“In captured Trojan homes they make their dwelling now, Set free from roofless bivouac in frost and dew. How they, the happy men, will sleep the livelong night Unpicketed!” Agamemnon enters in his chariot, with Cassandra, the captive princess of Troy, in his retinue, driving up from Nauplia. He addresses Argos and the gods. He boasts of the capture of Ilium. The interval necessary for the Ægean voyage is minimized—Troy’s ruins still smoulder sulkily:— “From smoke still rising even now conspicuous Is seen the captured city; blasts of ruin live; From out the smould’ring ashes there keep jetting forth Fat puffs of plunder!” From the ruined wealth of Troy the thought is turned to the traditional costly splendour of the Argive palaces. Clytemnestra cunningly avails herself of Agamemnon’s only half-concealed vanity to cover her own murderous intent and, if possible, to transfer to his account, in the eyes of the gods, a certain debit to Nemesis. She would persuade him to enter the palace treading presumptuously upon royal purple tapestries, and with grim ambiguity she says:— “And now to pleasure me, dear heart, down from thy car! Set not upon the ground, my lord, that foot of thine That hath sack’d Ilium. Maid servants! Why delay To strew the foot-path of his road with tapestries? Forthwith be purple-paved his way! Let Justice lead On to a dwelling where he scarce had hoped to come.” Agamemnon, flattered, makes a show of resistance, and finally, to ward off the evil consequences of presumption, compromises by bidding the slaves unloose his shoes:— “Lest bolt of envy from the gods’ eyes from afar Shall strike me as the costly purple I tread down.” As he yields there surges before the vision of the exultant Clytemnestra another sea:— “There is a sea and who shall ever drain it dry? It guards the drops of bounteous purple, ever fresh, As silver precious, raiment’s dye. Our house, my lord, With God’s help hath sufficient store of these. Our halls Are far from understanding ways of poverty.” As she turns to follow her victim she prays:— “O Zeus! O Zeus Fulfiller! these my prayers fulfil.” The captive Cassandra is left without. Before her searching but futile insight pass by-gone scenes in the bloodguilty palace to which she has just come as a stranger. She points to the murdered infants of Thyestes and their “roasted flesh upon which their father banqueted.” Then her prophetic vision forecasts the details presently to be enacted: Agamemnon’s death and her own, the welcoming bath, the ensnaring robe, “hand after hand outstretching blow on blow.” As she goes in to her death she utters lines unsurpassed in Greek tragedy, if anywhere, for the pathos of self-abnegating contrast between the littleness of the individual and the wider aspects of the universal:—