nothing to remind us of any want on our own parts, or to suggest that our criticisms might arise from ignorance of the poet's real design. And yet, certainly, such would be the case; the critic of the Agamemnon, as an isolated play, would undoubtedly lay his finger on those little points which are introduced to give connection to the whole trilogy, with the assurance that here was a deficiency, and the satisfaction of thinking that it was on the poet's side and not on his own.* Whatever our expectations of a catastrophe may have been, the nature of that which takes place, and the proclamation of Clytemnestra by herself as the Até of the family in human shape (pavrašéμevos dè yvvaikì νεκροῦ τοῦδ' ὁ παλαιὸς δριμὺς ἀλαστωρ, κ. 7. A., v. 1498,) is of such a nature that we are left full of horror and perplexity morally revolting-if this were all. The emotions are indeed stirred up; but it is to all appearance only a witch's caldron, 'Double, double, toil and trouble.' No problem in human nature is solved, nor anything done, so far, towards purifying the passions,' modifying, disciplining, or in any way turning them to use. warn fruitlessly, or it would cease to be destiny. Yet still, with all this preparation, how startlingly does the apparition of Clytemnestra and her fearless avowal come upon us! Agamemnon's death, and all connected with it, now stand out in due proportion; so balanced, indeed, that the chorus is almost at a loss to decide,-for a moment imposed upon by the sophistry of evil passions (v. 1560, seq.) until Ægisthus comes in, and his hateful presence decides them. But are matters to stay here? Can it be supposed that Clytemnestra has really, as she endeavours to flatter herself, laid the spirit of domestic strife, and shed the last blood that is to flow? A modern plot would go no further. But the mind is revolted at this. Whatever plausibilities there were against Agamemnon are annihilated by the monstrous character of her crime; and the scale of Destiny is clearly turning. At this conjuncture there are two or three seemingly trifling incidents artfully thrown in. Ægisthus speaks of his being expelled while in his infancy, to be brought back by Justice in his manhood; and the prophecy of Cassandra and the speech of the chorus carrying us on to the So that the moral effects return of another child, similarly spirited of the single play, as above noticed, would away. In the more modern scheme, this have been bad, But there are the links would all have been lost; and more than which join it to the Choëphorce, sufficient this, for the development of Clytemnestra's to suggest the turn which the plot is about character would have been lost too, unless to take, and to satisfy us that the action is the moral of the play had been the triumph tending towards a real end. In the Choëof evil: but the Greeks had too fine a sense phore we find the adulterous pair in fullof harmony to end with such a discord as blown outward prosperity; but the avenger this; and the whole conclusion of the play is at the door-Orestes has been distinctly supplies the links which unite it to that called to the duty of vengeance by the gods; which follows: all is subservient to the his commission is to slay the slayers; and grand design; and, wonderful as the Aga- this is confirmed by Clytemnestra's dream memuon is in itself, it is only to be appre- of evil augury. Still the same care is takciated-indeed it is only to be rightly un-en, as in the former plays, to convey, derstood-in connection with what ensues. though indistinctly, an assurance that the One can scarcely read the play without be- end is not near: there are marked indicaing taught, by this one lesson, to confess tions throughout that Orestes finds himself how imperfectly those remains of antiquity ill at ease. His whole conduct discloses.it can be appreciated, which have come down-vaguely, of course, but it does disclose it to us in any degree imperfect; and how and communicates to us his own inward much of their excellence may consist in apprehensions. He is, as it were, dragged portions which one would now scarcely miss if they were absent. Suppose that of the Orestean trilogy the Agamemnon only had been extant, as the Prometheus, or the Seven against Thebes are of their trilogies: we should still have had all the delineation of character, all the mastery over feeling and passion, all the power of language, and the essential poetry, lyric and dramatic, of the piece; in short, all the materials for the whole and though we might have complained of something apparently inartificial, we should probably have discovered into the arena, and worked up by the Chorus, by Electra, and finally by the oracular voice of the (probably) unseen Pylades, the representative of the Delphic oracle,† until he does the deed; and when it is done, he still remembers that she was his mother; his disquiet shows itself in his laboured attempts at self-justification; until finally we see that this way madness lies,' and This may suggest to us that, if we seek, we seem to us άπροςδιόνυσα in the other plays. + See Mueller. shall probably find a meaning in many things which the dread goddesses of wrath, the Erinnyes, I the third play, been chased to Delphi; but appear. We say deliberately appear: for he finds there a respite; the religio loci not even Hermann can persuade us that overpowers his pursuers, and they fall into they are invisible. It is to no purpose to a slumber.* Meanwhile, under the direcargue that the chorus does not see them: tion of his protector Apollo, Orestes esthe question is not whether they appear to capes to Athens, where Athena institutes Orestes alone or not; but whether they the court of Mars' Hill, presiding herself, really and externally appear to him, or are while Apollo appears in the double capaci-` the phantoms of his crazed brain. If they ty of witness and advocate for Orestes; and really appear to him-that is, if they are avows that the deed was done at his bidthere in actual, though not bodily presence, ding, and consequently by the authority of then the spectators must have cognizance Zeus himself—for of them. We appeal to the closet-scene in Hamlet, where the spectators see the apparition of the ghost, and hear his voice, while the Queen remarks— This is the very coinage of your brain: οἰ πώποτ' εἶπον μαντικοῖσιν ἐν θρήνοις Thus, finally, the difficulty is solved, which must otherwise have arisen afresh on every new act of mutual vengeance. The divine law is at length expounded, the con fusion of right and wrong unravelled, and the perplexity removed, which had grown Aschylus is now preparing the way for the next play, in which no one doubts their ap-out of the conflicting elements of the plot. pearance; and, besides, Eschylus was a devout believer in the existence, a devout worshipper of the divinity of these Beings: -which, by the bye, gives him an incalculable advantage in these plays over Shakspeare with his witches in Macbeth. To the chorus, who, in the dialogue, are, as it were, the impersonation of very common sense, and who thus see only with the natural eye, these goddesses are of course invisible. But the spectator's eye is supposed to be purged, and his ear open (φρὴν ἔμμασιν λαμπρύνεται) to admit things unseen and unheard except to the initiated. And when such is supposed to be the character of the chorus, as it is in the sub-choir of Areopagites in the Eumenides, they are visible to these also. But if a ring of the populace of Attica were represented as grouped round Mars' Hill, we would venture to say that they saw nothing of the Nameless Goddesses. Here ends the second regular tragedy, technically so called; and in both there has been excited interest, perplexity, and unsatisfied emotion: this has been first on one side, and then on the other; and it has accumulated in the second play; for we have now the gods taking their sides, and embroiling the fray. And the link of the appearance of the Furies brings us to the third drama, which is, strictly speaking, not a tragedy at all, according to our idea of one; but it is exactly by this peculiarity that it becomes a perfect finish to those which are so. The victim has, at the commencement of * See the remarkable passage in Aristotle's Problems, xix. 43. Orestes is at last acquitted and cleansed from the stains of blood; yet not without such penance as atones for the violence done to natural feeling by his revenge. Without this penance,--without the difficulty in appeasing the Furies,-the lesson would not be perfect. But, as the case stands, the process of purification and the restoration of peace among the actors in the drama, is a type of the true kúðaρois aonμárov, which, according to the definition of Aristotle, is wrought by the trilogy, taken as a whole. In the first play the feelings are moved in pity for Agamemnon and horror of Clytemnestra; and this gives our sympathies to Orestes in the second; but yet not wholly so; for whatever were the deserts of the mother, she was the mother still. Thus the emotions are stirred up in conflict, and are thrown into the highest state of commotion and ferment, so that we are further than ever from seeing the end. But the end is at hand: this very conflict and fermentation is the moving of the chaos, from which a new state of order is to be evolved. And as a just analogy is a sound and sober argument, let us take this metaphor which has come in our way, and examine it. What is the result of fermentation but to throw off impurities, and then, but not until then, to restore tranquillity; not the same, but a very different tranquillity from that turbid state of stagnation which went before? It tranquillizes, but by In vindicating the personality of the Furies, we need not shut our eyes to the moral cloaked under this allegory. † Εἰ γὰρ δικαίως ἔπαθεν τι, δικαίως πέπονθεν, ἀλλ' lows oix ino oov.-Aristot. Rhetor., ii. 23, 3. clarifying. And thus, to come back again to Aristotle, the passions or feelings are purified, that is, clarified and reconciled, and so chastened and soothed into calmness in the third play: the perplexity which man could not unravel is unravelled, and the ways of Heaven justified to man. Our pity and terror, after having been worked up into a ferment, are not left to become flat without purification (as in the King Edipus), but are brought into a new and better state, the soul having been enlightened on those high subjects of which it might otherwise have known nothing. Thus tranquillity returns; but how different! No longer the slumber of sluggish ignorance, which is apathy; but the holy calm of high knowledge and deep faith, the reasonable service of a disciplined and enlightened mind. And thus the muse becomes not a mere handmaid to the excitement of morbid emotion, but a powerful agent in the formation of high moral and religious character. It has appeared that the terms of the Aristotelic definition, as given above, do not apply to a tragedy, strictly so called; but that, on the other hand, they apply with remarkable exactness to the one extant specimen of the entire group, of which one tragedy only formed a part. The trilogy and the definition stand to each other in the relation of lock and key. And this entitles us to conclude not only that the trilogy, which, and which alone, so strikingly fulfils the conditions of the definition, is as it were an authentic example to illustrate its real meaning; but further, that this which the great critic has embodied was the strictly true theory of the tragic drama, however far dramatists may have wandered from it in practice. Nor is it difficult to account for their wandering. For, not to rest on the scarcity of plots which would admit of such handling, and the multiplied difficulties in handling them so as that there should be one consistent whole, containing a beginning, a middle, and an end-while at the same time each of these component parts should be so organized and complete as to form a whole by itself, (which is yet a consideration of most practical and serious importance)-there are other reasons. The progress of dramatic poetry indicates a tendency to bring down the heroes from their stilts, to reduce their tumid bulk (as Euripides is ludicrously made to say in the Frogs'), by vegetable diet and antiphlogistic treatment-to prune and fine down everything to the standard of life. And closely connected with this tendency (lying indeed, perhaps, at the root of it) is a disinclination to look so deep into the causes and secret springs of events, as is necessary for an elaborate and complicated plot; for in the observation of contemporary events these are in general not traceable; whereas the study of character lies more on the surface, and consequently becomes popular. The depth of Eschylus' plots, the intensity of mind demanded by him of his hearers, was fitted for those who fought at Marathon: but to young Athens, a generation of punier thewes and sinews, and enervated by an education in the schools of the Sophists, it was oppressive. As the American Indians would say, his medicine was too great for them. They could with difficulty swallow his words; far less could they embrace the whole scope of his design;-only they had a faint vision of its meaning, and a suspicion that it was aristocratic; a cry, we know, nearly as dangerous at Athens as in revolutionary France. Later poets took the hint, and as Athens would not become heroic, they yielded to the jealousy of their day (onpoкparikov aōr' čopor) and dwarfed and stunted their conceptions to meet it: content to hold a mirror up to nature, and reflect men as they were seen and could be understood, rather than to draw the curtain from before the wizard's glass, and body forth forms of beauty and power which had no prototype among the lookers-on. In those dramas in which ἡ γυνή τε μοι, χὼ δοῦλος οὐδὲν ἧττον, χὼ δεσπότης, χὴ παρθένος, χὴ γραῖς all availed themselves of the full Athenian liberty of speech, there must have been a necessary tendency to reduce the tone of the man to that of the slave, the girl, and the old woman ;* just as, when four horses draw one carriage, the speed of the slowest must regulate the team. In short, the scheme of the trilogy was too gigantic-too Eschylean-to continue popular: it taxed the powers of the poet too heavily; and it ensured him too ungrateful a return for his labour. But in the treatment of Eschylus-like the bow of Ulysses in the hand of its rightful lord— we see what it could be, and was. With the Orestean trilogy before us we can form an idea, not insufficient, of the capabilities of the Greek tragedy. Are we then to conclude that the poet who conceived and executed this work, left it as a solitary Of course it may be objected, that this is an argument only from the exaggerations and falsehoods of the old comedy: but the old comedy was a lie with a great truth at the bottom of it: and we in the general likeness, the character, as preserved in are not ashamed to say that we place full confidence the caricature of Aristophanes. specimen of his skill, as if by way of empty | end of the play, and the announcement by challenge to his rivals ? Μὴ τεχνησάμενος μηδ' ἄλλο τι τεχνήσαιτο, Antigoné and the semi-chorus which takes her part, of their determination to bury it, Again, Hermann remarks that, in the Seven, The supposition is in itself all but inad-only Eteocles and Polynices are dead, and the missible; and it is fully refuted, if by nocity, so far, safe: so that the event, with the thing else, by the record of the Lycurgia. fate of the six remaining chiefs, is yet to be But we have no time to go beyond the extold: and this latter point, according to Plutant plays: among them, however, it will tarch, was the subject of the Eleusinians be well, by way of conclusion to our inves-(Fragm. 48), which he (and upon second tigation, to inquire whether we detect any traces of connection with others which are lost. The Persians we give up in despair, for reasons formerly mentioned. But the Danaides (Fragm. 37, 38, 39, Dind.) may be reasonably reckoned as belonging to the Suppliants: and as one of the frag. ments quotes some words from a hymeneal chant, and another sets forth the universal sway of love, it may be concluded that the subject was their fatal marriage with the sons of Egyptus, and the splendid falsehood of Hypermnestra; and that it was probably wound up by Aphrodité vindicating her. This would make it the concluding play and as we have no account of any dilogies, or pairs of tragedies connected together, with a third at large by way of outrigger (like the cupatos nos in the ancient chariots,) it is not an improbable conjecture that the Egyptians, of which nothing but the name remains, made up the trilogy: but whether the Egyptians or the Suppli ants came first, it is not for us to say: we leave this point to be settled by Welcker, who has written two books on these subjects, and advocated both sides;* only remarking that Hermann and Gruppe place the Suppliants first. As to the Seven against Thebes, doctors do agree with an unanimity which is quite wonderful, that it is the second play of a connected trilogy; arguing from the hooks and eyes in it, the references to things which have gone before, and the preparation for something to come after. Of the former description is the reference by Eteocles to his ominous dream about the division of the heritage (v. 710 seq.) which would, probably, have been more explicit if it had not been mentioned before; to which Hermann adds (vv. 571575) the abuse heaped upon Tydeus, which contains so many particular allusions that it must refer to something also before mentioned. Of the latter, we have the prohibition to bury the corpse of Polynices, at the * Die Eschyl. Trilogie, p. 390; Die Griechischen Tragoedien, vol. i., p. 48. Hermann, Opusc. vol. ii., p. 319, seq.: Gruppe, Ariadne, p. 72,seq. thoughts Welcker also) places third in his trilogy: but here we suffer from the embarras des richesses: here are two separate plots furnished us for the third play, which are undoubtedly incompatible with each other. Let any one read over The Antigone of Sophocles, and The Suppliants of Euripides-for these, making allowance for difference of handling, furnish the two plots in question-and judge whether it would be possible to combine, in one Greek tragedy, the burial of Polynices and its results at Thebes, and the obsequies of the allied chiefs at Eleusis. Doubtless either one or the other plot might have formed a sequel to that of the Seven; but the subject of the Seven is actually so handled as to exclude any sequel which does not strictly pertain to the family of Edipus: the farewell speeches at the end of this play cannot be reconciled with the supposition that the next is to turn on the fortunes of the Six Chiefs, or anything except the burial of Polynices. Lastly, we come to the Prometheus; and, looking at Dindorf's edition, we find the Prometheus Bound extant, and the names and fragments of a Prometheus Freed, and a Prometheus vρpópos (firebringer), or xvpaces (fire-lighter). A satyric play, called Prometheus rupacis, belonged to the same tetralogy with the Persians; so that we have no right to take this into consideration: to this must be referred Fragm. 175, where the making of a torch is described, and 176, wherein a satyr, ignorant as yet of the properties of fire, is represented as in danger of singeing his beard by embracing it. But, if we examine the authorities, we shall not find that the editor is at all justified in identifying the ruppópos with the Rupkatus. The names are both mentioned by different authors and different fragments quoted from them-of which those which are referred to the Tupacús have a decidedly satyric complexion, which cannot be said of anything that we know of the oppopos. But, says Dindorf, Пupraces parùm aptum Prometheo nomen: aptissimum oppos.' What? was there nothing in connection with Prometheus of the na ture of a païá? Have we never heard, quite another strain to sing from that which of a Feast of Lamps, a torch-race in honour they once sang in honour of his nuptials of Prometheus, as god of fire and the arts with their sister Hesioné. This seems to therewith connected, in conjunction with make it certain that the same ocean nymphs Hephaestus and Athena ?† This name is formed the chorus in the first and second assuredly not at variance with the worship plays, and that the first contained—and, if of Prometheus-not with the old Attic na-so, probably ended with-his marriage to tional religion-not, finally, with the frag- Hesioné. And again, the whole plot of ment which describes the making of an the extant play implies that the noble theft oakum torch. But it is wholly at variance of fire was the subject of the foregoing one. with the other name :-for the uppópos Ocs, Indeed, under any other supposition we Tirav Пpoμnocus, was and could be none else shall be at a loss to explain the slight way than the Giver of Fire; and little as we in which this is mentioned, and assumed as know of this play, the fragment which Gel-known, in the second play. The gift of lius quotes, with the remark that it was fire was emphatically the merit (or demerit) almost word for word the same with a of Prometheus; by the ancients all the passage in the Ino of Euripides, may there- arts are traced to the possession of this fore fairly be presumed to be tragic (Fragm. | TávT6Xvov up; yet there is not much stress 174). To the same play we may probably laid upon it, and very little description refer Fragment 362, which alludes to Pan- given of it. All this points to a former dora. But it is at least questionable whe-play, in which the subject has been more ther Fragment 289, which expresses some one's dread of dying a silly night-moth's death, should not rather be connected with Fragment 176, as belonging to the pKatus. Enough has been said to disprove the supposed identity between the two. And if there ever was a case in which it was justifiable to assume positively the existence of a connected trilogy, where only one play is extant, it is this-where the three names, The Fire-Bringer, The Bound, and The Freed, combine to tell the whole tale of the Titan's fortunes, as we have them narrated in the mythological writers. The names themselves are sufficient to show (as soon as we have rid ourselves of the fancy that The Fire-Bringer was a satyric play) that they form a harmonious whole; the theme of the first being the theft of fire by Prometheus; that of the second the living death to which he was doomed; and the third representing his reconciliation with Zeus, and his liberation. The chorus of the extant play (v. 555) say that now in his misfortunes they have Cf. Eur. Phoen., v. 1121. -δεξιᾷ δὲ λαμπάδα elaborately treated and prominently set forth-whereas less notice, it may be, had been taken of the other secondary gifts which are detailed along with that of fire in the Prometheus Bound. The We will now conclude with a brief analysis of the argument for the trilogy, which Welcker has drawn out from these and other data, in the work called Trilogy Prometheus,' named fifth at the head of this article; of course without pledging ourselves to all his details (some of which he has indeed since recanted), but certainly considering it an able, and, in its most important features, a highly probable piece of constructive criticism. The first play, according to this theory, opens at the very forge of Hephaestus, the Lemnian volcano Moschylus; from whence Prometheus steals the spark, and afterwards parleys with the fire-god on the tyranny of Zeus, the state of the human race, the arts in esse and in posse, and, in short, things in general; while 'the smith stands with his hammer, thus, The while his iron does on the anvil cool, Swallowing' Τιτὰν Προμηθεὺς ἔφερεν, ὡς πρήσων πόλιν. Sophocles wrote a tragedy, called Nauplius vρkаcís, of which the plot was, that Nauplius, during the the speculations of the crafty Titan, who, storm which the Greeks encountered on the southern after having thus gained his object, returns coast of Euboea, revenged the death of his son Palamedes by lighting torches as signals to draw their to solemnise his nuptials; and with this vessels on the fatal headland of Caphareus. Senec.,geant the first play, Prometheus, the FireAgam. 566, - Clarum manu Lumen nefandâ vertice e summo efferens, In saxa duxit perfidâ classem face!' Hygin. cxvi. Tanquam auxilium eis afferret, facem ardentem eo loco extulit, quo saxa acuta, et locus periculosissimus erat.'-See Griechische Tragoedien, i. p. 184, seq. + See Dr. Smith's Dictionary of Antiquities, Art. Λαμπαδηδρομία. pa Bringer, concludes-so as to form the highest contrast with his position at the opening of the second, or Prometheus Bound. If we are persuaded to believe that this second refers us back to such a first play as has been sketched out, it carries us forward with far more certainty to the third, Prometheus Freed. The coming events have |