The poet becomes a prophet, and asserts what it has been given him to know of the righteous government of God. The dominant creed of Greece at the time was, that the Gods were envious of man's prosperity, that this alone, apart from moral evil, was enough to draw down their wrath, and bring a curse upon the prosperous house. So, _e.g._, Amasis tells Polycrates (Herod. iii. 40) that the unseen Divinity that rules the world is envious, that power and glory are inevitably the precursors of destruction. Comp. also the speech of Artabanos (Herod. vii. 10, 46). Against this, in the tone of one who speaks singlehanded for the truth, Æschylos, through the Chorus, enters his protest. Footnote 328: _Sc._, Agamemnon, by the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, had induced his troops to persevere in an expedition from which, in their inmost hearts, they shrank back with strong dislike. A conjectural reading gives, “By the sacrifice he offered Giving death-doomed men false boldness.” Footnote 329: The tone of ambiguous irony mingles, it will be seen, even here, with the praises of the Chorus. Footnote 330: Possibly an allusion to Pandora's box. Here, too, Hope alone was left, but it only came up to where the curve of the rim began, not to its top. The imagery is drawn from the older method of voting, in which (as in _Eumenides_, v. 678) the votes for condemnation and acquittal were cast into separate urns. Footnote 331: The lion, as the symbol of the house of Atreus, still seen in the sculptures of Mykenæ; the horse, in allusion to the stratagem by which Troïa had been taken. Footnote 332: At the end of autumn, and therefore at a season when a storm like that described by the herald would be a probable incident enough. Footnote 333: So in Sophocles, Philoctetes (v. 1025) taunts Odysseus:— “And yet thou sailedst with them by constraint, By tricks fast bound.” Footnote 334: Geryon appears in the myth of Hercules as a monster with three heads and three bodies, ruling over the island Erytheia, in the far West, beyond Hesperia. To destroy him and seize his cattle was one of the “twelve labours,” with which Hesiod (_Theogon._ vv. 287-294) had already made men familiar. Footnote 335: When a man is buried, there is earth above and earth below him. Clytæmnestra having used the words “coverlet,” pauses to make her language accurate to the very letter. She is speaking only of the earth which would have been laid over her husband's corpse, had he died as often as he was reported to have done. She will not utter anything so ominous as an allusion to the depths below him stretching down to Hades. Footnote 336: Or— “Weeping because the torches in thy house No more were lighted as they were of yore.” Footnote 337: