The first had the name of Phineus,* the blind prophet



2i8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

of the Argonaut legend, who probably prophesied some-
thing about the greater conflict between Europe and
Asia, of which that expedition was a type. The third
was Glaucus ;* but there were two p'ieces of that name,
and the plot is not certain. The Persce itself is modelled
on the PhoenisscB* of Phrynichus : the opening words
of the two are almost identical, and the scene in both
is in the council-chamber of Susa, though in the
Persce it afterwards changes to the tomb of Darius.
The PerscB has not much plot-interest in the ordinary
sense ; but the heavy brooding of the first scenes,
the awful flashes of truth, the evocation of the old
blameless King Darius, who had made no Persians
weep, and his stern prophecy of the whole disaster to
come, all have the germ of high dramatic power : one
feels the impression made by " tJie many arms and many
ships, and the sweep of the chariots of Syria" both in the
choir-songs and in the leaping splendour of the de-
scriptions of battle. The external position of the Perscs
as the first account of a great piece of history by a
great poet who had himself helped to make the history,
renders it perhaps unique in literature ; and its beauty
is worthy of its eminence.

The Seven against Thebes came third in the trilogy
after the La'ius* and the CEdipus* One old version
of the saga allowed CEdipus to put away locasta after
the discovery of their relationship, and marry Eury-
ganeia ; there was no self-blinding, and the children
were Euryganeia's. But yEschylus takes the story in
the more gruesome form that we all know. The Seven
gives the siege of Thebes by the exiled Polyneikes, the
battle, and mutual slaying of the two brothers. It w?'
greatly admired in antiquity — "« play full of Arel,



THE SEVEN. THE PROMETHEIA 219

that made every one who saw it wish forthwith to be
a ^ fiery foe," as Aristophanes puts it {RancB, 1002).
The war atmosphere is convincing, the characters plain
and strong. Yet, in spite of a certain brilHance and
force, the Seven is perhaps among yEschylean plays
the one that bears least the stamp of commanding
genius. It is like the good work of a lesser man.

Very different is the Prometheus, a work of the same
period of transition as the Seven, and implying the
use of three actors in the prologue, as the Seven
probably does in the 'exodus.' The trilogy seems
to have consisted of Prometheus Bound, Prometheus
Freed,* and Prometheus the Fire-Carrier* The subject
is Titanic ; it needs a big mind to cope with it. But
it has produced in the hands of ^schylus and of
Shelley two of the greatest of mankind's dramatic
poems. Prometheus is the champion of man against
the Tyrant Power that sways the world. He has
saved man from the destruction Zeus meant for him,
taught him the arts of civilisation, and, type of all
else, given him fire, which was formerly a divine
thing stored in heaven. For this rebellious love of
mankind he is nailed to a storm-riven rock of the
Caucasus ; but he is not conquered, for, in the first
place, he is immortal, and besides he knows a secret
on which the future of heaven and earth depends.
Zeus tries by threats and tortures to break him, but
Prometheus will not forsake mankind. And the
daughters of Ocean, who have gathered to comfort
him, will not forsake Prometheus. They face the
same blasting fire, and sink with him into the abyss.

otThere is action at the beginning and end of the play;

scche middle part, representing, apparently, centuries



220 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

rather than days, is taken up with long narratives of
Prometheus to the Oceanides, with the fruitless inter-
cession of Oceanus himself, and the strange entry of
another victim of Zeus, the half-mad Moon-maiden lo,
driven by the gadfly^ and haunted by the ghost of the
hundred-eyed Argos. The chorus of the Prometheus
is perhaps in character and dramatic fitness the most
beautiful and satisfying known to us on the Greek
stage. The songs give an expression of Weltschnierz
for which it would be hard to hud a parallel before
the present century. The whole earth is in travail as
Prometheus suffers : " There is a cry in the waves of the
sea as they fall together ^ and groaning in the deep ; a wail
comes up from the cavern realms of Death^ and the springs
of the holy rivers sob with the anguish of pity." In
another place the note is more personal : " Nay, thine
was a hopeless sacrifice, beloved; speak — what help shall
there be, and where? What succour froin things of a day?
Didst thou not see the little-doing, strengthless, dream-like,
wherein the blind race of man is fettered? Never, never
shall mortal counsels outpass the great Harmony of Zeus ! "
Zeus is irresistible : those who obey him have peace
and happiness such as the Ocean-Daughters once had
themselves. Yet they feel that it is better to rebel.

There is perhaps no piece of lost literature that has
been more ardently longed for than the Prometheus
Freed* What reconciliation was possible ? One can see
that Zeus is ultimately justified in many things. For
instance, the apparently aimless persecution of lo leads
to great results, among them the birth of Heracles, who
is another saviour of mankind and the actual deliverer
of Prometheus. Again, it seems that Prometheus does
not intend to overthrow the ' New Tyrant,' as Shelley's^



THE ORESTEIA 221

Prometheus does. He had deliberately helped him
against the old blind forces, Kronos and the Titans ;
but he means, so to speak, to wring a constitution out
of him, and so save mankind. But it needs another
yEschylus to loose that knot in a way worthy of the first.
Wc have some external facts about the second play.
It opened when Prometheus came back to the light
after thirty thousand years ; the chorus was of Titans.
The last play, the Fire-Carrier^ seems to have explained
the institution of the Festival of Prometheus at Athens.
Such 'origins' formed a common motive for drama.

The Oresteia represents the highest achievement of
^schylus, and probably of all Greek drama. It has
all the splendour of language and the lyrical magic of
the early plays, the old, almost superhuman grandeur
of outline, while it is as sharp and deep in character-
drawing, as keenly dramatic, as the finest work of
Sophocles. The Cassandra scene in the Agamemnon,
where the doomed prophetess, whom none may believe,
sees the vision of her own death and the king's, await-
ing her in the palace, is simply appalling on the stage,
while in private study many a scholar will testify to
its eternal freshness. The first play deals with the
murder of Agamemnon on his triumphant return from
Troy by a wife deeply sinned against and deeply sin-
ning. The Chocphoroi (' Libation-Bearers ') gives the
retribution. Orestes, a child at the time of his father's
death, has grown up in exile ; he returns secretly to
execute the blood-feud on ^gisthus, and, by special
command of Apollo, to slay also his mother.

The Chocphoroi is in some ways the most complex

of the dramas of ^schylus. There is a recognition

scene (see p. 259), impossible in detail, but grand and
16



222 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

moving ; there is a definite plot by which the ministers
of vengeance enter the palace ; there is great boldness
of drawing in all the characters down to the pathetic
and ludicrous old nurse ; there is the haunting shadow
of madness looming over Orestes from the outset, and
deepening through the hours that the matricide is be-
fore him and the awful voice of Apollo in his ears,
and he struggles helplessly between two horrors, up
to the moment when his mother's curses take visible
form to him, and he flies from the grey snake-locked
faces.

The Emnenides is dramatic in its opening, merely
spectacular in its close. There is a certain grandeur
in the trial scene where Orestes is accused by the
Curse-Spirits, defended by Apollo, and acquitted by
the voice of Athena, The gods, however, are brought
too close to us, and the foundation of the Areopagus
has not for us the religious reality it had for ^schylus.
But the thing that most disappoints us, the gradual
slackening of the interest till the ' pity and terror '
melt away in gentle artistic pleasure, was, as every
choric ode and most tragedies testify, one of the
essential principles of Greek art. Shakespeare was with
the Greeks. He ends his tragedies by quiet scenes
among minor characters, and his sonnets with a calm
generalising couplet. We end our plays with a point,
and our sonnets with the weightiest line.

The general spirit of ^schylus has been much mis-
understood, owing to the external circum.stance that his
life came at the beginning of an age of rapid progress.
The pioneer of 490 is mistaken for a reactionary of 404.
.^schylus is in thought generally 'a precursor of the



THE GENERAL SPIRIT OF ^SCHYLUS 223

sophistic movement, as Euripides is the outcome of it.
He is an enthusiastic democrat of the early type. Listen
to the paeans about freedom in the Perscs. That is the
very spirit recorded by Herodotus as having made
Athens rise from a commonplace Ionian state to be
the model and the leader of Hellas. And the Perscs is
not isolated. The king in the Suppliants is almost
grotesquely constitutional ; the Prometheus abounds in
protests against despotism that breathe the true
Athenian spirit ; a large part of the Agamemnon is a
merciless condemnation of the ideal of the conquering
monarch. In the Euinenides, it is true, ^schylus defi-
nitely glorifies the Areopagus at a time when Ephi-
altes and Pericles were removing most of its jurisdiction.
He was no opponent of Pericles, who was his 'choregus,'
at least once ; ^ but he was one of the men of 490. To
that generation, as Aristotle's Constitution has taught us,
the Areopagus was the incarnation of free Athens in
battle against Persia ; to the men of 460 it was an obso-
lete and anomalous body.

As to the religious orthodoxy of ^schylus, it appears
certain that he was prosecuted for having divulged or
otherwise offended against the mysteries, which suggests
that he was obnoxious to the orthodox party. We may
possibly accept the story, stated expressly by Clement,
and implied by Aristotle (11 11 «), that he escaped by
proving that he had not been initiated, and consequently
had nothing to divulge. For a distinguished Eleusinian
not to have been initiated — if credible at all — would
imply something like an anti-sacerdotal bias. Certainly
he seems to have held no priesthoods himself, as Sopho-
cles and Pindar did ; and his historical position may

' 1 C. I. A. 971,



224 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

well have been that of those patriots who could not
forgive or forget the poltroonery of Delphi before the
war (see p. 138). However this may be, he is in religious
thought generally the precursor of Euripides. He stands
indeed at a stage where it still seems possible to reconcile
the main scheme of traditional theology with morality
and reason. Euripides has reached a further point,
where the disagreement is seen to be beyond healing.
Not to speak of the Prometheus, which is certainly sub-
versive, though in detail hard to interpret, the man who
speaks of the cry of the robbed birds being heard by
^' some Apollo, some Pan or Zeus" (Ag. 55) ; who prays
to "Zeus, whoeer he be'' (160) ; who avows "there is no
power I can find, tliougJi I sink my plummet through all
being, except only Zeus, if I would in very truth cast off
this aimless burden of my heart" — is a long way from
Pindaric polytheism. He tries more definitely to grope
his way to Zeus as a Spirit of Reason, as opposed to the
blind Titan forms of Hesiodic legend. " Lo, there was one
great of yore, swollen with strength and lust of battle, yet it
shall not even be said of him that once he was ! A nd he
who came thereafter met his conqueror, and is gone. Call
thou on Zeiis by names of Victory. . . . Zeus, who made
for Man the road to Thought, who stablished ^ Learn by
Suffering' to be an abiding Law!" That is not written in
the revelations of Delphi or Eleusis ; it is true human
thought grappling with mysteries. It involves a practi-
cal discarding of polytheism in the ordinary sense, and
a conception — metaphorical, perhaps, but suggestive of
real belief — of a series of ruling spirits in the government
of the world — a long strife of diverse Natural Powers,
culminating in a present universal order based on reason,
like the political order which ^schylus had seen estab"



RELIGIOUS AND MORAL IDEAS 225

lished by Athenian law. Compare it with the passage in
Euripides {Tro. 884) : —

'■'•Base of the world and o'er the world enthroned,
Whoe'er thou art. Unknown and hard of surmise.
Cause-chain of Things or Matins o%vn Reason, Cod,
I give thee worship, who by noiseless paths
Of justice leadest all that breathes and dies /"

That is the same spirit in a further stage : further, first
because it is clearer, and because of the upsetting alter-
native in the third line ; but most, because in the actual
drama the one rag of orthodoxy which the passage
contains is convicted as an illusion ! The Justice for
which thanks are given conspicuously fails : the * noise-
less paths ' lead to a very wilderness of wrong — at least,
as far as we mortals can see.

The only orthodox Greek writer preserved to us is
Pindar. Sophocles held a priesthood and built a chapel,
but the temper of his age was touched with rationalism,
and the sympathetic man was apt unconsciously to
reflect it.

About the positive ideas, religious and moral, implied
in the plays of yEschylus, too much has been written
already ; it is difficult to avoid overstatement in criti-
cism of the kind, and the critics have generally been
historians of philosophy rather than lovers of Greek
poetry. One may perhaps make out rather more
strongly in /Eschylus than in other writers three
characteristic ways of looking at life. His tragedies
come, as perhaps all great tragedies do, from some
'Hubris,' some self-assertion of a strong will, in the
way of intellect or emotion or passion, against stronger
outside forces, circumstances or laws or gods, .^^schylas
was essentially the man to feel the impassable bar^



2 26 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

against which human nature battles ; and the over-
throw of the Great King was the one thought that
was in every Greek mind at the time. Thus the peril
of human 'Hubris' and the 'jealousy of God' — i.e.
the fact that man's will aims further than his power
can reach — is one rather conspicuous principle in
^schylus.

Another is a conviction of the inevitableness of things ;
not fatalism, nor any approach to it, in the vulgar
sense, but a reflection that is borne in on most people
in considering any grave calamity, that it is the natural
consequence of many things that have happened before.
The crimes in /Eschylus are hereditary in two senses.
In the great saga-houses of Thebes and Mycenas there
was actually what we should call a taint of criminal
madness— it is brought out most explicitly in Euripides's
Electra. Orestes was the son of a murderess and a
man who had dealt much in blood (7ro\vKT6vo<;). His
ancestors had been proud and turbulent chieftains,
whose passions led them easily into crime. But the
crime is hereditary in itself also. The one wild blow
brings and always has brought the blow back, " the
ancient blinded vengeance and the wrong that amendeth
wrong." This, most people will admit, is a plain fact ;
of course ' the poet puts it in a mystical or symbolical
form. The old blood remains fresh on the ground,
crying for other blood to blot it out. The deed of
wrong begets children in its own likeness. The first
sin produces an 'Ara,' a Curse-Spirit, which broods
over the scene of the wrong, or over the heart and
perhaps the race of the sinner. How far this is meta-
phor, how far actual belief, is a problem that we cannot
at present answer.



CHARACTERISTICS OF .ESCHYLUS 227

This chain of thought leads inevitably to the question,
What is the end of the wrong eternally avenged and
regenerated ? There may of course be no end but
the extinction of the race, as in the Theban Trilogy;
but there may come a point where at last Law or Justice
can come in and pronounce a final and satisfying word.
Reconciliation is the end of the Oresteia, the Prometheia,
the Danaid Trilogy. And here, too, we get a reflection
of the age in which ^schylus lived, the assertion over
lawless places of Athenian civilisation and justice.

In looking over the plays and fragments as a whole,
one notices various marks both of the age and of the
individual. It is characteristic of both that .^schylus
wrote satyr-plays so much, and, it would seem, so well.
These Titanic minds — -^Eschylus and Heraclitus among
Greeks, Victor Hugo and Ibsen and Carlyle among our-
selves—are apt to be self-pleasing and weird in their
humour. One of the really elemental jokes of ^schylus
is in the Prometheus Firekindler* a satyr-play, where
fire is first brought into the world, and the wild satyrs
go mad with love for its beauty, and burn their beards
in kissing it ! The thing is made more commonplace,
though of course more comic, in the Sophoclean satyr-
play Helens Marriage* where they go similarly mad
about Helen. A definite mark of the age is the large
number of dramas that take their names from the chorus,
which was still the chief part of the play — Bassarcs*
Edoni,* Danaides* &c. Another is the poet's fondness
for geographical disquisitions. Herodotus had not yet
written, and we know what a land of wonder the farther
parts of the world still were in his time. To the Athens
of ^schylus the geographical interest was partly of this
imaginative sort ; in part it came from the impulse given



228 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

by the rise of Athens to voyages of discovery and trade
adventure. Of our extant plays, the Prometheus is full of
mere declamations on saga-geography ; the Perscs comes
next, then the Suppliants ; and even the Agamemnon
has the account of the beacon stations. Glaucus of the
Sea,* Niobe* and probably the Mysians* were full of
the same thing. The impulse did not last in Greek
tragedy. Sophocles has his well-known burst of Hero-
dotean quotation, and he likes geographical epithets as a
form of ornament, but he keeps his interest in 'historic'
within due limits. Euripides, so keenly alive to all
other branches of knowledge, is quite indifferent to this.

In the choice of subjects ^schylus has a certain pre-
ference for something superhuman or unearthly, which
combines curiously with this geographical interest. The
Promethejis begins with the words : ^^ Lo, we are come to
the farthest verge of the world, to where the Scythians
wander, an unearthly desolation!' That is the region
where ^schylus is at home, and his ' large utterance '
natural and unhampered. Many of his lost plays move
in that realm which Sophocles only speaks of, among

" The last peaks of the worlds beyond all seas.
Well-springs of night and gleams of opened heaven.
The old garden of the Sun." ^

It is the scene of the Daughtejs of the Sun,* treating of
the fall of Phaethon ; of the Soul- Weighing,* where Zeus
balances the fates of Hector and Achilles ; of the Ixion ; *
of the Memnon ; * and the numerous plays on Dionysiac
subjects show the same spirit.

It is partly the infancy of the art and partly the in-
tensity of ^schylus's genius that makes him often choose
subjects that have apparently no plot at all, like our

^ Soph. frag. 870.



WHAT ^SCHYLUS THINKS ABOUT 229

Suppliants and Persce. He simply represents a situation,
Steeps himself in it, and lights it up with the splendour
of his lyrics. Euripides tried that experiment too, in
the Suppliants and HeracleidcB, for instance. Sophocles
seems never to have risked it, except perhaps in the
Demanding of Helen* It is curious that ^schylus, unlike
his successors, abstained entirely from the local legends.
Perhaps it was that he felt the subjects to be poor, and
that the realities of the Persian War had blotted out all
less vivid things from the horizon of his patriotism.

It is interesting to compare the fragments of the three
tragedians: fragments are generally 'gnomic,' and tend
to show the bent of a writer's mind. Sophocles used
gnomes but little. Reflection and generalisation did not
interest him, though he has something to say about the
power of wealth (frag. 85) and of words (frag. 192) and
of wicked women (frag. 187). Euripides notoriously
generalises about everything in heaven and earth. He
is mostly terse and very simple — so simple that an un-
sympathetic reader misses the point.

'"'' Love does not vex the mati who begs his bread'' (frag. 322).
" The things that must be are so strangely great" (frag. 733).
" Who knoiveth if we quick be verily dead,
And our death life to them that once have passed it? " (frag. 638).

Sometimes, as in the opening speeches of Phaedra and
Medea, he treats subtly a point in psychology. He has
much to say about wealth and slavery and power of
speech. .^schylus simply never thinks about such
things. He has some great lines on love (frag. 44), but
his typical gnome is like that in the Niobe : * —

" Lo, one god craves no gift. Thou shall not bend him
By much drink-offering and burnt sacrifice.
He hath no altar, hearkeneth to no song,
And fair Persuasion standeth far from Death"



230 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

It does "someliow spoil one's taste for twitterings." And
so, above all, do his great dramatic speeches, so ruggedly
grand that at lirst sight one is often blind to the keen
psychology of passion in them — for instance, that in
which Clytaemestra gives public welcome to her hus-
band. She does not know whether he has been told
of her unfaithfulness ; she does know that she is utterly
friendless, that the man whom she dreaded in her
dreams is returned, and that the last hour for one or
other of them has come. She tries, like one near to
death, to leave some statement of her case. She is near
breaking down more than once ; but she gathers courage
as she speaks, and ends in the recklessness of nervous
exaltation : —

'"'â–  Freemen of Argos, and ye gathered Elders,
I shall not hold it shame in the midst of you
To outspeak the love ye well htow burns within me.
There comes a time when all fear fades and dies.
Who else can speak ? Does any heart but mine
Know the long burden of the life I bore
While he was under Troy ? A lonely wo7nan
Set in a desolate hoiise, 7io man's arm near
To lean on — Oh, 'tis a wrong to make one mad I
Voices of wrath ring ever in her ears :
Now, he is come ! Now, 'tis a messenger :
And every tale worse tidings than the last.
And men's cries loud against the lualls that hold her I
If all the wounds that channelled rumour bore
Have reached this King's flesh — why, 'tis all a net,
A toil of riddled meshes ! Died he there
With all the deaths that crowded in metHs mouths,
The?t is he not some Giiyon, triple-lived.
Three-bodied, monstrous, to be slain and slain
Till every life be quelled ? . . . Belike ye have told him
Of tny death-thirst — the rope above the lintel.
And how they cut me down ? True : 'twas those voices,
The wrath and hatred sttrgitig in mine ears.



SPEECH OF CLYT^MESTRA 231

Our child, st7-e, is not here : I would he were :

Orestes, he who holds the hostages

For thee and me. Yet nowise marvel at it.

Our war-friend Strophios keeps him, who spoke much

Of blows nigh poised to fall,— thy daily peril.

And many plots a traitorous folk inight weave,

I once being weak, tnatilike, to spurn the fallen.

But I — the stormy rivers of my grief

Are quenched now at the spring, arid no drop left.

My late-couched eyes are seared with many a blight^

Weeping the beacon fires that burned for thee

For ever answerless. And did sleep come,

A gnafs thin song would shout me in my dreams,

And start tne up seei?ig thee all girt with terrors

Close-crowded, and too long for otie nights sleep /

And now ^ lis all past .' Now with heart at peace

I hail jny King, my watch-dog of the fold.

My ships o?te cable of hope, my pillar firm

Where all else reels, my father^ s one-born heir.

My land scarce seen at sea when hope was dead.

My happy sunrise after nights of storm,

My living well-sprirtg in the wilderness !

Oh, it is joy, the waiting-time is past I

Thus, King, I greet thee home. No god need grudge —

Sure we have suffered in time past e?iough —