[360]. As before (v. 115) the black eagle had been the symbol of the warrior-chief, so here the black-horned bull, that being one of the notes of the best breed of cattle. A various reading gives “with her swarthy horn.”
[361]. What the Chorus had just said as to the fruitlessness of prophetic insight tallied all too well with her own bitter experience.
[362]. The ecstasy of horror interrupts the tenor of her speech, and the second “thou” is addressed not to the Chorus, but to Agamemnon, whose death Cassandra has just witnessed in her vision.
[363]. The song of the nightingale, represented by these sounds, was connected with a long legend, specially Attic in its origin. Philomela, daughter of Pandion, king of Attica, suffered outrage at the hands of Tereus, who was married to her sister Procne, and was then changed into a nightingale, destined ever to lament over the fate of Itys her sister's son. The earliest form of the story appears in the Odyssey (xix. 518). Comp. Sophocles, Electr. v. 148.
[364]. In the marriage-rites of the Greeks of the time of Æschylos, the bride for three days after the wedding wore her veil; then, as now no longer shrinking from her matron life, she laid it aside and looked on her husband with unveiled face.
[365]. The picture might be drawn by any artist of power, but we may, perhaps, trace a reproduction of one of the grandest passages in the Iliad (iv. 422-426).
[366]. So in the Eumenides (v. 293), the Erinnyes appear as vampires, drinking the blood of their victims.
[367]. The death of Myrtilos as the first crime in the long history of the house of Pelops. Comp. Soth. Electr. v. 470. The “defiler” is Thyestes, who seduced Aerope, the wife of Atreus.
[368]. The horror of the Thyestes banquet again haunts her as the source of all the evils that followed, of the deaths both of Iphigenia and Agamemnon. The “stay-at-home” is Ægisthos.
[369]. Both words point to the Sindbad-like stories of distant marvels brought back by Greek sailors. The Amphisbæna (double-goer), wriggling itself backward and forward, believed to have a head at each extremity, was looked upon as at once the most subtle and the most venomous of serpents. Skylla, already famous in its mythical form from the story in the Odyssey (xii. 85-100), was probably a “development” of the monstrous cuttle-fish of the straits of Messina.