of which the best scholars can only conjecture the meaning.—­In all this criticism, let me say, one is but saying what has been said before; echoing Professor Mahaffy; echoing Professor Gilbert Murray; but there is a need to give you the best picture possible of this man speaking from the eternal.—­Unless Milton and Carlyle had co-operated to make it, I think, any translation of the Agamemnon—­which so many have tried to translate—­would be fatiguing and a great bore to read.  It may not be amiss to quote three lines from George Peel’s David and Bethsabe, which have been often called Aeschylean in audacity:—­

     “At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt,
     And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings,
     Sit ever burning on his hateful wings;”

His—­the thunder’s—­fair spouse is the lightning.  Imagine images as swift, vivid and daring as that, hurled and flashed out in language terse, sudden, lofty—­and you may get an idea of what this eagle’s bark was like.  And the word that came rasping and resounding on it out of storm-skies high over Olympus, for Athens then and the world since to hear, was KARMA.

He took that theme, and drove it home, and drove it home, and drove it home.  Athens disregarded the rights and sufferings of others; was in fact abominably cruel.  Well; she should hear about Karma; and in such a way that she should—­no, but she should—­ give ear.  Karma punished wrong-doing.  It was wrong-doing that Karma punished.  You could not do wrong with impunity.—­The common thought was that any extreme of good fortune was apt to rouse the jealousy of the Gods, and so bring on disaster.  This was what Pindar taught—­all-worshiped prosperous Pindar, Aeschylus’ contemporary, the darling poet of the Greeks.  The idea is illustrated by Herodotus’ story of the Ring of Polycrates.

You remember how the latter, being tyrant of Samos, applied to Amasis of Egypt for an alliance.  But wary Amasis, noting his invariable good luck, advised him to sacrifice something, lest the Gods should grow jealous:  so Polycrates threw a ring into the sea, with the thought thus to appease Nemesis cheaply; but an obliging fish allowed itself to be caught and served up for his supper with the ring in its internal economy; on hearing of which, wary Amasis foresaw trouble, and declined the alliance with thanks.  Such views or feelings had come to be Greek orthodoxy; you may take it that whatever Pindar said was not far from the orthodoxies—­hence his extreme popularity:  we dearly love a man who tells us grandly what we think ourselves, and think it right to think.  But such a position would not do for Aeschylus.  He noted his doctrine only to condemn it.

     “There live an old saw framed in ancient days
      In memories of men, that high estate,
      Full grown, brings forth its young, nor childless dies,
      But that from good success
      Springs to the