Page:The Dramas of Aeschylus (Swanwick).djvu/465



trilogy to which this drama belonged, like that of which "The Seven against Thebes" formed the concluding member, was founded upon an ancient epic, by an unknown author. Of this poem little is known, except that it contained five thousand five hundred verses, and bore the title of "The Danaides."

The story which it embodied appealed powerfully to that passion for legendary genealogies which formed such a striking feature of the Grecian character. Alleged descent from a common ancestor was the bond of union between the members of every Grecian community, great or small; and as this legendary personage was usually of divine or semi-divine origin, even the humblest citizen thus felt himself brought into more or less direct filiation with the gods. The divine element thus, according to the popular conception, incarnated in humanity, culminated in the great national hero, Herakles, "the most renowned and ubiquitous of all the semi-divine personages worshipped by the Hellenes"—the only mortal who, from a life of toil and suffering on earth, was admitted to the godhead, and received into the society of Olympos. His