INTRODUCTION. HARDLY, if at all, inferior to the Agamemnon in the conception of the characters and the exposition of a great moral truth, is the third play of the Trilogy, the Eumenides, or 'Benign Goddesses.' Composed for a political purpose, to uphold the authority of Conscience in the abstract, and specially that of the Court of the Areopagus against the proposed reforms of Ephialtes and Pericles1, it embodies the famed legend of the pursuit of the matricide Orestes by the Erinyes, his appeal as a suppliant for protection first to Apollo at Delphi, and then to Athena in the Erechtheum of her own Acropolis, and the institution of the court of the Areopagus itself for the express purpose of his trial. But besides the moral and political, there is also a religious import in the treatment of the play. The Erinyes, or 'Furies,' demon-powers, whose mission was the neverending persecution and torturing of the sinner in this world and the next2, were of the older or Titanian dynasty, children of Night. They could not be got rid of; they could not safely be thwarted or opposed; but they might be converted into children of Light, and by accepting the 1 See Sir G. W. Cox, Hist. of Greece, II. pp. 59, 60. 2 Like Plato, Gorg. p. 525 c, who speaks of the souls in hell Tà μέγιστα καὶ ὀδυνηρότατα καὶ φοβερώτατα πάθη πάσχοντας τὸν ἀεὶ χρόνον, Aeschylus believed in the eternity of punishments. Hence the chorus say (Eum. 167) υπό τε γᾶν φυγών οὗ ποτ' ἐλευθεροῦται, and δι aiwvos whero, ib. 533, he is for ever lost.' |