In fact, several passages which our texts attribute to the chorus really belong to conspirators. Next, Agamemnon by the accident of the storm has with him, not the great host, but a single ship’s company. Finally, though he has heard much ill of his wife—this only can account for the brutality wherewith he greets her—he does not suspect her resourcefulness, wickedness, and courage. Verrall’s theory should probably be accepted. This tragedy is beyond compare the greatest work of Æschylus. The lyrics surpass those of any other drama. To the majesty and scope familiar everywhere in Æschylean choric writing, and to the tenderness which diffuses a gentle gleam through the _Prometheus_, are now added matchless pathos and the authentic thrill of drama. The picture of Iphigenia (vv. 184-249) is not merely lovely and tearful beyond words; it is a marvel that this gloomy colossus of the stage should for a moment have excelled Euripides on Euripides’ strongest ground; it is as if Michelangelo had painted Raffaelle’s “Madonna of the Grand Duke” amid the prophets and sibyls of the Sistine Chapel. Even more poignant, because more simple, are the brief lines (vv. 436-47) which tell how the War-God, the money-changer of men’s bodies, sends back from Troy a handful of charred dust, the pitiful return for a man who has departed into the market-place of Death. Best known of all perhaps is the passage (vv. 402-26) which portrays the numb anguish of a deserted husband. Further, these lyrics are dramatic. The choric songs do not suspend the action by their sublime elucidations; the comments enable us to understand the march of events, giving us the keynote of the scene which follows each lyric. For instance, when the first stasimon dilates, not upon the glory of conquest, but upon the fall of pride and the sorrows of war, we are prepared for the herald and his tale in which triumph is overborne by the memory of hardship and tempest. The misgivings which brood over the third stasimon, in spite of the victorious entry of the king which has just been witnessed, is a fit prelude to the terrible outbreaks of Cassandra.