Page:The Dramas of Aeschylus (Swanwick).djvu/46

xxxvi expression also in the name of the latter Sun-god, Apollo, which, in the ancient Doric Æolian form, was not, the Destroyer, but , the Averter. It is under his darker aspect "as the Minister of Vengeance, and the Chastiser of Arrogance," that he appears for the most part in the poetry of Homer. "His punishments are pestilence and death;""Achilles, to whom he is particularly hostile, calls him the most pernicious of all the gods."

While the Homeric Apollo, in his relation with mortals, appears thus in the light of a malevolent and destroying power, among the Olympians he is introduced in association with the Muses, as the god of Music, charming the assembled deities with his harp (i. 603). The notion that the stars and the other heavenly bodies accomplished their revolutions to the sound of music is expressed in the ancient poetry of India, and also in that of the Persians. As the rhythm of the cosmical movements depended upon the solar luminary, the great orderer of times and seasons, it is not surprising that from the most remote antiquity the Sun god was represented as playing on the cithara; in this character he is portrayed on the oldest Archaic vases, encircled by the dancing hours.

Although in the Oresteia Apollo is introduced incidentally as a destroying and avenging deity, as in the passage already quoted in the 1st Chorus of the Agamemnon, and also where he is invoked by Cassandra