the poet of the EUMENIDES deserves the first rank. There is a tradition current, in various shapes, among the ancient writers that he was brought before the Court of the Areopagus (so nobly eulogised by himself), on the charge of impiety, but that he was acquitted. That the Athenians might have taken offence at the freedom and boldness with which he handled religious, as other topics, is possible, though certainly by no means probable, considering how little of fixed doctrine there was in their imaginative theology; but it is more like the truth, according to the accounts which we have, that the offence which he gave consisted in some purely accidental allusion occurring in one of his plays, to some points that were, or seemed to be connected with the awful Eleusinian mysteries.[f10] Certain it is that no writer could be less justly charged with impiety or irreligion. In his writings, religion is the key-note; and the noblest moral sentiments spring everywhere from the profoundest faith in a system of retribution carried on by the various personages of the great celestial aristocracy, of which Jove is the all-powerful and the all-wise head. So sublime, indeed, is the Æschylean theology, that certain modern writers, as if unwilling to think that such pure notions could co-exist with a belief in the popular religion, have concluded that the poet, like Euripides afterwards, must have been a free-thinker; and have imagined that they have found sure indications to this effect in his writings. But, though Æschylus was a Pythagorean (Cic. Tusc. II. 10), we have no proof that the Pythagoreans, any more than their successors, the Platonists, were given to scepticism. The seriousness of a poetic mind like that of Æschylus is, at all times, naturally inclined to faith; and the multiform {33} polytheism of the Greeks was as pliable in the hands of pure men for pure purposes, as in the hands of gross men, to give a delusive ideality to their grossness.[f11] AGAMEMNON {35} A LYRICO-DRAMATIC SPECTACLE "Ὁι Τρώων μεν ὑπεξέφυγον στονόεσσαν ἀϋτὴν Ἐν νόστῳ δ᾽ απόλοντο κακῆς ἰότητι γυναικός." "Greeks that 'scaped the Trojan war-cry, and the wailing battle-field, But home returning basely perished by a wicked woman's guile." HOMER, _Odys_. xi. 383-4. PERSONS {36} WATCHMAN. CHORUS OF ARGIVE ELDERS. CLYTEMNESTRA, Wife of Agamemnon. HERALD. AGAMEMNON, King of Argos and Mycenæ. CASSANDRA, a Trojan Prophetess, Daughter of Priam. ÆGISTHUS, Son of Thyestes. SCENE--The Royal Palace in Argos. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS {37}