Page:The Dramas of Aeschylus (Swanwick).djvu/469

Rh Æschylean drama. The remark of Grote with reference to this feature of Grecian tragedy will be perused with interest: "The tragedian," he says, "not only appeals more powerfully to the ethical sentiments than poetry had ever done before, but also, by raising these grave and touching questions, addresses a stimulus and challenge to the intellect, spurring it on to ethical speculation."

From the Hellenic point of view, Hypermnestra was regarded as a criminal, while the bloody deed of her sisters was extolled as an act of heroism, enjoined not only by their father, but by the gods themselves.

The suitors, moreover, are represented from the first as in the highest degree insolent and overbearing: barbarians, they had dared to invade the sacred soil of Hellas, and the vengeance which had overtaken them would ally itself in the popular imagination with the destruction of the Oriental hosts which had so recently crowned the grand contemporary conflict between Persia and Hellas. This feeling would be heightened by the war between Egypt and Athens, which began B.C. 462.

The trial of Hypermnestra most probably formed the principal subject of "The Danaides," the concluding member of the trilogy. From a fragment of the prologue which has been preserved, we learn that the drama opened with the hymn with which it was customary to awaken the newly-married pair: