“Here Æschylus lies, from his Athenian home
Remote, ’neath Gela’s wheat-producing loam.
How brave in battle was Euphorion’s son
The long-haired Mede can tell that fled from Marathon.”
With regard to the great merits of Æschylus both as a poet and as the creator of the tragic stage, there is but one testimony among the writers of antiquity. He not only introduced, as we have elsewhere stated, a second, and afterwards a third actor—without which there was no scope for the proper representation of an action—but he made the greatest improvements in the whole machinery and decorations of the stage, gave dignity to the actors by a minute attention to their masks, dresses, and buskins,[8] besides attending specially to the graceful culture of the dance, according to the testimony of Athenæus above quoted. As a dramatist he is distinguished by peculiar loftiness of conception and grandeur of phraseology. His style is sometimes harsh and abrupt, but it is always manly and vigorous; his metaphors are bold and striking, with something at times almost oriental in their cast; and, though not free from the offence of mixing incongruous metaphors—the natural sin of an imagination at once fearless and fertile—I do not think he can be fairly charged with turgidity and bombast; for, as Aristophanes remarks, in the Frogs, there is a superhuman grandeur about his characters which demands a more than common elevation of phrase.[9] As to the obscurity with which he has been charged, the comparative clearness of those plays which have been most frequently transcribed is a plain indication that this fault proceeds more from the carelessness of stupid copyists, than from confusion of thought or inadequate power of expression in the writer. In some cases, as in the prophecy of Calchas in the opening scene of the Agamemnon, the obscurity is studied and most appropriate. Poetry, like painting, will have its shade. But the great excellence of Æschylus, as a poet, is the bracing tone of thorough manhood, noble morality, and profound piety which pervades his works. Among those who are celebrated by Virgil as walking with Orpheus and Musæus in blissful Elysium—
“Quique pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti,”
the poet of the Eumenides deserves the first rank. There is a tradition current, in various shapes, among the ancient writers that he was brought before the Court of the Areopagus (so nobly eulogised by himself), on the charge of impiety, but that he was acquitted. That the Athenians might have taken offence at the freedom and boldness with which he handled religious, as other topics, is possible, though certainly by no means probable, considering how little of fixed doctrine there was in their imaginative theology; but it is more like the truth, according to the accounts which we have, that the offence which he gave consisted in some purely accidental allusion occurring in one of his plays, to some points that were, or seemed to be connected with the awful Eleusinian mysteries.[10] Certain it is that no writer could be less justly charged with impiety or irreligion. In his writings, religion is the key-note; and the noblest moral sentiments spring everywhere from the profoundest faith in a system of retribution carried on by the various personages of the great celestial aristocracy, of which Jove is the all-powerful and the all-wise head. So sublime, indeed, is the Æschylean theology, that certain modern writers, as if unwilling to think that such pure notions could co-exist with a belief in the popular religion, have concluded that the poet, like Euripides afterwards, must have been a free-thinker; and have imagined that they have found sure indications to this effect in his writings. But, though Æschylus was a Pythagorean (Cic. Tusc. II. 10), we have no proof that the Pythagoreans, any more than their successors, the Platonists, were given to scepticism. The seriousness of a poetic mind like that of Æschylus is, at all times, naturally inclined to faith; and the multiform polytheism of the Greeks was as pliable in the hands of pure men for pure purposes, as in the hands of gross men, to give a delusive ideality to their grossness.[11]
AGAMEMNON
A LYRICO-DRAMATIC SPECTACLE
“Ὁι Τρώων μεν ὑπεξέφυγον στονόεσσαν ἀϋτὴν