INTRODUCTION. PROFESSOR KENNEDY well sums up the drift and purpose of the three great tragedies that form the trilogy of the Orestea, by calling them "three acts, as it were, of one plot." The Agamemnon, he says1, is 'the Crime,' the Choephoroe is the Vengeance,' and the third, the Eumenides, is the Avenger's Trial.' In all there is a moral purpose which is developed not only very finely, from a poetic point of view, but very powerfully as the theological and philosophical teaching of an earnest, reverent, and religious mind. A fatalist by birth and education, a predestinarian by conviction, and a pessimist by the workings of a naturally gloomy mind, he traces a whole chain of family evils to ancestral crime. Originating in a delusion or moral infatuation, arŋ, the subsequent crimes and woes are with him the necessary effects of a cause. The murder of Agamemnon by the hand of his wife, and that of Clytemnestra by the hand of her son, are but the results of atrocities long before committed by Pelops and Atreus; for sin ever produces a brood 'like unto itself' (v. 735). As in all works of the highest art it will be found that our admiration increases with further study, so it is especially true of the Agamemnon to say, that the more carefully its plot and composition are studied, and the more pains are taken to master its many difficulties, the more it will seem to develop new beauties and new points of interest in the characters of the principal actors. To understand the play rightly and thoroughly is, without doubt, a high intellectual effort and exercise. The pride of Agamemnon, the unrelenting vindictiveness of Clytem 1 Introduction, p. 1, ed. 1878. |