristles with right hands”;[275] an anxious heart “wears a black tunic”;[276] heaven “loads the scales”[277] to the detriment of Persia; the trumpet “blazes”;[278] misfortune “wells forth”;[279] Amphiaraus “reaps the deep furrow of his soul”;[280] “the sea laughs in ripples without number”;[281] the snow descends “with snowy wings”;[282] for an intrepid woman “hope treads not the halls of fear”;[283] “Fate the maker of swords is sharpening her weapon”;[284] Anarchy in the State is the “mixing of mud with water”.[285] The best example of all is the celebrated beacon-speech in the _Agamemnon_: “The flame is conceived as some mighty spirit.... It ‘vaults over the back of the sea with joy’; it ‘hands its message’ to the heights of Macistus; it ‘leaps across’ the plain of Asopus, and ‘urges on’ the watchmen; its ‘mighty beard of fire’ streams across the Saronic gulf, as it rushes along from peak to peak, until finally it ‘swoops down’ upon the palace of the Atreidæ.”[286]

Allied to this picturesqueness of phrase is a picturesqueness of characterization: Æschylus loves to give life and colour even to his subordinate persons. Attic literature is so frugal of ornament that the richness of this writer gains a double effect. The watchman of the _Agamemnon_ has the effect of a Teniers peasant; Orestes’ nurse in the _Choephorœ_ is a promise of the nurse of Juliet; the Egyptian herald conveys with amazing skill the harem-atmosphere—one seems to see that he is a negro; Hermes in the _Prometheus_ is the father of all stage courtiers. Again, direct appeals to the eye were made by various quaint devices—the winged car of the Ocean Nymphs, their father’s four-legged bird, and the “tawny horse-cock” (whatever it was) which so puzzled Dionysus.[287] Such curiosities were meant merely as a feast for the idle gaze, at first; but the serious mind of the poet turned even these to deeper issues. The red carpets of the _Agamemnon_, and the king treading upon them in triumph, provided a handsome spectacle to the eye; but the mind at the same instant fell into grimmer bodements as the doomed man seemed to walk in blood. So, too, the word-pictures which please the ear are raised by genius to an infinitely higher power, as in that same scene, when Agamemnon complains of the waste of purple stuffs, and the queen seems but to say that there is dye enough left in the sea: “There is a sea, and who shall drain it dry?” The meaning of the words is as inexhaustible as the ocean they tell of, revealing abysses of hatred and love hellishly intertwined, courage to bear any strain, an hereditary curse whose thirst for blood is never sated, a bottomless well of life.

If we now consider Æschylus on his purely dramatic side, as a builder of plays, we find again the three distinctive notes, grandeur, simplicity, and picturesqueness. The grandeur of his architecture is an authentic sign of his massive genius—it by no means depends on his selection of divine or terrific figures; the _Persæ_ and the _Septem_ are witnesses. It is the outcome of his conception of life as the will of God impinging upon human character. Æschylus knows nothing about “puppets of fate.” Around and above men is a divine government about which many things may be obscure, but of which we surely know that it is righteous and the guardian of righteousness. Man by sin enters into collision with the law. The drama of Æschylus is his study of the will and moral consciousness of man in its efforts to understand, to justify to itself, and to obey that law. Supreme justice working itself out in terms of human will—such is his theme. Another source of grandeur lies in the perspectives which his works reveal. This, perhaps most evident in the _Prometheus_, runs through the other plays; and a technical result of this power is the skill with which the whole trilogies are wrought. To compose trilogies rather than simple tragedies shows indeed the instinct for perspective working at the very heart of his method. Again, if this instinct likens his work to painting, still more are we led by historical considerations to make a comparison with sculpture. It has been said[288] that the earliest play is “like one of those archaic statues which stand with limbs stiff and countenance smiling and stony.” This brilliant simile is full of enlightenment. Just as those early Greek statues which seem to the casual observer merely distressing are to be contrasted, not with the achievement of Praxiteles but with non-Hellenic art, the winged bulls of Assyria and the graven hummocks which present the kings of Egypt, whereupon we perceive the stirrings of life and beauty; so should the _Supplices_, were it only in our power, be compared to the rigid declamations from which, to all seeming, tragedy was born. In the _Supplices_ tragedy came alive like the marble Galatea. Dædalus was reputed to have made figures that walked and ran; it is no fable of Æschylus, but the history of his art.

Simplicity, the second note of Æschylus, needs little demonstration after the detailed account of his plots. The four earlier works contain each the very minimum of action. The characterization is noble, but far from subtle. All the persons are simply drawn, deriving their effect from one informing concept and from the circumstances to which they react. Euripides in the _Frogs_[289] fastens upon this, remarking, “You took over from Phrynichus an audience who were mere fools”. A later generation demanded smartness and subtlety; Æschylus was anything but artful, and so the same critic accuses him of obscurity in his prologues.[290] The _Oresteia_ exhibits a marked advance in construction. Leaving on one side the vexed question of the plot in the _Agamemnon_,[291] we observe in the _Choephorœ_ what we may call intrigue. Orestes has a device for securing admission to the palace; the libations by which Clytæmnestra intends to secure herself are turned into a weapon against her; the chorus intercept the nurse and alter her message so as to aid the conspiracy. This ingenuity is perhaps due to the influence of Sophocles.

Thirdly, what may be termed picturesqueness in structure is a matter of vital import for Æschylus. To write dramatically is to portray life by exhibiting persons, the vehicles of principles, in contact and collision. For an artist of the right bent, it is not difficult to select a scene of history or an imagined piece of contemporary life which under manipulation and polishing will show the hues of drama. But the earliest of dramatists turns aside in the main from such topics. His favourite themes are the deepest issues, not of individual life, but the life of the race, or the structure of the universe. What is the relation between Justice and Mercy? Why is the omnipotent omniscient? May a man of free will and noble instincts escape a hereditary curse sanctioned by heaven? Such musings demand surely a quiet unhurried philosophic poem, not the decisive shock of drama. Æschylus devoted himself, nevertheless, not to literature in the fashion of Wordsworth, but to tragedy. How was he to write a play about Justice and Mercy, to discuss a compromise between the rigidity of safe government and the flexibility of wise government? Justice and Mercy are both essential to the moral universe, says the theologian—but they are incompatible. Friendship and strife are both essential to the physical universe, says Empedocles—but how can they be wedded? This impossibility is everywhere, and everywhere by miracle it is achieved. This union of opposites pervades the world, from the primitive protoplasm which must be rigid to resist external shock but flexible to grow and reproduce itself, to the august constitution of the eternal kingdom in which “righteousness and peace have kissed each other”. Where, then, is the playwright to find foothold? His innumerable instances merge into one another. Æschylus, with noble audacity, lifts us out of the current of time and imagines a special instance, an instance which presents the problem in dual form—for example the human tangle of the Atridean house and the superhuman conflict between Zeus and the powers of earth. It is assumed that there has been no earlier, less decisive, jar. In the future, there will be no more. The great question is raised once for all in its completest, most difficult form. The gradual processes of time are abolished. Thus Atlas[292] is punished by condemnation to the task of upholding heaven for ever; how it was sustained before his offence is a question we must not raise. Hypermnestra[293] is put on trial for disobeying her father that her husband may live. She is saved by Aphrodite; and the innumerable cases of conflicts of duty which have broken hearts in days past are summed up (rather than disregarded) by this ultimate example. In the _Oresteia_ a man is hunted well-nigh to death by fiends because he has obeyed the will of God. Why? It can only be said that until the judgment in the _Eumenides_ all is nebulous, the world is being governed desperately as by some committee of public safety; morals, justice, and equity are still upon the anvil. After this one case no man will ever again be tortured like Orestes; nor indeed, we may conjecture, will the oracles of Zeus issue behests so merciless as that which he received.

Finally, something should be said about Æschylus’ views on religion. Other subjects had an interest for him, geography, history, and politics,[294] but his never-failing and profound interest in religion overshadows these. Not only was he interested in the local cults of Athens, as were his great successors; he is at home in the deepest regions of theology. Even more than this, he brings back strange messages from the eternal world, he seeks to purify the beliefs of his fellows by his deep sense of spiritual fact; he writes the chronicles of Heaven and bears witness to the conquests of the Most High. Among Greek writers he is the most religious, and, with Plato and Euripides, most alive to the importance of belief to the national health. He is not ashamed of the traditional gospel when he thinks it true: “the act comes back upon him that did it; so runs the thrice-old saw”.[295] Still less is he ashamed to denounce false maxims: “From of old hath this hoary tale been spread abroad among men, that when prosperity hath grown to its full stature it brings forth offspring and dies not childless; yea, that from good hap a man’s posterity shall reap unendingly a harvest of woe. But I stand apart from others, nor is my mind like theirs.”[296] This originality and sincere mood is shown everywhere. Already we have noted how earnestly just he is towards the claims of the Furies. The case was no foregone conclusion for him. To realize how terrible the quarrel was in his eyes we have only to imagine our feelings had Apollo been defeated. And defeated he nearly is; the human judges vote equally.

The poet’s clear thinking and ethical soundness are shown in his treatment of the hereditary Curse or Até (ἄτη). Some great sin brings this curse into being, and it oppresses the sinner’s family with an abnormal tendency to further crime. But the descendants are not forced to sin. The action of the curse, according to Æschylus, is upon their imagination. When some temptation to wrong-doing occurs to them, as to all men, they may suddenly remember the curse and exclaim in effect: “Why struggle against this temptation? our house is ridden by an Até which drives us to sin”. Thus they rush upon evil with a desperate gusto and abandon. So Eteocles[297] cries:—

Since Heav’n thus strongly urges on th’ event,
Let Laius’ race, by Phœbus loathed, all, all
Before the wind sweep down the stream of Hell!

But the curse can be resisted. The house of Atreus fed its curse from generation to generation by criminal bloodshed. But Orestes shed blood only at the behest of Heaven, and so combined necessary vengeance with innocence. Thus the curse was laid to rest.[298]

The revision to which he subjected the myths of popular religion is therefore characteristic. There were four leading phenomena which it was necessary somehow to co-ordinate if a consistent faith was to be possible. First, there was the Olympian hierarchy, the object of the State-religion at Athens as elsewhere. Secondly, there was Chthonian religion or the worship of earth-powers. Thirdly, there was the vague, less personal, power called Fate. And lastly, there was conscience, the feeling that sin polluted the soul, not merely the hands of the wrong-doer.[299] None of these four conceptions was by itself adequate in the eyes of Æschylus. The Olympians, though the rulers of men and on the whole their friends, were according to universal report stained with all the crimes of humanity. The earth-deities ruled only by fear; they punished but they did not inspire; nor was it clear that their power was not somehow subordinate to that of Heaven. Fate was impersonal and had no moral aspect on which men could base their understanding of its law. The conception of personal righteousness had no visible basis in the scheme of things; there was no power outside man who guaranteed the authenticity of his thirst for holiness. When once Æschylus set out on his self-appointed path, he brooked no obstacle. First, as to the Olympian gods, he explains away the difficulties. Most of them are frankly ignored,[300] edifying accounts being substituted for them; some few are accepted with a shrug.[301] Zeus is no longer the head of a turbulent confederacy; he has become the father and lord of powers who obey him implicitly and derive their prerogatives from his will. The earth-deities, as has been shown, surrender their moral functions and become mere spirits of fertility, localized, in the case of the Furies, upon Attic soil. Nothing, even in this writer, is more audacious than the monotheistic fervour which transforms these terrific beings into a species of fairy. Fate, again, is mysteriously assimilated to Zeus; the unvarying laws of the universe are invested with a moral tendency and a personal will. And lastly, the conception of human holiness finds its sanction in that will. Zeus bids us be righteous, and our faith affirms that he will punish the guilty and reward the good.