Page:The Dramas of Aeschylus (Swanwick).djvu/40

xxx to enter his protest against the unworthy conception of the Epic bard. This hypothesis seems the more plausible when we consider that the age of Æschylus immediately succeeded that of Pisistratus, who had given his sanction to the enactments of Solon, "by which the Iliad was raised into a liturgy, periodically rehearsed by law at the greatest of the Athenian festivals;""exhibiting for the first and last time in the history of the world the preservation of a poet's compositions made an object of permanent public policy."

Accordingly, in the opening chorus of the Agamemnon, Zeus is represented as conducting in person the grand judicial retribution which, in consequence of the crime of Paris, involves Ilium in ruin. In the second chorus this providential action of Zeus is brought out with even stronger emphasis; he is there represented as having with prescient might foreordained the blow which fell at length in accomplishment of his decree. The mighty net of Divine retribution is cast over the devoted city, and the character of Zeus is vindicated as the righteous governor of men. So again in the third chorus, it is Zeus, protector of the guest, who sends Helen, a fury fraught with destruction, to avenge on the sons of Priam the violated rights of hospitality; and whereas, in the Iliad, there is division in heaven, the deities, swayed by motives purely personal, and often of the lowest character (xxiv. 30; iv. 48), take part in the quarrel, and appear arrayed against one another in the hostile ranks;—in the Oresteia, on the contrary, they are represented as leagued with Zeus in carrying out the great ends of justice. Thus, when