Passing from the internal structure of these dramas to their form, we may notice how Æschylus provided theatrical variety consistent with the varying subject. It was requisite that the action of the two first should take place at Mycenæ; so the scene was not altered, but the Chorus was changed, in order that the pathos of Electra's situation might be made more clear in the Choëphorœ. The Eumenides admitted not only of a new Chorus, but also of a total change of scene; it may be added that this third drama violates the unities alike of place and time.
Of the three plays of the trilogy, the Agamemnon is unquestionably the noblest. It is the masterpiece of Æschylus, and to one who has conquered its difficulties and imbibed its spirit it offers a spectacle of tragic grandeur not to be surpassed, hardly to be equalled, by anything which even Shakespeare produced. What some modern critics might regard as defects—the lengthy choric passages, abstract in their thought, though splendid in their imagery—the concentration of the poet's powers on one terrific climax, for every word that Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Cassandra utter leads up to the death-cry of the king—contribute to the excellence of a drama of this style. If we lack the variety and subtlety that charm us in a work like Hamlet; if, after reading the play over and over again, and testing it in many crucibles of critical analysis, we do not, as in the case of Shakespeare's tragedies, discover new and delicate beauties in the minor parts, but learn each time, and by each process, to admire the vigor of the poet's main conception, the godlike energy with which he has developed it; that may be taken as the strongest proof of its perfection as a monument of classic art.
There is, in the Agamemnon, an oppressive sense of multitudinous crimes, of sins gathering and swelling to produce a tempest. The air we breathe is loaded with them. No escape is possible. The marshalled thunder-clouds roll ever onward, nearer and more near, and far more swiftly than the foot can flee. At last the accumulated storm bursts in the murder of Agamemnon, the majestic and unconscious victim felled like a steer at the stall; in the murder of Cassandra, who foresees her fate, and goes to meet it with the shrinking of some dumb creature, and with the helplessness of one who knows that doom may not be shunned; in the lightning-flash of Clytemnestra's arrogance, who hitherto has been a glittering hypocrite, but now proclaims herself a fiend incarnate. As the Chorus cries, the rain of blood, that hitherto has fallen drop by drop, descends in torrents on the house of Atreus: but the end is not yet. The whole tragedy becomes yet more sinister when we regard it as the prelude to ensuing tragedies, as the overture to fresh symphonies and similar catastrophes. Wave after wave of passion gathers and breaks in these stupendous scenes; the ninth wave mightier than all, with a crest whereof the spray is blood, falls foaming; over the outspread surf of gore and ruin the curtain drops, to rise upon the self-same theatre of new woes.
The imagery of the Agamemnon most powerfully contributes to heighten the tragic impression of the plot. At one time the ancestral fury of the doomed house is likened to a demon leaping on it from above, by a metaphor which vividly suggests Blake's design of Satan pouring flame upon the dwelling of Job's sons. At another it is compared to a cormorant brooding upon its battlements; and yet again, by a stroke of irony peculiarly impressive to the Greeks, it is likened to a band of revellers. The repetition of the same class of metaphors, the frequent references to the net in which Agamemnon was to be caught, to the axe with which he and Cassandra were to be slaughtered, to the smoke and scent of blood which was to bathe the altar of the household Zeus with sacrifice unhallowed, assail the imagination with portentous monotony.
Of all the terrors in this tragedy none is so awful in itself, or so artistically heightened, as Cassandra's prophecy. Accompanying her lord and master, she has approached the palace of Mycenæ. Clytemnestra has greeted the king with a set oration, admirable for its rhetoric, covering by dark innuendoes her foul thought. Spreading upon the threshold purple raiment and mantles suited to the service of the gods—such embroidered garments, we may fancy, as Athenian ladies wrought for Pallas—she exclaims: "Descend from this thy chariot; nor set on earth, dread monarch, thy foot that trampled upon Troy." It is as though a mediæval wife should bid her lord, returning from the East, to tread on altar-cloths and sacerdotal vestments. Agamemnon shrinks from the sacrilege, but she overrules his scruples, and he complies. All this while Cassandra is seated, patient, in her car. Like a statue sculptured in monumental alabaster, with hands upon her knees, and head bowed on her breast, she waits unmoved. Then the conqueror is led in to his doom—a doom which the Chorus, in one of their wild eddying hymns of woe, seem almost to anticipate. Still Cassandra tarries; and now Clytemnestra comes again, with taunts and dreadful irony: "Happy are you, princess though you be, to have such rich and prosperous masters; enter the palace; the sacrifice is ready at the altar, and to this, as a slave of the house, you, too, are bidden." But Cassandra will not move. In her soul, where, though a slave, she still retains the gift of oracular vision, she foresees her doom. She knows what the riches of the house of Atreus mean, what the prosperity of Agamemnon really is, what the sacrifice to which she, too, is bidden will be. Clytemnestra leaves her, half in scorn and half in anger. Then, at length, Cassandra lifts her head, and stirs herself, and groans. The first word she utters is "Apollo! oh! Apollo!" This rouses the Chorus, and they ask: "What cry of wailing hast thou shrieked about Apollo? He is not a god to be greeted with dirges." Phœbus was, in truth, the deity of brightness and music, not of the funeral groan or death lament. Still Cassandra, with the same ill-omened utterance, reverberates the name: "Apollo! ah, Apollo! lo, a second time hast thou undone me!" To Phœbus she had promised her virginity; the promise was not kept, and he requited her with prophecy that none might heed or understand. No tragic portion is more piteous than this of her who was the clear-eyed seer of coming woes, the unwilling mouthpiece of dread oracles, doomed alike to knowledge worse than ignorance, and to the scorn that falls on idle babblers. Now, once again, descending on her with the might of prophecy, the god compels her to predict her own swift-coming fate. Little by little, at the intercession of the Chorus, Cassandra becomes more articulate. She calls the house before her "the shambles of a man, a pavement blood-bedabbled." There stands the stately palace-front; its marble steps are covered with tapestry, the statues of its protective gods are crowned with flowers; while the lonely prophetess is shuddering at so fair a frontispiece to a tragedy within so frightful, now to be accomplished on her master and herself. Meantime the Chorus also wait, involved in their own anxiety; the mysterious anguish of the weird woman, whom they know to have the hand of God laid heavily upon her, makes them tremble. "What mean you," they exclaim, "by scenting like a dog for blood upon this royal threshold?" Cassandra only answers: "Are not these children wailing for their death enough? Is not their flesh, tasted by their father at their uncle's board, my witness?" She points to phantoms which the Chorus cannot see, the ghosts of the children of Thyestes. They reply sullenly, for they know the story of the house: "We want no soothsayers." Then Cassandra breaks forth afresh, this time vaticinating imminent calamity: "What is she plotting, what doom unbearable? and there is none to aid!" The Chorus take up their strain: "Here, indeed, you are a riddler; what you meant before was common talk." But Cassandra heeds them not. Her second-sight pierces the palace-walls, and she shrieks: "Mad woman, are you decking your husband for the bath? The end draws near. Hand stretches forth to hand. Is it a net of hell? Keep the ox from the heifer! she hath caught him in her robe and slays him. I tell you he is falling, falling in the trough of death." The Chorus are puzzled by these hurried and ecstatic exclamations; but their very fear seems to keep them from the apprehension of the truth. Then Cassandra changes her tone, and bewails her own misfortunes, her coming death, and the crime of Paris which brought her to this doom, employing throughout these prophecies a lyric metre suited to their pregnant brevity. At last, when she has wellnigh worn out the patience of the Chorus, she assumes the regular iambic of common speech: "Now, then, at length shall the oracle gaze upon you free from veils like a bride. The Furies are in this house; blood-surfeited, but not assuaged, they hold perpetual revel here. It is the crime of Atreus and of Thyestes which they hunt, and woe will fall on woe." The Chorus can only wonder that she, a foreign princess, should know the secrets of the fated race; but she tells them the story of Apollo's love, and how she deceived him, and what he wrought to punish her. Then, even as she speaks, the pang of inspiration thrills her. Perhaps the speech that follows, through its ghastly blending of visions evoked from the past with insight piercing into the immediate future, affects the imagination more intensely than any other piece of tragic declamation. Even the sleep-mutterings of Lady Macbeth, though they form a curious modern counterpart to the broken exclamations of Cassandra, are less appalling; for hers reveal a guilty conscience maddened by one crime, while Cassandra's outcry sums up the history of a whole accursed race, and expresses at the same time the agony of an innocent victim:
Woe, woe! Ah, ah! what pain!
Again the dreadful pangs oracular
Shoot through me, tempesting my soul with preludes.
See you those children seated on the house-roof?
Babes are they, like unto the shapes of dreams;
Yea, children seem they, slaughtered by their kin,
Whose hands are filled with meat of their own flesh;
Their very hearts and entrails, piteous load,
I see them bear, whereof their father tasted!
Wherefore I say, vengeance for this is plotting.
A lion, thewless, amid pillows lapped,
House-guard, alas! for my returning master—
Mine: for I needs must bear the yoke, a slave.
But he, the admiral, Ilion's overthrower,
Knows not what things the tongue of that lewd bitch
With speeches and with long-drawn fawning fairness, like
A lurking Até, by ill-luck will do.
Thus, then, she dares: she, woman, slays a man;
Yea, slays. What loathsome reptile can I name her,
Nor miss my mark?—foul amphisbæna, Scylla
That dwells in rocks, the ship-borne seaman's bane,
Raging mother of hell, a truceless strife
Belching on friend and kindred! How she shouted
With daring swollen, as when the foemen scatter!
Now of these things I care not if I gain
No credence. What? What will be, comes; and thou
Wilt stand and pity and call me too true prophet.
No translation can do justice to the appalling fury of the original, since it is only in Greek—a language usually sedate and harmonized by sense of beauty—that such phrases as θύουσαν Ἀΐδου μητέρ' have their full value. The Chorus are shaken from their incredulity, as much by the intensity of Cassandra's conviction as by the desperate calm of her last words. Is Agamemnon really to be slain? Yes, she answers, and, pray or not as you may choose, they there inside the house are slaying. Then once more the rage of divination seizes her, and the scene of her own death, like that of Agamemnon's, flames upon her soul. The second speech has more of pathos than the first, less of fury; but it is scarcely less awful:
Ah, ah! the fire! lo, how it comes upon me!
Phœbus Lycæan, ho! Ah, woe is me!
She, too, this two-foot lioness that couches
With the wolf, what time the lion is away,
Will slay me, slay me! Like a poison-brewer
She'll mix my death-wage with her broth of hell;
Yea, and she swears, sharpening the knife to slay him,
Her lord shall pay with blood for bringing me.
Why wear I, then, these gauds to laugh me down—
This rod, these necklace-wreaths oracular?
You, ere my death, at least I will destroy:—
Go; fall; away, and perish: I shall follow.
Make rich some other curse of men than me.
Lo, you! Apollo's self is stripping me
Of this prophetic raiment—he who saw me
Even in these robes jeered at mid friends by foemen,
Who scorned in chorus with one voice of vain scorn.
Yea, when I was called beggar, vagabond,
Poor, wretched, starveling, speechless, I endured:
Now he who made me prophetess, the prophet,
Himself hath brought me to these straits of death.
No altar of my fathers waits for me,
But that red block where I must reeking wallow.
Nay, but not unavenged of heaven we perish!
For yet another in our cause shall come,
Avenger, matricide, his father's champion:
Though exiled, wandering from this land a stranger,
He shall return to crown the curse of kindred:
For gods in heaven have sworn a mighty oath
That the sire's prostrate corse shall bring him home.
Why wait I, then, lamenting thus, an alien?—
I, who beheld of old proud Ilion
Fare as she fared, and they who dwelt therein
Receive such measure from the gods of judgment,
I, too, will rise and dare, myself, to perish.
Therefore I greet these gates as gates of Hades,
Praying a full fair stroke may be my due,
That thus with blood that gently flows to waste,
Torn by no death-pangs, I these eyes may close.
The draught of prophecy is now drained to the very dregs. Nothing remains but for Cassandra to enter the palace-doors of Hades. She approaches them step by step, bewailing, after the fashion of Greek tragedy, her own woes, and those of Priam's family. Suddenly she starts. The scent of blood assails her nostrils, and, like a steer that shivers at the gory shambles, she draws back. The Chorus say, "It is only the smell of sacrifice upon the hearth." But the weird woman discovers a very different odor of coming slaughter: "To me the reek is like the breath of charnels." Still forward, though shrinking from the unseen, unavoidable doom, she must advance, invoking the avenger of herself and Agamemnon, and calling on the all-seeing sun. Her last words are uttered in the same spirit as Macbeth's soliloquy upon the point of battle; they intensify and elevate the tragic moment by drawing the whole destiny of mortals into harmony with her own doom: