Another Shakespearian quality in the Æschylean use of language and of imagery might be illustrated from his metaphors. He calls the ocean a forest—πόντιον ἄλσος or ἁλίρρυτον ἄλσος—as though he would remind us of the great sea-beasts that roam like wolves or lions down beneath the waves. The vultures are ὀξύστομοι Ζηνὸς ἀκραγεῖς κύνες. The eagle is Διὸς πτηνὸς κύων δαφοινός. The Furies of Clytemnestra are μητρὸς ἔγκοτοι κύνες. The Argives who poured forth from the Wooden Horse to plunder Troy are called Ἀργεῖον δάκος, ἵππου νεοσσός, ἀσπιδηφόρος λεώς. The flame of the thunderbolt becomes πυρὸς ἀμφήκης βόστρυχος. The beacon-flame on Ægiplanctus is a huge beard, φλογὸς μέγαν πώγωνα. In all these metaphors we trace an imaginative energy which the Greek poets usually sought to curb. When we speak of the mighty line of Æschylus, we naturally remember verses like these:
ἀλλ' οὗ καρανιστῆρες ὀφθαλμωρύχοι,
and
φαιοχίτωνες καὶ πεπλεκτανημέναι
πυκνοῖς δράκουσιν,
which carry with them a massive weight, not only of sound and words, but also of meaning and of imagery. No wonder that Aristophanes jestingly compared the gravity of the style of Æschylus with that of Euripides in balances. A single phrase of the former's causes a score of the latter's to kick the beam; and as the sonorous nouns, flanked by their polysyllabic epithets, advance, the earth is seen to shake as though battalions were hurrying to the charge, and squadrons of cavalry with thundering horses' hoofs and waving plumes were prancing on the plain.
The difficulty of Æschylus, when it is not due, as in the Suppliants and in the choric odes of the Agamemnon, to a ruined text, may be ascribed to the rapidity of his transition from one thought to another, to the piling-up of images and metaphors, and to the remote and mystic nature of the ideas he is seeking for the first time to express in language. Where even simple prose could scarcely convey his meaning, he presents a cloud of highly poetic figures to our mind. This kind of difficulty, however, like that which the student has to meet in Pindar, is straightforward. You know when you are at fault, and why, and how alone you can arrive at a solution of the problem. The difficulty of Sophocles is more insidious. It is possible to think you understand him, when you really do not; to feel his drift, and yet to find it hard to construe his language. In this case the difficulty arises from the poet's desire to convey his meaning in a subtle, many-sided, pregnant, and yet smooth style. The more you think over it, the more you get from it. Euripides belonged to an age of facile speech, fixed phraseology, and critical analysis: it therefore follows that he presents fewer obvious difficulties to the reader; and this, perhaps, was one reason for his popularity among the early scholars of the modern age. At any rate, he does not share with Æschylus the difficulty that arose when a poet of intense feeling and sublime imagination strove to grapple with deep and intricate thoughts before language had become a scientific instrument.
In conclusion I would once again return to that doctrine of παθήματα μαθήματα, connected with a definite conception of the divine government and based upon a well-considered theory of human responsibility, which may be traced throughout the plays of Æschylus. To this morality his drama owes its unity and vigor, inasmuch as all the plots constructed by the poet both presuppose and illustrate it. The conviction that what a man sows he will reap, and that the world is not ruled by blind chance, is, in one sense or another, the most solid ethical acquisition of humanity. Amid so much else that seems to shift in morals and in religion, it affords firm ground for action. This vital moral faith the Greeks held as securely, at least, as we do; and the theology with which their highest teachers—men like Æschylus, Pindar, Plato—sought to connect it, tended to weaken its effect far less than any other systems of divinity have done. We are too apt to forget this, while we fix our attention upon the unrivalled beauty of Greek art. In reality there are few nations whose fine literature combines so much æsthetic splendor with direct, sound, moral doctrine; and this, not because the poets strove to preach, but because their minds were healthily imbued with human wisdom. Except in the works of Milton, we English, for example, can show no poetical exposition of a moral theory at all equal to that of Æschylus. But while Milton sets forth his doctrine as a portion of divine revelation, and vitiates it with the dross of dogmatism, Æschylus shows the law implicit in the history of men and heroes: it is inferred by him intuitively from the facts of spiritual life, as apprehended by the consciousness of the Greeks in their best age.
FOOTNOTES:
[125] See line 107.