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In the next place, Aeschylus is difficult because his mind was given to brood over subjects in their nature obscure, and the point and interest of which centres in the very fact of their being obscure. Dreams, prophecies, oracles, bodings, omens, and portents, were the favourite food of his fancy. In a word, the supernatural was his delight. We have ghosts and demons, Furies and gory spectres, prophetic ravings and dark presentiments,—all grand and awful and terrific both in the language in which they are clothed and the conceptions which they embody. And he treats these subjects with the earnestness of a poet who had a firm belief in their reality, and in their playing an important part in human affairs. The relations between the seen and the unseen, the modes by which departed spirits communicate and are made to sympathize with those on earth, or on the contrary, show their resentment beyond the grave; the mysterious connexion between sin and woe, crime and retribution, impiety and misfortune; the fixed laws of Fate, Necessity, and eternal Justice;-such are the themes which Aeschylus loved, and which certainly are not conducive, when deeply reasoned out by a naturally mystic mind, to the formation of a lucid style.

Thirdly, he is difficult from the almost Oriental figurativeness of his expressions, and from the constant use of metaphors and similes, and in particular, from a habit of confusing these two distinct forms of speech, which greatly involves and perplexes the meaning. He appears too to have borrowed some of his imagery and phraseology from the Persians, the recent victory over whom, whether he personally shared in it or not, naturally attracted his mind to a subject at once new and striking. Add

'Besides the ghost of Darius in the Persae and of Clytemnestra in the Eumenides, the spectral form of Argus, the keeper of Io, was represented on the stage, as is clear from Prom. 579-90, a passage which can only be understood of a real form and real sounds, not of a mere fancy.

1 Hence (see Ar. Ran. 938) he derived his fondness for strange and portentous forms, his iππadeктpvóves &c., the types of which may be traced in many of the Assyrian sculptures. Miss A. Swanwick, in her Introduction to the Translation of the Orestea, p. xvii, observes that the Persian Theology seems to have made great impression on the mind of Aeschylus. Prof. Kennedy (Introd. to Agam. p. viii) calls him "a pessimist, nay, the very patriarch and first preacher of pessimism."

to this a certain irony consisting in equivocal senses and double meanings, especially in dialogues, and an allusive or indirect way of speaking which is extremely liable to be misunderstood. To say that his words are often susceptible of more than one interpretation, is perhaps to state a fault which the Greek language, with all its clearness, is by no means exempt from. But whereas in other writers the context is usually quite decisive of the true sense, in Aeschylus this too often fails us as a guide, from the general obscurity of his meaning.

Fourthly, he is difficult from a grammatical carelessness or incoherency resulting from rapid composition, or rather from the impetus of genius, which, full of its own thoughts that crowd. each other in rapid succession, leaves much to be understood, and causes an abruptness and suddenness of transition which some have attempted to explain by the supposition of lost verses, a theory which Hermann has carried to an extent much beyond probability. Nominatives standing alone without their verbs, clauses cut short by aposiopesis, the frequent use of particles which have a force depending entirely on something to be mentally supplied, and of anomalous constructions and unusual meanings of words, are also frequent causes of perplexity. The extreme metrical accuracy which he uniformly adopts in the choral odes must also have greatly restricted him in the choice of words, and this in passages which the utmost freedom in diction would hardly have rendered very clear.

Lastly, a certain inflated, grandiloquent, and strained loftiness of language, sometimes not far removed (as the ancients themselves thought) from bombast, is a cause, if not of positive difficulty, at least of a continual mental effort in the perusal of his writings. He is, so to speak, always upon stilts, and reluctant to descend to the ordinary standard of poetical expression. Tranquillity and repose are thus too seldom allowed; he was great in EKπλngis, but he sacrificed everything to it. Aristophanes with good reason called him στόμφαξ, κομποφακελορρήμων, αὐθαδόστομος, and ξυμβαλεῖν οὐ ῥᾴδιος. His invention was constantly occupied with strange forms and unnatural portents. His fondness for horrors amounted almost to a morbid appetite for blood. The conception of the spectral children in the Agamemnon, carrying their own gnawed hearts in their hands; the frightful

details, in the same play, of the king's murder by his wife; the blood-dripping and blood-sucking Erinyes; the butchery of the Persians at Salamis; the mangled liver of Prometheus, and his agonizing tortures; not to add the list of atrocities enumerated in Eum. 177, &c., fully bear out this estimate of idiosyncrasy.

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It may seem almost a contradiction to add, that the general style of Aeschylus has a straightforwardness and a simplicity rather epic than dramatic in its character. The truth however is, that his narratives are too impetuous to be artistically involved; and hence his idioms, on the whole, present a marked contrast with the complex and rhetorical constructions of Sophocles. Especially to be noticed is the natural order and arrangement of his words. The chief impediments arise from uncertainty of the readings, or archaic phraseology, or from some point of political or religious usage only partially known to us. The latter, indeed,—the religious system held and inculcated by the poet,-is of such paramount importance to the right understanding of his works, that an outline of it,-necessarily a very brief one,—may here be usefully subjoined.

In several respects, and not the least so in this, Aeschylus may be regarded as a poet of the heroic ages. His mind was deeply imbued with the old Element-worship of the PelasgoArgive people. The gods were not however with him merely the symbols of nature-powers; they were the agents in human affairs, the punishers of crime, the authors of calamity to those who violated their laws or infringed their high prerogatives. Earth is to him a real divinity, closely connected with the infernal powers, and therefore requiring propitiation both as

2 Of Homer he was avowedly a student and an imitator. Athen. viii. p. 347, Ε, τὰς αὑτοῦ τραγῳδίας τεμάχη εἶναι ἔλεγε τῶν ̔Ομήρου μεγάλων δείπνων. But this refers perhaps chiefly to his selection of the Homeric heroes for his themes; and this he would do, because Homer was in favour with the Aristocracy. See Theatre of the Greeks, p. 76. Ar. Ran. 1040, ödev ýμǹ φρὴν ἀπομαξαμένη πολλὰς ἀρετὰς ἐποίησεν, Πατρόκλων, Τεύκρων θυμολεόντων. It should however be clearly understood, that before the time of Plato the name Homer included all the so-called Cyclic' subjects; and it is very doubtful if Aeschylus knew our Iliad and Odyssey. But he was certainly an imitator of Theognis. Compare Ag. 36 with Theog. 815, Ag. 381-3 with Theog. 417 and 449 seqq., Ag. 450-2 with Theog. 151-2, Ag. 705-6 with Theog. 961, Cho. 53-7 with Theog. 203 seqq., and 839 with 1165.

the guardian of the dead, whom she holds in reserve as potent agents for good or evil, and as the sender of hostile monsters, diseases, and barrenness, in wrath for pollutions contracted from the human race. The nurturer of youth, the mother of all produce, which she benignly teems forth to be received back again into her lap, she holds the foremost place among the powers which directly sustain human life, and as such she is always invoked first by new comers to a country. As the giver of vitality, she is able to impart even to the spirits of the dead a certain power, without which they would be totally helpless, and unable to hold any communication with their friends on earth. She is, in a word, the medium by which such connexion is sustained. The sun and the moon, and perhaps the other stars, are "the bright powers that bring summer and winter to mortals;" the light of the sun is the source of joy and hope and prosperity; and hence his identity with Apollo, though rather obscurely hinted at in the extant works of Aeschylus, is not to be doubted, and indeed is clear from a single passage, rightly understood (Choeph. 974). Apollo, Hermes, Pallas, and last, but not least, Zeus under very varied attributes (Téλelos, Κτήσιος, Αἰδοῖος, Σωτὴρ, Ξένιος, &c.), seem to be the chief divinities of the supernal or upper order of gods, though not unfrequent mention is made of Artemis, Aphrodite, Ares, Hera, and Poseidon. Each of these has his or her peculiar and welldefined office; but it is needless to pursue the inquiry into this subject. Pallas, as the patron-goddess of Athens, is the impersonation of divine wisdom, and she holds, in the Eumenides, the first place in tempering justice with mercy, and laying down moral principles for the guidance of man. Between the infernal powers (XOóvio) of the old elemental mythology, including demons, heroes, and Erinyes,-gloomy, vengeful, and terrible,—and the newer and more benign deities of the Jovian dynasty (veάτeρol Oeoì, Eum. 156), the Olympian gods generally, he draws a clear distinction. The former are the genii of death and Nature's sternest laws; the latter interfere closely and sympathetically in the affairs of men, as protectors of cities and of the people in their social and political relations. It was the great object of the poet to explain away the old legends which represented these two powers (xóvior and ovρávioi) in continual conflict, and to

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show that there was a real and material union between them,in a word, that the government of the world and the law of Nature could not be other than a harmonious principle. From their eternal warfare he perceived that nothing but evil could result for man, and therefore he laboured to reconcile what appeared to be adverse, or at least to show that it was but a temporal and accidental disagreement. Of the Chthonian Powers he speaks with a mixed veneration and religious awe (σéßas and Seioidaiμovía) which leads him to deprecate, propitiate, and euphemize them, and which leaves no doubt of the sincerity of his belief in their influence over the destinies of mankind.

It has been well said, that "Aeschylus belongs to a period when the national legends of Greece were considered not as mere amusing fictions, but as evidences of the divine power which ruled over Greece." Hence he always makes Destiny a prominent feature in describing victory, defeat, alliances, and the fortunes of regal houses, which, in his mind, represented the nations themselves. The origin of families and even of nations he attributes to the counsels of Zeus, and he never loses sight of this view in tracing the course of events which have signalized a nation or a dynasty.

Aeschylus was, indeed, pre-eminently a religious poet. He derived from the teaching of his master Pythagoras a sublime, though a stern and gloomy, conception of the divine attributes, the mysterious and inscrutable ways, the irresistible will, the inviolable majesty of God. He shrinks from impiety as the fertile source of every woe. But most especially does he dwell on the Omnipotence and the Justice of the Supreme Being. On these two points hangs a large portion of his theology; the helplessness of man, his inevitable fall sooner or later, when under the wrath of heaven; the dependence of every event on the will of Zeus; the facility with which he works out his own counsels; the certainty of sin being ultimately punished. Zeus knows no superior, but only that Eternal Destiny which even he is compelled to obey. He is the Consummator (Téλetos) of all things with this reservation, that Fate or Necessity must have pre-ordained the event which

3 K. O. Müller, Hist. Gr. Lit. p. 326.