Another celebrated trilogy had for its theme the tale of Troy. The Myrmidons (Μυρμιδόνες), named from the followers of Achilles who formed the chorus, dealt with the death of Patroclus. Achilles, withdrawn from battle because of his quarrel with Agamemnon, is adjured by the chorus to pity the defeat of the Greeks. He allows Patroclus, his friend, to go forth against the Trojans. After doing valiantly, Patroclus is slain by Hector. The news is brought by Antilochus to Achilles, who gives himself up to passionate lament. This play was a favourite of Aristophanes, who quotes from it repeatedly. In this drama occurred the celebrated simile of the eagle struck to death with an arrow winged by his own feathers, which was cited throughout antiquity and which Byron paraphrased in one of his most majestic passages.[259] The story was apparently continued in the Nereides (Νηρηίδες). Achilles determined to revenge Patroclus. The magic armour made for him by Hephæstus was brought by his mother Thetis, accompanied by her sisters, the sea-nymphs, daughters of Nereus, who formed the chorus. The last play was the Phrygians (Φρύγες) or Ransom of Hector (Ἕκτορος Λύτρα) in which Priam prevailed upon Achilles to give up the corpse of Hector for burial. It appears likely that in the two preceding plays Æschylus followed Homer somewhat closely. But in the Ransom he did not. Besides the detail to which Aristophanes[260] makes allusion, that Achilles sat for a long time in complete silence, no doubt while the chorus and Priam offered piteous and lengthy appeals, there are differences of conception. In Homer, one of the most moving features of the story is that Priam goes to the Trojan camp practically alone. He is met by the God Hermes who conducts him to the tent of Achilles. Then, solitary among his foes, he throws himself upon the mercy of his son’s destroyer. No such effect was to be found in Æschylus. The chorus of Phrygians accompanied their king, and we find in a fragment of Aristophanes[261] a hint of much posturing and stage-managed supplication.
The Women of Etna (Αἰτναῖαι) was produced in Sicily at the foundation of Hiero’s new city. In the Men of Eleusis (Ἐλευσίνιοι) Æschylus dealt with the earliest struggle of Athens—the war with Eleusis, his own birth-place. More ambitious in its topic was the Daughters of the Sun (Ἡλιάδες) which dealt with the fall of Phaethon. A pretty fragment alludes to that “bowl of the Sun” so brilliantly described by Mimnermus, in which the god travels back by night from West to East. It seems that the geographical enumerations prominent in the Prometheus-trilogy were found here also, tinged less with grimness and more with romance. In the Thracian Women (Θρῇσσαι) Æschylus treated the same theme as Sophocles in the Ajax. It is significant that the death of the hero was announced by a messenger. Possibly, then, it was a desire for novelty which caused the younger playwright to diverge so strikingly from custom as to depict the actual suicide. The Cabiri (Κάβειροι) was the first tragedy to portray men intoxicated. In the Niobe (Νιόβη) occurred splendid lines quoted with approbation by Plato:—
Close kin of heavenly powers,
Men near to Zeus, who upon Ida’s peak
Beneath the sky their Father’s altar serve,
Their veins yet quickened with the blood of gods.[262]
The Philoctetes is the subject of an interesting essay by Dio Chrysostom.[263] All the three great tragedians wrote plays[264] of this name, and Dio offers a comparison. Naturally, but for us unfortunately, he assumes a knowledge of these works in his readers; still, certain facts emerge about the Æschylean work. Men of Lemnos—the island on which Philoctetes had been marooned—constituted the chorus. To them the hero narrated the story of his desertion by the Greeks, and his wretched life afterwards. Odysseus persuaded him to come and help the Greeks at Troy by a long recital of Hector’s victory and false reports of the death of Agamemnon and Odysseus. Neither Neoptolemus nor Heracles (important characters in Sophocles) seems to have been introduced by Æschylus. Dio comments on the style and characterization. The primitive grandeur of Æschylus, he remarks, the austerity of his thought and diction, appear appropriate to the spirit of tragedy and to the manners of the heroic age. Odysseus is indeed clever and crafty, but “far removed from present-day rascality”; in fact he seems “absolutely patriarchal when compared with the modern school”. That the play is named after one of the persons and not the chorus, leads one to attribute it to a comparatively late period in the poet’s life. Finally, the Weighing of the Souls (Ψυχοστασία) is remarkable for the scene in Heaven, modelled upon a passage in the Iliad, where Zeus, with Thetis, mother of Achilles, on one hand, and Eos, mother of Memnon, on the other, weighed in a balance the souls or lives of the two heroes about to engage in fight before Troy.
In attempting a general appreciation of this poet one should avoid making the error of judging him practically by the Agamemnon alone. Otherwise we cannot hope to understand the feeling of fifth century Athens towards him. Most of his work has vanished, but the collection we possess seems fairly representative of his development; if we give weight to his comparatively inferior plays we may understand the feeling of two such different men as Aristophanes and Euripides. Incredible as it may seem, by the end of that century Æschylus was looked on as half-obsolete. Euripides thought of him much as Mr. Bernard Shaw now thinks of Shakespeare; Aristophanes, lover of the old order as he was, seems to have felt for the man who wrote the Agamemnon a breezy half-patronizing affection; while putting him forward in the Frogs to discomfit Euripides, he handles the older poet only less severely than he handles the younger. He and his contemporaries viewed Æschylus as a whole, not fixing their eyes exclusively on his final trilogy.
Let us consider him first as a purely literary artist, a master of language, leaving his strictly dramatic qualities on one side. We find that his three great notes are grandeur, simplicity, and picturesqueness. To describe the grandeur of Æschylus is a hopeless task; some notion of it may be drawn from the account of his individual works just given, but the only true method is of course direct study of his writings. The lyrics, from the Supplices to the Eumenides, touch the very height of solemn inspiration and moral dignity; as it has been often said, his only peers are the prophets of Israel. The non-lyrical portions of his work, stiff with gorgeous embroidery, are less like the conversations of men and women than the august communings of gods; that majestic poem which has for auditors the Sun himself, the rivers, the mountains, and the sea, and for background the whole race of man, is not merely written about Prometheus: it might have been written by Prometheus. But such magnificence has its perils. The mere bombast for which Kyd and even Marlowe are celebrated, and which has given us such things as
The golden sun salutes the morn