victorious.  The Peoples of the earth shall kneel before your throne; you shall get your vulgar empire;—­but you shall get it presently, as they say, “where the chicken got the axe”:  Vengeance is mine, saith the Law; I will repay. The cycle, on the plane to which you have dragged it down, will run its course; your high throne will go down with it, and yourself shall kneel to races you now sniff at for ‘inferior.’  You have brought it on to the material plane, and are now going upward on its upward trend there gaily—­

“Ah, let no evil lust attack the host
Conquered by greed, to plunder what they ought not;
For yet they need return in safety home,
Doubling the goal to run their backward race”

          
                                    [Agamemnon, Plumtre’s translation]

The downtrend of the cycle awaits you—­the other half—­just as the runner in the foot-races to win, must round the pillar at the far end of the course, and return to the starting-place.—­That is among the warnings Aeschylus spoke in the Agamemnon to an Athens that was barefacedly conquering and enslaving the Isles of Greece to no end but her own wealth and power and glory.  The obvious reference is of course to the conquerors of Troy.

I have spoken of this Oresteian Trilogy as his Hamlet; with the Prometheus Bound—­another tremendous Soul-Symbol—­it is what puts him in equal rank with the four supreme Masters of later Western Literature.  I suppose it is pretty certain that Shakespeare knew nothing of him, and had never heard of the plot of his Agamemnon. But look here:—­

There was one Hamlet King of Denmark, absent from control of his kingdom because sleeping within his orchard (his custom always of an afternoon).  And there was one Agamemnon King of Men, absent from control of his kingdom because leading those same Men at the siege of Troy.  Hamlet had a wife Gertrude; Agamemnon had a wife Clytemnestra.  Hamlet had a brother Claudius; who became the lover of Gertrude.  Agamemnon had a cousin Aegisthos, who became the paramour of Clytemnestra.  Claudius murdered Hamlet, and thereby came by his throne and queen.  Clytemnestra and Aegisthos murdered Agamemnon, and Aegisthos thereby became possessed of his throne and queen.  Hamlet and Gertrude had a son Hamlet, who avenged his father’s murder.  Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had a son Orestes, who avenged his father’s murder.

There, however, the parallel ends.  Shakespeare had to paint the human soul at a certain stage of its evolution:  the ’moment of choice,’ the entering on the path:  and brought all his genius to bear on revealing that.  He had, here, to teach Karma only incidentally; in Macbeth, when the voice cried ’Sleep no more!’ he is more Aeschylean in spirit.  That dreadful voice rings through Aeschylus; who was altogether obsessed with the majesty and awfulness of Karma.  It is what he cried to Athens then, and to all ages since, reiterating Karma with terrible sleep-forbidding insistency from dark heights.—­I have quoted the wonderful line in which Browning, using similes borrowed from Aeschylus himself, sums up the effect of his style: