P. 36, Clytemnestra.]—­A wonderful speech.  It seems to me that Aeschylus’ imagination realized all the confused passions in Clytemnestra’s mind, but that his art was not yet sufficiently developed to make them all clear and explicit.  She is in suspense; does Agamemnon know her guilt or not?  At least, if she is to die, she wants to say something to justify or excuse herself in the eyes of the world.  A touch of hysteria creeps in; why could he not have been killed in all these years?  Why must he rise, like some monster from the grave, unkillable?  Gradually she recovers her calm, explains clearly the suspicious point of Orestes’ absence, and heaps up her words and gestures of welcome to an almost oriental fullness (which Agamemnon rebukes, ll. 918 ff., p. 39).  Again, at the end, when she finds that for the time she is safe, her real feelings almost break out.

P. 38.]—­What is the motive of the Crimson Tapestries?  I think the tangling robe must have been in the tradition, as the murder in the bath certainly was.  One motive, of course, is obvious:  Clytemnestra is tempting Agamemnon to sin or “go too far.”  He tries to resist, but the splendour of an oriental homecoming seduces him and he yields.  But is that enough to account for such a curious trait in the story, and one so strongly emphasized?  We are told afterwards that Clytemnestra threw over her victim an “endless web,” long and rich (p. 63), to prevent his seeing or using his arms.  And I cannot help suspecting that this endless web was the same as the crimson pall.

If one tries to conjecture the origin of this curious story, it is perhaps a clue to realize that the word droite means both a bath and a sarcophagus, or rather that the thing called droite, a narrow stone or marble vessel about seven feet long, was in pre-classical and post-classical times used as a sarcophagus, but in classical times chiefly or solely as a bath.  If among the prehistoric graves at Mycenae some later peasants discovered a royal mummy or skeleton in a sarcophagus, wrapped in a robe of royal crimson, and showing signs of violent death—­such as Schliemann believed that he discovered—­would they not say:  “We found the body of a King murdered in a bath, and wrapped round and round in a great robe?”

P. 39 f.]—­Agamemnon is going through the process of temptation.  He protests rather too often and yields.

P. 39, l. 931, Tell me but this.]—­This little dialogue is very characteristic of Aeschylus.  Euripides would have done it at three times the length and made all the points clear.  In Aeschylus the subtlety is there, but it is not easy to follow.

P. 40, l. 945, These bound slaves.]—­i.e. his shoes.  The metaphor shows the trend of his unconscious mind.

P. 41, l. 950, This princess.]—­This is the first time that the attention of the audience is drawn to Cassandra.  She too is one of Aeschylus’ silent figures.  I imagine her pale, staring in front of her, almost as if in a trance, until terror seizes her at Clytemnestra’s greeting in l. 1035, p. 45.