are, as they have described themselves, weak and very old, "dreams
wandering in the daylight."

The characters of this play seem, in a sense, to arise out of the theme
and consequently to have, amid all their dramatic solidity, a further
significance which is almost symbolic. Cassandra is, as it were, the
incarnation of that knowledge which Herodotus describes as the crown of
sorrow, the knowledge which sees and warns and cannot help (Hdt. ix. 16).
Agamemnon himself, the King of Kings, triumphant and doomed, is a symbol
of pride and the fall of pride. We must not think of him as bad or
specially cruel. The watchman loved him (ll. 34 f.), and the lamentations
of the Elders over his death have a note of personal affection (pp. 66
ff.). But I suspect that Aeschylus, a believer in the mystic meaning of
names, took the name Agamemnon to be a warning that [Greek: Aga mimnei],
"the unseen Wrath abides." _Agâ_, of course, is not exactly wrath; it is
more like Nemesis, the feeling that something is [Greek: agan], "too
much," the condemnation of _Hubris_ (pride or overgrowth) and of all
things that are in excess. _Agâ_ is sometimes called "the jealousy of
God," but such a translation is not happy. It is not the jealousy, nor
even the indignation, of a personal God, but the profound repudiation and
reversal of Hubris which is the very law of the Cosmos. Through all the
triumph of the conqueror, this _Agâ_ abides.

The greatest and most human character of the whole play is Clytemnestra.
She is conceived on the grand Aeschylean scale, a scale which makes even
Lady Macbeth and Beatrice Cenci seem small; she is more the kinswoman of
Brynhild. Yet she is full not only of character, but of subtle psychology.
She is the first and leading example of that time-honoured ornament of the
tragic stage, the sympathetic, or semi-sympathetic, heroine-criminal.
Aeschylus employs none of the devices of later playwrights to make her