So it has been said that Aeschylean Tragedy is more nearly allied to sculpture; Shakespearean Tragedy to the Epic.

Think how that unchanging mask, that frozen moment of expression, would develop the quality of tragic irony.  In it Clytemnestra comes out to greet the returning Agamemnon.  She has her handmaids carpet the road for him with purple tapestries; she makes her speeches of welcome; she alludes to the old sacrifice of Iphigenia; she tells him how she has waited for his return;—­ and all the while the audience knows she is about to kill him.  They listen to her doubtful words, in which she reveals to them, who know both already, her faithlessness and dire purpose; but to her husband, seems to reveal something different altogether.  With Agamemnon comes Cassandra from fallen Troy:  whose fate was to foresee all woes and horror, and to forthtell what she saw—­ and never to be believed; so now when she raises her dreadful cry, foreseeing what is about to happen, and uttering warning—­ none believe her but the audience, who know it all in advance.  And then there are the chantings of the chorus, a group of Argive elders.  They know or guess how things stand between the queen and her lover; they express their misgiving, gathering as the play goes on; they recount the deeds of violence of which the House of Atreus has been the scene, and are haunted by the foreshadowings of Karma.  But they many not understand or give credence to the warnings of Cassandra:  Karma disallows fore-fending against the fall of its bolts.  Troy has fallen, they say:  and that was Karma; because Paris, and Troy in supporting him, had sinned against Zeus the patron of hospitality,—­to whom the offense rose like vultures with rifled nest, wheeling in mid-heaven on strong oars of wings, screaming for retribution.  —­You may not that Aeschylus’ freedom from the bonds of outer religion is like Shakespeare’s own:  here Zeus figures as symbol of the Lords of Karma; from him flow the severe readjustments of the Law;—­but in the Prometheus Bound he stands for the lower nature that crucifies the Higher.

Troy, then, had sinned, and has fallen; but (says the Chorus) let the conquerors look to it that they do not overstep the mark; let there be no dishonoring the native Gods of Troy; (the Athenians had been very considerably overstepping the mark in some of their own conquests recently;)—­let there be no plundering or useless cruelty; (the Athenians had been hideously greedy and cruel;)—­or Karma would overtake it own agents, the Greeks, who were not yet out of the wood, as we say—­who had not yet returned home.  This was when the beacons had announced the fall of Troy, and before the entry of Agamemnon.