[385]. Incense was placed on the head of the victim. The Chorus tell Clytæmnestra that she has brought upon her own head the incense, not of praise and admiration, but of hatred and wrath, as though some poison had driven her mad.
[386]. The species of swan referred to is said to be the Cygnus Musicus. Aristotle (Hist. Anim. ix. 12) describes swans of some kind as having been heard by sailors near the coast of Libya, “singing with a lamentable cry.” Mrs. Somerville (Phys. Geog., c. xxxiii. 3) describes their note as “like that of a violin.” The same fact is reported of the swans of Iceland and other regions of the far North. The strange, tender beauty of the passage in the Phædo of Plato (p. 85, a), which speaks of them as singing when at the point of death, has done more than anything else to make the illustration one of the commonplaces of rhetoric and poetry.
[387]. The structure of the lyrical dialogue that follows is rather complicated, and different editors have adopted different arrangements. I have followed Paley's.
[388]. Several lines seem to have dropped out by some accident of transcription.
[389]. Agamemnon and Menelaos, as descended from Tantalos, the father of Pelops.
[390]. In each case women, Helen and Clytæmnestra, had been the unconscious instruments of the divine Nemesis, to which the Chorus traces the ruin of the house of Atreus.
[391]. Or, with another reading,—
“He (sc. the avenging Demon) boasteth in his pride of heart.”
[392]. It is characteristic of the teaching of Æschylos that the Chorus passes from the thought of the agency of any lower Power to the supreme will of Zeus.
[393]. Or, “Dying, as dies a slave.”