Page:The Dramas of Aeschylus (Swanwick).djvu/334

264 never be violated with impunity: with sleepless vigilance the dread avenger follows on the track of crime: for a season, perhaps, no muttering is heard of the coming storm; but not the less inevitably does punishment eventually overtake the wrongdoer, or his posterity. Associated with this inexorable law of retribution, the poet, in the Theban tragedy, exhibits the working of those mysterious tendencies to moral evil which, like hereditary disease, not unfrequently accompany the fatal heritage of crime, and which, if not counteracted by the force of personal will, issue in the final destruction of the sin-polluted race. A brief outline of the hoary legend, the main features of which would doubtless be embodied in the first two members of the trilogy, the Laios and the Œdipus, is essential for the due appreciation of the concluding drama.

The crime of Laios may be regarded as the fatal seed-corn from which he and his descendants reaped a tear-fraught harvest. This is indicated in the choral ode of "The Seven against Thebes" (v. 737), which it has been truly said strikes the key-note of the drama. Received as a guest into the house of Pelops, he, according to the legend, carried off Chrysippus, the son of his host, whose curse against the ravisher is subsequently confirmed by Apollo, who thrice warns him from his sacred shrine to save the State by dying childless. Heedless of the divine monition, he, in an