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Had Jesus Christ or Socrates dwelt in Agamemnon's palace among the Atrides, then had there been no Oresteia; nor would Oedipus ever have dreamed of destroying his sight if they had been tranquilly seated on the threshold of Jocasta's abode.
Somewhat the same lesson as that of the Oresteia is taught later, with more of sweetness and harmony, but not with more force, in the Oedipus Coloneus of Sophokles. And in Pindar we see the same tendencies inchoate. Like Aeschylus he does by implication subordinate to morality both politics and religion.
Droysen's eloquent commentaries in particular helped to bring before my imagination the intoxicating effect of the production of an Athenian tragedy, so that I could see the Oresteia with my mind's eye, as though it were actually being performed, and its effect upon me was indescribable.
Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido what modern poem presents personages as interesting, even to us moderns, as these personages of an "exhausted past"? We have the domestic epic dealing with the details of modern life, which pass daily under our eyes; we have poems representing modern personages in contact with the problems of modern life, moral, intellectual, and social; these works have been produced by poets the most distinguished of their nation and time; yet I fearlessly assert that Hermann and Dorothea, Childe Harold, Jocelyn, the Excursion, leave the reader cold in comparison with the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the Oresteia, or by the episode of Dido.
In assailing it, he justified his constant recourse to Antiquity for subject and method; he exalted Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, and Dido as eternally interesting; he asserted that the most famous poems of the nineteenth century "left the reader cold in comparison with the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the Oresteia, or by the episode of Dido."
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