IV--AESCHYLUS AND HIS ATHENS
Greece holds such an eminence in history because the Crest-Wave rolled in there when it did. She was tenant of an epochal time; whoever was great then, was to be remembered forever. But the truth is, Greece served the future badly enough.
The sixth and fifth centuries B. C. were an age of transition, in which the world took a definite step downward. There had been present among men a great force to keep the life of the nations sweet: that which we call the Mysteries of Antiquity. Whether they had been active continuously since this Fifth Root Race began, who can say? Very possibly not; for in a million years cycles would repeat themselves, and I dare say conditions as desolate as our own have obtained. There may have been withdrawals, and again expansions outward. But certainly they were there at the dawn of history, and for a long time before.
What their full effect may have been, we can only guess; for when the history that we know begins, they were already declining:--we get no definite news, except of the Iron Age. The Mysteries were not closed at Eleusis until late in the days of the Roman Empire; and we know that such a great man as Julian did not disdain to be initiated. But they were only a remnant then, an ever-indrawing source of inspiration; already a good century before Pericles they must have ceased to rule life. Pythagoras--born, probably, in the five-eighties--had found it necessary, to obtain that with which spirituality might be reawakened, to travel and learn what he could in India, Egypt, Chaldaea, and, according to Porphyry and tradition, among the Druids in Gaul--and very likely Britain, their acredited headquarters. From these countries he brought home Theosophy to Greek Italy; and all this suggests that he--and the race--needed something that Eleusis could no longer give.
About the same time Buddha and the founder of Jainism in India, Laotse and Confucius in China, and as we have seen, probably also Zoroaster in Persia, all broke away from the Official Mysteries, more or less, to found Theosophical Movements of their own; --which would indicate that, at least from the Tyrrhenian to the Yellow Sea, the Mysteries had, in that sixth century, ceased to be the efficient instrument of the White Lodge. The substance of the Ancient Wisdom might remain in them; the energy was largely gone.
Pisistratus did marvels for Athens; lifting her out of obscurity to a position which should invite great souls to seek birth in her. He died in 527; two years later a son was born to the Eupatrid Euphorion at Eleusis; and I have no doubt there was some such stir over the event, on Olympus or on Parna.s.sus, as happened over a birth at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, and one in Florence in the May of 1265. In 510, Hippias, grown cruel since the a.s.sa.s.sination of his brother, was driven out from an Athens already fomenting with the yeast of new things. About that time this young Eleusinian Eupatrid was set to watch grapes ripening for the vintage, and fell asleep. In his dream Dionysos, G.o.d of the Mysteries, appeared to him and bade him write tragedies for the Dionysian Festival. On waking, he found himself endowed with genius: beset inwardly with tremendous thoughts, and words to clothe them in; so that the work became as easy to him as if he had been trained to it for years.
He competed first in 499--against Ch.o.e.rilos and Pratinas, older poets--and was defeated; and soon afterwards sailed for Sicily, where he remained for seven years. The dates of Pythagoras are surmised, not known; Plumptre, with a query, gives 497 for his death. I wonder whether, in the last years of his life, that great Teacher met this young Aeschylus from Athens; whether the years the latter spent in Sicily on this his first visit there, were the due seven years of his Pythagorean probation and initiation? "Veniat Aeschylus," says Cicero, "non poeta solum, sed etiam Pythagoreus: sic enim accepimus ";--and we may accept it too; for that was the Theosophical Movement of the age; and he above all others, Pythagoras having died, was the great Theosophist. They had the Eleusinian Mysteries at Athens, and Most of the prominent Athenians must have been initiated into them--since that was the State Religion; but Aeschylus alone in Athens went through life clothed in the living power of Theosophy.
Go to the life of such a man, if you want big clues as to the inner history of his age;--the life of Aeschylus, I think, can interpret for us that of Athens. There are times when the movement of the cycles is accelerated, and you can see the great wheel turning; this was one. Aeschylus had proudly distinguished himself at Marathon; and Athens, as the highest honor she could do him for that, must have his portrait appear in the battle-picture painted for a memorial of the victory. He fought, too, at Artemisium and Salamis; with equal distinction.
In 484 he won the first of thirteen annual successes in the dramatic compet.i.tions. These were the years during which Athens was really playing the hero; the years of Aristides" ascendency.
In 480 Xerxes burned the city; but the people fought on, great in faith. In 479 came Plataea, Aeschylus again fighting.
Throughout this time, he, the Esotericist and Messenger of the G.o.ds, was wholly at one with his Athens--an Athens alive enough then to the higher things to recognize the voice of the highest when it spoke to her--to award Aeschylus, year after year, the chief dramatic prize. Then in 478 or 477 she found herself in a new position: her heroism and intelligence had won their reward, and she was set at the head of Greece. Six years later Aeschylus produced _The Persians,_ the first of the seven extant out of the seventy or eighty plays he wrote; in it he is still absolutely the patriotic Athenian. In 471 came the _Seven against Thebes;_ from which drama, I think, we get a main current of light on the whole future history of Athens.
Two men, representing two forces, had guided the city during those decades. On the one hand there was Aristides, called the Just--inflexible, incorruptible, impersonal and generous; on the other, Themistocles--precocious and wild as a boy; profligate as a youth and young man; ambitious, unscrupulous and cruel; a genius; a patriot; without moral sense. The policy of Aristides, despite his so-called democratic reforms, was conservative; he persuaded Greece, by sound arguments, to the side of Athens: he was for Athens doing her duty by Greece, and remaining content.
That of Themistocles was that she should aim at empire by any means: should make herself a sea-power with a view to dominating the Greek world. Oh, to begin with, doubtless with a view to holding back the Persians; and so far his policy was sane enough; but his was not the kind of mind in which an ambitious idea fails to develop in ambitious and greedy directions; and that of mastery of the seas was an idea that could not help developing fatally. He had been banished for his corruption in 471; but he had set Athens on blue water, and bequeathed to her his policy.
Henceforward she was to make for supremacy, never counting the moral cost. She attacked the islands at her pleasure, conquered them, and often treated the conquered with vile cruelty. The _Seven against Thebes_ was directed by Aeschylus against the Themistoclean, and in support of the Aristidean, policy.
Imperialistic ambitions, fast ripening in that third decade of the fifth century, were opposed by the Messenger of the G.o.ds.
His valor in four battles had set him among the national heroes; he had been, in _The Persians,_ the laureate of Salamis; by the sheer grandeur of his poetry he had won the prize thirteen times in succession.--And by the bye, it is to the eternal credit of Athenian intelligence that Athens, at one hearing of those obscure, lofty and tremendous poems, should have appreciated them, and with enthusiasm. Try to imagine _Samson Agonistes_ put on the stage today; with no academical enthusiasts or eclat of cla.s.sicism to back it; but just put on before thirty thousand sight-seers, learned and vulgar, statesman and cobbler, tinker and poet; the mob all there; the groundlings far out-numbering the elite:--and all not merely sitting out the play, but roused to a frenzy of enthusiasm; and Milton himself, present and acting, the hero of the day. That, despite Mr. Whistler and the _Ten O"Clock_--seems really to have been the kind of thing that happened in Athens. Tomides was there, with his companions-- little Tomides, the mender of bad soles--and intoxicated by the grand poetry; understanding it, and never finding it tedious;-- poetry they had had no opportunity to study in advance, they understood and appreciated wildly at first hearing. One cannot imagine it among moderns.--And Milton is clear as daylight beside remote and difficult Aeschylus. To catch the latter"s thought, we need the quiet of the study, close attention, reading and re-reading; and though of course time has made him more difficult; and we should have understood him better, with no more than our present limited intelligence, had we been his countrymen and contemporaries; yet it remains a standing marvel, and witness to the far higher general intelligence of the men of Athens. The human spirit was immensely nearer this plane; they were far more civilized, in respect to mental culture, than we are. Why?--The cycles have traveled downward; our triumphs are on a more brutal plane; we are much farther from the light of the Mysteries than they were.
And yet they were going wrong: the great cycle had begun its down-trend; they were already preparing the way for our fool-headed materialism. In the _Seven against Thebes_ Aeschylus protested against the current of the age. Three years later, Athens, impatient of criticism, turned on him.
He is acting in one of his own plays--one that been lost. He gives utterance, down there in the arena, to certain words-- tremendous words, as always, we must suppose: words hurled out of the heights of an angry eternity--
_"Aeschylus" bronze-throat eagle-bark for blood,"_
--and Athens, that used to thrill and go mad to such tones when they proclaimed the G.o.dlike in her own soul and encouraged her to grand aspirations--goes mad now in another sense. She has grown used to hear warning in them, and something in alliance with her own stifled conscience protesting against her wrong courses; and such habituation rarely means acquiescence or soothed complacency. Now she is smitten and stung to the quick. A yell from the mob; uproar; from the tiers above tiers they b.u.t.t, lurch, lunge, pour forward and down: the tinkers and cobblers, demagogs and demagoged: intent--yes--to kill. But he, having yet something to say, takes refuge at the altar; and there even a maddened mob dare not molest him. But the prize goes to a rising star, young Sophocles; and presently the G.o.ds" Messenger is formally accused and tried for "Profanation of the Mysteries."
Revealing secrets pertaining to them, in fact. And now note this: his defense is that he did not know that his lines revealed any secret--was unaware that what he had said pertained to the Mysteries. Could he have urged such a plea, had it not been known he was uninitiated? Could he have known the teachings, had he not been instructed in a school where they were known? He, then, was an initiate of the Pythagoreans, the new Theosophical Movement upon the new method; not of Orthodox Eleusis, that had grown old and comatose rather, and had ceased to count.--Well, the judges were something saner than the mob; memory turned again to what he had done at Marathon, what at Arternisium and Plataea; to his thirteen solid years of victory (national heroism on poetico-dramatic fields); and to that song of his that "saved at Salamis":
_"O Sons of Greeks, go set your country free!"_
--and he was acquitted: Athens had not yet fallen so low as to prepare a hemlock cup for her teacher. But meanwhile he would do much better among his old comrades in Sicily than at home; and thither he went.
He returned in 458, to find the Age of Pericles in full swing; with all made anew, or in the making; and the time definitely set on its downward course. "Reform" was busy at abolishing inst.i.tutions once held sacred; was the rage;--that funeral speech of Pericles, with its tactless vaunting of Athenian superiority to all other possible men and nations, should tell us something.
When folk get to feel like that, G.o.d pity and forgive them!--it is hard enough for mere men to. Aeschylus smote at imperialism in the _Agamemnon_--the first play of this last of his trilogies; and at the mania for reforming away sacred inst.i.tutions in the _Eumenides_--where he a.s.serts the divine origin of the threatened Areopagus. Popular feeling rose once more against him, and he returned to Sicily to die.
Like so many another of his royal line, apparently a failure.
And indeed, a failure he was, so far as his Athens was concerned.
True, Athenian artistic judgment triumphed presently over the Athenian spite. Though it was the rule that no successful play should be performed more than once, they decreed that "revivals"
of Aeschylus should always be in order. And Aristophanes testifies to his lasting popularity--when he shows little Tomides with a bad grouch over seeing a play by Theognis, when he had gone to the theater "expecting Aeschylus";--and when he shows Aeschylus and Euripides winning, because his poetry had died with him, and so he had it there for a weapon--whereas Aeschylus"s was still alive and on earth. Yes; Athens took him again, and permanently, into favor: took the poet, but not the Messenger and his message. For she had gone on the wrong road in spite of him: she had let the divine force, the influx of the human spirit which had come to her as her priceless cyclic opportunity, flow down from the high planes proper to it, on to the plane of imperialism and vulgar ambition; and his word had been spoken to the Greeks in vain--as all Greek history and Karma since has been proclaiming. But in sooth he was not merely for an age, but for all time; and his message, unlike Pindar"s whom all Greece worshiped, and far more than Homer"s or that of Sophocles--is vital today. Aeschylus, and Plato, and Socrates who speaks through Plato, and Pythagoras who speaks through all of them, are the Greeks whose voices are lifted forever for the Soul.
Even the political aspect of his message--the only one I have touched on--is vital. It proclaims a truth that underlies all history: one, I suspect, that remains for our Theosophical Movement to impress on the general world-consciousness so that wars may end: namely, that the impulse of Nationalism is a holy thing, foundationed upon the human spirit: a means designed by the Law for humanity"s salvation. But like all spiritual forces, it must be kept pure and spiritual, or instead of saving, it will d.a.m.n. In its inception, it is vision of the Soul: of the Racial or National Soul--which is a divine light to lure us away from the plane of personality, to obliterate our distressing and private moods; to evoke the divine actor in us, and merge us in a consciousness vastly greater than out own. But add to that saving truth this d.a.m.ning corolary: _I am better than thou; my race than thine; we have harvests to reap at your expense, and our rights may be your wrongs:_--and you have, though it appear not for awhile, fouled that stream from G.o.dhood:--you have debased your nationalism and made it h.e.l.lish. Upon your ambitions and your strength, now in the time of your national flowering, you may win to your desire, if you _will;_ because now the spirit is quickening the whole fiber of your national self; and the national will must become, under that pressure, almost irresistibly victorious. The Peoples of the earth shall kneel before your throne; you shall get your vulgar empire;--but you shall get it presently, as they say, "where the chicken got the axe": _Vengeance is mine, saith the Law; I will repay._ The cycle, on the plane to which you have dragged it down, will run its course; your high throne will go down with it, and yourself shall kneel to races you now sniff at for "inferior." You have brought it on to the material plane, and are now going upward on its upward trend there gaily--
"Ah, let no evil l.u.s.t attack the host Conquered by greed, to plunder what they ought not; For yet they need return in safety home, Doubling the goal to run their backward race"
[_Agamemnon,_ Plumtre"s translation]
The downtrend of the cycle awaits you--the other half--just as the runner in the foot-races to win, must round the pillar at the far end of the course, and return to the starting-place.--That is among the warnings Aeschylus spoke in the _Agamemnon_ to an Athens that was barefacedly conquering and enslaving the Isles of Greece to no end but her own wealth and power and glory. The obvious reference is of course to the conquerors of Troy.
I have spoken of this Oresteian Trilogy as his _Hamlet;_ with the _Prometheus Bound_--another tremendous Soul-Symbol--it is what puts him in equal rank with the four supreme Masters of later Western Literature. I suppose it is pretty certain that Shakespeare knew nothing of him, and had never heard of the plot of his _Agamemnon._ But look here:--
There was one Hamlet King of Denmark, absent from control of his kingdom because sleeping within his orchard (his custom always of an afternoon). And there was one Agamemnon King of Men, absent from control of his kingdom because leading those same Men at the siege of Troy. Hamlet had a wife Gertrude; Agamemnon had a wife Clytemnestra. Hamlet had a brother Claudius; who became the lover of Gertrude. Agamemnon had a cousin Aegisthos, who became the paramour of Clytemnestra. Claudius murdered Hamlet, and thereby came by his throne and queen. Clytemnestra and Aegisthos murdered Agamemnon, and Aegisthos thereby became possessed of his throne and queen. Hamlet and Gertrude had a son Hamlet, who avenged his father"s murder. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had a son Orestes, who avenged his father"s murder.
There, however, the parallel ends. Shakespeare had to paint the human soul at a certain stage of its evolution: the "moment of choice," the entering on the path: and brought all his genius to bear on revealing that. He had, here, to teach Karma only incidentally; in _Macbeth,_ when the voice cried "Sleep no more!" he is more Aeschylean in spirit. That dreadful voice rings through Aeschylus; who was altogether obsessed with the majesty and awfulness of Karma. It is what he cried to Athens then, and to all ages since, reiterating _Karma_ with terrible sleep-forbidding insistency from dark heights.--I have quoted the wonderful line in which Browning, using similes borrowed from Aeschylus himself, sums up the effect of his style:
"Aeschylus" bronze-throat eagle-bark for blood,"
which compensates for the more than Greek--unintelligibility of Browning"s version of the _Agamemnon:_ it gives you some color, some adumbration of the being and import of the man. How shall we compare him with those others, his great compeers on the Mountain of Song? Shakespeare--as I think--throned upon a peak where are storms often, but where the sun shines mostly; surveying all this life, and with an eye to the eternal behind: Dante--a prophet, stern, proud, glad and sorrowful; ever in a great pride of pain or agony of bliss; surveying the life without,--only to correlate it with and interpret it by the vaster life within that he knew better;--this Universe for him but the crust and excoriata of the Universe of the Soul. Milton--a t.i.tan Soul hurled down from heaven, struggling with all chaos and the deep to enunciate--just to proclaim and put on everlasting record-- those two profound significant words, _t.i.tan_ and _Soul,_ for a memorial to Man of the real nature of Man. Aeschylus--the barking of an eagle--of Zeus the Thunderer"s own eagle out of ominous skies above the mountains: a thing unseen as Karma, mysterious and mighty as Fate, as Disaster, as the final Triumph of the Soul; sublime as death; a throat of bronze, superhumanly impersonal; a far metallic clangor of sound, hoa.r.s.e or harsh, perhaps, if your delicate ears must call him so; but grand; immeasurably grand; majestically, ominously and terribly grand;-- ancestral voices prophesying war, and doom, and all dark tremendous destinies;--and yet he too with serenity and the Prophecy of Peace and bliss for his last word to us: he will not leave his avenging Erinyes until by Pallas" wand and will they are transformed into Eumenides, bringers of good fortune.
Something like that, perhaps, is the impression Aeschylus leaves on the minds of those who know him. They bear testimony to the fact that, however grand his style--like a Milton Carlylized in poetry--thought still seems to overtop it and to be struggling for expression through a vehicle less than itself.
Says Lytton, not unwisely perhaps: "His genius is so near the verge of bombast, that to approach his sublime is to rush into the ridiculous"; and he goes on to say that you might find the nearest echo of his diction in Sh.e.l.ley"s _Prometheus;_ but of his diction alone; for "his power is in concentration--that of Sh.e.l.ley in diffuseness." "The intellectuality of Sh.e.l.ley," he says, "destroyed; that of Aeschylus only increased his command over the pa.s.sions. The interest he excites is startling, terrible, intense." Browning tried to bring over the style; but left the thought, in an English _Double-Dutched,_ far remoter than he found it from our understanding. The thought demands in English a vehicle crystal-clear; but Aeschylus in the Greek is not crystal-clear: so close-packed and vast are the ideas that there are lines on lines of which the best scholars can only conjecture the meaning.--In all this criticism, let me say, one is but saying what has been said before; echoing Professor Mahaffy; echoing Professor Gilbert Murray; but there is a need to give you the best picture possible of this man speaking from the eternal.--Unless Milton and Carlyle had co-operated to make it, I think, any translation of the _Agamemnon_--which so many have tried to translate--would be fatiguing and a great bore to read. It may not be amiss to quote three lines from George Peel"s _David and Bethsabe,_ which have been often called Aeschylean in audacity:--
"At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt, And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings, Sit ever burning on his hateful wings;"
His--the thunder"s--fair spouse is the lightning. Imagine images as swift, vivid and daring as that, hurled and flashed out in language terse, sudden, lofty--and you may get an idea of what this eagle"s bark was like. And the word that came rasping and resounding on it out of storm-skies high over Olympus, for Athens then and the world since to hear, was KARMA.
He took that theme, and drove it home, and drove it home, and drove it home. Athens disregarded the rights and sufferings of others; was in fact abominably cruel. Well; she should hear about Karma; and in such a way that she should--no, but she _should_-- give ear. Karma punished wrong-doing. It was wrong-doing that Karma punished. You could not do wrong with impunity.--The common thought was that any extreme of good fortune was apt to rouse the jealousy of the G.o.ds, and so bring on disaster. This was what Pindar taught--all-worshiped prosperous Pindar, Aeschylus"
contemporary, the darling poet of the Greeks. The idea is ill.u.s.trated by Herodotus" story of the Ring of Polycrates.
You remember how the latter, being tyrant of Samos, applied to Amasis of Egypt for an alliance. But wary Amasis, noting his invariable good luck, advised him to sacrifice something, lest the G.o.ds should grow jealous: so Polycrates threw a ring into the sea, with the thought thus to appease Nemesis cheaply; but an obliging fish allowed itself to be caught and served up for his supper with the ring in its internal economy; on hearing of which, wary Amasis foresaw trouble, and declined the alliance with thanks. Such views or feelings had come to be Greek orthodoxy; you may take it that whatever Pindar said was not far from the orthodoxies--hence his extreme popularity: we dearly love a man who tells us grandly what we think ourselves, and think it right to think. But such a position would not do for Aeschylus. He noted his doctrine only to condemn it.
"There live an old saw framed in ancient days In memories of men, that high estate, Full grown, brings forth its young, nor childless dies, But that from good success Springs to the race a woe insatiable.
But I, apart from all, Hold this my creed alone: Ill deeds along bring forth offspring of ill Like to their parent stock."
Needless to say the translation--Dean Plumptre"s in the main-- fails to bring out the force of the original.
We must remember that for his audiences the story he had to tell was not the important thing. They knew it in advance; it was one of their familiar legends. What they went to hear was Aeschylus" treatment of it; his art, his poetry, his preaching.
That was what was new to them: the thing for which their eyes and ears were open. We go to the theater, as we read novels, for amus.e.m.e.nt; the Athenians went for aesthetic and religious ends.
So Aechylus had ready for him an efficient pulpit; and was not suspect for using it. We like Movies shows because they are entertaining and exciting; the Athenian would have d.a.m.ned them because they are inartistic.
I said, he had a pulpit ready for him; yet, as nearly as such a statement can come to truth, it was he himself who invented the drama. It was, remember, an age of transition: things were pa.s.sing out from the inner planes: the Mysteries were losing their virtue. The Egyptian Mysteries had been dramatic in character; the Eleusinian, which were very likely borrowed or copied or introduced from Egypt, were no doubt dramatic too.
Then there had been festivals among the rustics, chiefly in honor of Dionysos not altogether in his higher aspects, with rudimentary plays of a coa.r.s.e buffoonish character. By 499, in Athens, these had grown to something more important; in that year the wooden scaffolding of the theater in which they were given broke down under the spectators; and this led to the building of a new theater in stone. It was in 499 Aeschylus first competed; the show was still very rudimentary in character. Then he went off to Sicily; and came back with the idea conceived of Greek Tragedy as an artistic vehicle or expression--and something more. He taught the men who had at first defeated him, how to do their later and better work; and opened the way for all who came after, from Sophocles to Racine. He took to sailing this new ship of the drama as near as he might to the sh.o.r.e-line of the Mysteries themselves;--indeed, he did much more than this; for he infused into his plays that wine of divine life then to be found in its purity and vigor only or chiefly in the Pythagorean Brotherhood.--And now as to this new art-form of his.
De Quincey, accepting the common idea that the Dionysian Theater was built to seat between thirty and forty thousand spectators (every free Athenian citizen), argues that the formative elements that made Greek Tragedy what it was were derived from these huge dimensions. In such a vast building (he asks) how could you produce such a play as _Hamlet?_--where the art of the actor shows itself in momentary changes of expression, small byplay that would be lost, and the like. The figures would be dwarfed by the distances; stage whispers and the common inflexions of the speaking voice would be lost. So none of these things belonged to Greek Tragedy. The mere physical scale necessitated a different theory of art. The stature of the actors had to be increased, or they would have looked like pygmies; their figures had to be draped and m.u.f.fled, to hide the unnatural proportions thus given them. A mask had to be worn, if only to make the head proportionate to the body; and the mask had to contain an arrangement for multiplying the voice, that it might carry to the whole audience. That implied that the lines should be chanted, not spoken;--though in any case, chanted they would be, for they were verse, not prose; and the Greeks had not forgotten, as we have, that verse is meant to be chanted. So here, to begin with, the whole scheme implied something as unlike actual life as it well could be. And then, too, there was the solemnity of the occasion--the religious nature of the whole festival.
Thus, in substance De Quincey; who makes too little, perhaps, of the matter of that last sentence; and too much of what goes before. We may say that it was rather the grand impersonal theory of the art that created the outward condition; not the conditions that created the theory. Mahaffy went to Athens and measured the theater; and found it not so big by any means. They could have worked out our theories and practice in it, had they wanted to, so far as that goes. Coa.r.s.e buffoonish country festivals do not of themselves evolve into grand art or solemn occasions; you must seek a cause for that evolution, and find it in an impulse arisen in some human mind. Or minds indeed; for such impulses are very mysterious. The G.o.ds sow their seed in season; we do not see the sowing, but presently mark the greening of the brown earth. The method of the Mysteries--drama serious and religious--had been drifting outwards: things had been growing to a point where a great creative Soul could take hold of them and mold them to his wish. If Aeschylus was not an Initiate of Eleusis, he had learnt, with the Pythagoreans, the method of the Mysteries of all lands. He knew more, not less, than the common pillars of the Athenian Church and State. I imagine it was he, in those thirteen consecutive years of his victories, who in part created, in part drew from his Pythagorean knowledge, those conventions and circ.u.mstances for Tragedy which suited him--rather than that conventions already existing imposed formative limits on him. His genius was aloof, impersonal, severe, and of the substance of the Eternal; such as would need precisely those conventions, and must have created them had they not been there. Briefly, I believe that this is what happened.
Sent by Pythagoras to do what he could for Athens and Greece, he forged this mighty bolt of tragedy to be his weapon.
The theory of modern drama is imitation of life. It has nothing else and higher to offer; so, when it fails to imitate, we call it trash. But the theory of Aeschylean Tragedy is the illumination of life. Illumination of life, through a medium quite unlike life. Art begins on a spiritual plane, and works down to realism in its decadence; then it ceases to be art at all, and becomes merely copying what we imagine to be nature,--nature, often, as seen through a diseased liver and well-atrophied pineal gland.