Jean Deslyons, doctor of the Sorbonne, theologal of Senlis, author of the "Discours ecclesiastique contre le paganisme du Roi boit," published in the seventeenth century a work against the custom of laying coffins one above the other in the cemeteries, in which he took for his authority the twenty-fifth canon of the Council of Auxerre: "Non licet mortuum super mortuum mitti." Deslyons, in a note added to that work, now very scarce, and a copy of which was in the possession of Charles Nodier, if our memory is faithful, quotes a passage from the great antiquarian numismatist of Venloo, Hubert Goltzius, in which, in reference to embalming, Goltzius mentions the "Egyptians," of Æschylus, and "The Apotheosis of Orpheus,"—a title omitted in the enumeration given by Meursius. Goltzius adds that "The Apotheosis of Orpheus" was recited at the mysteries of the Lycomidians.
This title, "The Apotheosis of Orpheus" opens a field for thought. Æschylus speaking of Orpheus, the Titan measuring the giant, the god interpreting the god, what more magnificent, and how one would long to read that work! Dante, speaking of Virgil and calling him his master, does not fill up this gap, because Virgil, a noble poet, but without invention, is less than Dante; it is between equals, from genius to genius, from sovereign to sovereign, that such homage is splendid. Æschylus raises to Orpheus a temple of which he might occupy the altar himself: it is grand.
CHAPTER VII.
Æschylus is incommensurate. There is in him something of India. The wild majesty of his stature recalls those vast poems of the Ganges which walk through art with the steps of a mammoth, and which have, among the Iliads and the Odysseys, the appearance of hippopotami among lions. Æschylus, a thorough Greek, is yet something else besides a Greek. He has the Oriental immensity.
Saumaise declares that he is full of Hebraisms and Syrianisms.[1] Æschylus makes the Winds carry Jupiter's throne, as the Bible makes the Cherubim carry Jehovah's throne, as the Rig-Veda makes the Marouts carry the throne of Indra. The winds, the cherubim, and the marouts are the same beings,—the Breezes. Saumaise is right. The double-meaning words so frequent in the Phœnician language, abound in Æschylus. He plays, for instance, in reference to Jupiter and Europa, on the Phœnician word ilpha, which has the double meaning of "ship" and "bull." He loves that language of Tyre and Sidon, and at times he borrows the strange gleams of its style; the metaphor, "Xerxes with the dragon eyes," seems an inspiration from the Ninevite dialect, in which the word draka meant at the same time dragon and clear-sighted. He has Phœnician heresies. His heifer Io is rather the cow of Isis; he believes, like the priests of Sidon, that the temple of Delphi was built by Apollo with a paste made of wax and bees'-wings. In his exile in Sicily he often drank religiously at the fountain of Arethusa, and never did the shepherds who watched him hear him name Arethusa otherwise than by this mysterious name, Alphaga,—an Assyrian word signifying "source surrounded with willows."
Æschylus is, in the whole Hellenic literature, the sole example of the Athenian mind with a mixture of Egypt and Asia. These depths were repugnant to the Greek intelligence. Corinth, Epidaurus, Œdepsus, Gythium, Cheronea, which was to be the birth-place of Plutarch, Thebes, where Pindar's house was, Mantinea, where the glory of Epaminondas shone,—all these golden towns repudiated the Unknown, a glimpse of which was seen like a cloud behind the Caucasus. It seemed as though the sun was Greek. The sun, used to the Parthenon, was not made to enter the diluvian forests of Grand Tartary under the gigantic mouldiness of the monocotyledons under the lofty ferns of five hundred cubits, where swarmed all the first dreadful models of Nature, and under whose shadows existed unknown, shapeless cities, such as that fabulous Anarodgurro, the existence of which was denied until it sent an embassy to Claudius. Gagasmira, Sambulaca, Maliarpha, Barygaza, Cavenpatnam Sochoth-Benoth, Theglath-Phalazar, Tana-Serim—all these almost hideous names affrighted Greece when they came to be reported by the adventurers on their return first by those with Jason, then by those of Alexander. Æschylus had no such horror. He loved the Caucasus. It was there he had made the acquaintance of Prometheus. One almost feels in reading Æschylus that he had haunted the vast primitive thickets now become coal mines, and that he has taken huge strides over the roots, snake-like and half-living, of the ancient vegetable monsters. Æschylus is a kind of behemoth among geniuses.
Let us say, however, that the affinity of Greece with the East, an affinity hated by the Greeks, was real. The letters of the Greek alphabet are nothing else but the letters of the Phœnician alphabet reversed. Æschylus was all the more Greek from the fact of his being a little of a Phœnician.
This powerful mind, at times apparently crude on account of his very grandeur, has the Titanic gayety and affability. He indulges in quibbles on the names of Prometheus, Polynices, Helen, Apollo, Ilion, on the cock and the sun, imitating in this respect Homer, who made on the olive that famous pun which caused Diogenes to throw away his plate of olives and eat a tart.
The father of Æschylus, Euphorion, was a disciple of Pythagoras. The soul of Pythagoras, that philosopher half magian and half brahmin, seemed to have entered through Euphorion into Æschylus. We have said already that in the dark and mysterious quarrel between the celestial and the terrestrial gods, the intestinal war of Paganism, Æschylus was terrestrial. He belonged to the faction of the gods of earth. The Cyclops had worked for Jupiter; he rejected them as we would reject a corporation of workers who had turned traitors, and he preferred to them the Cabyri. He adored Ceres. "O thou, Ceres, nurse of my soul!" and Ceres is Demeter, is Gemeter, is the mother-earth. Hence his veneration for Asia. It seemed then as though Earth was rather in Asia than elsewhere. Asia is, in reality, compared with Europe, a kind of block almost without capes and gulfs, and little penetrated by the sea. The Minerva of Æschylus says, "Great Asia." "The sacred soil of Asia," says the chorus of the Oceanides. In his epitaph, graven on his tomb at Gela and written by himself, Æschylus attests "the Mede with long hair." He makes the chorus celebrate "Susicanes and Pegastagon, born in Egypt, and the chief of Memphis, the sacred city." Like the Phœnicians, he gives the name of "Oncea" to Minerva. In the "Etna" he celebrates the Sicilian Dioscuri, the Palici, those twin gods whose worship, connected with the local worship of Vulcan, had reached Asia through Sarepta and Tyre. He calls them "the venerable Palici." Three of his trilogies are entitled the "Persians," the "Ethiopid," the "Egyptians." In the geography of Æschylus, Egypt was Asia, as well as Arabia. Prometheus says, "the dower of Arabia, the heroes of Caucasus." Æschylus was, in geography, very peculiar. He had a Gorgonian city Cysthenes, which he placed in Asia, as well as a river Pluto, rolling gold, and defended by men with a single eye,—the Arimaspes. The pirates to whom he makes allusion somewhere are, according to all appearance, the pirates of Angria who inhabited the rock Vizindruk. He could see distinctly beyond the Pas-du-Nil, in the mountains of Byblos, the source of the Nile, still unknown to-day. He knew the precise spot where Prometheus had stolen the fire, and he designated without hesitation Mount Mosychlus in the neighbourhood of Lemnos.