Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/353

331 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 331 excited and stirred up by the actions and destiny of the individual cha- racters in this middle piece, produce rather a distressing than a pleas- ing 1 effect; but under the guidance of sublime and significant images they take such a course of developement, that an elevated yet softened tone is shed over them, and all is resolved into a feeling of awe and devotion for the decrees of a higher power. § 11. The poetical career of iEschylus concludes for us, as for the ancient Athenians, with the only complete trilogy that is extant, the possession of which, after the Iliad and Odyssey, might be considered the richest treasure of Greek poetry, if it had been better preserved, and had come down to us without the gaps and interpolations by which it is defaced. iEschylus brought this trilogy upon the stage at a moment of great political excitement in his native city, Olymp. 80. 2. b. c. 458; at the time when the democratic party, under the guidance of Pericles, were endeavouring to overthrow the Areopagus, the last of those aris- tocratic institutions which tended to restrain the innovating spirit of the people in public and private life. He was impelled to make the legend of Orestes the groundwork of a trilogic composition, of which, as we have still the whole before us, we will give only the principal points. Agamemnon comes on the stage in the tragedy which bears his name, in one scene only, when he is received by his wife Clytaemnestra as a conquering hero, and, after some hesitation, walks over the outspread purple carpets into the interior of his palace. He is, however, the chief person of the piece, for all through it the actors and chorus are almost exclusively occupied with his character and destiny. iEschylus represents him as a great and glorious monarch, but who, by his enterprise against Troy, has sacrificed to his warlike ambition the lives of many men,* and, above all, that of his own daughter Iphi- genia ;t and he has thus involved in a gloomy destiny his house, which is already suffering from wounds inflicted long before his time. Cly- taemnestra, on the other hand, is a wife, who, while she pursues her impulses and pleasures with unscrupulous resolution, has power and cunning enough to carry her evil designs into full effect. Agamemnon is completely enveloped in her subtle schemes, even before she throws the traitorous garment over him like a net; and after the deed is done, she has the skill, in her conversation with the chorus, to throw ovei it a cloak of that sophistry of the passions, which iEschylus so well knew how to paint, by enumerating all the reasons she might have had for it, had the real ground not been sufficient. been the cause of death to many men" {ran toXuktoviuv yag ovk aaxovrot (*<«/.) f The chorus does not hesitate to censure this sacrifice, (especially in v. '217,) and considers it as actually completed, so does Clytsemnestra, v. 1555; though /Eschy- lus does not mean hy this to set aside the story of Iphigenia's deliverance. Accord nig to his view of the case the saerificers themselves must have been blinded by Artemis.
 * " For the gods,'' says the chorus, (v. 461.) " never lose sight of those who have