the representations are widely different in most respects. The Witches are creatures of medieval credulity, satanic agents human and feminine, who tempt the innocent to sin, and lead them by fraudulent arts from crime to crime, ending in destruction. In Shakespeare's plot they are important characters, on account of the influence they exercise on the feelings and actions of Macbeth. Cassandra, the frantic prophetess, whose predictions find no belief, is a personage well known in the legend of Troy; and her interview with the Chorus, forming the fourth episode of the Agamemnon, is executed with a beauty and passionate power to which we know no parallel in the same kind. But, while she serves to heighten, we may almost say to constitute, the pathos of the play, she has no signal influence in the development of the plot. Her arrival at Argos as the prize, and, according to Greek custom, the assumed paramour of Agamemnon, supplies Clytaemnestra with a further excuse for her bloody deed, and enhances the luxury of its commission: but her motives were ample enough without it; they are, primarily, hatred and vengeance; secondarily, but, as we think, in a minor degree, ambition and guilty love. Lady Macbeth's crime is committed without hatred, without having a wrong to avenge, against a generous benefactor and a good sovereign. Ambition, high-soaring, all-grasping, is the one sole motive; ambition for a husband whom she loves, and, in that husband, for herself. Clytemnestra is a mother robbed of her darling child and deserted by a husband whom she also knows to be unfaithful. As a wronged woman, she feels none of the repentant horror and anguish which kill Lady Macbeth: she is remorseless to her last moments. And so we recognise a just aesthesis in the delineation of both these women (so like

in some respects, so different in others) by two great poets whom twenty centuries, with all the contrasts of ancient and modern thought, divide from one another.

V. The Scene of the Agamemnon is laid at Argos: see 11. 24, 462, 738. Yet the royal seat of Agamemnon, described as such throughout the Homeric poems, was not Argos itself, but Mycenae, which lay among the mountains in the north of the Argive plain, between five and six miles from Argos: and there its ruins have remained ever since its capture and destruction by the Argives B. C. 468, Ol. 78, 1, ten years before the Oresteia was produced. Yet Mycenae is not so much as mentioned in the Agamemnon. Dr Schliemann, the indefatigable explorer of its site, in his elaborate work entitled Mycenae and Tiryns, p. 36, says: "Strabo justly observes that, on account of the close vicinity of Argos and Mycenae, the tragic poets have made a confusion regarding their names, continually substituting the one for the other. But this is to be excused, because in antiquity travelling was both difficult and very unsafe. Besides, people were not archaeologists &c." Mr W. G. Clark writes more fully to the same effect in defence of Aeschylus for thus neglecting to distinguish the two neighbouring cities (Peloponnesus, p. 70). "Rigorous exactness," he says, "is quite alien from the spirit of Aeschylus and of all the old poets,...... The scene of the Agamemnon is before the palace of the Atreidae, and I question whether he wasted a second thought upon its site. There is not in all the play the faintest allusion to the scenery of the Argive plain, or the relative position. of its cities. Aeschylus had evidently been a diligent reader or hearer of Homer-his characters, language, and

allusions prove this... He could not, therefore, have been ignorant that Mycenae was constantly spoken of by Homer as the city and abode of the Atreidae, and yet throughout the play there is no mention of Mycenae... No doubt the citizens of Argos, as they transported the people of Mycenae and incorporated them with their own body, were anxious also to appropriate their ancient legends and heroic fame. The Agamemnon was represented ten years after this final destruction of the ancient capital of the Atreidae. The fact that the poet does not mention the city seems to indicate that its fate excited little or no sympathy in contemporary Greece. If the Argive topography of Aeschylus is thus indefinite and negative, that of Sophocles is elaborately wrong. In the opening scene of the Electra, the Paedagogue, addressing Orestes, says: Here is the ancient. Argos you were longing for, and this the Lycean agora of the wolf-slaying god (to wit, the market-place of the town of Argos), and this on the left is the renowned temple of Hera; and, at the place we are come to, believe that you have before your eyes Mycenae rich in gold, and here the blood-stained house of the Pelopidae.' No one reading this description would infer that Argos was between five and six miles distant, and the Heraeum nearly two. The truth is, that neither Sophocles nor his Paedagogue thought of administering a lecture on topography under the guise of a dramatic entertainment, as Milton or Ben Jonson might have done; so far from it, he held the entertainment to be all in all, and made topography and everything else give way to it. He wanted to produce an effect by bringing Argos, Mycenae, and the Heraeum within the compass of a single coup

d'œil, and I warrant that not one of the spectators was pedantic enough to quarrel with him for it."

VI. The Translation which follows our Text was written to be read from time to time in lectures delivered at Cambridge during the months of February and March, 1878. It is not an attempt to poetise Aeschylus in English, but merely to supply students with a close rendering somewhat more agreeable than a prose version. Its dialogue metre is that of the Greek original, which in English is called Alexandrine'. The lyric lines. do not imitate Greek rhythm, but the antistrophic verses correspond to those of the strophe. At the close of the volume we have supplied a partial Index only, considering that our interpretation of particular words is indicated by our translation; and also deeming it probable, that most students of the Agamemnon will have at hand the glossary of Linwood or that of Blomfield, or both, besides the Greek Lexicon of Liddell and Scott.

1 This is the metre used in French epic and dramatic poetry, and by our own Drayton in his Polyolbion.

2 Rhymeless lyric verse is adopted by Milton in his Samson Agonistes, by Southey in his Thalaba, and by Lord Lytton in his Tales of Miletus, and translation of Horace's Odes.

INTRODUCTION

TO THE SECOND EDITION.

I. As this Second Edition may possibly be the last word we shall have to speak respecting the Agamemnon, that word must be fully and distinctly spoken, with 'the courage of our opinions.' We first made acquaintance with this play sixty years ago, since which date we have read and lectured upon it more times than we can attempt to count, always finding some new light thrown on the text and interpretation. Our present views, therefore, whether right or wrong, have not been reached without long study and much reflection.

II. For the constitution of the text, we have to depend, of course, primarily and mainly on the extant manuscripts which contain it.

(1) The text of the Agamemnon is derived from the following manuscripts:

A. a. Codex Mediceus, in the Laurentian Library at Florence (cited as M.). This, the most valuable ms. of Aeschylus, is ascribed to the 10th century, and supposed by some to have been copied from an uncially written codex, though more probably it is a copy of such a copy. Of the Agamemnon, it exhibits only