Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/245

Rh Prometheus does. He had deliberately helped him against the old blind forces, Kronos and the Titans; but he means, so to speak, to wring a constitution out of him, and so save mankind. But it needs another Æschylus to loose that knot in a way worthy of the first. We have some external facts about the second play. It opened when Prometheus came back to the light after thirty thousand years; the chorus was of Titans. The last play, the Fire-Carrier,* seems to have explained the institution of the Festival of Prometheus at Athens. Such 'origins' formed a common motive for drama.

The Oresteia represents the highest achievement of Æschylus, and probably of all Greek drama. It has all the splendour of language and the lyrical magic of the early plays, the old, almost superhuman grandeur of outline, while it is as sharp and deep in character-drawing, as keenly dramatic, as the finest work of Sophocles. The Cassandra scene in the Agamemnon, where the doomed prophetess, whom none may believe, sees the vision of her own death and the king's, awaiting her in the palace, is simply appalling on the stage, while in private study many a scholar will testify to its eternal freshness. The first play deals with the murder of Agamemnon on his triumphant return from Troy by a wife deeply sinned against and deeply sinning. The Choëphoroi ('Libation-Bearers') gives the retribution. Orestes, a child at the time of his father's death, has grown up in exile; he returns secretly to execute the blood-feud on Ægisthus, and, by special command of Apollo, to slay also his mother.

The Choëphoroi is in some ways the most complex of the dramas of Æschylus. There is a recognition scene (see p. 259), impossible in detail, but grand and