Tragedy and of Greek Religion. The fall of Pride, the avenging of wrong by wrong, is no new subject selected by Aeschylus. It forms both the commonest burden of the moralising lyrics in Greek tragedy and even of the tragic myths themselves; and recent writers have shown how the same idea touches the very heart of the traditional Greek religion. "The life of the Year-Daemon, who lies at the root of so many Greek gods and heroes, is normally a story of Pride and Punishment. Each year arrives, waxes great, commits the sin of Hubris and must therefore die. It is the way of all Life. As an early philosopher expresses it, "All things pay retribution for their injustice one to another according to the ordinance of Time."[1]
To me this consideration actually increases the interest and beauty of the Oresteia, because it increases its greatness. The majestic art, the creative genius, the instinctive eloquence of these plays—that eloquence which is the mere despair of a translator—are all devoted to the expression of something which Aeschylus felt to be of tremendous import. It was not his discovery; but it was a truth of which he had an intense realization. It had become something which he must with all his strength bring to expression before he died, not in a spirit of self-assertion or of argument, like a discoverer, but as one devoted to something higher and greater than himself, in the spirit of an interpreter or prophet.
G.M.
- ↑ See my Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 47. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, Chapter I. See also the fine pages on the Agamemnon in the same writer's Thucydides Mythistoricus, pp. 144, ff. (E. Arnold 1907).
