Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/253

TREASURE TOMBS AT MYKENÆ upon whom was wrought this murder, "most foul, strange, and unnatural." In Homer, ambition, guilty love, and jealousy, are the combined motives of the deed. But, to satisfy the wider scope of the dramatists, new forces had to be introduced. The sun is not extinguished by a convulsion that might blot out a star. Nothing but the hand of Destiny, and the implacable Erinnyes, can destroy an Agamemnon. Hence, Æschylos compelled the tragedy of the Atreidæ to date back from the unnatural crime of Atreus himself, who proffered his brother Thyestes the flesh of that brother's son, and who was slain by Thyestes in atonement. The Gods were not forgetful, although permitting Agamemnon to rule in splendor over Argos, and Menelaös to rule over Sparta. Menelaös loses Helena, and the King of Men, at the height of his renown, is murdered by his spouse and her paramour. Here Æschylos also adds, as a human element, the indignation of Klytæmnestra at the death of her daughter, Iphigeneia, decoyed by the King to Aulis under pretense of her marriage to Achilles, and there sacrificed to appease the goddess Artemis. To the king's death succeeds the punishment of the traitorous lovers, who die by the hand of Orestes. The parricide, in turn, is pursued by the Furies, who are appeased only through the intervention of Athena and the Athenians. Finally, the woes and wanderings of Elektra, the sister of Orestes, supply another theme, by turns forceful and tender, to the three tragedians and their differing dramatic modes.

If, among the seven plays of Æschylos remaining [239]