To Athens then the scene changes, where Orestes' case is tried: Apollo defends him; Pallas is the judge; the Furies the accusers; the Court of the Areopagus the jury. The votes of these are equally divided; but Athene gives her casting vote in his favor; and to compensate the Erinyes, turns them into Eumenides—from Furies to goddesses of good omen and fortune. Orestes is free, and the end is happy.
No doubt very pretty and feeble of the bronze-throated Eagle- barker to make it so. What! clap on an exit to these piled-up miseries?—he should have plunged us deeper in woe, and left us to stew in our juices; he Should have shunned this detestable effeminacy, worthy only of the Dantes and Shakespeares. But unfortunately he was an Esotericist, with the business of helping, not plaguing, mankind: he must follow the grand symbolism of the story of the Soul, recording and emphasizing and showing the way to its victories, not its defeats. He had the eye to see deep into realities, and was not to be led from the path of truth eternal by the cheap effective expedients of realism. He must tell the whole truth: building up, not merely destroying; and truth, at the end, is not bitter, but bright and glorious. It is the triumph and purification of the soul; and to that happy consummation all sorrow and darkness and the dread Furies themselves, whom he paints with all the dark flame-pigments of sheerest terror, are but incidental and a means.
And the meaning of it all? Well, the meaning is as vast as the scheme of evolution itself, I suppose. It is Hamlet over again, and treated differently; that which wrote Hamlet through Shakespeare, wrote this Trilogy through Aeschylus. I imagine you are to find in the Agamemnon the symbol of the Spirit's fall into matter—of the incarnation (and obscuration) of the Lords of Mind—driven thereto by ancient Karma, and the result—of the life of past universes. Shakespeare deals with this retrospectively, in the Ghost's words to Hamlet on the terrace. The 'death' of the Spirit is its fall into matter.
And just as the ghost urges Hamlet to revenge, so Apollo urges Orestes; it is the influx, stir, or impingement of the Supreme Self, that rouses a man, at a certain stage in his evolution, to lift himself above his common manhood. This is the most interesting and momentous event in the long career of the soul: it takes the place, in that drama of incarnations, that the marriage does in the modern novel. Shakespeare, whose mental tendencies were the precise opposite of Aeschylus's—they ran to infinite multiplicity and complexity, where the other's ran to stern unity and simplicity (of plot)—made two characters of Polonius and Gertrude: Polonius,—the objective lower world, with its shallow wisdom and conventions; Gertrude,—Nature, the lower world in it subjective or inner relation to the soul incarnate in it. Aeschylus made no separate symbol for the former. Shakespeare makes the killing of Polonius a turning-point; thenceforth Hamlet must, will he nill he, in some dawdling sort sweep to his revenge. Aeschylus makes that same turning-point in the killing of Clytemnestra, whereafter the Furies are let loose on Orestes. If you think well what it means, it is that "leap" spoken of in Light on the Path, by which a man raises himself "on to the path of individual accomplishment instead of mere obedience to the genii which rule our earth." He can no longer walk secure like a sheep in the flock; he has come out, and is separate; he has chosen a captain within, and must follow the Soul, and not outer convention. That step taken, and the face set towards the Spirit-Sun—the life of the world forgone, that a way may be fought into the Life of the Soul:—all his past lives and their errors rise against him; his passions are roused to fight for their lives, and easy living is no longer possible. He must fly then for refuge to Loxias the Sun-God, the Supreme Self, who can protect him from these Erinyes—but it is Pallas, Goddess of the Inner Wisdom, of the true method of life, that can alone set him free. And it is thus that Apollo pleads before her for Orestes who killed his mother (Nature) to avenge his Father (Spirit):—a man, says he, is in reality the child of his father, not of his mother:—this lower world in which we are incarnate is not in truth our parent or originator at all, but only the seed-plot in which we, sons of the Eternal, are sown, the nursery in which we grow to the point of birth;—but we ourselves are in our essence flame of the Flame of God. So Pallas—and you must think of all she implied—Theosophy, right living, right thought and action, true wisdom—judges Orestes guiltless, sets him free, and transforms his passions into his powers.
V. SOME PERICLEAN FIGURES
Yoshio Markino (that ever-delightful Japanese) makes an illuminating comparison between the modern western and the ancient eastern civilizations. What he says amounts to this: the one is of Science, the other of the Human Spirit; the one of intellect, the other of intuition; the one has learnt rules for carrying all things through in some shape that will serve—the other worked its wonders by what may be called a Transcendental Rule of Thumb. But in fact it was a reliance on the Human Spirit, which invited the presence thereof;—and hence results were attained quite unachievable by modern scientific methods. What Yoshio says of the Chinese and Japanese is also true of all the great western ages of the past. We can do a number of things,— that is, have invented machinery to do a number of things for us,—but with all our resources we could not build a Parthenon: could not even reproduce it, with the model there before our eyes to imitate.*
——— * I quote Prof. Mahaffy in his Problems of Greek History. He also points out that it is beyond the powers of modern science in naval architecture to construct a workable model of a Greek trireme. ———
It stands as a monument of the Human Spirit: as an age-long witness to the presence and keen activity of that during the Age of Pericles in Athens. It was built at almost break-neck speed, yet remains a thing of permanent inimitable beauty, defying time and the deliberate efforts of men and gunpowder to destroy it. The work in it which no eye could see was as delicate, as exquisite, as that which was most in evidence publicly; every detail bore the deliberate impress of the Spirit, a direct spiritual creation. There is no straight line in it; no two measurements are the same; but by a divine and direct intuition, every difference is inevitable, and an essential factor in the perfection of the whole. As if the same creative force had made it, as makes of the sea and mountains an inescapable perfection of beauty.
It is one of the many mighty works wherewith Pericles and his right-hand man Pheidias, and his architects Ictinus and Callicrates, adorned Athens. It would serve no purpose to make a list of the great names of the age; which you know well enough already. The simple fact to note is this: that at a certain period in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. the Crest-Wave of Evolution was, so far as we can see, flowing through a very narrow channel. The Far Eastern seats of civilization were under pralaya; the life-forces in West Asia were running towards exhaustion, or already exhausted; India, it is true, is hidden from us; we cannot judge well what was going on there; and so was most of Europe. Any scheme of cycles that we can put forward as yet must necessarily be tentative and hypothetical; what we do not know is, to what we do know, as a million to one; I may be quite wrong in giving Europe as long a period for its manvantaras as China; possibly there were no manvantaric activities in Europe, in that period, before the rise of Greece. But whether or no, this particular time belongs, of all European countries, to Greece: the genius of the world, the energy of the human spirit, was mainly concentrated there; and of Greece, in the single not too large city of Athens. It is true I am rather enamored of the cycle of a hundred and thirty years; prejudiced, if you like, in its favor; it is also true that genius was speaking through at least one world-important Athenian voice— that of Aeschylus—before the age of Pericles began. Still, these dates are significant: 477, in which year Athens attained the hegemony of Greece, and 347, in which Plato died. It was after 477 that Aeschylus eagle-barked the grandest part of his message from the Soul, and that the great Periclean figures appeared; and though Athenians of genius out-lived Plato, he was the last world-figure and great Soul-Prophet; the last Athenian equal in standing to Aeschylus. When those thirteen decades had passed, the Soul had little more to say through Athens.— Aristotle?—I said, the Soul had little more to say. . . .
About midway through that cycle came Aegospotami, and the destruction of the Long Walls and of the Empire; but these did not put an end to Athenian significance. Mahaffy very wisely goes to work to dethrone the Peloponnesian War—as he does, too, the Persian—from the eminence it has been given in the textbooks ever since. As usual, we get a lopsided view from the historians: in this case from Thucydides, who slurred through a sort of synopsis of the far more important and world-interesting mid-fifth century, and then dealt microscopically with these twenty-five years or so of trumpery raidings, petty excursions and small alarms. That naval battle at Syracuse, which Creasy puts with Marathon in his famous fifteen, was utterly unimportant: tardy Nicias might have won all through, and still Athens would have fallen. Her political foundations were on the sand. Under Persia you stood a much better chance of enjoying good government and freedom: Persian rule was far less oppressive and cruel. The states and islands subject to Athens had no self-government, no representation; they were at the mercy of the Athenian mob, to be taxed, bullied, and pommeled about as that fickle irresponsible tyranny might elect or be swayed to pommel, tax, and bully them. Thucydides was a great master of prose style, and so could invest with an air of importance all the matter of his tale. Besides, he was the only contemporary historian, or the only one that survives. So the world ever since has been tricked into thinking this Peloponnesian War momentous; whereas really it was a petty family squabble among that most family-squabblesome of peoples, the Greeks.—In most of which I am only quoting Mahaffy; who, whether intentionally or not, deals with Greek history in such a way as to show the utter unimportance, irrelevance, futility, of war.