which the sun refused to look upon; the ghosts of the mangled children
appear to her on the battlements of the palace. She also sees the death
which is preparing for her lord; and, though shuddering at the reek of
death, as if seized with madness, she rushes into the house to meet her
own inevitable doom, while from behind the scene we hear the groans of the
dying Agamemnon. The palace opens; Clytemnestra stands beside the body of
her king and husband; like an insolent criminal, she not only confesses
the deed, but boasts of and justifies it, as a righteous requital for
Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia to his own ambition. Her jealousy of
Cassandra, and criminal connexion with the worthless Aegisthus, who does
not appear till after the completion of the murder and towards the
conclusion of the piece, are motives which she hardly touches on, and
throws entirely into the background. This was necessary to preserve the
dignity of the subject; for, indeed, Clytemnestra could not with propriety
have been portrayed as a frail seduced woman--she must appear with the
features of that heroic age, so rich in bloody catastrophes, in which all
passions were violent, and men, both in good and evil, surpassed the
ordinary standard of later and more degenerated ages. What is more
revolting--what proves a deeper degeneracy of human nature, than horrid
crimes conceived in the bosom of cowardly effeminacy? If such crimes are
to be portrayed by the poet, he must neither seek to palliate them, nor to
mitigate our horror and aversion of them. Moreover, by bringing the
sacrifice of Iphigenia thus immediately before us, the poet has succeeded
in lessening the indignation which otherwise the foul and painful fate of
Agamemnon is calculated to awaken. He cannot be pronounced wholly
innocent; a former crime recoils on his own head: besides, according to
the religious idea of the ancients, an old curse hung over his house.
Aegisthus, the author of his destruction, is a son of that very Thyestes
on whom his father Atreus took such an unnatural revenge; and this fateful
connexion is vividly brought before our minds by the chorus, and more