Reginald Copleston

“ Living thus with no anxieties; surrounded by the constant presence of deities who showed themselves to him through every form of natural beauty; reared on sunny hills amid the olive and the vine, and looking out always on bright bays and islands of the eastern sea; trained in every exercise of health; beautiful in face and person as the gods he believed in,—every Greek was in his measure an Apollo, always young in spirit, and cheerful and strong. ”

“ In the oldest of all poems, it may be, in the Book of Job, the same great spectacle of heroic endurance is set before us, and there too the hero represents humanity. Prometheus, after his long suffering, is restored to happiness; humanity suffers and is restored in his person. So it is, in a much higher sense, with Job. Not only in his physical sufferings and restoration, but in the deeper agony of the moral problem which overpowers him, and the higher elevation of the future to which he looks. Job represents all mankind. In him are answered the angry questions which Shelley and Byron ask. ”

“ They are as indignant as Prometheus is at the tyranny of the new rulers of heaven, and, with the enthusiasm of their sex, are even more open in expressing their indignation; and when Prometheus feels as the bitterest pang the exultation which he knows his sufferings cause to the other gods, and cries that to be buried in the depths of Tartarus, out of sight, though bound in darkness for ever, would be better than their mockery, the Chorus scarcely can believe, they say, that any god but the relentless Zeus could rejoice at such a sight. ”

“ And ten years afterward there came a day, less critical, indeed, but even more splendid, when "ships by thousands lay" off Salamis, and the Athenians led the Greeks to the fullest victory. The Athenians then had sacrificed their homes and the temples of their gods to fight for fellow-countrymen who were ungrateful and remiss; the virtue of one Athenian and the genius of another had made the victory possible; and on this proudest day that Athens ever saw the brother of Æschylus was named as having borne himself the best, and the poet himself was doubtless not far behind. ”

“ If the city is taken, it will be because the gods have left it, as the king said earlier in the play. "The gods, 'tis said, desert a conquered town." Then they must go forth—these gods who have dwelt so long in Thebes, and gotten their shrines and favourite haunts there—they must go out to seek some other resting-place, some vacant spot unoccupied by deities, desolate, and cherished by no devoted worshippers. Gods, like men, have homes which they get to love; they cling to the people who have been kind to them, and feel uneasy in a strange abode. ”

“ He, like all the Greeks of his day, was hardy and warlike always; more warlike than most, almost fierce perhaps he was; and though he could turn to elegant pursuits,—though he was a courtier and a poet as well as a soldier,—yet this was not to be noticed in him as an exceptional combination. For an Athenian was expected to be a man of many powers, and not, because he excelled in one thing, therefore to fail in every other: rather, to be excellent was with them to excel in all things to which a free and cultivated man might turn his hand. ”

“ The Chorus bids her accompany the offerings with good wishes for the righteous—for herself, that is, and all who hate Ægisthus—and for Orestes her exiled brother, and pray that on the guilty some god or mortal may come in vengeance. All this is dimly and gradually suggested, and then Electra prays. In perfect beauty she stands before us, sorrow mingled with righteous anger, and prays to the gods below and mother Earth, and to her father's spirit, that they may pity her slavish lot and bring home Orestes from his exile, and that her father's murderess may be justly slain. ”

“ Not only is Xerxes greater in his fall than even Miltiades in his triumph,—as a despot, if great at all, is greater than one leader among many can be in a free people,—but the familiar event is set in a new light, as a Persian calamity instead of a Greek success, and in a light even more flattering to the national pride of Athens.
We have spoken at length on this point, lest it should be thought that Æschylus makes Xerxes his hero simply because tragedy requires a calamity. A sad ending is not essential to tragedy; greatness and "removedness" are. ”

“ And still the burden is repeated. Wealth brings a misery that never dies, but breeds a brood of evils ever growing. Beneath the quiet cottage-roof dwells Justice, and "decent life flows peaceful on;" but over the gilded palace is spread the funeral pall of Atè.
Agamemnon enters.
Earthly greatness and triumph are at their height, as the chief returns, with chariots and retinue, to his palace. The Chorus welcome him as he deserves:—
"Hail, king of Atreus' race renowned,
Who Troy hast levelled with the ground! ”

“ Those clouds of arrows only kept the sun from the eyes of the Greeks, while the "slow and cumbrous lance" was active enough to scatter all those "unnumbered hosts of heroes." Still intenser is the irony in the stanzas that follow—"What mortal," they sing, "can withstand misfortune and the vengeance of the sky? Flattering at first, she falls with crushing power upon her victim: and so"—mark here the irony—"shall Persia fall upon her foes." But there is ground for fear too. While all are away in Greece, any invader might find in Persia an easy prey. ”

“ We, to whom a theatre means something so utterly different, can hardly fancy the enthusiasm with which the Athenian citizen, on the great religious day, went into the assembly of his countrymen to see the land's most gifted sons, in grand words decked out with every aid of art and dance and music, rival one another in celebrating the great deeds of gods and kings and heroes, the founders and patrons of the Grecian race. Let us endeavour as far as we may to realise the scene.
At the time of such a festival Athens was crowded. ”

“ Such was the fate of Xerxes. Checked at Thermopylæ, routed at Salamis, driven home in confusion to his own shores, followed thither by losses and defeat, the Great King became a spectacle to all men of the vanity of greatness when it is not guarded by moderation. Now for five years at least the Persian power has lain prostrate at the feet of Greece, and men have had time to learn the lesson which her misfortunes teach.
Such are perhaps the reflections which pass through the Athenian's mind when he hears it announced that the next play is to be "The Persians." ”

“ And still the murderess "keeps her fixed unaltered mood."
This is in the true spirit of Athenian tragedy. Lady Macbeth, before her crime, is a very Clytemnestra; she welcomes Duncan with the same exaggerated courtesy, and is as resolute in her purpose; but afterwards she trembles and turns pale. Shakespeare is painting human nature, weak and fickle even in the strongest; Æschylus is showing us the wrath of gods, which is simple, direct, and unrepenting.
At length, in the end of the play, Ægisthus himself appears, and he exhibits the character of a violent and cowardly tyrant. ”

“ The inquirer is baffled at every turn, and from that very brightness of his outward life which makes him love light and seek it, he is only led the more to find in the inner meaning of things darkness and mystery, to think the dealings of heaven inscrutable, and to believe in dreadful deities of dim and unknown, even of cruel, powers. So while on the one hand the Greek believed in gods of daylight, as it were, clad with sunny youth like Apollo, or fair like Venus, or wise and kind like Minerva ”

“ The sound of their breathing, the loathsome aspect of their faces, and the filthiness of their dress, all combine to make their very presence a pollution to a temple, or even to the roofs of men. As soon as the terrified priestess has described all this, the scene opens and we see it for ourselves. In the inner sanctuary of the temple is Orestes sitting on the Omphalos, and by him stands Apollo; while behind them, in a semicircle, the Furies are asleep, and quite in the background stands Mercury or Hermes, the escorter of the dead. ”

“ And Æschylus, as a leader in the development of the artistic spirit, could not but be rightly indignant at the arrogance of newly-gotten wealth. To him, as to all true Greeks, such arrogance was a sin against the gods. A man exulting in his great prosperity, and presuming on it, was a sight at which the gods were angry: they would impel such a man to violent deeds, and make his pride the instrument of his destruction. The moderate wealth and well-founded dignity of an ancient family had all charms for Æschylus ”

“ The veil is drawn aside which hides the dark forms of Erinnys and Atè from men's eyes as they scowl upon the sinner and dog his steps; as they stir up the powers that punish, or in their anger rear the fell brood of arrogance and impiety in their victim's home. And we are admitted, too, to see the conflict between the bright gods of day and the powers of darkness; we are taught why men suffer, and how they may be healed. In the inner moral significance of the plot, then, we must look for the chief element of greatness. ”

“ Hence a dark cloud hung over history: it was but the gloomy record of men raised to success and wealth, then waxing insolent and forgetting to give the gods their due, then by the angry gods abandoned to a reprobate hardihood, in which they began a course of crime whose consequences clung to them and their descendants, till some one holier than the rest, by a long course of expiation, should win the pardon of heaven, and free his family from the curse. Over each step of this dismal round a deity presided. ”

“ With the entrance of these fifty Danaids the play begins. Slowly they march, with audible tramp, to the sound of their own chanting, appealing as they go to Zeus, the god of suppliants, for the protection which he especially owes them as the founder of their race. They describe in few words the causes of their flight, and pray that their pursuers may be overwhelmed in the sea, and never reach the shores of Argos. ”

“ All that has passed—the yielding of Vulcan, the caution of Oceanus, the misery of Io—has contributed to increase in our minds the estimate of the irresistible power of Zeus, and so prepare us to admire the more the heroic resistance of Prometheus. A stronger trial of his determination is still to come. In tremendous words he foretells the certain fall of Zeus; he defies his thunders, and thinks rather how a stronger weapon than the thunder will some day be found ”

“ But the priestess rushes forth again in an agony of terror. She has seen a portentous sight, for at the Omphalos itself a man is sitting in suppliant guise;
⁠"His hands still dripping gore,
His sword new-drawn, his lofty olive-branch
With ample fillets piously enwreathed,
White bands of wool;"
and behind him is a wondrous company of women sleeping—or rather, women they cannot be called, for no gorgons nor harpies are so hideous. ”

“ From them will spring Hercules, whose arrows will slay the eagle which devours Prometheus, and set him free. So much and no more he will tell.
Immediately his prophecies about lo begin to accomplish themselves. The frenzy which the gadfly's bite inspires seizes on her afresh, and in a wild agony she rushes forth to renew her wanderings through the earth. The music of the Chorus is now heard again, and dancing slowly and sadly round the altar, they chant their reflections on the fate of Io; deprecating for themselves any ill-matched love, such as Io received from Zeus ”

“ And now the conspirators are come, Orestes and Pylades, with attendants. Orestes walks straight up to the great palace-gates, and knocks repeatedly. A servant at length, appears, and goes into the house to fetch some one to hear the stranger's application. Orestes had said,—
"Let one in trust, a woman bearing rule,
Come forth; yet more decorous were a man.
For when by bashfulness the tongue is swayed
Darkened is speech;—boldly man speaks to man,
And tells his message forth without reserve."
It is a woman who comes out to answer, and no less a woman than Clytemnestra. ”

“ It is possible, perhaps, that men should go through life, as some savages indeed probably do, without any attempt at explanation of the events that occur to them, regarding each as a separate fact, and not comparing them together. This, however, is only possible where there is not only no history, but not even any continuous memory of the past; and a nation like the Athenian, which had enjoyed for centuries a noble literature, could not be in any such case as this. To them the freewill of man and his responsibility, and such questions as these, had long been suggesting themselves. ”