[289]. The words point to the ritual of Greek feasts, which assigned the first libation to Zeus and the Olympian Gods, the second to the Heroes, the third to Zeus in his special character as Saviour and Preserver; the last was commonly accompanied by a pæan, hymn of praise. The life of Agamemnon is described as one which had good cause to offer many such libations. Iphigeneia had sung many such pæans.
[290]. The mythical explanation of this title for the Argive territory is found in the Suppl. v. 256, and its real meaning is discussed in a note to that passage.
[291]. To speak of Morning as the child of Night was, we may well believe, among the earliest parables of nature. In its mythical form it appears in Hesiod (Theogon. 123), but its traces are found wherever, as among Hebrews, Athenians, Germans, men reckoned by nights rather than by days, and spoke of “the evening and the morning” rather than of “day and night.”
[292]. The God thought of is, as in v. 272, Hephæstos, as being Lord of the Fire, that had brought the tidings.
[293]. It is not without significance that Clytæmnestra scorns the channel of divine instruction of which the Chorus had spoken with such reverence. The dramatist puts into her mouth the language of those who scoffed at the notion that truth might come to the soul in “visions of the night,” when “deep sleep falleth upon men.” So Sophocles puts like thoughts into the mouth of Jocasta (Œd. King, vv. 709, 858).
[294]. Omens came from the flight of birds. An omen which was not trustworthy, or belonged to some lower form of divination, might therefore be spoken of as “wingless.” But the word may possibly be intensive, not negative, “swift-winged,” and then refer generically to that form of divination.
[295]. The description that follows, over and above its general interest, had, probably, for an Athenian audience, that of representing the actual succession of beacon-stations, by which they, in the course of the wars, under Pericles, had actually received intelligence from the coasts of Asia. A glance at the map will show the fitness of the places named—Ida, Lemnos, Athos, Makistos (a mountain in Eubœa), Messapion (on the coast of Bœotia), over the plains of the Asôpos to Kithæron, in the south of the same province, then over Gorgopis, a bay of the Corinthian Gulf, to Ægiplanctos in Megaris, then across to a headland overlooking the Saronic Gulf, to the Arachnæan hill in Argolis. The word “courier-fire” connects itself also with the system of posts or messengers, which the Persian kings seem to have been the first to organise, and which impressed the minds both of Hebrews (Esth. viii. 14) and Greeks (Herod. viii. 98) by their regular transmission of the king's edicts, or of special news.
[296]. Our ignorance of the details of the Lampadephoria, or “torch-race games,” in honour of the fire-God, Prometheus, makes the allusion to them somewhat obscure. As described by Pausanias (I. xxx. 2), the runners started with lighted torches from the altar of Prometheus in the Academeia and ran towards the city. The first who reached the goal with his torch still burning became the winner. If all the torches were extinguished, then all were losers. As so described, however, there is no succession, no taking the torch from one and passing it on to another, like that described here and in the well-known line of Lucretius (ii. 78),
“Et quasi cursores vitaï lampada tradunt.”
(And they, as runners, pass the torch of life.)