Mighty yoke-pair, two sons they of Atreus their sire,
Sped forth from this land in a thousand of ships
Of our Argives a host
As a warrior band bringing succour.”
The old men even in the hour of victory are filled with strange foreboding of coming ill and with fear of a still unadjusted Nemesis. A curse is inbred in the royal house. “The fearsome wrath, recurrent, house-haunting, guileful, unforgetting, exacting vengeance for the children” more than hints at the grim story of Thyestes fed by Atreus on the flesh of his children. Iphigeneia’s sacrifice at Aulis by Agamemnon[[35]] is skilfully introduced to complicate the ethical situation by giving Clytemnestra a plausible justification for her unfaithfulness and for the secret plottings of which the chorus is not unaware.
Clytemnestra, intoxicated with the thought that Agamemnon is about to fall into her snare, tells the chorus how the beacons, her “racers with the torch,” have brought the news, and then breaks forth with a recital, swift and vivid, reminding them how, even while she speaks, the Argive warriors are stalking triumphant through the streets of Troy:—
“Troy the Achæans have and hold this very day!
Methinks I hear commingling outcries in the town.”
The captive Trojan women “from throats no longer free” bewail their dead, while the Argives plunder as they shout or seat themselves at an impromptu breakfast:—
“In captured Trojan homes they make their dwelling now,