Page:The Dramas of Aeschylus (Swanwick).djvu/67

Rh a minute description is given by Pausanias, and which have been admirably restored by Fr. and Joh. Riepenhausen. The first picture exhibits the capture of Ilion, the desecration of her sanctuaries, and brings before the mental eye the outrage committed against Athena in the person of Cassandra, thus setting forth the origin of the disasters which befell the returning armament of the Greeks: it would be impossible for the beholders of this picture not to recall the speech of Clytemnestra in the Agamemnon (320), in which she forcibly describes the contrast between the state of victors and vanquished in the captured city, the desolation of which is touchingly symbolized in the painting by the empty cuirass that lies on the altar to which a child is clinging. The exhibition of the very crimes so earnestly deprecated by the poet (330), prepares the mind for the second picture, exhibiting the descent of Ulysses to Hades, to learn from the prophet the means by which a safe return might be secured. The punishment of the sacrilegious Tityus, and the retaliation on the undutiful son, could not fail to suggest to the mind of the spectator those passages of the Eumenides in which the poet, with terrible earnestness, describes the direful fate which in the lower regions is the sure award of filial impiety and sacrilege (260).

The schools of design which are springing up