Two other tragedies were associated with this, Prometheus the Fire-bringer (Προμηθεὺς πυρφόρος) and Prometheus Unbound (Προμηθεὺς λυόμενος). That the latter followed the extant play is of course certain, but the position of the Fire-bringer is doubtful. One would naturally place it first in the trilogy: the offence, the punishment, the reconciliation. But, say some, in that case one can hardly imagine how Æschylus wrote the first tragedy without anticipating a great part of the second—the noble account which Prometheus gives of the victory of Zeus, his own offence, and the blessings it conferred upon men. Hence arises a theory that the Fire-bringer was the last play of the trilogy in which the Titan, reconciled to Zeus, became a local deity of Athens, the giver of fire. But this view has been discredited by evidence[228] that there is not enough matter remaining for the Fire-bringer after the close of the Prometheus Unbound. These two difficulties about the position of the Fire-bringer have induced some to identify it with that Prometheus which we know as the satyric play appended to the Persæ trilogy, and to suppose that Æschylus told the story in two plays only, the present trilogy being completed by a tragedy unconnected with the subject. The best view is that the Fire-bringer was the first play; the title suggests that it dealt with the transgression which led to the punishment portrayed in the extant drama; and the objection as to overlapping of the Fire-bringer and the Prometheus Vinctus is illusory.
The scene is a desolate gorge in Scythia. Hephæstus, the God of Fire, with Cratos and Bia, Strength and Violence, servants of Zeus, appear, dragging with them the Titan Prometheus. Hephæstus nails the prisoner to the rocks under the superintendence of Cratos; he has little liking for his task, but Cratos rebukes his tenderness for the malefactor who has braved Heaven in order to succour mankind. At length Prometheus is left to his lonely agony. Hitherto he has been silent, but now he voices his pain and indignation to the sea and sky and earth around him. His soliloquy breaks off as he catches the sound of wings, and the chorus enter—a band of sea-nymphs who have been startled from their cave by the clatter of iron. They strive to comfort him, and he tells how by his counsel Zeus was enabled to defeat the Titans. Then, consolidating his empire, the god determined to destroy mankind and create a new race. Prometheus, in love of men, saved them from destruction and bestowed upon them the gift of fire, which he stole from Heaven and which has been the beginning of civilization. At this point Oceanus enters, riding upon a four-legged bird; he is a Titan who stood aloof from the conflict with Zeus. An amiable but obsolete person, he wishes to release Prometheus (without running into danger himself) and urges submission. The prisoner listens with disdainful courtesy, refuses the advice, and hints to Oceanus that he had better not associate with a malefactor. His visitor soon bustles away, and the chorus sing how all the nations of the earth mourn over the torments of their deliverer. Prometheus then tells of the arts by which he has taught man to alleviate his misery. The Nymphs ask if he has no hope of release himself; he hints at the possible downfall of Zeus. Another lyrical passage hymns the power of that god and expresses surprise at the contumacy of the Titan. Then appears Io, the heifer-maiden, who at the request of the chorus describes her strange ill-fortune. Beloved of Zeus, she has incurred the wrath of his queen, Hera, who has changed her into a heifer and sent her roaming wildly over the earth pursued by a gadfly. Prometheus prophesies her future wanderings, which shall end in Egypt. He speaks more clearly of the fall of Zeus, who is preparing to wed one who shall bear a child greater than his father. Then he narrates the story of Io’s course up to the present hour, ending with the prophecy that in Egypt she shall bear to Zeus a son named Epaphus. He speaks of the history of this man’s line, particularly of one “courageous, famed for archery” who shall release Prometheus. Io, in a sudden paroxysm, rushes from the scene. The chorus sing of the dangers which lie in union with the Gods. Prometheus again foretells the overthrow of Zeus by his own son. Hermes, the messenger of Zeus, enters demanding that the prisoner reveal the fatal secret. Prometheus treats his message with defiance. Hermes warns him of still more fell tortures: the “winged hound of Zeus” will come each day to tear his liver; a convulsion of the earth will hurl him into Hades. The nymphs again urge submission, but when the messenger declares that unless they leave Prometheus they will perchance suffer too, they haughtily refuse to listen. Amid an upheaval of the whole of Nature, the Titan, still defiant, sinks from sight.
The Prometheus Vinctus has impressed all generations of readers with wonder and delight; in particular it has inspired poetry only less magnificent than itself. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound is a gorgeous amplification of its spiritual and material features. The sinister and terrific figure which dominates the early part of Paradise Lost is but Prometheus strayed at an untoward hour into Christian mythology. Again, this play is the noblest surviving example of the purely Æschylean manner. The Oresteia is greater, perhaps, certainly more interesting to us; but there Æschylus has reacted to the spirit of Sophocles. Here, the stark hauteur of the Supplices has developed into a desolate magnificence. The lyrics which, since the Seven, have again dwindled in size, have yet grown in beauty, variety, and characterization. On the other side, there is a development of the dialogue which is amazing. Long speeches are still the rule, but line-by-line conversations are frequent. Characters in the Supplices and the Seven talk as if blank-verse dialogue were a strange and difficult art—as indeed it was till Æschylus forged it into shape. Throughout, whether in lengthy speeches or in conversation, the iambic metre has found a grace and suppleness which is too often ignored by those who come to the Prometheus fresh from the Medea or the Œdipus Tyrannus. Above all, the maturity of Æschylus’ poetic strength is to be seen in the terrific perspectives which he brings before us—perspectives of time, as the voice of the tortured prophet carries us down a vista of centuries through the whole history of Io’s race to the man of destiny; perspectives of scenery, as the eye of the Ocean-Nymphs from the summit of earth gazes down upon the tribes of men, horde behind horde fading into the distance, all raising lament for the sorrows of their saviour; perspectives of thought, as the exultant history of civilization leaps from the lips of him who dies hourly through untold years to found and uphold it, telling how that creeping victim of his own helplessness and the disdain of Heaven goes from weakness to strength and from strength to triumph.
No less wonderful is the strictly dramatic economy of the play. The action is slight. Prometheus works no more; it is his part to endure. All the secondary characters act as a foil to bring the central figure into massive relief. Each has some touch of Prometheus: Hephæstus, pity without self-sacrifice; Cratos, strength without reflection; the Nymphs, tenderness without force; Oceanus, common-sense without dignity; Io, sensibility to suffering without the vision which learns the lesson of pain; Hermes, the power to serve without perception of the secret of sovereignty. Most essential of all these is Io. The only human participant in the action, she reminds us that the hand of Zeus has been heavy upon innocent mortals as well as rebel gods, and thus gives fresh justification to the wrath of Prometheus. Still more, she is vital to the whole trilogy. As Hephæstus links the Fire-bringer to the second play, so does she join the second play to the Prometheus Unbound. It is her descendant Heracles who after thirteen generations will free Prometheus and reconcile him to Zeus; the hero of the last drama is brought in a sense upon the scene in the person of his ancestress. Prometheus himself suggests to us the thought of Christ; and yet (as has been said) the Satan of Milton is like him too. This double kinship is made possible by the conception of Zeus which here obtains. Under the sceptre of a god who hates mankind it is possible for the saviour of men to be a rebel and an outcast. Right or wrong, the Titan is godlike in his goodness, his wisdom, his courage. At one point only does his deity show a flaw; he endures his pangs not as a god, but as a man; he agonizes, he laments his pains, he utters exclamations of fear. Rightly, for if the actors in this world-drama are immortal, the spectators are not. To have portrayed Prometheus as facing his punishment without a quiver would have been perhaps sounder theology, but worse drama; the human audience must be made to understand something at least of these pangs, or the greatness of the sacrifice will elude them. A parallel on which we must not dilate cannot escape the reader. One strange outcome of his rebellion is generally overlooked. Zeus had wished to destroy mankind and create a new race. That is, he meant to treat men as he treated the Titans—or would have treated them had they been mortal. Prometheus thwarted this plan, so that we men are a survival of that pre-moral world which the new ruler supersedes. We are the younger brothers of the Titans and (so to put it) have all survived the Flood. Our pettiness and futility condemned us in the eyes of Zeus, who wished for progress; but Prometheus loved us in spite of our miserable failings, and so insisted on carrying us over into the new and nobler world at the cost of his own age-long agony.
The basic question must be briefly discussed—the relation of Prometheus to the new King of Heaven. Zeus is here described as a youthful tyrant, blind to all rights and interests save the security of his recent conquest. This cannot have been the picture presented by the whole trilogy. Not only is enough known of Æschylus’ religious views to make such a theory impossible; though the Prometheus Unbound is lost we know the story in outline. Heracles in his wanderings came upon Prometheus, now released from Hades, but still chained to his rock and gnawed by the vulture. The hero slew the bird with an arrow, and procured the release of Prometheus by inducing the wounded Centaur Chiron to go down to death in his place, and by reconciling the Titan to Zeus, who promised to free him on hearing the secret of the fatal marriage.[229] Prometheus, to commemorate his captivity, assumed a ring of iron. The authority of the King of Gods was thus for ever established. It is only in a different atmosphere that any inconsistency can be felt. For Æschylus there was a progress in the history of Heaven as in the civilization of earth. Even Zeus in the early days of his dominion seeks to rule by might divorced from wisdom, a severance typified by his feud with Prometheus. He has his lesson to learn like all others; if he will not govern with the help of law, bowing to Fate, then the hope of the Universe is vain and the blind forces of unguided Nature, the half-quelled Titans, will bring chaos back. But youthful and harsh as he is, his will has a moral foundation, unlike theirs; and so perhaps it is that Prometheus cannot but exclaim “I sinned” in opposing that will. Upon the reconciliation between Zeus and his antagonist, Prometheus became a local Attic deity and no more. That eternal wisdom which he embodied is mysteriously assimilated into the soul of Zeus. This is the consummation; omnipotence and omniscience are at one.
We arrive finally at the trilogy which bears the name Oresteia and which obtained the prize in 458 B.C. This is the only instance in which the whole series has survived; the satyric play, Proteus,[230] has perished. The name Oresteia was applied to the whole tetralogy.
The background of the Agamemnon[231] is the palace of King Agamemnon at Argos. A sentinel is discovered upon the roof; he is watching for the beacon which shall signify that Troy has at length fallen. While waiting he broods, dropping hints that all is not well at home. Then the beacon flashes forth, and he shouts the news to the Queen Clytæmnestra within the house. On his departure the chorus enter, aged councillors of Argos, who have not yet heard the tidings. They sing of the quarrel between Greece and Troy and describe the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Agamemnon’s daughter, who was offered up to Artemis in order to obtain a favourable wind for the fleet. All the altars are blazing with incense; Clytæmnestra enters, and they ask her the reason. Troy, she replies, was taken last night; a system of beacons has been arranged; the signal has spread over sea and land before dawn. She ponders over the state of the captured city and hopes that the victors have not sinned against the gods of Troy. The old men sing praise to Heaven and moralize on the downfall of human pride. A herald appears, announcing that Agamemnon has landed and will soon reach the city; he dilates on the miseries of the campaign, till the queen sends him away with her welcome to Agamemnon. The chorus call him back and ask news of Menelaus, the king’s brother; Menelaus, he replies, is missing: as the Greeks were sailing home a tempest arose which scattered the fleet. Agamemnon’s ship has returned alone. The elders, after he has gone, sing of Helen and the deadly power of her beauty. Agamemnon arrives, accompanied by the daughter of the Trojan King Priam, Cassandra the prophetess, who has become his unwilling concubine. Clytæmnestra greets him with effusiveness, to which he responds haughtily. She persuades him against his will to walk into the palace over rich carpets like an Oriental conqueror, and accompanies him within doors. The chorus express forebodings which they cannot understand. The queen comes forth and orders Cassandra within, to be present at the sacrifice of thanksgiving, but the captive pays no heed and Clytæmnestra in anger retires. The elders attempt to encourage the silent girl, who at last breaks forth into incoherent cries, not of fear but of horror, and utters vague but frightful prophecies of bloodshed and sin, punctuated by the bewildered questions of her hearers. She tells them that they will see the death of Agamemnon, bewails her own wretchedness, greets her death, and prophesies the coming of an avenger. She passes into the house. After a lyric on wicked prosperity, the voice of the king is heard crying within that he has been mortally wounded. Another shriek follows, and then silence. The chorus are in a tumult, when the doors are flung open and Clytæmnestra is seen standing over the corpses of Agamemnon and Cassandra. She has slain the king with an axe, entrapping him in the folds of a robe while in his bath. In reply to the furious accusations of the elders she glories in her act—she is the personification of the ancestral curse; and she has avenged the murder of Iphigenia. The altercation has for the moment reached something like calm, when Ægisthus appears. He is the cousin of Agamemnon, but between the two families there is a murderous and adulterous feud; Ægisthus himself is the lover of Clytæmnestra and has shared in the plot. The Argives turn on him in hatred and contempt, which he answers with tyrannical threats. They remind him that Orestes, the king’s young son, is alive and safe abroad. Swords are drawn, but Clytæmnestra insists that the quarrel shall cease; she and Ægisthus must rule with dignity.
A novel theory of the plot has been put forward by the late Dr. A. W. Verrall in his edition of the play.[232] He finds the following difficulties in the usual acceptation: (i) Agamemnon lands in Argos on the morning after the night in which Troy was captured, though as a matter of course and a matter of “history” several days (at the very least) must have elapsed before the Greek host so much as embarked; and though a storm has befallen the fleet on its way. (ii) The story given by Clytæmnestra about the beacons is absurd. Why has the arrangement existed for only one year of the ten? Why make an arrangement which would depend so entirely on the weather? How could the beacon on Mount Athos have been seen from Eubœa (a hundred miles away) when a tempest was raging on the intervening sea? (iii) This mystery, that Agamemnon reaches home only two or three hours after his signal, is never cleared up: neither he nor the queen mentions it when they meet. (iv) Thus the whole affair of the beacons is gratuitous as well as incredible. (v) We are not told how Agamemnon was slain. That is, though the poet is precise enough about the details of the actual murder, we are not enlightened as to how a great and victorious prince could be killed with impunity by his wife and her lover, who thereupon, with no difficulty, usurp the government. (vi) What does Ægisthus mean by claiming to have contrived the whole plot? On the face of it he has done nothing but skulk in the background. Dr. Verrall’s explanation, set forth with splendid lucidity, skill, and brilliance, may be briefly summarized thus. For a year Clytæmnestra and Ægisthus have been joined in a treasonable and adulterous league, Ægisthus knows what is happening at Troy and has the first news of Agamemnon’s landing (at night). He lights upon Mount Arachnæus a beacon which tells Clytæmnestra that all is ready. (Her story of the fire-chain is a lie to deceive the watchman and the elders.) Agamemnon thus naturally arrives only an hour or two after the news that Troy has fallen. The assassination-plot succeeds for various reasons. During the ten years’ war many citizens of Argos have been alienated from the king by the enormous loss of Greek lives. Hence the usurpers have a strong body of potential adherents. In fact, several passages which our texts attribute to the chorus really belong to conspirators. Next, Agamemnon by the accident of the storm has with him, not the great host, but a single ship’s company. Finally, though he has heard much ill of his wife—this only can account for the brutality wherewith he greets her—he does not suspect her resourcefulness, wickedness, and courage. Verrall’s theory should probably be accepted.
This tragedy is beyond compare the greatest work of Æschylus. The lyrics surpass those of any other drama. To the majesty and scope familiar everywhere in Æschylean choric writing, and to the tenderness which diffuses a gentle gleam through the Prometheus, are now added matchless pathos and the authentic thrill of drama. The picture of Iphigenia (vv. 184-249) is not merely lovely and tearful beyond words; it is a marvel that this gloomy colossus of the stage should for a moment have excelled Euripides on Euripides’ strongest ground; it is as if Michelangelo had painted Raffaelle’s “Madonna of the Grand Duke” amid the prophets and sibyls of the Sistine Chapel. Even more poignant, because more simple, are the brief lines (vv. 436-47) which tell how the War-God, the money-changer of men’s bodies, sends back from Troy a handful of charred dust, the pitiful return for a man who has departed into the market-place of Death. Best known of all perhaps is the passage (vv. 402-26) which portrays the numb anguish of a deserted husband. Further, these lyrics are dramatic. The choric songs do not suspend the action by their sublime elucidations; the comments enable us to understand the march of events, giving us the keynote of the scene which follows each lyric. For instance, when the first stasimon dilates, not upon the glory of conquest, but upon the fall of pride and the sorrows of war, we are prepared for the herald and his tale in which triumph is overborne by the memory of hardship and tempest. The misgivings which brood over the third stasimon, in spite of the victorious entry of the king which has just been witnessed, is a fit prelude to the terrible outbreaks of Cassandra.
The characterization shows a marked advance on the Prometheus in variety and colour. This is not so much because three actors are needed as against two in the earlier play; for though they are necessary, comparatively little use is made of the increased facilities. But, while Clytæmnestra is technically as great a creation as Prometheus, the secondary persons are much more interesting in themselves than in the earlier drama. They do of course form a series of admirable foils to the queen, but they are worthy of careful study for their own sakes, which cannot be said very heartily for the lesser personages of the Prometheus. The sentinel is excellent, sketched in a few lines with a sureness of touch which is a new thing in this poet’s minor characters. The sense of impending trouble mixed with expected joy, the flavour of rich colloquialism about his speech, and the hearty dance upon the palace-roof wherewith he hails the beacon, make him live. Even more commonplace, theoretically, is the part given to the herald, but him again Æschylus has created a real man. The passionate joy with which he greets his native soil, and the lugubrious relish wherewith he details the hardships of the army before Troy, make him our friend at once, and present us with that sense of atmosphere which is often lacking in Greek tragedy. Agamemnon may seem a disappointing figure; very naturally, for it is the poet’s purpose to disappoint us. To depict a great and noble king would have spoiled the splendid effect of Clytæmnestra. Agamemnon’s murder must be made for the moment as intelligible as may be, therefore the dramatist shows us a conceited, heavy-witted, pompous person who none the less reveals certain qualities which have made it possible for such a man to overthrow Troy.