Page:The Tragic Drama of the Greeks (1896).djvu/80

64 The choral part is here reduced to very small dimensions. But more significant than the mere length of the choral odes is the fact that the chorus now for the first time begins to assume that conventional and subordinate role which it fills in the dramas of Sophocles and Euripides. It no longer possesses any personal interest or concern in the evolution of the plot, but simply acts the part of a sympathetic witness, offering advice and consolation to the principal character, and filling up the pauses in the action with general reflections upon the events which have taken place. Again, in the Prometheus we are brought face to face with the actual crisis, and witness the struggle with our own eyes, instead of being told of it at second hand. We see Prometheus chained to the rock by the ministers of Zeus; we listen to his angry controversy with Hermes, in which he hurls defiance at the tyrant; and we hear the rolling of the thunder which announces his approaching doom. But the influence of the older drama is still very manifest. The central portion of the play consists merely of narratives, in which the action makes no progress; and the long recital of the benefactions of Prometheus, and of the wanderings of Io, recalls the descriptive scenes in the Persae and the Septem.

In the three plays which compose the Orestean trilogy, the art of Aeschylus reaches its culminating point. The essential qualities of dramatic representation are here realised much more fully than even in the Prometheus. The plots are disclosed in a series of vivid scenes, abounding in the direct delineation of conflicting passions and antagonisms. Agamemnon is confronted with Clytaemnestra, Clytaemnestra with Orestes. Orestes and Apollo encounter the Furies face to face. The dialogue, as a rule, is marked by intense life and movement and dramatic force. A third actor is occasionally employed, after the fashion recently set by Sophocles, and adds much to the variety and interest of the action upon the stage. The chorus, also, in two at least of the three plays, occupies the same subordinate position as in the Prometheus; and the elders in the Agamemnon, and the maidens in the Choephori, have only a remote connexion with the plot. In the Eumenides,