consider in detail the Aeschylean presentation of the story. THE ‘AGAMEMNON.’ The outstanding event of the _Agamemnon_ drama, the pivot upon which the plot revolves, and the catastrophe which gives it meaning, is the brutal murder by Clytaemnestra of her husband, Agamemnon, King of Argos, after his triumphant return from Troy. In this play Aeschylus follows in the main the Homeric story, but there are one or two non-Homeric features which must be indicated. In the gloomy chants of the Chorus, in their veiled fears of coming danger, one finds something more than the echoes of a political conspiracy, one finds the unmistakable influence of the creed of the ancestral curse. Are we to suppose that Aeschylus invented this non-Homeric doctrine which, in his own day, was a ‘creed outworn’? Such a supposition is improbable, for we know from Stesichorus[12] that this doctrine had already in the sixth century been incorporated in the legend. We have already[13] attributed the _floruit_ of this doctrine to the post-Homeric age of chaos. Such beliefs survive in dogma and in ritual long after men have ceased to adhere to them. In Aeschylus the ancestral curse began with the famous ‘feast of Thyestes,’ but Euripides attributes its origin to the murder of Myrtilus.[14] The Erinnyes of the children who were brutally slain by their kinsman Atreus continued to pursue the children of the slayer. Hence, in this play Cassandra, the prophetess, cries out on her arrival at Argos[15]: Yea! There, there, there! Here’s evidence enough! Smell? Nay, I see, I hear them! Little children Whose throats are cut, still wailing of their murder, And the roast flesh a father tasted—swallowed! Again[16]: See the beginning of sorrows: what are these, What dreamlike forms kneel on yon roof? Young boys As they’d been slain by those who should have loved them, Holding a burden piteous to be borne— Gobbets of flesh, their very own, their entrails Clearly discernible, the heart, the liver, Of which their father ate! In these lines we can hear the rumblings of the coming storm. When the storm has passed, when the curse has found its mark, Clytaemnestra echoes the same sentiment, thus representing herself as the divine instrument of an avenging Justice. She says to the Chorus[17]: Ye proclaim it my deed. Yet, beware!... ’Tis the spirit of Vengeance awaking from sleep For the banquet of Atreus of old to Thyestes cruelly given, Putting on the resemblance of her that was queen to the dead, That hath visited all upon him And hath sternly repaid a grown victim for little ones slain.