With Euripides, on the other hand, the character of the protagonist becomes more deeply significant than even Æschylus had made her. For Euripides, the mandate of the god was false, and the vengeance taken was a stupendous crime against humanity. When Orestes and Electra, wrought up by passion, have accomplished it, Euripides makes reaction come to them as to any other mortal being. They are not pursued by visible Furies, from which they may flee to the sanctuary of Apollo, but by remorse and cankering doubt of their own motives. For him they are simply human creatures; and the touch of realism, animated as it is by a daring sceptical spirit, has laid a blight on much that was beautiful in the earlier conception of Electra’s character. To recover that, we must go back to the Libation-bearers of Æschylus.
[16]. From Professor Lewis Campbell’s translation of the Choephorœ (Clarendon Press).
Æschylus: Cassandra
For the beginning of Cassandra’s story we must go back to the epic theme. The first word which Homer tells of her is in the Thirteenth Book of the Iliad, where she is called “the fairest of Priam’s daughters.” But that is late in the Siege; and there is a legend which gives her an earlier connection with the tale of Troy. Indeed, we find that she was a link in the chain of events which led Helen and the Greek army to her native city. When she was still a young girl she had, in some mysterious way, been beloved by the god Apollo. The god gave her the gift of prophecy; but because she refused his love he angrily confounded the gift that he could not recall by decreeing that her prophetic utterances should never be believed. This is the central point round which our thought about Cassandra must revolve. She is the virgin priestess who holds herself inviolate even from the embraces of a divine lover; and she is an oracle of clear vision and stainless truth, whose divination is cursed with futility.
The events of her career show blacker and more hideous against the clear light of her spirit. All through the long agony of the Trojan war we have a sense of Cassandra at the altar, lifting pure hands in supplication for her dear city. The fighting raged outside the walls like an angry sea, while inside the town and away in the Greek encampment all the passions let loose by war raged no less fiercely than the battle itself. But Cassandra, withdrawn from sight and sound of the conflict, continued to pray and sacrifice. Her life was consecrated. And although the gods themselves seemed sometimes leagued against her; although she had a perception of what the end must be, nothing could weaken her endurance nor shake her will. The Trojan princes wooed her in vain: the love of the great Sun-god himself could not make her swerve. The glory of her beauty: her gift of vision: her lofty impassioned soul, were vowed irrevocably to the service of her country and her home.
Yet this idealist and mystic was destined to suffer the worst brutalities of war in the hour of Troy’s destruction. She was made captive at her own altar; and was carried away by Agamemnon to be his slave-wife and the rival of his queen. The mind revolts at the thought: it is too awful to contemplate, and will not shape itself in cold reflection. The poets seem to have felt this; and we find that Æschylus and Euripides, who have both dwelt upon the story of Cassandra’s downfall, rise to stormy heights of emotion when they tell about it.
Euripides has placed Cassandra in the group of royal women in his Troades. The time of the drama is the morning which follows the overthrow of Troy; and the action represents the carrying-off of the princesses by their captors. It is, one would think, a time and a scene quite unfitted for dramatic presentation. The immense excitement—of victory on the one hand and defeat upon the other—has ebbed away; and all that remains to the Trojan women is misery so profound and hopeless as almost to be beyond the power of expression. The measure of their pain seems to claim a reverent silence; and we feel that the Troades does need the sanction of the ethical purpose which Professor Murray has found in it. But once we realize the deep and humane thought behind it: that the poet has chosen this part of the story expressly to reveal the hideous suffering which war entails upon women, the tragedy is fraught with significance.
The final act of Cassandra’s life is given by Æschylus in the Agamemnon. He, no less than Euripides, feels the appalling tragedy of her story; and both poets have put into her lips lyrics of wild and haunting beauty. But Æschylus, by removing the action to Mycenæ and by bringing Cassandra into conflict with Clytemnestra, has wrought a climax of extraordinary power.