Sentences, blind, dark syllables. At last
A word clear-visaged came to Machus
Enjoining plainly and saying he should thrust me
Forth of the house, forth of the land, to wander
At large, a separate thing even to the last
Confines of earth.
The story is the same, but the treatment is different, and the two passages illustrate the difference between romantic idealism and realistic depreciation.
But Io, in the Prometheus, is only one of the gallery of Æschylus’ heroines, for in his art women take the foremost place. The dramatist is at variance with his age, and his fervent patriotism is almost the sole bond of union between him and his fellows. Æschylus is a mystic; he believed in the Delphic inspiration, and took an interest in religious speculation. His contemporaries were materialists, suspected the politics of Delphi, and regarded religion simply as a ceremony. Æschylus was a conservative in politics, although a liberal in thought; Athens was already becoming an extreme democracy. Finally, Æschylus bases his theatre on women, and makes them the chief agents of the drama, while the ordinary woman of his time was shut out altogether from the active business of life.
But he is an unconscious feminist, and the definite purpose which we find in Euripides is quite absent from his plays. It shows, however, a strange lack of appreciation to reproach him, as some critics have done, with neglecting the feminine interest. Of the seven tragedies that the Byzantine tradition has preserved for us, four, if their subject was handled by a modern dramatist, would be called feminist problem plays, and in the other three the female characters supply most of the dramatic interest, even though the first idea of the plot might seem to put them in the second plan of action.
Of the lost plays, many, as far as we may judge by their titles and meagre fragments, have the same characteristic. The most famous, the Niobe, had for its central figure the sorrowing mother, such another as Euripides’ Hecuba in the first scene of the Trojan Women, and represented perhaps in much the same fashion, for Æschylus, like most Athenian women, knew full well the dramatic value of silence, and the pathos of Niobe’s situation needs no long speeches. So, if we possessed the Callisto, the legend of the maiden changed into a bear, the Penelope, the Iphigenia, or the Oreithyia, that favourite Athenian story of the young girl roaming on the sea-shore and carried off by the fierce god to his northern fastness, we should appreciate even more vividly than we can now the romantic side of the tragedian’s art. It is a significant fact in this connection that of the sixty odd titles of lost plays which have come down to us, nearly half are names of women. Moreover, in seventeen of these plays, the title is taken from the chorus, and in the Æschylean Theatre the chorus is generally the central figure in the dramatic action. Such titles as the ‘Daughters of the Sun,’ the ‘Nurses of Dionysus,’ the ‘Daughters of Nereus,’ and the ‘Bacchanal Women,’ suggest at any rate romantic plays with a strong feminine interest; such others as the ‘Women of the Bedchamber,’ the ‘Water-carriers,’ and the ‘Women of Etna,’ might well be examples of that realistic treatment of women’s life of which we have an example in the Nurse of the ‘Libation-bearers.’ Arguments drawn merely from the names of lost plays are obviously of little value, except in so far as they strengthen the definite evidence which the existing tragedies supply, but an examination of the remaining seven plays will show that the first and greatest of Athenian dramatists was deeply impressed with the potentialities for good and evil of the female mind.