ἄλγεα Πολλὰ μἀλ᾽ ὃσσα τε μητρὸς Ἐριννύες ἐκτελέουσιν. _Odyssey_ xi. 289. My solitude is solitude no more, But peopled with the Furies. BYRON. PERSONS {132} THE PYTHONESS of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. APOLLO. HERMES (Mute). THE SHADE OF CLYTEMNESTRA. CHORUS OF FURIES. PALLAS ATHENA. JUDGES of the Court of Areopagus (Mute). CONVOY OF THE FURIES. SCENE--_First at Delphi in the Temple of Apollo; then on the Hill of Mars, Athens._ INTRODUCTORY REMARKS {133} THOUGH the ancient Greek religion, there can be no question, was too much the creation of mere imagination, and tended rather to cultivate a delicate sense of beauty than to strike the soul with a severe reverence before the awful majesty of the moral law, yet it is no less certain that to look upon it as altogether addressed to our sensuous emotions, however convenient for a certain shallow school of theology, would lead the calm inquirer after moral truth far away from the right track. As among the gods that rule over the elements of the physical world, Jove, according to the Homeric creed, asserts a high supremacy, which restrains the liberty of the celestial aristocracy from running into lawless licence and confusion; so the wild and wanton ebullitions of human passion, over which a Bacchus, a Venus, and a Mars preside, are not free from the constant control of a righteous Jove, and the sacred terror of a retributive Erinnys. The great lesson of a moral government, and a secret order of justice pervading the apparent confusion of the system of things of which we are a part, is sufficiently obvious in the whole structure of the two great Homeric poems; but if it exists in the midst of that sunny luxuriance of popular fancy as a felt atmosphere, it is planted by Æschylus, the thoughtful lyrist of a later age, on a visible elevation, whence, as from a natural pulpit, enveloped with dark clouds, or from a Heathen Sinai, involved in fearful thunders and lightnings, it trumpets forth its warnings, and hurls its bolts of flaming denunciation against Sin. The reader, who has gone through the two preceding pieces of this remarkable trilogy, without discovering this their deep moral significance, has read to little purpose; but it is here, in the concluding piece, that the grand doctrine of the moral government of the world is most formally enunciated; it is in the person of the Furies that the wrathful indignation of Jove against the violators of the moral law manifests itself, in the full panoply of terror, and stands out as the stern Avatar of an inexorable Justice. Here, therefore, if we will understand the moral seriousness, of which the gay Hellenic Polytheism was not without its background, let us fix our gaze. If the principles of "immutable morality," of which our great English Platonist talks so comprehensively, are to be found anywhere, they are to be found here. {134}