balanced. The hero is both a victim and a rebel. He is punished for his benefits to man; but though Zeus is tyrannous and ungrateful, the hero’s reckless defiance is shocking to Greek feeling. As the play goes on, this is subtly and delicately indicated by the attitude of the chorus. They enter overflowing with pity. They are slowly chilled and alienated by the hero’s violence and impiety; but they nobly decline, at the last crisis, the mean advice of Hermes to desert Prometheus and save themselves; and in the final crash they share his fate.
Oresteia.—The last and greatest work of Aeschylus is the Oresteia, which also has the interest of being the only complete trilogy preserved to us. It is a three-act drama of family fate, like the Oedipus-trilogy; and the acts are the sin, the revenge, the reconciliation, as in the Prometheus-trilogy. Again, as in Prometheus, the plot, at first sight, is such that the conditions of drama seem to exclude much development in character-drawing. The gods are everywhere at the root of the action. The inspired prophet, Calchas, has demanded the sacrifice of the king’s daughter Iphigenia, to appease the offended Artemis. The inspired Cassandra, brought in as a spear-won slave from conquered Troy, reveals the murderous past of the Pelopid house, and the imminent slaughter of the king by his wife. Apollo orders the son, Orestes, to avenge his father by killing the murderess, and protects him when after the deed he takes sanctuary at Delphi. The Erinnyes (“Furies”) pursue him over land and sea; and at last Athena gives him shelter at Athens, summons an Athenian council to judge his guilt, and when the court is equally divided gives her casting vote for mercy. The last act ends with the reconciliation of Athena and the Furies; and the latter receive a shrine and worship at Athens, and promise favour and prosperity to the great city. The scope for human drama seems deliberately restricted, if not closed, by such a story so handled. Nevertheless, as a fact, the growth of characterization is, in spite of all, not only visible but remarkable. Clytemnestra is one of the most powerfully presented characters of the Greek drama. Her manly courage, her vindictive and unshaken purpose, her hardly hidden contempt for her tool and accomplice, Aegisthus, her cold scorn for the feebly vacillating elders, and her unflinching acceptance (in the second play) of inevitable fate, when she faces at last the avowed avenger, are all portrayed with matchless force—her very craft being scornfully assumed, as needful to her purpose, and contemptuously dropped when the purpose is served. And there is one other noticeable point. In this trilogy Aeschylus, for the first time, has attempted some touches of character in two of the humbler parts, the Watchman in Agamemnon, and the Nurse in the Choephoroe. The Watchman opens the play, and the vivid and almost humorous sententiousness of his language, his dark hints, his pregnant metaphors drawn from common speech, at once give a striking touch of realism, and form a pointed contrast to the terrible drama that impends. A very similar effect is produced at the crisis of the Choephoroe by the speech of the Nurse, who coming on a message to Aegisthus pours out to the chorus her sorrow at the reported death of Orestes and her fond memories of his babyhood—with the most homely details; and the most striking realistic touch is perhaps the broken structure and almost inconsequent utterance of the old faithful slave’s speech. These two are veritable figures drawn from contemporary life; and though both appear only once, and are quite unimportant in the drama, the innovation is most significant, and especially as adopted by Aeschylus.
It remains to say a word on two more points, the religious ideas of Aeschylus and some of the main characteristics of his poetry. The religious aspect of the drama in one sense was prominent from the first, owing to its evolution from the choral celebration of the god Dionysus. But the new spirit imported by the genius of Aeschylus into the early Charac-teristics.drama was religious in a profounder meaning of the term. The sadness of human lot, the power and mysterious dealings of the gods, their terrible and inscrutable wrath and jealousy (ἄγα and φθόνος), their certain vengeance upon sinners, all the more fearful if delayed,—such are the poet’s constant themes, delivered with strange solemnity and impressiveness in the the songs, especially in the Oresteia. And at times, particularly in the Trilogy, in his reference to the divine power of Zeus, he almost approaches a stern and sombre monotheism. “One God above all, who directs all, who is the cause of all” (Ag. 163, 1485); the watchfulness of this Power over human action (363-367), especially over the punishment of their sins; and the mysterious law whereby sin always begets new sin (Ag. 758-760):—these are ideas on which Aeschylus dwells in the Agamemnon with peculiar force, in a strain at once lofty and sombre. One specially noteworthy point in that play is his explicit repudiation of the common Hellenic view that prosperity brings ruin. In other places he seems to share the feeling; but here (Ag. 730) he goes deeper, and declares that it is not ὄλβος but always wickedness that brings about men’s fall. All through there is a recurring note of fear in his view of man’s destiny, expressed in vivid images—the “death that lurks behind the wall” (Ag. 1004), the “hidden reef which wrecks the bark, unable to weather the headland” (Eum. 561-565). In one remarkable passage of the Eumenides (517-525) this fear is extolled as a moral power which ought to be enthroned in men’s hearts, to deter them from impious or violent acts, or from the pride that impels them, to such sins.
Of the poetic qualities of Aeschylus’ drama and diction, both in the lyrics and the dialogue, no adequate account can be attempted; the briefest word must here suffice. He is everywhere distinguished by grandeur and power of conception, presentation and expression, and most of all in the latest works, the Prometheus and the Trilogy. He is pre-eminent in depicting the slow approach of fear, as in the Persae; the imminent horror of impending fate, as in the broken cries and visions of Cassandra in the Agamemnon (1072-1177), the long lament and prayers to the nether powers in the Choephoroe (315-478), and the gradual rousing of the slumbering Furies in the Eumenides (117-139). The fatal end in these tragedies is foreseen; but the effect is due to its measured advance, to the slowly darkening suspense which no poet has more powerfully rendered. Again, he is a master of contrasts, especially of the Beautiful with the Tragic: as when the floating vision of consoling nymphs appears to the tortured Prometheus (115-135); or the unmatched lyrics which tell (in the Agamemnon, 228-247) of the death of Iphigenia; or the vision of his lost love that the night brings to Menelaus (410-426). And not least noticeable is the extraordinary range, force and imaginativeness of his diction. One example of his lyrics may be given which will illustrate more than one of these points. It is taken from the long lament in the Septem, sung by the chorus and the two sisters, while following the funeral procession of the two princes. These laments may at times be wearisome to the modern reader, who does not see, and imperfectly imagines, the stately and pathetic spectacle; but to the ancient feeling they were as solemn and impressive as they were ceremonially indispensable. The solemnity is here heightened by the following lines sung by one of the chorus of Theban women (Sept. 854-860):—
Nay, with the wafting gale of your sighs, my sisters,
Beat on your heads with your hands the stroke as of oars,
The stroke that passes ever across Acheron,
Speeding on its way the black-robed sacred bark,—
The bark Apollo comes not near,
The bark that is hidden from the sunlight—
To the shore of darkness that welcomes all!
Authorities.—The chief authority for the text is a single MS. at Florence, of the early 11th century, known as the Medicean or M., written by a professional scribe and revised by a contemporary scholar, who corrected the copyist’s mistakes, added the scholia, the arguments and the dramatis personae of three plays (Theb., Agam., Eum.), and at the end the Life of Aeschylus and the Catalogue of his dramas. The MS. has also been further corrected by later hands. In 1896 the Italian Ministry of Public Instruction published the MS. in photographic facsimile, with an instructive preface by Signor Rostagno. Besides M. there are some eight later MSS. (13th to 15th century), and numerous copies of the three select plays (Sept., Pers., Prom.) which were most read in the later Byzantine period, when Greek literature was reduced to gradually diminishing excerpts. These later MSS. are of little value or authority.
The editions, from the beginning of the 15th century to the present are very numerous, and the text has been further continuously
