Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/128

 development of any myth, research almost always finds in Stesichorus the main bridge between the earliest remains of the story and the form it has in tragedy or in the late epos. In the Agamemnon legend, for instance, the concentration of the interest upon Clytaemnestra, which makes the story a true tragedy instead of an ordinary tale of blood-feud, is his; Clytaemnestra's dream of giving suck to a serpent is his; the conscience-mad Orestes is probably his; so are many of the details of the sack of Troy, among them, if the tradition is right, the flight of Aeneas to Italy.

This is enough to show that Stesichorus was a creative genius of a very high order-though, of course, none of these stories is absolutely his own invention. Confessed fiction was not possible till long after Stesichorus. To the men of his day all legend was true history; if it was not, what would be the good of talking about it? The originality lies, partly, in the boldness of faith with which this antique spirit examines his myths, criticising and freely altering details, but never suspecting for an instant that the whole myth is an invention, and that he himself is inventing it. It is the same with Pindar. Pindar cannot and will not believe that Tantalus offered his son to the gods as food, and that Demeter ate part of his shoulder. Therefore, he argues, not that the whole thing is a fable, nor yet that it is beyond our knowledge; agnosticism would never satisfy him: he argues that Poseidon must have carried off Pelops to heaven to be his cup-bearer, and that during his absence some 'envious neighbour' invented the cannibal-story. This is just the spirit of the Palinodia.

But, apart from this, even where Stesichorus did not alter his saga-material, he shows the originality of genius