_Ah! what is mortal life? When prosperous, A shadow can o’erturn it; and, when fallen, A throw o’ the wet sponge blurs the picture out._ THIS IS MORE PITEOUS THAN THE RUIN OF PRIDE.[19] ----- Footnote 17: From Mr Andrew Lang’s _Helen of Troy_ (G. Bell & Sons). Footnote 18: From Professor G. Murray’s translation of the _Troades_ (George Allen & Co. Ltd.). Footnote 19: From Professor Lewis Campbell’s translation of the _Agamemnon_ (Clarendon Press). _Æschylus: Io_ We turn now from the Trojan legend to that of Thebes. We are still in the realm of Tragedy; and in some respects the Theban story is more barbarous than that of Troy. But by some means the tension is slightly relieved, and the atmosphere is lightened by one degree. Perhaps that is because, in the dramas which treat of this subject, the poets seem to have gone back further into the remote past and to have steeped themselves in the spirit of those early times. Perhaps, too, it is on account of something wilder and more primitive inherent in the Theban story itself. Such elements, and such a treatment by the poets, would tend to remove the persons of the drama a step further from probability, and would make them to that extent greater or less than human. Thus their appeal to the emotions would not be so direct, nor so intimate. On the other hand, the figures so presented gain in sublimity. Their mythical origin surrounds them with a halo, through which they loom vast, mysterious, and inaccessible. Such a being is Io. In the _Prometheus Bound_, the drama in which her story is given, Æschylus has gone back for his subject literally to the beginning of things; to the time when Zeus was young and the reign of Chaos was not long overpast. We must be prepared then for a tale which in its details is marvellous and incredible: for a naïve account of the love of the supreme god for a mortal woman: of the anger of Hera, his jealous queen: of the metamorphosis and long wanderings of the innocent maid: and of her reward at last, when she becomes the ancestress of the founder of Thebes, and ancestress too, in a remote generation, of Heracles, the deliverer of Prometheus.