The Chorus, though too old to take part in the expedition, are yet able to tell both of what passed as the expedition started, and of the terrible fulfilment of the omens which they had seen. The two eagles are, of course, in the symbolism of prophecy, the two chieftains, Menelaos and Agamemnon. The “white feathers” of the one may point to the less heroic character of Menelaos: so in v. 123, they are of “diverse mood.” The hare whom they devour is, in the first instance, Troïa, and so far the omen is good, portending the success of the expedition; but, as Artemis hates the fierceness of the eagles, so there is, in the eyes of the seer, a dark token of danger from her wrath against the Atreidæ. Either their victory will be sullied by cruelty which will bring down vengeance, or else there is some secret sin in the past which must be atoned for by a terrible sacrifice. In the legend followed by Sophocles (_Electr._ 566), Agamemnon had offended Artemis by slaying a doe sacred to her, as he was hunting. In the manifold meanings of such omens there is, probably, a latent suggestion of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia by the two chieftains, though this was at the time hidden from the seer. The fact that they are seen on the right, not on the left hand, was itself ominous of good. Footnote 278: The song of Linos, originally the dirge with which men mourned for the death of Linos, the minstrel-son of Apollo and Urania, brother of Orpheus, who was slain by Heracles—a type, like Thammuz and Adonis, of life prematurely closed and bright hopes never to be fulfilled,—had come to be the representative of all songs of mourning. So Hesiod (in Eustath. on Hom. _Il._, vii. 569) speaks of the name, as applied to all funeral dirges over poets and minstrels. So Herodotos (ii. 79) compares it, as the type of this kind of music among the Greeks, with what he found in Egypt connected with the name of Maneros, the only son of the first king of Egypt, who died in the bloom of youth. The name had, therefore, as definite a connotation for a Greek audience as the words _Miserere_ or _Jubilate_ would have for us, and ought not, I believe, to disappear from the translation. Footnote 279: The comparison of a lion's whelps to dew-drops, bold as the figure is, has something in it analogous to that with which we are more familiar, describing the children, or the army of a king, as the “dew” from “the womb of the morning” (Ps. cx. 3). Footnote 280: The sacrifice, _i.e._, was to be such as could not, according to the customary ritual, form a feast for the worshippers. Footnote 281: The dark words look at once before and after, back to the murder of the sons of Thyestes, forward, though of this the seer knew not, to the sacrifice of Iphigeneia. Clytæmnestra is the embodiment of the Vengeance of which the Chorus speaks. Footnote 282: