blow and must do so _ad infinitum_. But, according to Aeschylus, there is
a new Ruler now in heaven, one who has both sinned and suffered and
thereby grown wise. He is Zeus the Third Power, Zeus the Saviour, and his
gift to mankind is the ability through suffering to Learn (pp. 7 f.)

At the opening of the _Agamemnon_ we find Clytemnestra alienated from her
husband and secretly befriended with his ancestral enemy, Aigisthos. The
air is heavy and throbbing with hate; hate which is evil but has its due
cause. Agamemnon, obeying the prophet Calchas, when the fleet lay
storm-bound at Aulis, had given his own daughter, Iphigenîa, as a human
sacrifice. And if we ask how a sane man had consented to such an act, we
are told of his gradual temptation; the deadly excuse offered by ancient
superstition; and above all, the fact that he had already inwardly
accepted the great whole of which this horror was a part. At the first
outset of his expedition against Troy there had appeared an omen, the
bloody sign of two eagles devouring a mother-hare with her unborn
young.... The question was thus put to the Kings and their prophet: Did
they or did they not accept the sign, and wish to be those Eagles? And
they had answered Yes. They would have their vengeance, their full and
extreme victory, and were ready to pay the price. The sign once accepted,
the prophet recoils from the consequences which, in prophetic vision, he
sees following therefrom: but the decision has been taken, and the long
tale of cruelty rolls on, culminating in the triumphant sack of Troy,
which itself becomes not an assertion of Justice but a whirlwind of
godless destruction. And through all these doings of fierce beasts and
angry men the unseen Pity has been alive and watching, the Artemis who
"abhors the Eagles' feast," the "Apollo or Pan or Zeus" who hears the
crying of the robbed vulture; nay, if even the Gods were deaf, the mere
"wrong of the dead" at Troy might waken, groping for some retribution upon
the "Slayer of Many Men" (pp. 15, 20).