Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 4, 2025
Hear Thyestes: My impious brother fain would have me eat My children, and thus serves them up for meat. To what length now will not anger go? even as far as madness. Therefore we say, properly enough, that angry men have given up their power, that is, they are out of the power of advice, reason, and understanding; for these ought to have power over the whole mind.
But these alone cannot account for his bringing forward so decidedly the Euripidean element in Euripides; for his neglecting the choruses still more than did his original; for his laying still stronger emphasis on sensuous effect than the Greek; nor for his taking up pieces like the -Thyestes- and the -Telephus- so well known from the immortal ridicule of Aristophanes, with their princes' woes and woful princes, and even such a piece as Menalippa the Female Philosopher, in which the whole plot turns on the absurdity of the national religion, and the tendency to make war on it from the physicist point of view is at once apparent.
They tell of this Aesop, that while representing in the theatre Atreus deliberating the revenge of Thyestes, he was so transported beyond himself in the heat of action, that he struck with his sceptre one of the servants, who was running across the stage, so violently, that he laid him dead upon the place.
Our author translated this play when he was at Oxford; it is wrote in the same manner of verse as the other, only the chorus is written in alternate rhime. The translator has added a scene at the end of the fifth act, spoken by Thyestes alone; in which he bewails his misery, and implores Heaven's vengeance on Atreus. These plays are printed in a black letter in 4to. 1581.
"They took, likewise, some of our slaves, for the governor had ordered that they should be all summoned to attend in public; and they, fearing the torments they saw the saints undergo, and instigated by the soldiers, accused us falsely of odious deeds, such as the banquet of Thyestes, the incest of Oedipus, and other crimes which must not be named or even thought of, and which we cannot bring ourselves to believe that men were ever guilty of.
In the background of all we fancy a hideous Eidolon, from whose side even the damned recoil in loathing. There is a grin on the lips yet red and wet with the traces of the unholy banquet. Thyestes exalts over the fulfillment of another chapter in the inevitable curse. Who has not grown savage over that scene?
There remains, then, the intermediate kind of personage, a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgement, of the number of those in the enjoyment of great reputation and prosperity; e.g. Oedipus, Thyestes, and the men of note of similar families. Fact also confirms our theory.
Of these signs some are congenital, like the 'lance-head which the Earth-born have on them', or 'stars', such as Carcinus brings in in his Thyestes; others acquired after birth these latter being either marks on the body, e.g. scars, or external tokens, like necklaces, or to take another sort of instance, the ark in the Discovery in Tyro.
Of the two sons of the next generation, Thyestes seduced the wife of his brother Atreus; and Atreus in return killed the sons of Thyestes, and made the father unwittingly eat the flesh of the murdered boys. Agamemnon, son of Atreus, to propitiate Artemis, sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia, and in revenge was murdered by Clytemnestra his wife.
It was rage that destroyed Thyestes with horrible perdition; and has been the final cause that lofty cities have been entirely demolished, and that an insolent army has driven the hostile plowshare over their walls. Compose your mind. An ardor of soul attacked me also in blooming youth, and drove me in a rage to the writing of swift-footed iambics.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking