INTRODUCTION
did not easily represent the Supreme Father in bodily form, on the stage. Apart from satyr-plays and comedy, I only know of one play, The Soul Weighing of Aeschylus, in which Zeus was actually represented; and there he appears not on the stage but in the sky, holding the divine balance. In the Eumenides he is represented by his son and daughter, Apollo and Athena.
Apollo, we are told expressly, is "the Prophêtês Dios, the revealer of Zeus" (19). He says himself, "Never have I spoken on my throne of prophecy any word concerning man, woman or city, which was not commanded by Zeus the Father" (616). He warns the Court not to disregard the oracles "that are mine and the Father's" (713). Consequently we see that it was by the will of Zeus himself that Orestes slew his mother, it is Zeus who wills now that he be set free.
Athena likewise, we are told with emphasis, is the daughter of Zeus alone, with no mother. She is pure, undiluted Zeus (664 ff.). She is, so to speak, his Thought, not born by by any bodily process, but sprung directly from his brain (665); and when she gives her vote it is not so much that she votes on the side of Zeus but that her judgment inevitably is the same as his, "for I am utterly the Father's" (738). When she asks the Furies to yield to the will of Zeus she says, "I also trust and obey him I know his overwhelming strength, but He needs it not!" (826). And she explains that Zeus has given to her just that power of thinking and understanding (τὸ φρονεῖν) to which we were told in the Agamemnon that he was guiding mankind. Thus the mechanical and automatic opera-
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