The chief difficulty of the play consists, therefore, in understanding the error of the protagonist, and in reconciling the character of Zeus, as here depicted, with the theology elsewhere expressed by Æschylus. The most probable solution of the problem is suggested by the ideal to which Greek tragedy aspired. It was the object of the Athenian dramatists not to represent a simple study of character, or to set forth a merely stirring action, but to depict a hero worthy of all respect and admirable, exposed to suffering or ruin by some fault of temperament. We are probably meant to look upon Prometheus as having erred, though nobly, through self-will, because he would not obey the ruler of the world for the time being, nor abide the working-out of the law of fate in patience, but tried to take that law into his own hands, and to anticipate the evolution of events. At the same time the play seems to convict supreme Zeus himself of a tyrannical exercise of a forcefully acquired power: he also, through a like self-will, appears to be kicking against the pricks of immutable destiny; and it is prophesied that in his turn he will be superseded by a more righteous ruler. The secret of the revolution in Olympus, whereby Zeus will be deposed, is possessed by Prometheus, and withheld by him from his tormentor. Thus the knowledge of the future enables the hero of the drama to endure, while Zeus upon his throne suffers through the consciousness that fate cannot be resisted. Therefore thePrometheus, as we possess it, presents the spectacle of two stubborn wills in conflict. The action is suspended. The conclusion cannot be foreseen. Owing to its very excellence as a work of art, it contains no indication of the ultimate solution; we are only told by Prometheus that, after he has been liberated, and not till then, he may reveal the means by which the ruin of Zeus shall be averted. We are left to conjecture that Æschylus intended to harmonize the wills of the Titan and his oppressor through the final submission of both alike to the laws of destiny, which are supreme. Prometheus, when once his pride has given way, will reveal the secret which he holds,and Zeus, made acquiescent by the lapse of time, will accept it.
The chief obstacle to the satisfactory interpretation of thePrometheussprings, as I have hinted, from the difficulty of understanding how Prometheus was guilty and Zeus justified. The transgression of the hero, if it deserves the name at all, was eminently noble. His punishment appears extravagant in its severity. At first sight we can hardly avoid the conclusion that the final alliance between the two conflicting actors in this drama was a kind of political compromise, unworthy of the protagonist. To this judgment Shelley was led by his hatred of despotism, and by his inability to imagine a dignified termination to the dispute that enlisted his sympathies so strongly on the side of the disinterested hero. "I was averse," he says in the Preface toPrometheus Unbound, "from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary." Those, however, who have learned to respect the lofty theosophy of Æschylus, no less than to admire his imperial artistic faculty, will be slow to accept the conclusion of Shelley, or to believe that the catastrophe prepared by the Greek poet was feeble. They will rather mistrust their powers of judgment, or suspect that the key to the riddle has been lost. The truth is, that we have no means of settling what the catastrophe really was; and at this point it is necessary to give some account of the relation of this drama to the entire scheme of Æschylus.
ThePrometheus Bound(δεσμώτης) was probably the second of a trilogy, or series of three tragedies, of which the first was calledPrometheus the Fire-bearer(πυρφόρος), and the thirdPrometheus Unbound(λυόμενος).Prometheus the Fire-bearerandPrometheus Unboundhave disappeared; it seems that they were not even known to the Greek scholiast, for he does not mention them in his argument to thePrometheus Bound. At the same time the argument prefixed to thePersæinforms us that that play was the second in a series, of which thePhineuswas first, theGlaucus Potnieusthird, and a so-calledPrometheusfourth. It has been conjectured that thePrometheuswhich formed the fourth or satyric drama in this tetralogy was distinguished by the titleFire-kindler(πυρκαεύς,), a name which is mentioned in an obscure passage of Pollux; and that consequently four plays altogether by Æschylus bore the title ofPrometheus. It cannot, however, be proved beyond doubt that theFire-kindlerexisted independent of theFire-bearer; or, if so, that the former was the last play in the tetralogy of thePersæ, the latter the first in the trilogy of thePrometheus Bound. Both arguments to the onlyPrometheuswe possess entire are unfortunately silent about the plays which accompanied it; and it is only from allusions to a lost tragedy calledPrometheus Unboundthat we are at all justified in assuming the disappearance of the first drama of the series, and in calling it theFire-bearer. It should be added that the learned editor of the Greek Scenic Poets is inclined to identify theFire-bearerand theFire-kindler, and to regard this play as the satyric drama attached to the tetralogy of thePersæ. By so doing he leaves thePrometheus BoundandUnboundwithout a proper dramatic introduction.
In spite of the uncertainty which surrounds the criticism of this play, no students familiar with the style of Æschylus will fail to recognize in thePrometheus Unboundthe second drama of a trilogy. It has the stationary character which belongs to theChoëphorœ, thePersæ, and theSupplices. The dramatic action is not helped forward in these second pieces; they develop the situation to which affairs have been brought by the events ofa previous drama, and which in its turn must lead to the conclusive action of the third piece. It was only in this way that a series of three dramas on the same subject could be connected into true artistic unity. The catastrophe of the first play produced a combination of events which required such expansion in a second that a new action, involving a final catastrophe, should be unfolded in the third, and the whole series should in the end be seen to have coherence. Now thePrometheus Unboundis unintelligible, except as the result of a preceding action, while its conclusion leaves the fate of the hero still undetermined: the events which brought the hero to his dreadful doom, and the events which will deliver him, are alluded to as things of the past and of the future; in the present there is no drama, no doing, but only a development of the intermediate and transitional situation. We have, therefore, the right to assume the antecedence of a play which must, according to the data given in our extant tragedy, have turned upon the hero's theft of fire.[125]
We may now attempt to reconstruct the whole trilogy, and see if, having done so, any new conditions are supplied for the solution of the difficulty as originally stated. In theFire-bearer, for the subject-matter of which we have to rely on the allusions of theBound, Zeus has recently acquired the empire of the universe by imprisoning his father, Kronos, and by defeating the giants who rose up in arms against him. Prometheus, knowing, through the inspiration of his mother, Earth, or Themis, that Zeus will prevail, has taken his side, and has materially helped him in the conflict. But the sympathies of Prometheus are less with Zeus than with the race of men, who, at that primitive period of the world's history, existed in the lowest state of wretchedness. Zeus, intent on getting his new kingdom into order, entertains the notion of destroying mankind, and planting a better stock of mortal beingson the earth. Prometheus opposes this design, and enables men to raise themselves above their savage condition into comparative power and comfort. It is just at this point that the lost drama would probably have revealed the true nature of his offence, or ἁμαρτία. In the Hesiodic legend he is punished for having taught men to deceive the powers of heaven; and though it is clear that Æschylus did not closely follow that version of the myth, we may conjecture that he represented the benefactor of humanity as a rebel against the ruler of Olympus. Against the express command of Zeus, Prometheus gave men fire; and though this act seems innocent enough, we must remember that, according to Genesis, Adam lost Eden by merely plucking an apple. Satisfied with his own sense of justice, and hardened in his pride by the foreknowledge of the future, Prometheus resisted a power that he regarded as tyrannical, and had to be treated by Zeus with the same severity as Atlas or Typhoeus.
In thePrometheus Boundwe see the beginning of his punishment. The Titan, in whose person, as it were, the whole race of mortals suffer, is crucified on a barren cliff of Scythia. Meanwhile he makes two prophecies—first, that a descendant of Io is destined to deliver him; and, secondly, that Zeus will marry and beget a son who shall sway the universe in his place. At the same time he declares that he knows how Zeus may avoid this danger. Zeus, anxious to possess this secret, sends down Hermes, and endeavors to wrest it from his prisoner with threats; but Prometheus abides, scornful and unyielding; his pain may be increased, yet it cannot last forever; he is immortal, and Zeus will in the end be humiliated. To requite his contumacy, Zeus rends the mountains, hell is opened, and Prometheus descends to the lowest pit of Tartarus.
It is clear that, whatever may have been the fault of Prometheus in theFire-bearer, the poet has done all in his power to excite our sympathy for him in the second drama of the trilogy. He draws the character of Oceanus as a trimmer and time-server, who inspires contempt. He introduces Io suffering as a wretched victim of the selfish love of her almighty master. He makes the Oceanides willing in the end to share the doom of the Titan; while all the human sympathies of the audience are powerfully affected by the spectacle of a martyrdom incurred for their sake. This play is, therefore, the triumph of the protagonist; his offence is hidden; his heroic resistance is idealized; we are made to feel sure that, when at last he is reconciled with Zeus, it will be through no unworthy weakness on his part.
In the third drama of the trilogy, parts of which, translated into Latin by Cicero, have been preserved to us, Prometheus has been raised from Tartarus, and is again crucified on Caucasus. A vulture sent by Zeus daily gnaws his liver, which, daily growing, supplies continually fresh food for the tormentor. The tension of the situation is still protracted. Prometheus has not given way. Zeus has not relented. Meanwhile the seasons have revolved through thirteen generations of the race of men, and the deliverer appears. It is Herakles who cuts the Gordian knot. He destroys the vulture, and persuades his father Zeus to suffer Cheiron, the Centaur, whom he had smitten with a poisoned arrow, and who is weary of continued life, to take the place of the Titan in Hades. Then Prometheus is liberated. He declares that Zeus, if he would avoid the coming doom, must refrain from marriage with Thetis. He binds the willow of repentance round his forehead, and places the iron ring of necessity upon his finger. His will is made at last concordant with that of his enemy. Thetis is given in wedlock to the mortal Peleus, and Achilles is born.[126]
From this last drama of the trilogy it would appear that thehonors of the whole series were reserved for Herakles. Herakles is the offspring of Zeus by a mortal woman. He occupies, therefore, a middle place between the two contending parties, and is able to effect their reconciliation. We may fairly conclude that herein lay the solution designed by Æschylus. In order to mediate between Zeus and Prometheus, a third agency was imperatively demanded. The heroic demi-god, who is the son of the Olympian, and at the same time a scion of oppressed humanity, prompted by no decree of his father, but following the instincts of his generous humanity, will not allow the torments of Prometheus to continue. By killing the vulture, he resolves the justice of Zeus in an act of mercy; at the same time, he touches the heart of the Titan, and draws his secret from him, working a revolution in the stubborn nature of Prometheus similar to that which Neoptolemus effected in Philoctetes by his humane uprightness. It is thoroughly in accordance with the spirit of Greek tragedy that the scales should thus have fallen from the eyes of Prometheus. He saw at last that Zeus, though severe, was really justified; and, as a makepeace-offering, he rendered up the secret which brought the ruler into harmony with the immutable laws of fate. According to this solution of the plot, the final concession of Prometheus would have been as noble as his intermediate resistance; the περιπέτεια, or revolution, which was imperatively required before the drama could have been conducted to an issue, would have taken place within the protagonist's soul, while Herakles, by introducing a new element into the action, furnished the efficient cause of its conclusion. It may be argued on the other hand that Prometheus foreknew the advent of Herakles, and prophesied of him to Io in the second drama of the trilogy. To this I should answer that he could not then have calculated on the change which would be wrought in his own character by thedeliverer.
How Æschylus handled the subject-matter of thePrometheus Unboundwe cannot say. It seems, however, certain that, unless he falsified his otherwise consistent conception of Zeus, as the just and wise, though stern, lord of the universe, and unless he satisfied himself with a catastrophe which Shelley would have been justified in calling "feeble," he must, through Herakles, have introduced a factor capable of solving the problem, by revealing to Prometheus the nature of his original ἁμαρτία, and thus rendering it dignified for him to bow to Zeus.
If this reading of thePrometheusbe accepted, it will be seen that the whole trilogy involved the deepest interests, the mightiest collision of wills, the most pathetic situations, and the most sublime of reconciliations. Zeus, in the second drama of the series, is purposely exposed to misrepresentation in order that his true character in the climax, as
τὸν φρονεῖν βροτοὺς ὁδώσαντα, τὸν πάθη μάθοςθέντα κυρίως ἔχειν,[127]
τὸν φρονεῖν βροτοὺς ὁδώσαντα, τὸν πάθη μάθοςθέντα κυρίως ἔχειν,[127]
may be established. The divine justice personified in Zeus is displayed irreconcilably opposed to the natural will personified in Prometheus, until the hero who partakes of both, the active and unselfish Herakles, atones them. We are even justified in conjecturing that, as Prometheus occupied the foreground of the second drama, so Zeus must have been paramount in the first, and that the two antithetical propositions having thus been stated, the chief part of the third play was assigned to Herakles. What strengthens the interpretation now advanced is the peculiar nature of the punishment of Prometheus. The liver, according to antique psychology, was the seat of the passions; consequentlyPrometheus suffered through the organ of his sin.
That Æschylus intended to describe the protagonist of his trilogy as a transgressor, though offending in a noble cause, while Zeus was acting in accordance with real justice, however hard to comprehend, is further indicated by the series of events which are supposed to have taken place between the termination of theFire-bearerand the climax of theUnbound. All this while Prometheus in his obstinacy is suffering on Caucasus and in the depth of Tartarus; but the way of salvation is meantime being wrought out on earth. By the commerce of the Olympian deities with the daughters of men the heroic race is generated; and not only is the deliverer and reconciler, Herakles, sent forth to purge the world of monstrous wrong, but the better age of equity and justice, foreseen by the Titan and ordained by the Fates, is being prepared. The marriage of Thetis to Peleus is the proper inauguration of the heroic age; it not only confirms Zeus in his sovereignty, but it also provides for humanity the greatest actor in the drama of the Trojan war—the first historical event of Hellas.
If the character ascribed to Zeus in thePrometheus Boundstill seems to offer difficulties; if, in other words, we are not satisfied with assuming that his conduct must have been justified by the evolution of events in thePrometheus Unbound, the following considerations may be adduced by way of further explanation. In the first place, at the supposed time of thePrometheus Bound, Zeus was but just seated on his throne, and had to deal with unruly and insurgent powers. The punishment of Prometheus was an episode in the Titanomachy. It was the business, therefore, of Æschylus to exhibit the firmness and force of government of the new ruler, not to draw the picture of a kind paternal monarch. In the second place, the speakers who describe Zeus as despotic belonged by kinship to the old order of the Titans,or were closely related through friendship to Prometheus. Dramatic propriety required that they should calumniate the new king, or at least misunderstand his motives. In the third place, Io, whose fate appeared so hard, became the mother of a mighty nation, and received tenfold for all her sufferings at the hand of Zeus.[128]Here, therefore, his inscrutable ways were in the end proved righteous; nor is it probable that if Æschylus justified Zeus in his dealings with the unoffending Io, he would leave his treatment of Prometheus unexplained. In the fourth place, the theology of the Greeks was not absolute, like that to which we are accustomed through Christianity. The power ascribed to their deities was political and economical. Fate and necessity determined the action of even Zeus, who was himself an outgrowth from an earlier and ruder order. They also imagined a gradual development in the moral order of the universe. The intellectual powers of Olympus had superseded the old nature-forces of the Titanic cosmogony. There was, therefore, nothing ridiculous to the Greek mind in the notion that Zeus might be conceived as growing in wisdom and in righteousness. In the fifth place, we must remember that the Athenian audience, familiar with the Hesiodic legend of Prometheus, were better prepared than we are, after listening to the invectives against Zeus in the second drama of the trilogy, to accept his triumphant justification in the third.
Not only is the trilogy of Æschylus—if, indeed, he composed a Promethean trilogy at all—now irrecoverable except by hazardous conjecture, but, what is more unfortunate, the whole mythus on which it was based has descended to us in hopelessly mutilated fragments. We can clearly perceive that it enshrined the deepest speculations of the Greeks concerning the origin of humanity, the relation of deified intelligence to material nature and to abstractnecessity, the kinship between the human soul and the divine spirit, and the consciousness of sin, which implies a division between the will and the reason. Furthermore, there are hints implied in it of purification through punishment, of ultimate reconciliation, and of vicarious suffering. But the fabric of the legend is so ruined that to reconstruct these elements of a theological morality is now impossible. Moreover, the very conditions under which the mythus flourished tended to divert the minds of the Greeks themselves away from the underlying meaning to the romantic presentation. The story could not fail to usurp upon the doctrine. Like the Glaucus of Greek mythology, whom Plato used as a parable in theRepublic, the idea which takes shape in a legend during the first ages of human speculation gathers an accretion of the sea-weeds and the shells of fancy round it, lying at the bottom of the ocean of the human mind through centuries, so that, when it emerges into the light of critical inquiry, the original lineaments of the conception are deformed and overgrown, and to strip it bare and see it clearly is no easy matter. Far more difficult is the task when only the maimed fragments, thedisjecta membra, of the myth remain to us.
However freely Æschylus may have dealt with the tale of Prometheus, however he may have employed it as a vehicle for rational theology, he cannot have wholly eliminated those qualities which belonged to it as a Saga rather than a chapter of religious tradition. Indeed, by dramatizing, he was probably impelled to accentuate the legendary outline at the expense of philosophical coherence. This consideration may explain some of the apparent incongruities in his fable, to which attention has not been yet directed in this essay. One of these concerns the position of the human race between Zeus, their apparent oppressor, and Prometheus, their avowed champion. It was for the sake of mankind that Prometheus disobeyed Zeus; it was through severity towards mankind that Zeus placed himself at variance with justice. Yet we find Zeus seeking a mortal bride among the daughters of the men he had sought to destroy; nor is there any reason why, when he could crucify their champion, he should not have annihilated the whole race outright. Perhaps, however, we ought to conjecture that, at this point, the episode of Deucalion and his restoration of mankind after the deluge was understood to have intervened.
Other discrepancies may be stated briefly. In the elder version of the fable presented by Hesiod, Prometheus is almost identified with humanity, while some later fragments of the legend make him the father of Deucalion. In Æschylus he is an immortal god, whose sympathy with men proceeds from generosity and pity. Hesiod describes him as the son of the Titan Iapetos by Asia. Æschylus places him in the first rank of Titanic agencies, by making him the son of Earth or Themis; he is married to Hesione, daughter of Oceanus. Hesiod names his brother Epimetheus; and herein we trace the remnants of an antique psychological analysis, whereof Æschylus has made no use. It is clear, therefore, that the Attic poet dealt freely with the mythus, selecting for artistic purposes only such points in the Hellenic fable as would fit the framework of his drama.
The only sure ground, amid so much that is both shifting and uncertain, is that the race of men had sinned against God, and that Prometheus was a responsible co-agent in their crime. This in itself is a strong argument in favor of the view which has been urged throughout this essay. This view may be resumed in the following positions. First, it is probable that thePrometheus Boundis only the second drama of a trilogy. Secondly, the vilification of Zeus as a despot must be understood in a dramatic sense; it was appropriate to the situation of the actors, and intended to enhance the pathos of the protagonist's suffering. Thirdly, if we possessed the trilogy entire, we should see that Prometheus had been really and gravely in the wrong, and that his obstinacy was in the highest sense tragic according to the Greek conception, inasmuch as it displayed the aberration of a sublime character. Fourthly, the occasion of a worthy reconciliation between Zeus and Prometheus, wherein the former should forego his anger and the latter bend the proud neck of his will, was furnished by Herakles, who held an intermediate position between God and man, and who was recognized as the redresser of wrongs and savior by the Greeks at large.
The trilogy of theOresteiais at the same time the masterpiece of Æschylus as a dramatic poet, and also the surest source that we possess for forming a theory of his theological opinions. I do not propose to consider it from the second of these points of view, but rather to concentrate attention upon its greatness as a connected poem in three stupendous parts—as "the majestic image of a high and stately tragedy shutting up and intermingling her solemn scenes and acts with a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies." In theOresteiaÆschylus has plucked the last fruit upon the Upas-tree of crime which flourished in the palace of Mycenæ. The murder of Agamemnon, after his return in pomp and power from Troy, forms the subject of the first play. By selecting this point for the overture to the series, the poet was able to allude in choric songs to the ancestral curse of the house, and also to the special crimes of Agamemnon, in his sacrifice of Iphigeneia, in the protracted sufferings of the Argives before Troy, and in his fatal pride. The vaticinations of Cassandra opened a terrific vista of the horrors accumulated upon the family of Thyestes. Thus the past was connected with the present, and the intolerable account of guilt which Orestes, the chief actor, was destined in the end, by the help of Heaven, to discharge, was vividly presented to the minds of the audience. Agamemnon ismurdered, and the tragedy closes with Clytemnestra's pæan of triumph and defiance. She glories in her act, pretending that she has duly revenged the death of Iphigeneia, and suppressing her own adultery with Ægisthus—a criminal motive more than enough to vitiate its character of retributive justice.
The Chorus, who are hostile to her and her paramour, call upon her, if she really slew her husband for Iphigeneia's sake, to leave the palace and seek purification. This was her duty according to Greek etiquette. But she refuses; and no Furies haunt her for her crime, seeing that the Furies take account of none but kindred blood, and Clytemnestra killed a man who was no relative by birth, but only by marriage. Such is the strange doctrine which the Eumenides themselves, in the third play of the series, propound before the judgment-seat of Pallas. In a deeper sense it was artistically fitting that Clytemnestra should remain unvisited by the dread goddesses. They were the deities of remorse, and she had steeled her soul against the stings of conscience. Neither from the blood of a slain husband could they rise; nor was there in her own heart harborage for their grim choir. But though Clytemnestra escaped the spiritual visitings of the Erinnyes, she knew what fear was. Orestes, as the Chorus told her, was still living.
TheChoëphorœcontinues the tale of blood and vengeance. Orestes returns to Mycenæ. He recognizes his sister Electra by their father's tomb, deludes Clytemnestra with a false tale of his own death, and then succeeds in killing her together with Ægisthus on the spot where they had murdered Agamemnon. Once more the palace is thrown open; instead of Agamemnon and Cassandra, Clytemnestra and Ægisthus lie prostrate before the desecrated altars, and Orestes exhibits to the Argives the robe in which his father had been caught and tangled ere the axe descended on his head. Then, when the song of joy is rising fromElectra and the Chorus, while they are crying that the ancient Fury of the house has been appeased, at that very moment the eyes of Orestes dilate with horror, his hair bristles, and he trembles with madness. He sees what none around him may discern. The Erinnyes of his mother are upon him, and he flies. Like all the middle plays of a trilogy, theChoëphorœis somewhat stationary in its action. But this closing scene is tremendous. It powerfully affected the imagination of the Greeks, and continued, through the period of Græco-Roman art, to form a favorite subject for sepulchral bass-reliefs. Some of these have been preserved to us, the finest being one in the Capitoline Museum.
By the termination of theChoëphorœwe are prepared for yet another tragedy, the last of the series. TheEumenidesopens with a scene which represents the Temple of Phœbus at Delphi. Orestes has taken refuge with the god who bade him slay his mother, and who must now purify him. He lies breathless at the altar-steps with the branch of suppliant woollen-woven olive in his hand. Not far away are stretched the Furies, hideous, and snorting in their slumber. Phœbus, while they yet sleep, bids his client rise and speed to Athens, to await the verdict of Pallas in his case. So much we learn, partly from the speech of the Pythia, and partly from the lips of the god himself. Then, when Orestes has started on his way, the phantom of Clytemnestra appears and bids the sleeping Furies rise. One by one they start, and groan like hounds disturbed in the midst of dreamings of the chase. When they see their prey has escaped, they break into full cry—a brazen-throated chorus, accompanied by brazen-footed tramplings. Phœbus, however, drives them forth with scorn from his sun-bright shrine. Why linger they in those hypæthral temple-chambers, resonant with song and gladdened by the feet of youths and maidens bearing bays? Their haunts should rather be the charnel-house, the shambles, the gallows, the torture-chamber of barbarians. The scene is now changed to Athens, where Pallas presides over the court of the Areiopagus assembled to decide between the Furies who prosecute Orestes and Phœbus who defends his suppliant. There is no doubt about the deed: Clytemnestra was slain by her own son. The question to settle is, whether circumstance could justify so unnatural an act. The Furies represent the blind instinct of repulsion for the shedding of maternal blood, which noprima facieargument can excuse, and which cannot be covered. Phœbus is the holy and pure power, who will not suffer moral abominations, like the unpunished insolence of the murderess Clytemnestra, to abide. Pallas stands for reason, capable of weighing motives, of disengaging a necessary act of retributive justice from brute murder. In the breasts of the human judges, these three faculties—the instinct which condemns matricide, the instinct which sanctions under any circumstance the punishment of crime, and the reason which holds the balance of impulses—are active. After much angry pleading by the advocates on both sides, the votes are taken. Half decide against Orestes; half acquit him. Pallas, by her casting vote, determines the verdict in his favor. The Eumenides, disappointed of their prey, threaten vengeance against Athens; but Pallas appeases them, and assigns them a place of honor in her city forever.
It is clear that the three plays of this trilogy are closely bound together, and that their connection is that of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. TheAgamemnonsets forth the crime of Clytemnestra; theChoëphorœexhibits the exceptional conduct of Orestes with regard to that crime; theEumenidescontains his exculpation. The third play offers a reconciliation of the agencies at warfare in the first and second; the curse of the house of Atreus is worked out and set at rest by the hero whose awful duty it was to revenge a father's murder on a mother. His justification layin his submission to the divine will. Had he taken the matricidal office on himself in haste or anger, he must have added another link to the chain of crime that hitherto had bound his family through generations. What he did, however, was done with a clear conscience; and, though he suffered the maddening anguish of so terrible an act, he found rest and peace for his soul at last. Thus a new power, unrealized in theAgamemnonand theChoëphorœ, was needed for the solution presented in theEumenides.
Passing from the internal structure of these dramas to their form, we may notice how Æschylus provided theatrical variety consistent with the varying subject. It was requisite that the action of the two first should take place at Mycenæ; so the scene was not altered, but the Chorus was changed, in order that the pathos of Electra's situation might be made more clear in theChoëphorœ. TheEumenidesadmitted not only of a new Chorus, but also of a total change of scene; it may be added that this third drama violates the unities alike of place and time.
Of the three plays of the trilogy, theAgamemnonis unquestionably the noblest. It is the masterpiece of Æschylus, and to one who has conquered its difficulties and imbibed its spirit it offers a spectacle of tragic grandeur not to be surpassed, hardly to be equalled, by anything which even Shakespeare produced. What some modern critics might regard as defects—the lengthy choric passages, abstract in their thought, though splendid in their imagery—the concentration of the poet's powers on one terrific climax, for every word that Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Cassandra utter leads up to the death-cry of the king—contribute to the excellence of a drama of this style. If we lack the variety and subtlety that charm us in a work likeHamlet; if, after reading the play over and over again, and testing it in many crucibles of critical analysis, we do not, as in the case of Shakespeare's tragedies, discover new and delicate beauties in the minor parts, but learn each time, and by each process, to admire the vigor of the poet's main conception, the godlike energy with which he has developed it; that may be taken as the strongest proof of its perfection as a monument of classic art.
There is, in theAgamemnon, an oppressive sense of multitudinous crimes, of sins gathering and swelling to produce a tempest. The air we breathe is loaded with them. No escape is possible. The marshalled thunder-clouds roll ever onward, nearer and more near, and far more swiftly than the foot can flee. At last the accumulated storm bursts in the murder of Agamemnon, the majestic and unconscious victim felled like a steer at the stall; in the murder of Cassandra, who foresees her fate, and goes to meet it with the shrinking of some dumb creature, and with the helplessness of one who knows that doom may not be shunned; in the lightning-flash of Clytemnestra's arrogance, who hitherto has been a glittering hypocrite, but now proclaims herself a fiend incarnate. As the Chorus cries, the rain of blood, that hitherto has fallen drop by drop, descends in torrents on the house of Atreus: but the end is not yet. The whole tragedy becomes yet more sinister when we regard it as the prelude to ensuing tragedies, as the overture to fresh symphonies and similar catastrophes. Wave after wave of passion gathers and breaks in these stupendous scenes; the ninth wave mightier than all, with a crest whereof the spray is blood, falls foaming; over the outspread surf of gore and ruin the curtain drops, to rise upon the self-same theatre of new woes.
The imagery of theAgamemnonmost powerfully contributes to heighten the tragic impression of the plot. At one time the ancestral fury of the doomed house is likened to a demon leaping on it from above, by a metaphor which vividly suggests Blake's design of Satan pouring flame upon the dwelling of Job's sons. At another it is compared to a cormorant brooding upon its battlements; and yet again, by a stroke of irony peculiarly impressive to the Greeks, it is likened to a band of revellers. The repetition of the same class of metaphors, the frequent references to the net in which Agamemnon was to be caught, to the axe with which he and Cassandra were to be slaughtered, to the smoke and scent of blood which was to bathe the altar of the household Zeus with sacrifice unhallowed, assail the imagination with portentous monotony.
Of all the terrors in this tragedy none is so awful in itself, or so artistically heightened, as Cassandra's prophecy. Accompanying her lord and master, she has approached the palace of Mycenæ. Clytemnestra has greeted the king with a set oration, admirable for its rhetoric, covering by dark innuendoes her foul thought. Spreading upon the threshold purple raiment and mantles suited to the service of the gods—such embroidered garments, we may fancy, as Athenian ladies wrought for Pallas—she exclaims: "Descend from this thy chariot; nor set on earth, dread monarch, thy foot that trampled upon Troy." It is as though a mediæval wife should bid her lord, returning from the East, to tread on altar-cloths and sacerdotal vestments. Agamemnon shrinks from the sacrilege, but she overrules his scruples, and he complies. All this while Cassandra is seated, patient, in her car. Like a statue sculptured in monumental alabaster, with hands upon her knees, and head bowed on her breast, she waits unmoved. Then the conqueror is led in to his doom—a doom which the Chorus, in one of their wild eddying hymns of woe, seem almost to anticipate. Still Cassandra tarries; and now Clytemnestra comes again, with taunts and dreadful irony: "Happy are you, princess though you be, to have such rich and prosperous masters; enter the palace; the sacrifice is ready at the altar, and to this, as a slave of the house, you, too, are bidden." But Cassandra will not move. In her soul, where, though a slave, she stillretains the gift of oracular vision, she foresees her doom. She knows what the riches of the house of Atreus mean, what the prosperity of Agamemnon really is, what the sacrifice to which she, too, is bidden will be. Clytemnestra leaves her, half in scorn and half in anger. Then, at length, Cassandra lifts her head, and stirs herself, and groans. The first word she utters is "Apollo! oh! Apollo!" This rouses the Chorus, and they ask: "What cry of wailing hast thou shrieked about Apollo? He is not a god to be greeted with dirges." Phœbus was, in truth, the deity of brightness and music, not of the funeral groan or death lament. Still Cassandra, with the same ill-omened utterance, reverberates the name: "Apollo! ah, Apollo! lo, a second time hast thou undone me!" To Phœbus she had promised her virginity; the promise was not kept, and he requited her with prophecy that none might heed or understand. No tragic portion is more piteous than this of her who was the clear-eyed seer of coming woes, the unwilling mouthpiece of dread oracles, doomed alike to knowledge worse than ignorance, and to the scorn that falls on idle babblers. Now, once again, descending on her with the might of prophecy, the god compels her to predict her own swift-coming fate. Little by little, at the intercession of the Chorus, Cassandra becomes more articulate. She calls the house before her "the shambles of a man, a pavement blood-bedabbled." There stands the stately palace-front; its marble steps are covered with tapestry, the statues of its protective gods are crowned with flowers; while the lonely prophetess is shuddering at so fair a frontispiece to a tragedy within so frightful, now to be accomplished on her master and herself. Meantime the Chorus also wait, involved in their own anxiety; the mysterious anguish of the weird woman, whom they know to have the hand of God laid heavily upon her, makes them tremble. "What mean you," they exclaim, "by scenting like a dog for blood upon this royal threshold?" Cassandra only answers: "Are not these children wailing for their death enough? Is not their flesh, tasted by their father at their uncle's board, my witness?" She points to phantoms which the Chorus cannot see, the ghosts of the children of Thyestes. They reply sullenly, for they know the story of the house: "We want no soothsayers." Then Cassandra breaks forth afresh, this time vaticinating imminent calamity: "What is she plotting, what doom unbearable? and there is none to aid!" The Chorus take up their strain: "Here, indeed, you are a riddler; what you meant before was common talk." But Cassandra heeds them not. Her second-sight pierces the palace-walls, and she shrieks: "Mad woman, are you decking your husband for the bath? The end draws near. Hand stretches forth to hand. Is it a net of hell? Keep the ox from the heifer! she hath caught him in her robe and slays him. I tell you he is falling, falling in the trough of death." The Chorus are puzzled by these hurried and ecstatic exclamations; but their very fear seems to keep them from the apprehension of the truth. Then Cassandra changes her tone, and bewails her own misfortunes, her coming death, and the crime of Paris which brought her to this doom, employing throughout these prophecies a lyric metre suited to their pregnant brevity. At last, when she has wellnigh worn out the patience of the Chorus, she assumes the regular iambic of common speech: "Now, then, at length shall the oracle gaze upon you free from veils like a bride. The Furies are in this house; blood-surfeited, but not assuaged, they hold perpetual revel here. It is the crime of Atreus and of Thyestes which they hunt, and woe will fall on woe." The Chorus can only wonder that she, a foreign princess, should know the secrets of the fated race; but she tells them the story of Apollo's love, and how she deceived him, and what he wrought to punish her. Then, even as she speaks, the pang of inspiration thrills her. Perhaps the speech that follows, through its ghastly blending of visions evoked from the past with insight piercing into the immediate future, affects the imagination more intensely than any other piece of tragic declamation. Even the sleep-mutterings of Lady Macbeth, though they form a curious modern counterpart to the broken exclamations of Cassandra, are less appalling; for hers reveal a guilty conscience maddened by one crime, while Cassandra's outcry sums up the history of a whole accursed race, and expresses at the same time the agony of an innocent victim:
Woe, woe! Ah, ah! what pain!Again the dreadful pangs oracularShoot through me, tempesting my soul with preludes.See you those children seated on the house-roof?Babes are they, like unto the shapes of dreams;Yea, children seem they, slaughtered by their kin,Whose hands are filled with meat of their own flesh;Their very hearts and entrails, piteous load,I see them bear, whereof their father tasted!Wherefore I say, vengeance for this is plotting.A lion, thewless, amid pillows lapped,House-guard, alas! for my returning master—Mine: for I needs must bear the yoke, a slave.But he, the admiral, Ilion's overthrower,Knows not what things the tongue of that lewd bitchWith speeches and with long-drawn fawning fairness, likeA lurking Até, by ill-luck will do.Thus, then, she dares: she, woman, slays a man;Yea, slays. What loathsome reptile can I name her,Nor miss my mark?—foul amphisbæna, ScyllaThat dwells in rocks, the ship-borne seaman's bane,Raging mother of hell, a truceless strifeBelching on friend and kindred! How she shoutedWith daring swollen, as when the foemen scatter!Now of these things I care not if I gainNo credence. What? What will be, comes; and thouWilt stand and pity and call me too true prophet.
Woe, woe! Ah, ah! what pain!Again the dreadful pangs oracularShoot through me, tempesting my soul with preludes.See you those children seated on the house-roof?Babes are they, like unto the shapes of dreams;Yea, children seem they, slaughtered by their kin,Whose hands are filled with meat of their own flesh;Their very hearts and entrails, piteous load,I see them bear, whereof their father tasted!Wherefore I say, vengeance for this is plotting.A lion, thewless, amid pillows lapped,House-guard, alas! for my returning master—Mine: for I needs must bear the yoke, a slave.But he, the admiral, Ilion's overthrower,Knows not what things the tongue of that lewd bitchWith speeches and with long-drawn fawning fairness, likeA lurking Até, by ill-luck will do.Thus, then, she dares: she, woman, slays a man;Yea, slays. What loathsome reptile can I name her,Nor miss my mark?—foul amphisbæna, ScyllaThat dwells in rocks, the ship-borne seaman's bane,Raging mother of hell, a truceless strifeBelching on friend and kindred! How she shoutedWith daring swollen, as when the foemen scatter!Now of these things I care not if I gainNo credence. What? What will be, comes; and thouWilt stand and pity and call me too true prophet.
No translation can do justice to the appalling fury of the original, since it is only in Greek—a language usually sedate and harmonized by sense of beauty—that such phrases as θύουσαν Ἀΐδου μητέρ' have their full value. The Chorus are shaken from their incredulity, as much by the intensity of Cassandra's conviction as by the desperate calm of her last words. Is Agamemnon really to be slain? Yes, she answers, and, pray or not as you may choose, they there inside the house are slaying. Then once more the rage of divination seizes her, and the scene of her own death, like that of Agamemnon's, flames upon her soul. The second speech has more of pathos than the first, less of fury; but it is scarcely less awful:
Ah, ah! the fire! lo, how it comes upon me!Phœbus Lycæan, ho! Ah, woe is me!She, too, this two-foot lioness that couchesWith the wolf, what time the lion is away,Will slay me, slay me! Like a poison-brewerShe'll mix my death-wage with her broth of hell;Yea, and she swears, sharpening the knife to slay him,Her lord shall pay with blood for bringing me.Why wear I, then, these gauds to laugh me down—This rod, these necklace-wreaths oracular?You, ere my death, at least I will destroy:—Go; fall; away, and perish: I shall follow.Make rich some other curse of men than me.Lo, you! Apollo's self is stripping meOf this prophetic raiment—he who saw meEven in these robes jeered at mid friends by foemen,Who scorned in chorus with one voice of vain scorn.Yea, when I was called beggar, vagabond,Poor, wretched, starveling, speechless, I endured:Now he who made me prophetess, the prophet,Himself hath brought me to these straits of death.No altar of my fathers waits for me,But that red block where I must reeking wallow.Nay, but not unavenged of heaven we perish!For yet another in our cause shall come,Avenger, matricide, his father's champion:Though exiled, wandering from this land a stranger,He shall return to crown the curse of kindred:For gods in heaven have sworn a mighty oathThat the sire's prostrate corse shall bring him home.Why wait I, then, lamenting thus, an alien?—I, who beheld of old proud IlionFare as she fared, and they who dwelt thereinReceive such measure from the gods of judgment,I, too, will rise and dare, myself, to perish.Therefore I greet these gates as gates of Hades,Praying a full fair stroke may be my due,That thus with blood that gently flows to waste,Torn by no death-pangs, I these eyes may close.
Ah, ah! the fire! lo, how it comes upon me!Phœbus Lycæan, ho! Ah, woe is me!She, too, this two-foot lioness that couchesWith the wolf, what time the lion is away,Will slay me, slay me! Like a poison-brewerShe'll mix my death-wage with her broth of hell;Yea, and she swears, sharpening the knife to slay him,Her lord shall pay with blood for bringing me.Why wear I, then, these gauds to laugh me down—This rod, these necklace-wreaths oracular?You, ere my death, at least I will destroy:—Go; fall; away, and perish: I shall follow.Make rich some other curse of men than me.Lo, you! Apollo's self is stripping meOf this prophetic raiment—he who saw meEven in these robes jeered at mid friends by foemen,Who scorned in chorus with one voice of vain scorn.Yea, when I was called beggar, vagabond,Poor, wretched, starveling, speechless, I endured:Now he who made me prophetess, the prophet,Himself hath brought me to these straits of death.No altar of my fathers waits for me,But that red block where I must reeking wallow.Nay, but not unavenged of heaven we perish!For yet another in our cause shall come,Avenger, matricide, his father's champion:Though exiled, wandering from this land a stranger,He shall return to crown the curse of kindred:For gods in heaven have sworn a mighty oathThat the sire's prostrate corse shall bring him home.Why wait I, then, lamenting thus, an alien?—I, who beheld of old proud IlionFare as she fared, and they who dwelt thereinReceive such measure from the gods of judgment,I, too, will rise and dare, myself, to perish.Therefore I greet these gates as gates of Hades,Praying a full fair stroke may be my due,That thus with blood that gently flows to waste,Torn by no death-pangs, I these eyes may close.
The draught of prophecy is now drained to the very dregs. Nothing remains but for Cassandra to enter the palace-doors of Hades. She approaches them step by step, bewailing, after the fashion of Greek tragedy, her own woes, and those of Priam's family. Suddenly she starts. The scent of blood assails her nostrils, and, like a steer that shivers at the gory shambles, she draws back. The Chorus say, "It is only the smell of sacrifice upon the hearth." But the weird woman discovers a very different odor of coming slaughter: "To me the reek is like the breath of charnels." Still forward, though shrinking from the unseen, unavoidable doom, she must advance, invoking the avenger of herself and Agamemnon, and calling on the all-seeing sun. Her last words are uttered in the same spirit as Macbeth's soliloquy upon the point of battle; they intensify and elevate the tragic moment by drawing the whole destiny of mortals into harmony with her own doom: