him and agreed to share his kingdom. He curses them, and presently the curse is fulfilled. Eteocles expels Polynices, who, with six other heroes, comes to take Thebes. The brothers fall by mutual slaughter. “Since they have fallen by each other's deadly hands and the dust has the black blood of murder, who shall bring purifications? Who shall wash them clean? A new curse upon the house has become involved with an old taint, an old sin swift to bring its penalty, and abiding to the third generation.” At the end of the play Antigone announces her intention to defy the order of the State and to bury her brother. The consequences are not brought out in this play: her words stand as a declaration of sisterly affection, and a protest against the breach of divine law involved in the refusal of funeral rites to the dead.
In the Trilogy—Agamemnon, Choephoroi, and Eumenides—Aeschylus returns to the cycle of the Trojan legend. Here, again, we have a curse abiding to the third generation, but it is made clear how human presumption and sin co-operate with it It can only be stayed by divine interposition. Still Zeus is not the author of sin, but the establisher of an immutable law which makes sorrow its certain sequel (Ag. 167):—
“He will be wise who from his heart proclaims |
It is not God, but the incalculable capacity of men
