Page:Four Plays of Aeschylus (1908) Morshead.djvu/15

Rh speak conjecturally. There is a passage in the Prometheus Bound (ll. 860–69), in which we learn that the maidens were somehow reclaimed by the suitors, and that all, except one, slew their bridegrooms on the wedding night. There is a faint trace, among the Fragments of Aeschylus, of a play called Thalamopoioi,—i.e. The Preparers of the Chamber,—which may well have referred to this tragic scene. Its grim title will recall to all classical readers the magnificent, though terrible, version of the legend, in the final stanzas of the eleventh poem in the third book of Horace's Odes. The final play was probably called The Danaides, and described the acquittal of the brides through some intervention of Aphrodite: a fragment of it survives, in which the goddess appears to be pleading her special prerogative. The legends which commit the daughters of Danaus to an eternal penalty in Hades are, apparently, of later origin. Homer is silent on any such penalty; and Pindar, Aeschylus' contemporary, actually describes the once suppliant maidens as honourably enthroned (Pyth. ix. 112; Nem. x. ll. 1–10). The Tartarean part of the story is, in fact, post-Aeschylean.

The Suppliant Maidens is is full of charm, though the text of the part which describes the arrival of the pursuers at Argos is full of uncertainties. It remains a fine, though archaic, poem, with this special claim on our interest, that it is, probably, the earliest extant poetic drama. We see in it the tendency to grandiose language, not yet fully developed as in the Prometheus: