τὸ μήτ’ ἄναρχον μήτε δεσποτούμενονἀστοῖς περιστέλλουσι βουλεύω σέβεινκαὶ μὴ τὸ δεινὸν πᾶν πόλεως ἔξω βαλεῖν.[253]
τὸ μήτ’ ἄναρχον μήτε δεσποτούμενονἀστοῖς περιστέλλουσι βουλεύω σέβεινκαὶ μὴ τὸ δεινὸν πᾶν πόλεως ἔξω βαλεῖν.[253]
τὸ μήτ’ ἄναρχον μήτε δεσποτούμενονἀστοῖς περιστέλλουσι βουλεύω σέβεινκαὶ μὴ τὸ δεινὸν πᾶν πόλεως ἔξω βαλεῖν.[253]
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 theEumenidesis 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 setat 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 theLycurgea(Λυκουργεία, or trilogy of Lycurgus), to which theBacchæof 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, theEdoni(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 eitherBassarides(Βασσαρίδες) orBassaræ(Βασσάραι)—theWomen 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. TheYouths(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 calledLycurgus; if we may judge from one of the three fragments the tragictreatment of wine was transformed into a comic discussion of beer.[258]
Another celebrated trilogy had for its theme the tale of Troy. TheMyrmidons(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 theNereides(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 thePhrygians(Φρύγες) orRansom 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 theRansomhe 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 camppractically 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.
TheWomen of Etna(Αἰτναῖαι) was produced in Sicily at the foundation of Hiero’s new city. In theMen 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 theDaughters 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 theThracian Women(Θρῇσσαι) Æschylus treated the same theme as Sophocles in theAjax. 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. TheCabiri(Κάβειροι) was the first tragedy to portray men intoxicated. In theNiobe(Νιόβη) occurred splendid lines quoted with approbation by Plato:—
Close kin of heavenly powers,Men near to Zeus, who upon Ida’s peakBeneath the sky their Father’s altar serve,Their veins yet quickened with the blood of gods.[262]
Close kin of heavenly powers,Men near to Zeus, who upon Ida’s peakBeneath the sky their Father’s altar serve,Their veins yet quickened with the blood of gods.[262]
Close kin of heavenly powers,Men near to Zeus, who upon Ida’s peakBeneath the sky their Father’s altar serve,Their veins yet quickened with the blood of gods.[262]
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]
ThePhiloctetesis the subject of an interesting essay byDio 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, theWeighing of the Souls(Ψυχοστασία) is remarkable for the scene in Heaven, modelled upon a passage in theIliad, 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 theAgamemnonalone. 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 representativeof 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 theAgamemnona breezy half-patronizing affection; while putting him forward in theFrogsto 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 theSupplicesto theEumenides, 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 mornAnd, having gilt the ocean with his beams,Gallops the zodiac in his glistering coach,[265]
The golden sun salutes the mornAnd, having gilt the ocean with his beams,Gallops the zodiac in his glistering coach,[265]
The golden sun salutes the mornAnd, having gilt the ocean with his beams,Gallops the zodiac in his glistering coach,[265]
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 mouthBlack fume, the eddying sister of the flame,[269]
Typhos, who belcheth from fire-reeking mouthBlack fume, the eddying sister of the flame,[269]
Typhos, who belcheth from fire-reeking mouthBlack fume, the eddying sister of the flame,[269]
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 fiercebattle 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 theOresteia. The earlier tragedies, both in the characters and in the language, are rough-hewn, for all their glory. In theSupplicesthis 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 thePersæand theSeptemthere 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 theAgamemnon: “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 theAgamemnonhas the effect of a Teniers peasant; Orestes’ nurse in theChoephorœis 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 thePrometheusis 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 theAgamemnon, and the king treading upon them in triumph, provided a handsome spectacle to theeye; 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; thePersæand theSeptemare 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 thePrometheus, 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 hasbeen 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 theSupplices, were it only in our power, be compared to the rigid declamations from which, to all seeming, tragedy was born. In theSupplicestragedy 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 theFrogs[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]TheOresteiaexhibits a marked advance in construction. Leaving on one side the vexed question of the plot in theAgamemnon,[291]we observe in theChoephorœwhat 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 theOresteiaa 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 theEumenidesall 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 thetraditional 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, allBefore the wind sweep down the stream of Hell!
Since Heav’n thus strongly urges on th’ event,Let Laius’ race, by Phœbus loathed, all, allBefore the wind sweep down the stream of Hell!
Since Heav’n thus strongly urges on th’ event,Let Laius’ race, by Phœbus loathed, all, allBefore the wind sweep down the stream of Hell!
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 ofHeaven, 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 andderive 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.