being driven insane by the Furies; but his reason was subsequently
restored. It is the chief object of the poet, in this tragedy, to
display the distress of Orestes at the necessity he feels of
avenging his father's death upon his mother. To this BYRON refers
in Childe Harold:

O thou! who never yet of human wrong
Left the unbalanced scale--great Nem'esis!
Thou who didst call the Furies from the abyss,
And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss
For that unnatural retribution--just,
Had it but been from hands less near--in this,
Thy former realm, I call thee from the dust!

At the close of an interesting characterization of AEschylus and
his works--much too long for a full quotation here--PROFESSOR
MAHAFFY observes as follows:

"We always feel that AEschylus thought more than he expressed,
that his desperate compounds are never affected or unnecessary.
Although, therefore, he violated the rules that bound weaker
men, it is false to say that be was less an artist than they.
His art was of a different kind, despising what they prized, and
attempting what they did not dare, but not the less a conscious
and thorough art. Though the drawing of character was not his
main object, his characters are truer and deeper than those of
poets who attempted nothing else. Though lyrical sweetness had
little place in the gloom and terror of his Titanic stage, yet
here too, when he chooses, he equals the masters of lyric song.
So long as a single Homer was deemed the author of the Iliad