Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/467

 of Homer ,"we cannot tell; but the saying has point when it is interpreted by his way of treating his subject-matter.

Take, for instance, the story of Agamemnon. The conqueror of Troy dies at home by the hand of his wife; his son, a young boy at the time, grows up in exile; returns in early manhood; slays the murderess, his mother; is pursued by the Furies; is tried at Athens, and is acquitted. We are not concerned now with any details in which Aeschylus departed from the epic version; we have only to observe that, from an epic point of view, this story is a single whole; the poet who tells how Agamemnon was killed would naturally go on to tell how Orestes avenged him, and what happened to Orestes afterwards. And this epic point of view was that from which Aeschylus approached dramatic composition. But it is manifest that the whole story could not be effectively treated in a single tragedy. Therefore he treated it in three tragedies, forming three successive chapters of the story: the Agamemnon, with the murder; the Choephoroe, with the revenge; and the Eumenides, with the acquittal. The fact that this trilogy was known as the Oresteia (a name certainly not restricted to the last two plays) illustrates the fact that, in a trilogy where the plays were thus connected, the second play regularly marked the tragic climax. It has been much discussed whether the plays of an Aeschylean