Even this to know, Apollo stirred my breast.
Apollo! didst thou strike the god with love?
Till now I was ashamed to hint the tale.
And hast thou children from divine embrace?
I gave the word to Loxias, not the deed
Hadst thou before received the gift divine?
I had foretold my countrymen all their woes
Did not the anger of the god pursue thee?
It did; I warned, but none believed my warning.
If it must be, but may the gods forefend!
Pray thou, and they will have more time to kill.
What man will dare to do such bloody deed?
I spake not of a man: thy thoughts shoot wide
The deed I heard, but not whose hand should do it.
And yet I spake good Greek with a good Greek tongue.
Thou speakest Apollo’s words: true, but obscure.
I’m in the net. Time will not break the meshes.
But the last moment of sweet life is honoured.
My hour is come, what should I gain by flight?
Thou with a stout heart bravely look’st on fate.
Bravely thou praisest: but the happy hear not Such commendations. 82
Woe’s me, the father and his noble children!
Whither now? What father and what children? Speak.
What means this woe? What horrid fancy scares thee?
Blood-dripping murder reeks from yonder house.
How? ’Tis the scent of festal sacrifice.
The scent of death—a fragrance from the grave.
Soothly no breath of Syrian nard she names.
O wretched maid! O luckless prophetess
[ Exit.
[ From within. ] O I am struck! struck with a mortal blow!
Hush! what painful voice is speaking there of strokes and mortal blows?
O struck again! struck with a mortal blow!
[ The scene opens from behind, and discovers Clytemnestra standing over the dead bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra. ]
Enter Ægisthus.
Nay, if thou for brawls art eager, and for battle, thou shalt know—
I can also hold a hilted dagger—not afraid to die.
Die !—we catch the word thou droppest, lucky chance, if thou wert dead!
Ill beseems our Argive mettle to court a coward on a throne.
Shielded now, be brave with words; my deeds expect some future day.
Ere that day belike some god shall bring Orestes to his home.
Feed, for thou hast nothing better, thou and he, on empty hope.
Glut thy soul, a lusty sinner, with sin’s fatness, while thou may’st.
Thou shalt pay the forfeit, greybeard, of thy braggart tongue anon.
Oh, the cock beside its partlet now may crow right valiantly!
modified thus by Orelli—
With a reference to Menelaus and not to Helen. In doing so, I am not at all moved by any merely philological consideration; but I may observe that the remark made by Well., Peile, and Con, that the words cannot refer to Menelaus, because he has not yet been mentioned, can have little weight in the present chorus, in the first antistrophe of which Paris is first alluded to, by dim indications, and afterwards distinctly by name This method of merely hinting at a person, before naming him, is common in all poetry, but peculiarly characteristic of Æschylus. Besides, it is impossible to deny that the πόθος in the next line refers to Menelaus, and can refer to no other. Con., who refers the words to Helen, translates thus—
to which I have this further objection, that it is contrary to the poet’s intention and to the moral tone of the piece, to paint the fair fugitive with such an engaging look of reluctance to leave her husband; on the contrary, he blames her in the strongest language, ἄτλητα τλα̂σα, and represents her as leaving Argos with all the hurry of a common elopement, where both parties are equally willing for the amorous flight, βέβακε ρίμϕα διὰ πυλα̂ν. After which our fancy has nothing to do but imagine her giving her sails to the wind as swiftly as possible, and bounding gaily over the broad back of ocean with her gay paramour. In this connection, to say “ she stands, ” appears quite out of place. In my view of this “very difficult and all but desperate passage” ( Peile ) I am supported by Sym. in an able note, which every student ought to read, by Med. and Sew., Buck., Humb., and Droys. Neither is Fr. against me, because, though following a new reading of Hermann,
he avoids all special allusions to Menelaus, it is evident that the picture of solitary desolation given in his translation can have no reference but to the palace of the king of Sparta—
Orestes, Son of Agamemnon.
Pylades, Friend of Orestes
Chorus of Captive Women.
Electra, Sister of Orestes.
Nurse of Orestes.
Clytemnestra, Mother of Orestes.
Ægisthus.
Servant.
Scene as in the preceding piece. The Tomb of Agamemnon in the centre of the Stage.
The right of the avenger of blood, so familiar to us from its prominency in the Mosaic Law (see Numbers, chap. 35), is a moral phenomenon which belongs to a savage or semi-civilized state of society in all times and places; and appears everywhere with the most distinct outline in the rich records of the early age of Greece, which we possess in the Homeric poems. No doubt, the most glowing intensity, and the passionate exaggeration of the feeling, from which this right springs, is found only among the hot children of the Arabian desert; * and in no point of his various enactments were the wisdom and the humanity of their great Jewish lawgiver more conspicuous than in the appointment of sacerdotal cities of refuge, which set certain intelligible bounds of space and time to the otherwise interminable prosecution of family feuds, and the gratification of private revenge. But the great traits of the system of private revenge for manslaughter, stand out clearly in the Iliad and Odyssey; and the whole of the ancient heroic mythology of Greece is full of adventures and strange chances that grew out of this germ. Out of many, I shall mention only the following instance. In the twenty-third book of the Iliad (v. 82), when the shade of Patroclus appears at the head of his sorrowful, sleeping friend, after urging the necessity of instant funeral, for the peace of his soul, he proceeds to make a further request, as follows:—
In these verses, we see the common practice of the heroic ages in Greece, with regard to manslaughter. No matter how slight the occasion might be out of which the lethal quarrel arose; how innocent scever of all hostile intention the unhappy offender; the only safety to him from the private revenge of the kinsman of the person unwittingly slain, was to flee to a country that acknowledged some foreign chief, and find both a friend and a country in a distant land. All this, too, in an era of civilization, when courts of law and regular judges (as from various passages of Homer is apparent) were not altogether unknown; but nature is stronger than law, and passion slow to yield up its fiery right of summary revenge, for the cold, calculating retribution of an impartial judge.
The person on whom the duty of avenging shed blood, according to the heroic code of morals, fell, was the nearest of kin to the person whose blood had been shed; and accordingly we find (as stated more at large by Gesenius and Michaelis * ) that in the Hebrew language, the same word means both an avenger of blood and a kinsman, while in the cognate Arabic the term for an avenger means also a survivor —that is, the surviving kinsman. In the same way, when Clytemnestra, as we have just seen in the previous drama, had treacherously murdered her husband Agamemnon, the code of social morality then existing laid the duty of avenging this most unnatural deed on the nearest relation of the murdered chieftain, viz.—his son, Orestes; a sore duty indeed, in this case, as the principal offender was his own mother: so that in vindicating one feeling of his filial nature the pious son had to do violence to another; but a duty it still remained; and there does not appear the slightest trace that it was considered one whit the less imperative on account of the peculiar relation that existed here between the dealer of the vengeful blow and the person on whom it was dealt. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed was the old patriarchal law on the subject, proclaimed without limitation and without exception; and the cry of innocent blood rose to Heaven with peculiar emphasis when the sufferer was both a father and a king.
“Good, how good, when one who dies unjustly leaves a son behind him To avenge his death!”
is the wisdom of old Nestor with regard to this subject and this very case: and the wise goddess Athena, the daughter of the Supreme Councillor, in whom “all her father lives,” stamps her distinct approval on the deed of Orestes, by which Clytemnestra was murdered, and holds him up as an illustrious example to Telemachus, by which his own conduct was to be regulated in reference to the insolent and unjust suitors who were consuming his father’s substance.
Public opinion, therefore, to use a modern phrase, not only justified Orestes in compassing the death of his mother, but imperatively called on him to do so. Public opinion, however, could not control Nature, nor save the unfortunate instrument of paternal retribution from that revulsion of feeling which must necessarily ensue, when the hand of the son is once red with the blood of her whose milk he had sucked. Orestes finds himself torn in twain by two contrary instincts, the victim of two antagonist rights. No sooner are the Furies of the father asleep, than those of the mother awake; and thus the bloody catastrophe of the present piece prepares the way for that tragic conflict of opposing moral claims set forth with such power in the third piece of this trilogy—the Eumenides.
The action of this play is the simplest possible, and will, for the most part, explain itself sufficiently as it proceeds. Clytemnestra, disturbed in conscience, and troubled by evil dreams, sends a chorus of young women to offer libations at the tomb of Agamemnon, which, in the present play, may fitly be conceived as occupying the centre of the stage. * These “libation-bearers” give the name to the piece. In their pious function, Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon, joins; and as she is engaged in the solemn rite, her brother Orestes (who had been living as an exile in Phocis with Strophius, married to Anaxibia, the sister of Agamemnon) suddenly arrives, and making himself known to his sister, plans with her the murder of Ægisthus and Clytemnestra—which is accordingly executed. Scarcely is this done, when the Furies of the murdered mother appear, and commence that chase of the unhappy son from land to land, which is ended in the next piece only by the eloquent intercession of Apollo, and the deliberative wisdom of the blue-eyed virgin-goddess of the Acropolis
As a composition, the Choephoræ is decidedly inferior both to the Agamemnon which precedes, and the Eumenides which follows it; and the poet, as if sensible of this weakness, following the approved tactics of rhetoricians and warriors, has dexterously placed it in a position where its deficiencies are least observed. At the same time, in passing a critical judgment on this piece we must bear in mind two things— first, that some parts of this play that appear languid, long-drawn, and ineffective to us who read, may have been overflowing with the richest emotional power in their living musical exhibition; and, secondly, that many parts, especially of the choral chaunts, have been so maimed and shattered by time that the modern commentator is perhaps as much chargeable with the faults of the translation as the ancient tragedian.
Enter Orestes and Pylades.
[ They go aside.
Chorus, dressed in sable vestments, bearing vessels with libations.
Enter Electra.
Speak thus devoutly, and thou’lt answer well.
Who are they?
Thyself the first, and whoso hates Ægisthus.
That is myself and thou.
Thyself may’st judge.
Hast thou none else to swell the scanty roll?
One far away, thy brother, add—Orestes.
’Tis well remembered, very well remembered.
Nor them forget that worked the deed of guilt.
Ha! what of them? I’d hear of this more nearly.
Pray that some god may come, or mortal man.
Judge or avenger?
And may I pray the gods such boon as this?
In what? Within me leaps my heart for fear.
Seest thou this lock of hair upon the tomb?
A man’s hair is it, or a low-zoned maid’s? 16
Few points there are to hit. ’Tis light divining
I am thine elder, yet I fain would reap Instruction from young lips
’Tis like, O strange! how like!
Like what? What strange conception stirs thy brain?
But how should he have dared to tread this ground?
Sayest thou? What cause have I to thank the gods?
Even here before thee stands thine answered prayer.
One man I wish to see: dost know him—thou?
Thy wish of wishes is to see Orestes.
Even so: but wishing answers no man’s prayer.
Nay, but this is some plot?
That were to frame a plot against myself.
Unkind, to scoff at my calamities!
To scoff at thine, were scoffing at mine own.
And can it be? Art thou indeed Orestes?
O father, help thy friends, when helping thee!
My tears, if they can help, shall flow for thee.
Now might with might engage, and right with right!
And the gods justly the unjust shall smite.
The bath that drank thy life remember, father.
The close-drawn meshes of thy death remember.
Then when with treacherous folds they curtained thee.
Wake, father, wake to avenge thy speechless wrongs!
Lift, father, lift thy dear-loved head sublime!
What saw she in her dream?
A serpent, say’st thou?
Eager for food, doubtless, the new-born monster?
The nurturing nipple herself did fearless bare.
How then? escaped the nipple from the bite?
[ Exeunt.
Enter Orestes.
[ appearing at the door ]. Enough I hear thee. Who art thou, and whence?
Enter Clytemnestra.
[ Exeunt into the house.
Enter Nurse.
What say’st thou, Nurse? how shall thy master come?
How say’st thou? how shall I receive the question?
Alone, I mean, or with his guards?
How? hast thou news to a different tune?
Enter Ægisthus.
[ Exit into the house.
[ from within ]. Ah me! I fall. Ah! Ah!
Enter Servant.
Enter Clytemnestra.
Well! what’s the matter? why this clamorous cry?
He, who was dead, has slain the quick. ’Tis so.
Enter Orestes, dragging in the dead body of Ægisthus; with him Pylades.
Thee next I seek. For him, he hath enough.
Ah me! my lord, my loved Ægisthus dead!
I nursed thy childhood, and in peace would die. 60
Spare thee to live with me—my father’s murderer?
Not I; say rather Fate ordained his death.
The self-same Fate ordains thee now to die.
My curse beware, the mother’s curse that bore thee.
That cast me homeless from my father’s house.
Nay; to a friendly house I lent thee, boy.
Being free-born, I like a slave was sold.
I trafficked not with thee. I gat no gold.
Worse—worse than gold—a thing too foul to name!
Name all my faults; but had thy father none?
Hard was my lot, my child, alone, uncherished.
Thou wilt not kill me, son?
I kill thee not. Thyself dost kill thyself.
Beware thy mother’s anger-whetted hounds. *
My father’s hounds have hunted me to thee.
Ah me! I nursed a serpent on my breast.
[ He drives her into the house, and there murders her.
Enter Orestes, with the body of Clytemnestra.
[ The Furies appear in the background.
Here we have a notable example of the terms of that sort of excommunication which the religious and social feeling of the ancients passed against the perpetrators of atrocious crimes. See Introductory Remarks to the Eumenides.
“ All strangers and beggars come from Jove. ”
—See Butler’s Notes.
The Pythoness of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi.
Apollo.
Hermes (Mute).
The Shade of Clytemnestra.
Chorus of Furies.
Pallas Athena.
Judges of the Court of Areopagus (Mute).
Convoy of the Furies.
Scene — First at Delphi in the Temple of Apollo; then on the Hill of Mars, Athens.
Though the ancient Greek religion, there can be no question, was too much the creation of mere imagination, and tended rather to cultivate a delicate sense of beauty than to strike the soul with a severe reverence before the awful majesty of the moral law, yet it is no less certain that to look upon it as altogether addressed to our sensuous emotions, however convenient for a certain shallow school of theology, would lead the calm inquirer after moral truth far away from the right track. As among the gods that rule over the elements of the physical world, Jove, according to the Homeric creed, asserts a high supremacy, which restrains the liberty of the celestial aristocracy from running into lawless licence and confusion; so the wild and wanton ebullitions of human passion, over which a Bacchus, a Venus, and a Mars preside, are not free from the constant control of a righteous Jove, and the sacred terror of a retributive Erinnys. The great lesson of a moral government, and a secret order of justice pervading the apparent confusion of the system of things of which we are a part, is sufficiently obvious in the whole structure of the two great Homeric poems; but if it exists in the midst of that sunny luxuriance of popular fancy as a felt atmosphere, it is planted by Æschylus, the thoughtful lyrist of a later age, on a visible elevation, whence, as from a natural pulpit, enveloped with dark clouds, or from a Heathen Sinai, involved in fearful thunders and lightnings, it trumpets forth its warnings, and hurls its bolts of flaming denunciation against Sin. The reader, who has gone through the two preceding pieces of this remarkable trilogy, without discovering this their deep moral significance, has read to little purpose; but it is here, in the concluding piece, that the grand doctrine of the moral government of the world is most formally enunciated; it is in the person of the Furies that the wrathful indignation of Jove against the violators of the moral law manifests itself, in the full panoply of terror, and stands out as the stern Avatar of an inexorable Justice. Here, therefore, if we will understand the moral seriousness, of which the gay Hellenic Polytheism was not without its background, let us fix our gaze. If the principles of “immutable morality,” of which our great English Platonist talks so comprehensively, are to be found anywhere, they are to be found here.
The Furies (or the Εὐμενίδες, i.e. the Gracious-minded, as they are called by a delicate euphemism) are generally looked upon as the impersonations of an evil conscience, the incarnated scourges of self-reproach. In this view there is no essential error; but it may be beneficial, in entering on the perusal of the present piece, to place before the modern reader more literally the true Homeric idea of these awful Powers. In the Iliad and Odyssey, frequent mention is made of the Erinnyes; and from the circumstances, in which their names occur, in various passages of these poems, there can be no doubt that we are to view them primarily as the impersonation of an imprecation or curse, which a person, whose natural rights have been grossly violated, pronounces on the person, by whom this violation comes. * Thus the father of Phoenix (Il. ix. 453), being offended by the conduct of his son in relation to one of his concubines, “loads him with frequent curses, and invokes the hated Furies”—
Πολλὰ κατηρατο, στυγερὰς δ’ ἐπίκεκλετ Εριννῠς,
and “the gods,” it is added, “gave accomplishment to his curse, the subterranean Jove, and the awful Persephone” In the same book we find, in the narration of the war, between the Curetes and the Ætolians, about Calydon, how Althaea, the mother of Meleager, being offended with her son on account of his having slain her brother, cursed him, and invoked Pluto and Proserpine that he might die, and
Both these instances relate to offences committed against the revered character of a parent; but the elder brother also has his Erinnys.—(Il. xv. 204), and even the houseless beggar—(Od. xvii. 575), and, more than all, he to whose prejudice the sacred obligation of truth and honour have been set at nought by the perjured swearer—
says Agamemnon—(Il. xix. 257)—in restoring the intact Briseis to Achilles.
Thus, according to Homer’s idea, wherever there is a cry of righteous indignation, rising up to Heaven from the breast of an injured person, there may be a Fury or Furies; for they are not limited or defined in any way as to number. It is not, however, on every petty occasion of common offence that these dread ministers of divine vengeance appear. Only, when deeds of a deeper darkness are done, do these daughters of primeval Night (for so Æschylus symbolises their pedigree) issue forth from their subterranean caverns. There is something volcanic in their indignation, whose eruption is too terrible to be common. They chiefly frequent the paths, that are dabbled with blood. A murdered father, or a murdered mother especially, were never known to appeal to them in vain, even though Jove’s own prophet, Apollo, add his sanction to the deed. An Orestes may not hope to escape the bloody chase, which the “winged hounds,” invoked by a murdered Clytemnestra, are eager to prepare—the sacred precincts of an oracular Delphi may not repel their intrusion—the scent of blood “laughs in their nostrils,” and they will not be cheated of their game. Only one greatest goddess, in whose hands are the keys of her father’s armoury of thunder, may withstand the full rush of these vindictive powers. Only Pallas Athena, with her panoply of Olympian strength, and her divine wisdom of reconciliation can bid them be pacified.
In order to understand thoroughly the situation of the matricide Orestes, in the present play, we must consider further the ancient doctrine of pollution attaching to an act of murder, and the consequent necessity of purification to the offender. The nature of this is distinctly set forth by Orestes himself in a reply to his sister Iphigenia, put into his mouth by Euripides. “Loxias,” he says, “first sent me to Athens, and
Like an unclean leper among the Jews, the man polluted with human blood wandered from land to land, as with a Cain’s mark upon his brow, and every fellow-being shrank from his touch as from a living plague.
Under the ban of such a social excommunication as this, the first act of readmission into the fraternity of human society was performed by the sprinkling of swine’s blood on the exile, a ceremony described particularly in the following passage of Apollonius Rhodius, where Jason and Medea are purified by Circe from the taint of the murder of Absyrtus:—
The other “pure libations” here mentioned include specially water, of which particular mention is made in the legend of Alcmæon, which bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Orestes, and in which it is in the sacred stream of the Achelous alone that purification is at length found, from the deeply-engrained guilt of matricide.—(Apollodor, Lib. III., c. 7.) All this, however, availed only to remove the unhallowed taint, with which human blood had defiled the murderer. It was necessary, further, that he should be tried before a competent court, and formally acquitted, as having performed every atonement and given every satisfaction that the nature of the case required. According to the consuetudinary law of Athens, there were various courts in which different cases of murder and manslaughter were tried; but of all the courts that held solemn judgment on shed blood, none was more venerable in its origin, or more weighty in its authority, than the famous court of the Areopagus; and here it is, accordingly, that, after being wearied out by the sleepless chase of his relentless pursuers, Orestes, with the advice and under the protection of Apollo, arrives to gain peace to his soul by a final verdict of acquittal from the sage elders of Athens, acting by the authority and with the direction of their wise patron-goddess, Athena.
The connection of Athena and the Areopagus with the Orestean legend gives to the present play a local interest and a patriotic hue of which the want is too often felt in the existing remains of the Attic tragedy. But Athena and the grave seniors of the hill of Ares are not the only celestial personages here, in whom an Athenian audience would find a living interest. The Furies themselves enjoyed a special reverence in the capital of Athens, under the title of Σεμνὰι θεαι, or the dread goddesses, and the principal seat of this worship, whether by a happy conjunction or a wise choice, was situated on the north-east side (looking towards the Acropolis) of that very hill of the war god, where the venerable court that bore his name held its solemn sessions on those crimes, which it was the principal function of the Furies to avenge. Up to the present hour, the curious traveller through the wreck of Athenian grandeur sees pointed out the black rift of the rock into which the awful virgins, after accepting the pacification of Athena, are reported to have descended into their subterranean homes; * and it is with this very descent, amid flaming torch-light and solemn hymns, that the great tragedian, mingling peace with fear, closes worthily the train of startling superhuman terrors which this drama exhibits.
But Æschylus is not a patriot only, and a pious worshipper of his country’s gods in this play, he is also, to some small extent at least, manifestly a politician. The main feature of the constitutional history of Athens in the period immediately following the great Persian war, to which period our trilogy belongs, was the enlargement and the systematic completion of those democratic forms, of which the timocratic legislation of Solon, about a century and a-half before, had planted the first germs. Of these changes, Pericles, the man above all others who knew both to understand and to control his age, was the chief promoter; and in a policy whose main tendency was the substitution of a numerous popular for a narrow professional control of public business, it could not fail to be a main feature, that the authority of the judges of the old aristocratic courts was curtailed in favour of those bodies of paid jurymen, the institution of which is specially attributed to Pericles and his coadjutor Ephialtes. † Whether these changes were politic or not, in the large sense of that word, need not be inquired here; Mr. Grote has done much to lengthen the focus of those short-sighted national spectacles, through which the English eye has been accustomed to view the classic democracies; but let it be that Pericles kept within the bounds of a wise liberty in giving a fair and a large trial to the action of democratic principles at that time and place; or let it be, on the other hand, that he overstepped the line
in either case, where decision was so difficult, and discretion so delicate, no one can accuse the thoughtful tragic poet of a stolid conservatism, when he comes forward, in this play, as the advocate of the only court of high jurisdiction in Athens, now left unshaken by the great surge of those popular billows, that were yet swelling everywhere with the eager inspiration of Marathon and Salamis. * The court of Areopagus was not now, since the legislation of Solon, and the further democratic movement of Cleisthenes, in any invidious or exclusive sense an aristocratic assembly, such as the close corporations of the old Roman aristocracy before the series of popular changes introduced by Licinius Stolo; it was a council, in fact, altogether without that family and hereditary element, in which the principal offence of aristocracy has always lain; its members were composed entirely (not recruited merely like our House of Lords) of those superior magistrates—archons annually elected by the people—who had retired from office. To magnify the authority of such a body, and maintain intact the few privileges that had now been left it, was, when an obvious opportunity offered, not only excusable in a great national tragedian, but imperative. One thing his political attitude in this matter certainly proves, that he was not a vulgar hunter after popularity, delighting to swell to the point of insane exaggeration the cry of the hour, but one of those men of high purpose, who prove a greater strength of patriotism by stemming the popular stream, than by swimming with it.
Besides the championship of the Court of the Areopagus, there is another political element in this rich drama, which, though of less consequence, must not be omitted. No sooner had the Persian invaders been fairly driven back from the Hellenic shore, than that old spirit of narrow local jealousy, which was the worm at the heart of Grecian political existence, broke out with renewed vigour, and gave ominous indications in the untoward affair of Tanagra, of that terrible collision which shook the two great rival powers a few years afterwards in the famous Peloponnesian war. Sparta and Athens, opposed as they were by race, by geographical position, and by political character, after some public attempts at co-operation, in which Cimon was the principal actor, shrunk back, as in quiet preparation for the great trial of strength, into a state of isolated antagonism. But, though open hostility was deferred, wise precaution could not sleep; and, accordingly, we find the Athenians, about this time, anxious to secure a base of operations, so to speak, against Sparta in the Peloponnesus, by entering into an alliance with Argos. As a genuine Athenian, Æschylus, whatever his political feelings might be towards Cimon and the Spartan party, could not but look with pleasure on the additional strength which this Argive connection gave to Athens in the general council of Greece; and, accordingly, he dexterously takes advantage of the circumstance of Orestes being an Argive, to trace back the now historical union of the two countries to a period where Fancy is free to add what links she pleases to the brittle bonds of international association
Such is a rapid sketch of the principal religious and political relations, some notion of which is necessary to enable the general English reader to enter with sympathy on the perusal of the very powerful and singular drama of the Eumenides The professional student, of course, will not content himself with what he finds here, but will seek for complete satisfaction in the luminous pages of Thirlwall and Grote—in the learned articles of Dr. Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities, in the notes of Schoemann, and, above all, in the rare Dissertations of Ottfried Muller, accompanying his edition of the Eumenides—a work which I have read once and again with mingled admiration and delight—from which I have necessarily drawn with no stinted hand in my endeavours to comprehend the Orestean trilogy for myself, and to make it comprehensible to others; and which I most earnestly recommend to all classical students as a pattern-specimen of erudite architecture raised by the hand of a master, from whom, even in his points of most baseless speculation (as what German is without such?), more is to be learned than from the triple-fanged certainties of vulgar commentators.
Scene. — In front of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
[ She goes into the Temple, but suddenly returns.
[ Exit.
The interior of the Delphic Temple is now presented to view. Orestes is seen clinging to the navel-stone; the Eumenides lie sleeping on the seats around. In the background Hermes beside Orestes. Enter Apollo.
[ Exit Hermes, leading Orestes. Apollo retires.
Enter the Shade of Clytemnestra.
[ The Chorus moans.
[ The Chorus moans again.
[ The Chorus groans.
[ The Chorus groans again.
[ with redoubled groans and shrill cries ].
Hold! seize him! seize him! seize there! there! there! hold!
Chorus, 19 starting up in hurry and confusion.
Awake! awake! rouse her as I rouse thee!
Shame on me, too: a bootless, fruitless shame!
The snare hath sprung: flown is the goodly game.
Thou being young dost overleap the old. 20
Apollo’s shrine a mother-murderer’s hold!