Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/251

Rh This chain of thought leads inevitably to the question, What is the end of the wrong eternally avenged and regenerated? There may of course be no end but the extinction of the race, as in the Theban Trilogy; but there may come a point where at last Law or Justice can come in and pronounce a final and satisfying word. Reconciliation is the end of the Oresteia, the Prometheia, the Danaid Trilogy. And here, too, we get a reflection of the age in which Æschylus lived, the assertion over lawless places of Athenian civilisation and justice.

In looking over the plays and fragments as a whole, one notices various marks both of the age and of the individual. It is characteristic of both that Æschylus wrote satyr-plays so much, and, it would seem, so well. These Titanic minds—ÆEschylus and Heraclîtus among Greeks, Victor Hugo and Ibsen and Carlyle among ourselves—are apt to be self-pleasing and weird in their humour. One of the really elemental jokes of Æschylus is in the Prometheus Firekindler,* a satyr-play, where fire is first brought into the world, and the wild satyrs go mad with love for its beauty, and burn their beards in kissing it! The thing is made more commonplace, though of course more comic, in the Sophoclean satyr-play Helen's Marriage,* where they go similarly mad about Helen. A definite mark of the age is the large number of dramas that take their names from the chorus, which was still the chief part of the play—Bassaræ,* Edôni,* Danaides,* &c. Another is the poet's fondness for geographical disquisitions. Herodotus had not yet written, and we know what a land of wonder the farther parts of the world still were in his time. To the Athens of Æschylus the geographical interest was partly of this imaginative sort; in part it came from the impulse given