INTRODUCTION
occasionally that, since every living thing has its own Moira, one Moira might conceivably interfere with another, just as sometimes God may prevent the seed from maturing (Agamemnon, l. 1025). But in the main the rule that blood calls for blood, that Hubris goes before a fall, or that sin brings punishment, stands as an unbroken natural law, and the Erinyes are its especial guardians.
That being so, how can there be any forgiveness? Would_not forgiveness be a sort of monstrosity, a wanton breach in the law of Cause and Effect? Aeschylus, in the Agamemnon, gives his answer in unusually clear language (161–182). The prophet Calchas has been describing the ravenous feast of the two Eagles; the wrath of Artemis thereat and the vengeance exacted in the death of Iphigenia; the future vengeance to be exacted for that death; and beyond a yet further vista of vengeances re-avenged. Then Aeschylus asks how man can find escape from this endless chain and "cast off from his mind the burden of futility." "Only," he answers, "in the thought of Zeus, whatever Zeus may be." It is a Zeus sublimated by the mind of Aeschylus and very different from that glorified Achaean chieftain who was King of gods and men in the ordinary Homeric tradition. To Aeschylus Zeus, as the ruler of heaven, is the founder of a new world, much as Athens herself was the founder of a new civilization on earth. The old gods struck and were stricken; they fought and they passed away. One had no more meaning than another. But Zeus is "He who made a road to Thought, who established Learning by Suffering to be an abiding law." He himself in the distant past
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