Allied to this picturesqueness of phrase is a picturesqueness of characterization: Æschylus loves to give life and colour even to his subordinate persons. Attic literature is so frugal of ornament that the richness of this writer gains a double effect. The watchman of the _Agamemnon_ has the effect of a Teniers peasant; Orestes’ nurse in the _Choephorœ_ is a promise of the nurse of Juliet; the Egyptian herald conveys with amazing skill the harem-atmosphere—one seems to see that he is a negro; Hermes in the _Prometheus_ is the father of all stage courtiers. Again, direct appeals to the eye were made by various quaint devices—the winged car of the Ocean Nymphs, their father’s four-legged bird, and the “tawny horse-cock” (whatever it was) which so puzzled Dionysus.[287] Such curiosities were meant merely as a feast for the idle gaze, at first; but the serious mind of the poet turned even these to deeper issues. The red carpets of the _Agamemnon_, and the king treading upon them in triumph, provided a handsome spectacle to the eye; but the mind at the same instant fell into grimmer bodements as the doomed man seemed to walk in blood. So, too, the word-pictures which please the ear are raised by genius to an infinitely higher power, as in that same scene, when Agamemnon complains of the waste of purple stuffs, and the queen seems but to say that there is dye enough left in the sea: “There is a sea, and who shall drain it dry?” The meaning of the words is as inexhaustible as the ocean they tell of, revealing abysses of hatred and love hellishly intertwined, courage to bear any strain, an hereditary curse whose thirst for blood is never sated, a bottomless well of life.