While child-avenging anger waits
Guileful and horrid at the palace gates.”
Though I have no doubt she is alluded to among other Furies that haunt the house of Atreus; and the poet very wisely supplies here a motive. So Well., and Lin.; and my version, though free, I hope does nothing more than express this idea of a retributive wrath brooding through long years over a doomed family, and ever and anon, when apparently laid, breaking out with new manifestations—an idea, however, so expressed in the present passage that, as Dr. Peile says, “No translation can adequately set it forth.”
“Jove, or what other name.”
After the above sublime introduction follows the Invocation of Jove, as the supreme over-ruling Deity, who alone, by his infinite power and wisdom, is able to lead the believing worshipper through the intricacies of a seemingly perplexed Providence. The passage is one of the finest in ancient poetry, and deserves to be specially considered by theological students. The reader will note carefully the reverential awe with which the Chorus names the god invoked—a feeling quite akin to that anxiety which takes possession of inexperienced people when they are called on to address written or spoken words to persons of high rank. Many instances of this kind are quoted from the ancients by Victorius, in Stanley’s notes, by Sym., and by Peile. The most familiar instance to which I can refer the general reader is in the second chapter of Livy’s first book:—
“Situs est Æneas, quemcumque eum dici jus fasque est, super Numicium flumen. Jovem indigetem appellant.”
If in so obvious a matter a profound mythologist like Welcker—(Tril., p. 104)—should have found in this language of deepest reverence signs of free-thinking and irony, we have only another instance of the tyrannous power of a favourite idea to draw facts from their natural cohesion, that they may circle round the nucleus of an artificial crystallization. Sewell has also taken up the same idea with regard to the scepticism of this passage; and in him, no less, must we attribute this notion to the influence of a general theory with regard to the religious opinions of Æschylus, rather than to any criticism which the present passage could possibly warrant.
“With all-defiant valour brimming o’er.”