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In the Electra this element is practically ignored. Electra has no qualms; Orestes shows no signs of madness; the climax is formed not by the culminating horror, the matricide, but by the hardest bit of work, the slaying of Aegisthos! Aeschylus has kept Electra and Clytemnestra apart; here we see them freely in the hard unloveliness of their daily wrangles.
In the Eumenides of Aeschylus, the plea of Orestes in extenuation of his crime is that he is not of kin to his mother. Euripides, also, puts into the mouth of Apollo the same physiological notion, that she who bears the child is only its nurse.
Crown 8vo. Finely printed and bound in blue buckram. CICERO De Oratore I. Translated by E.N.P. MOOR, M.A., Assistant Master at Clifton. 3s. 6d. AESCHYLUS Agamemnon, Chöephoroe, Eumenides. Translated by LEWIS CAMPBELL, LL.D., late Professor of Greek at St. Andrews. 5s. Translated by S.T. IRWIN, M.A., Assistant Master at Clifton; late Scholar of Exeter College, Oxford. 3s. 6d.
Thus too Aeschylus preludes the bloody slaughter of Salamis with the white horses of the dawn, the echoes in the cliffs, the foam whitening beneath the oars, and when he speaks of the island where the Persians are butchered, does not forget the dances in which Pan rejoiced there of old. Thus, again, one of the most tragic moments in the Hippolytus is followed by the song,
Our greatness is of the past. "Look at the statues in the theatre! AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides surrounded by what a horde of little moderns! Menander standing cheek by jowl with a poetaster! The Emperors have dallied with us, wanting the gifts we bear to the Empire. The Roman Republic saw to it that we should bring no new gifts.
The patriotic and liberty-breathing Aeschylus has recourse to a judicial, and the pious Sophocles to a religious, procedure; even the consecration of Oedipus in death.
"This, however, is a digression; the question before us is whether Aristophanes really liked AEschylus or only pretended to do so.
At this period, accordingly, it was natural that the literature of Greece should be tinctured with the Oriental style. And that style, we think, is discernible in the works of Pindar and Aeschylus. The latter often reminds us of the Hebrew writers. Considered as plays, his works are absurd; considered as choruses they are above all praise.
The play contains the first indication of a sceptical spirit which was soon to alter the whole character of the Drama. The running sore of polytheism is clear. In worshipping one deity a man may easily offend another, Aeschylus made this conflict of duties the cause of Agamemnon's death, but accepted it as a dogma not to be questioned.
They made use of divers remedies, according to art, to give him ease; but all would not do; the distemper prevailed over the remedies; insomuch that the famous Wide-nostrils died that morning of so strange a death that I think you ought no longer to wonder at that of the poet Aeschylus.
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