Page:Four Plays of Aeschylus (1908) Morshead.djvu/24

xvi had survived to us, we might conceivably have found and realized another and less intolerable solution. The name Zeus, in Greek, like that of God, in English, comprises very diverse views of divine personality. The Zeus in the Prometheus has little but the name in common with the Zeus in the first chorus of the Agamemnon, or in The Suppliant Maidens (ll. 86–103): and parallel reflections will give us much food for thought. But, in any case, let us realize that the Prometheus is not a human play: with the possible exception of Io, every character in it is an immortal being. It is not as a vaunt, but as a fact, that Prometheus declares, as against Zeus (l. 1053), that "Me at least He shall never give to death."

A stupendous theological drama of which two-thirds has been lost has left an aching void, which now can never be filled, in our minds. No reader of poetry needs to be reminded of the glorious attempt of Shelley to work out a possible and worthy sequel to the Prometheus. Who will not echo the words of Mr. Gilbert Murray, when he says that "no piece of lost literature has been more ardently longed for than the Prometheus Freed"?

But, at the end of a rather prolonged attempt to understand and translate the surviving tragedies of Aeschylus, one feels inclined to repeat the words used by a powerful critic about one of the greatest of modern poets—"For man, it is a weary way to God, but a wearier far to any demigod." We shall not