Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/250

226 against which human nature battles; and the overthrow of the Great King was the one thought that was in every Greek mind at the time. Thus the peril of human 'Hubris' and the 'jealousy of God'—i.e. the fact that man's will aims further than his power can reach—is one rather conspicuous principle in Æschylus.

Another is a conviction of the inevitableness of things; not fatalism, nor any approach to it, in the vulgar sense, but a reflection that is borne in on most people in considering any grave calamity, that it is the natural consequence of many things that have happened before. The crimes in Æschylus are hereditary in two senses. In the great saga-houses of Thebes and Mycenæ there was actually what we should call a taint of criminal madness—it is brought out most explicitly in Euripides's Electra. Orestes was the son of a murderess and a man who had dealt much in blood. His ancestors had been proud and turbulent chieftains, whose passions led them easily into crime. But the crime is hereditary in itself also. The one wild blow brings and always has brought the blow back, "the ancient blinded vengeance and the wrong that amendeth wrong." This, most people will admit, is a plain fact; of course the poet puts it in a mystical or symbolical form. The old blood remains fresh on the ground, crying for other blood to blot it out. The deed of wrong begets children in its own likeness. The first sin produces an 'Arâ,' a Curse-Spirit, which broods over the scene of the wrong, or over the heart and perhaps the race of the sinner. How far this is metaphor, how far actual belief, is a problem that we cannot at present answer.