We might quote many instances of this proud pessimism in Homer:

Kai se, geron, to prin men, akouomen, olbion einai—

"Thou to, we hear, old man, e'en thou was at once time happy;"

Hos gar epeklosanto theoi deiloisi brotoisin Zoein achnumenous. Autoi de l'akedees eisin—

"The Gods have allotted to us to live thus mortal and mournful, Mournful; but they themselves live ever untouched by mourning."

Proud—no; it is not quite proud; not in an active sense; there is a resignation in it; and yet it is a kind of haughty resignation. As if he said: We are miserable; there is nothing else to be but miserable; let us be silent, and make no fuss about.—It is the restraint—a very Greek quality—the depth hinted at, but never wailed over or paraded at all—that make in these cases his grand manner. His attitude is, I think, nearer the Teutonic than the Celtic:—his countrymen, like the Teutons, were accustomed to the pralaya, the long racial night. But he and the Celts achieved the grand manner, which the Teutons did not. His eyes, like Llywarch's or Oisin's, were fixed on a past glory beyond the nightfall.

But where does this Homeric mood lead us? To no height of truth, I think. Katherine Tingley gave us a keynote for the literature of the future and the grandest things it should utter,—for the life, the art, the poetry of a coming time that shall be Theosophical, that is, lit with the splendor and beauty of the Soul—when she spoke that high seeming paradox that "Life is Joy." Let us uncover the real Life; all this sorrow is only the veil that hides it. God knows we see enough of the veil; but the poet's business is to tear it down, rend it asunder, and show the brightness which it hides. If the personality were all, and a man's whole history were bounded by his cradle and his grave; then you had done all, when you had presented personalities in all their complexity, and made your page teem with the likenesses of living men, and only shown the Beyond, the Governance, as something unknowable, adverse and aloof. But the Greater Part of a man is eternal, and each of his lives and deaths but little incidents in a vast and glorious pilgrimage; and when it is understood that this is the revelation to be made, this grandeur the thing to be shadowed forth, criticism will have entered upon its true path and mission.

I find no such Soul-symbol in the Iliad: the passion and spiritual concentration of whose author, I think, was only enough to let him see this outward world: personalities, with their motive-springs of action within themselves: his greatness, his sympathy, his compassion, revealed all that to him; but he lacked vision for the Meanings. I found him then less than Shakespeare: whose clear knowledge of human personalities— ability to draw living men—was but incidental and an instrument; who but took the tragedy of life by the way, as he went to set forth the whole story of the soul; never losing sight of Karma, and that man is his own adverse destiny; finishing all with the triumph of the soul, the Magician, in The Tempest. And I count him less than that Blind Titan in Bardism, who, setting out to justify the ways of God to men, did verily justify the ways of fate to the Soul; and showed the old, old truth, so dear to the Celtic bards, that in the very depths of hell the Soul has not yet lost all her original brightness; but is mightily superior to hell, death, fate, sorrow and the whole pack of them;—I count him less than the "Evening Dragon" of Samson Agonistes, whose last word to us is

"Nothing is here for tears; nothing to wail Or knock the breast; no weakness or contempt."

And I found him less that One with the grand tragic visage, whose words so often quiver with unshed tears, who went forth upon his journey

.... pei dolci pomi Promessi a me per lo verace Duca; Ma fino al centro pria convien ch'io tomi:—

"to obtain those sweet apples (of Paradise) promised me by my true Leader; but first is"—convien—how shall you translate the pride and resignation of that word?—"it behoves," we must say, "it convenes"—"first it is convenient that I should fall as far as to the center (of hell);"—who must end the gloom and terror of that journey, that fall, with

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle,

"And then we came forth to behold again the Stars;" and who came from his ascent through purifying Purgatory with

Rifatto si, come piante novelle Rinnovellate di novella fronda, Puro e disposto a salire alle stelle—

"So made anew, like young plants in spring with fresh foliage, I was pure and disposed to come forth among the Stars;"—and who must end his Paradiso and his life-work announcing

L'amor che muove il sole e le altre stelle,

"The Love that moves the sun and the other Stars." Ah, glory to this Dante! Glory to the man who would end nothing but with the stars!



III. GREEKS AND PERSIANS

Now to consider what this Blind Maeonides did for Greece. Sometime last Century a Black Potentate from Africa visited England, and was duly amazed at all he saw. Being a very important person indeed, he was invited to pay his respects to Queen Victoria. he told her of the many wonders he had seen; and took occasion to ask her, as the supreme authority, how such things came to be. What was the secret of England's greatness? —She rose to it magnificently, and did precisely what a large section of her subjects would have expected of her. She solemnly handed him a copy of the Bible, and told him he should find his answer in that.

She was thinking, no doubt, of the influence of Christian teaching; if called on for the exact passage that had worked the wonder, very likely she would have turned to the Sermon on the Mount. Well; very few empires have founded their material greatness on such texts, as The meek shall inherit the earth. They take a shorter road to it. If a man ask of thee thy coat, and thou give him thy cloak also, thou dost not (generally) build thyself a world-wide commerce. When he smiteth thee on they left cheek, and thou turnest to him thy right for the complementary buffet, thou dost not (as a rule) become shortly possessed of his territories. Queen Victoria lived in an age when people did not notice these little discrepancies; so did Mr. Podsnap. And yet there was much more truth in her answer than you might think.

King James's Bible is a monument of mighty literary style; and one that generations of Englishmen have regarded as divine, a message from the Ruler of the Stars. They have been reading it, and hearing it read in the churches, for three hundred years. Its language has been far more familiar to them than that of any other book whatsoever; more common quotations come from it, probably, than from all other sources combined. The Puritans of old, like the Nonconformists now, completely identified themselves with the folk it tells about: Cromwell's armies saw in the hands of their great captain "the sword of the Lord and of Gideon." When the Roundhead went into battle, or when the Revivalist goes to prayer meeting, he heard and hears the command of Jehovah to "go up to Ramoth Gilead and prosper"; to "smite Amalek hip and thigh." Phrases from the Old Testament are in the mouths of millions daily; and they are phrases couched in the grand literary style.

Now the grand style is the breathing of a sense of greatness. When it occurs you sense a mysterious importance lurking behind the words. It is the accent of the eternal thing in man, the Soul; and one of the many proofs of the Soul's existence. So you cannot help being reminded by it of the greatness of the soul. There are periods when the soul draws near its racial vehicle, and the veils grow thin between it and us: through all the utterances of such times one is apt to hear the thunder from beyond. Although the soul have no word to say, or although it message suffer change in passing through the brain-mind, so that not high truth, but even a lie may emerge—it still comes, often, ringing with the grand accents. Such a period was that which gave us Shakespeare and Milton, and the Bible, and Brown, and Taylor, and all the mighty masters of English prose. Even when their thought is trivial or worse, you are reminded, by the march and mere order of their words, of the majesty of the Soul.

When Deborah sings of that treacherous murderess, Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite, that before she slew her guest and ally Sisera, "He asked water and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish,"—you are aware that, to the singer, no question of ethics was implied. Nothing common, nothing of this human daily world, inheres in it; but sacrosanct destinies were involved, and the martialed might of the Invisible. It was part of a tremendous drama, in which Omnipotence itself was protagonist. Little Israel rose against the mighty of this world; but the Unseen is mightier than the mighty; and the Unseen was with little Israel. The application is false, unethical, abominable—as coming through brain-minds of that kind. But you must go back behind the application, behind the brain-mind, to find the secret of the air of greatness that pervades it. It is a far-off reflection of this eternal truth: that the Soul, thought it speak through but one human being, can turn the destinies and overturn the arrogance of the world. When David sang, "Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered; yea, let all his enemies be scattered!" he, poor brain-mind, was thinking of his triumphs over Philistines and the like; with whom he had better have been finding a way to peace;—but the Soul behind him was thinking of its victories over him and his passions and his treacheries. So such psalms and stories, though their substance be vile enough, do by their language yet remind us somehow of the grandeur of the Spirit. That is what style achieves.

Undoubtedly this grand language of the Bible, as that of Milton and Shakespeare in a lesser degree—lesser in proportion as they have been less read—has fed in the English race an aptitude, an instinct, for action on a large imperial scale. It is not easy to explain the effect of great literature; but without doubt it molds the race. Now the ethic of the Old Testament, its moral import, is very mixed. There is much that is true and beautiful; much that is treacherous and savage. So that its moral and ethical effects have been very mixed too. But its style, a subtler thing than ethics, has nourished conceptions of a large and seeping sort, to play through what ethical ideas they might find. The more spiritual is any influence—that is, the less visible and easy to trace—the more potent it is; so style in literature may be counted one of the most potent forces of all. Through it, great creative minds mold the destinies of nations. Let Theosophy have expression as noble as that of the Bible—as it will—and of that very impulse it will bite deep into the subconsciousness of the race, and be the nourishment of grand public action, immense conceptions, greater than any that have come of Bible reading, because pure and true. Our work is to purify the channels through which the Soul shall speak; the Teachers have devoted themselves to establishing the beginnings of this Movement in right thought and right life. But the great literary impulse will come, when we have learned and earned the right to use it.

Now, what the Bible became to the English, Homer became to the Greeks—and more also. They heard his grand manner, and were billed by it with echoes from the Supermundane. Anax andron Agamemnon—what Greek could hear a man so spoken of, and dream he compounded of common clay? Never mind what this king of men did or failed to do; do but breathe his name and titles, and you have affirmed immortality and the splendor of the Human Soul! The human Soul?

"Tush!" said they, "the Greek Soul! he was a Greek as we are!".... And so Tomides, Dickaion and Harryotatos, Athenian tinkers and cobblers, go swaggering back to their shops, and dream grand racial dreams. For this is a much more impressionable people than the English; any wind from the Spirit blows in upon their minds quickly and easily. Homer in Greece —once Solon, or Pisistratus, or Hopparchus, had edited and canonized him, and arranged for his orderly periodical public reading (as the Bible in the churches)—had an advantage even over the Bible in England. When Cromwell and his men grew mighty upon the deeds of the mighty men of Israel, they had to thrill to the grand rhythms until a sort of miracle had been accomplished, and they had come to see in themselves the successors and living representatives of Israel. But the Greek, rising on the swell of Homer's roll and boom, had need of no such transformation. The uplift was all for him; his by hereditary right; and no pilfering necessary, from alien creed or race. We have seen in Homer an inspired Race-patriot, a mighty poet saddened and embittered by the conditions he saw and his own impotence to change them.—Yes, he had heard the golden-snooded sing; but Greeks were pygmies, compared with the giants who fought at Ilion! There was that eternal contrast between the glory he had within and the squalor he saw without. Yes, he could sing; he could launch great songs for love of the ancients and their magnificence. But what could a song do? Had it feet to travel Hellas; hands to flash a sword for her; a voice and kingly authority to command her sons into redemption?—Ah, poor blind old begging minstrel, it had vastly greater powers and organs than these!

Lycurgus, it is said, brought singers or manuscripts of your poems into Sparta; because, blind minstrel, he had a mind to make Sparta great-souled; and he knew that you were the man to do it, if done it could be. Then for about two hundred and sixty years, without much fuss to come into history, you were having your way with your Greeks. Your music was ringing in the ears of mothers; their unborn children were being molded to the long roll of your hexameters. There came to be manuscripts of you in every city: corrupt enough, many of them, forgeries, many of them; lays fudged up and fathered on you by venal Rhapsodoi, to chant in princely houses whose ancestors it was a good speculation to praise. You were everywhere in Greece: a great and vague tradition, a formless mass of literature: by the time Solon was making laws for Athens, and Pisistratus was laying the foundations of her stable government and greatness.

And then you were officially canonized. Solon, Pisistratus, or one of the Pisistratidae, determined that you should be, not a vague tradition and wandering songs any longer, but the Bible of the Hellenes. From an obscure writer of the Alexandrian period we get a tale of Pisistratus sending to all the cities of Greece for copies of Homeric poems, paying for them well; collating them, editing them out of a vast confusion; and producing at last out of the matter thus obtained, a single more or less articulate Iliad. From Plato and others we get hints leading to the supposition that an authorized state copy was prepared; that it was ordained that the whole poem should be recited at the Panathenaic Festivals by relays of Rhapsodoi; this state copy being in the hands of a prompter whose business it was to see there should be no transgression by the chanters.* The wandering songs of the old blind minstrel have become the familiar Sacred Book of the brightest-minded people in Greece.

——— * For a detailed account of all this see De Quincey's essay Homer and the Homeridae. ———

Some sixty years pass, and now look what happens. A mighty Power in Asia arranges a punitive expedition against turbulent islanders and coast-dwellers on its western border. But an old blind minstrel has been having his way with these: and the punitive expedition is to be of the kind not where you punish, but where you are punished;—has been suggesting to them, from the Olympus of his sacrosanct inspiration, the idea of great racial achievement, till it has become a familiar thing, ideally, in their hearts.—The huge armies and the fleets come on; Egypt has gone down; Lydia has gone down; the whole world must go down before them. But there is an old blind minstrel, long since grown Olympian in significance, and throned aloft beside Nephelegereta Zeus, chanting in every Greek ear and heart. Greeks rise in some sort to repel the Persian: Athens and Sparta, poles apart in every feeling and taste, find that under the urge of archaic hexameters and in the face of this common danger, they can co-operate after a fashion. The world is in a tumult and threatens to fall; but behind all the noise and ominous thunder, by heaven, you can hear the roll of hexameters, and an old blind sorrow-stricken bard chanting. The soul of a nation is rising, the beat of her wings keeping time to the music of olden proud resounding lines. Who led the Grecian fleet at Salamis?—Not Spartan Eurygiades, but an old blind man dead these centuries. Who led the victors at Marathon? Not sly Athenian Miltiades, but an old dead man who had only words for his wealth: blind Maeonides chanting; and with his chanting marshaling on the roll of his hexameters mightier heroes than ever a Persian eye could see: the host that fought at Ilion; the creatures of his brain; Polymechanos Odysseus, and Diomedes and Aias; Podargos Achilles; Anas andron Agamemnon.

The story of the Persian Wars comes to us only from the Greek side; so all succeeding ages have been enthusiastically Prohellene. We are to think that Europe since has been great and free and glorious, because free and cultured Greeks then held back a huge and barbarous Asian despotism. All of which is great nonsense. Europe since has not been great and free and glorious; very often she has been quite the reverse. She has, at odd times, been pottering around her ideal schemes of government; which Asia in large part satisfied herself that she had found long ago. As for culture and glory, the trumps have now been with the one, now with the other. And the Persians were not barbarians by any means. And when you talk of Asia, remember that it is as far a cry from Persia to China, as from Persian to England. Let us have not more of this preoccupation with externals, and blind eyes to the Spirit of Man. I suppose ballot-boxes and referenda and recalls and the like were specified, when it was said Of such is the kingdom of Heaven?...

But Persia would not have flowed out over Europe, if Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea had gone the other way. Empires wax and wane like the moon; they ebb and flow like the tides; and are governed by natural law as these are; and as little depend, ultimately, upon battle, murder, and sudden death; which are but effects that wisdom would evitate; we are wrong in taking them for causes. Two things you can posit about any empire: it will expand to its maximum; then ebb and fall away. Though the daily sun sets not on its boundaries, the sun of time will set on its decay; because all things born in time will die; and no elixer of life has been found, nor ever will be. There is an impulse from the inner planes; it strikes into the heart of a people; rises there, and carries them forward upon an outward sweep; then recedes, and leaves them to their fall. Its cycle may perhaps be longer or shorter; but in the main its story is always the same, and bound to be so; you cannot vote down the cycles of time. What hindered Rome from mastery of Europe; absolute mastery; and keeping it forever? Nothing—but the eternal Cyclic Law. So Persia.

She was the last phase of that West Asian manvantara which began in 1890 and was due to end in 590 B. C. As such a phase, a splendor-day of thirteen decades should have been hers; that, we find, being always the length of a national illumination. She began under Cyrus in 558; flowed out under Cambyses and Darius to her maximum growth—for half the thirteen decades expanding steadily. Then she touched Greece, where a younger cycle was rising, and recoiled. She should have been at high tide precisely three years before-Marathon—a half-cycle after the accession of Cyrus, or in 493;—and was. Then the Law-pronounced its Thus far and no further; and enforced it with Homer's songs, and Greek valor, and Darius' death, and Xerxes' fickle childishness (he smacked the Hellespont because it was naughty). These things together brought to naught the might and ambition and bravery of Iran; but had they been lacking, the Law would have found other means. Though Xerxes and Themistocles had both sat at home doing nothing, Alexander would still have marched east in his time, and Rome conquered the world. So discount all talk of Greece's having saved Europe, which was never in danger. But you may say Persia saved Greece: that her impact kindled the fires—was used by the Law for that purpose—which so brilliantly have illumined Europe since.

Persia rose in the evening of that West Asian manvantara; the empires of its morning and noon, as Assyria chiefly, had been slower of growth, longer of life, smaller of expanse; and for her one, had several periods of glory. A long habit of empire -building had been formed there, which carried Persia rapidly and easily to her far limits. Assyria, the piece de resistance of the whole manvantara, with huge and long effort had created, so to say, an astral mold; of which Persia availed herself, and overflowed its boundaries, conquering regions east and west Assyria never knew. But if she found the mold and the habit there to aid her, she came too late for the initial energies of the morning, or the full forces of the manvantaric noon. Those had been wielded by the great Tiglath Pilesers and Assurbanipals of earlier centuries; fierce conquerors, splendid builders, ruthless patrons of the arts. What was left for the evening and Persia could not carry her outward her full thirteen decades, but only half of them: sixty-five years her tides were rising, and then she touched Greece. Thence-forward she remained stationary within her borders, not much troubled internally, until the four -twenties. To a modern eye, she seems on the decline since Marathon; to a Persian of the time, probably, that failure on the Greek frontier looked a small matter enough. A Pancho Villa to chase; if you failed to catch him, pooh, it was nothing! Xerxes is no Darius, true: Artaxerxes I, no Cyrus, nor nothing like. But through both their reigns there is in the main good government in most of the provinces; excellent law and order; and a belief still in the high civilizing mission of the Persians. Peace, instead of the old wars of conquest; but you would have seen no great falling off. Hystaspes himself had been less conqueror than consolidator; the Augustus of the Achaemenids, greater at peace than at war;—though great at that too, but not from land-frontiers; and indeed, had ample provocation, as those things go, for his punitive expedition that failed. For the rest, he had strewn the coast with fine harbors, and reclaimed vast deserts with reservoirs and dikes; had explored the Indus and the ocean, and linked Egypt and Persia by a canal from the Red Sea to the Nile. Well; and Xerxes carried it on; he too played the great Achaemenid game; did he not send ships to sail round Africa? If there was no more conquering, it was because there was really nothing left to conquer; who would bother about that Greece?—Darius Hystaspes was the last strong kind, yes; but Datius Nothus was the first gloomy tyrant, or at least his queen, bloodthirsty Parysatis, was; which was not til 434. So that Persia too had her good thirteen decades of comfortable, even glorious, years.

Whereafter we see her wobbling under conflicting cyclic impulses down to her final fall. For lack of another to take her place, she was still in many ways the foremost power; albeit here and there obstreperous satraps were always making trouble. When Lysander laid Athens low in 404, it was Persian financial backing enabled him to do it; but Cyrus might march in to her heart, and Xenophon out again, but two years later, and none to say them effectually nay. Had there been some other West Asian power, risen in 520 or thereabouts, to outlast Persia and finish its day with the end of the great cycle in 390, one supposes the Achaemenids would have fallen in the four-twenties, and left that other supreme during the remaining years. But there was none. The remains of Nineveh and Babylon slept securely in the Persian central provinces; there was nothing there to rise; they had their many days long since. Egypt would have done something, if she could; would have like to;—but her own cycles were against her. She had the last of her cyclic days under the XXVIth Dynasty. In 655 Psamtik I reunited and resurrected her while his overlord Assurbanipal was wrecking his—Assurbanipal's—empire elsewhere; thirteen decades afterwards, in 525, she fell before Cambyses. Thirteen decades, nearly, of Persian rule followed, with interruptions of revolt, before she regained her independence in 404;—stealing, you may say, the nine years short from the weakness of Persia. Then she was free for another half -cycle, less one year; a weak precarious freedom at best, lost to Artaxerxes Ochus in 340. All but the first fourteen years of it fell beyond the limits of the manvantara; the West Asian forces were spent. Egypt was merely waiting til the Greek cycle should have sunk low enough and on to the military plane; and had not long to wait. She paid back most of her nine years to Persia; then hailed Alexander as her savior; and was brought by him, to some extent, under the influence of European cycles; to share then in what uninteresting twilight remained to Greece, and presently in the pomps and crimsons of Rome.

Persia, too, was waiting for that Greek military cycle; until it should rise, however, something had to be going on in West Asia. The Athenian first half-cycle—sixty-five years from the inception of the hegemony—ended in 413, when the Peloponnesian War entered its last, and for Athens, disastrous, phase. Another half-cycle brings us to the rise of Philip; who about that time became dominant in Greece. But not yet had a power consolidated, which could contest with Persia the hegemony of the world. Having enabled Sparta to put down Athens, the western satraps turned their attention to finding those who should put down Sparta. Corinth, Thebes, Argos and Athens were willing; and Pharnabazus financed them for war in 395. A year after, he and Conon destroyed the Spartan fleet. In 387 came the Peace of Antalicidas, by which Persia won what Xerxes had fought for of old; the suzerainty of Greece. But she was not strong; her cycle was long past; she stood upon the wealth and prestige of her better days, and the weakness of her contemporaries. Internally she was falling to pieces until Artaxerxes Ochus, between 362 and 338, wading through blood and cruelty, restored her unity, wore out her resources, and left her apparently as great as under Xerxes, but really ready to fall at a touch. He prepared the way for Alexander.

So ended an impulse that began, who knows when? on a high spiritual plane in the pure religion of the Teacher we call Zoroaster; a high system of ethics expressed in long generations of clean and noble lives. From that spirituality the impulse descending reached the planes of intellect and culture; with results we cannot measure now; nothing remains but the splendor of a few ruins in the wilderness—the course the lion and the lizard keep. It reached the plane of military power, and flowed over all the lands between the Indus and the Nile; covering them with a well-ordered, highly civilized and wisely governed empire. Then it began to ebb; meeting a counter-impulse arising in Eastern Europe.

Which, too, had it source on spiritual planes; in the heart and on the lyre of blind Maeonides; and worked downward and outward, till it had wrought on this plane a stable firmness in Sparta, an alertness in Athens. It contacted then the crest of the Persian wave, and received from the impact huge accession of vigor. It blossomed in the Age of Pericles on the plane of mind and creative imagination. It came down presently on to the plane of militarism, and swelled out under Alexander as far as to the eastern limits of the Persian Empire he overthrew. Where it met a tide beginning to rise in India; and receded or remained stationary before that. And at last it was spent, and itself overthrown by a new impulse arisen in Italy; which took on impetus from contact with Greece, as Greece had done from contact with Persia.

The Greeks of Homer's and Hesiod's time, before the European manvantara, elsewhere begun, had reached or quickened them, were uncouth and barbarous enough; they may have stood, to their great West Asian neighbors, as the Moors of today to the nations of Europe; they may have stood, in things cultural, to the unknown nations of the north or west already at that time awakened, as the Chinese now and recently to the Japanese. Like Moors, like Chinese, they had behind them traditions of an ancient greatness; but pralaya, fall, adversity, squalor, had done their work on them, developing the plebeian qualities. Now that they have emerged into modern history, as then when they were emerging into ancient, we find them with many like characteristics; a turn for democracy, for example; the which they assuredly had not when they were passing into pralaya under the Byzantine Empire. A turn for democracy; plebeian qualities; these are the things one would expect after pralaya, if that pralaya had been at all disastrous. With the ancient Greeks, the plebeian qualities were not all virtues by any means; they retained through their great age many of the vices of plebeianism. They won their successes for the most part on sporadic impulses of heroism; shone by an extraordinary intellectual and artistic acumen. But taking them by and large, they were too apt to ineffectualize those successes, in the fields of national and political life, by extraordinary venality and instability of character. I shall draw here deeply on Professor Mahaffy, who very wisely sets out to restore the balance as between Greeks and Persians, and burst bubble-notions commonly held. Greek culture was extremely varied, and therein lay its strength; you can find all sorts of types there; and there are outstanding figures of the noblest. But on the whole, says Mahaffy—I think rightly—there was something sordid, grasping, and calculating: noblesse oblige made little appeal to them—was rather foreign to their nature. Patricianism did exist; in Sparta; perhaps in Thebes. Of the two Thebans we know best, Pindar was decidedly a patrician poet, and Epaminondas was a very great gentleman; now Thebes, certainly, must have been mighty in foregone manvantaras, as witness her five cycles of myths, the richest in Greece. In her isolation she had doubtless carried something of that old life down; and then, too, she had Pindar. Nor was Sparta any upstart;—of her we have only heard Athenians speak. But outside of these two, you hardly find a Greek gentleman in public life; hardly that combination of personal honor, contempt of commerce, class-pride, leisured and cultured living;—with, very often, ultra-conservatism, narrowness of outlook, political ineptitude and selfishness. The Spartans had many of these instincts, good and bad. They reached their cultural zenith in the seventh century or earlier; probably Lycurgus had an eye to holding off that degeneration which follows on super-refinement; and hence the severe life he brought in. My authority makes much of the adoration the other Greeks accorded them; who might hate and fight with Sparta, but took infinite pride in her nonetheless. Thus they told those tales of the Spartan mothers, and the Spartan boy the fox nibbled; thus their philosophers, painting an Utopia, took always most of its features from Lacedaemon.

All of which I quote for the light's sake it throws on the past of Greece: the past of her past, and the ages before her history. Or really, on the whole history of the human race; for I think it is what you shall find always, or almost always. I spoke of the Celtic qualities as having been of old patrician; they are plebeian nowadays, after the long pralaya and renewal. As a pebble is worn smooth by the sea, so the patrician type, with its refinements and culture, is wrought out by the strong life currents that play through a race during its manvantaric periods. Pralaya comes, with conquest, the overturning of civilization, mixture of blood; all the precious results obtained hurled back into the vortex;—and then to be cast up anew with the new manvantara, a new uncouth formless form, to be played on, shaped and infused by the life-currents again. In Greece an old manvantara had evolved patricianism and culture; which the pralaya following swept all away, except some relics perhaps in Thebes the isolated and conservative, certainly in Sparta. Lycurgus was wise in his generation when he sought by a rigid system to impose the plebeian virtues on Spartan patricianism.

Wise in his generation, yes; but he could work no miracle. Spartan greatness, too, was ineffectual: there is that about pouring new wine into old bottles. Sparta was old and conservative; covered her patrician virtues with a rude uncultural exterior; was inept politically—as old aristocracies so commonly are; she shunned that love of the beautiful and the things of the mind which is the grace, as Bushido—to use the best name there is for it—is the virtue, of the patrician. You may say she was selfish and short-sighted; true; and yet she began the Peloponnesian War not without an eye to freeing the cities and islands from the soulless tyranny an Athenian democracy had imposed on them: when there is a war, some men will always be found, who go in with unselfish high motives.— Being the patrician state, and the admired of all, it was she naturally who assumed the hegemony when the Persian came. But she had foregone the graces of her position, and her wits, through lack of culture, were something dull. She lost that leadership presently to a young democratic Athens endowed with mental acumen and potential genius; who, too, gained immeasurably from Sparta, because she knew how to turn everything to the quickening of her wits—this having at her doors so contrasting a neighbor, for example.—Young? Well, yes; I suspect if there had ever been an Athenian glory before, it was ages before Troy fell. She plays no great part in the legends of the former manvantara; Homer has little to say about her. She had paid tribute at one time to Minos, king of Crete; her greatness belonged not to the past, but to the future.

As all Greeks admired the Spartans—what we call a 'sneaking' admiration—so too they admired the Persians; who were gentleman in a great sense, and in most moral qualities their betters. Who was Ho Basileus, The King par excellence? Always 'the Great King, the King of the Persians.' Others were mere kings of Sparta, or where it might be. And this Great King was a far-way, tremendous, golden figure, moving in a splendor as of fairy tales; palaced marvelously, so travelers told, in cities compared with which even Athens seemed mean. Greek drama sought its subjects naturally in the remote and grandiose; always in the myths of prehistory, save once—when Aeschylus found a kindred atmosphere, and the material he wanted, in the palace of the Great King. To whom, as a matter of history, not unrecorded by Herodotus, his great chivalrous barons accorded a splendid loyalty,—and loyalty is always a thing that lies very near the heart of Bushido. Most Greeks would cheerfully sell their native city upon an impulse of chagrin, revenge, or the like. Xerxes' ships were overladen, and there was a storm; the Persian lords gaily jumped into the sea to lighten them. Such Samurai action might not have been impossible to Greeks,—Spartans especially; but in the main their eyes did not wander far from the main chance. You will think of many exceptions; but this comes as near truth, probably, as a generalization may. We should understand their temperament; quick and sensitive, capable of inspiration to high deeds; but, en masse, rarely founded on enduring principles. That jumping into the seas was nothing to the Persians; they were not sung to it; it was not done in defense of home, or upon a motive of sudden passion, as hate or the like; but permanent elements in their character moved them to it quietly, as to the natural thing to do. But if Greeks had done it, with what kudos, like Thermopylae, it would have come down!

They were great magnificoes, very lordly gentlemen, those Persian nobles; hijosdalgo, as they say in Spain; men of large lives, splendor and leisure, scorning trade; mighty huntsmen before the Lord. Of the Greeks, only the Spartans were sportsmen; but where the Spartans hunted foxes and such-like small fry, The Persians followed your true dangerous wild-fowl: lions, leopards, and tigers. A great satrap could buy up Greece almost at any time; could put the Greeks to war amongst themselves, and finance his favorite side out of his own pocket. On such a scale they lived; and travelers and mercenaries brought home news of it to Greece; and Greeks whose wealth might be fabulous strove to emulate the splendor they heard of. The Greeks made better heavy armor—one cause of the victories; but for the most part the Persian crafts and manufactures outshone the Greek by far. All these things I take from Mahaffy, who speaks of their culture as "an ancestral dignity for superior to, and different from, the somewhat mercantile refinement of the Greeks." The secret of the difference is this: the West Asian manvantara, to which the Persians belonged, was more than a thousand years older than the European manvantara, to which the Greeks belonged; so the latter, beside the former, had an air of parvenu. The Greeks dwelt on the Persian's borders; and fought him when they must; intrigued with or against him when they might; called him barbarian for self-respect's sake—and admired and envied him always. Had he been really a barbarian, in contact with their superior civilization, he would have become degraded by the contact; in such cases it always happens that the inferior sops up the vices only of his betters. But Alexander found the Persians much the same courtly-mannered, lordly-living, mighty huntsmen they had been when Herodotus described them; and was ambitious that his Europeans should mix with them on equal terms and learn their virtues.

Where and when did this high tradition grow up? There was not time enough, I think, in that half cycle between the rise of Cyrus and Marathon. In truth we are to see in these regions vistas of empires receding back into the dimness, difficult to sort out and fix their chronology. Cyrus overthrew the Assyrian; from whose yoke his people had freed themselves some fifteen years or so before. The Medes had been rising since the earlier part of that seventh century; sometime then they brought the kindred race of Persians under their sway. Sometime then, too, I am inclined to think, lived the Teacher Zoroaster: about whose date there is more confusion than about that of any other World Reformer; authorities differ within a margin of 6000 years. But Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Pythagoreanism all had their rise about this time; the age of religions began then; it was not a thing of chance, but marked a definite change in the spiritual climate of the world. The Bundahish, the Parsee account of it, says that he lived 258 years before Alexander; almost all scholars reject the figure—once more, "it is their nature to." But you will note that 258 is about as much as to say 260, which is twice the cycle of thirteen decades; I think the probabilities are strong that the Bundahish is right. The chief grounds for putting him much earlier are these: Greek accounts say, six thousand years before the Greek time; and there are known to have been kings in those parts, long before Cyrus, by the name or title of Mazdaka,—which word is from Mazda, the name of the God-Principle in Zoroastrianism. The explanation is this: you shall find it in H.P. Blavatsky: there were many Zoroasters; this one we are speaking of was the last (as Gautama was the last of the Buddhas); and of course he invented nothing, taught no new truth; but simply organized as a religion ideas that had before belonged to the Mysteries. Where then did his predecessors teach?—Where Zal and Rustem thundered as they might; in the old Iran of the Shah Nameh, the land of Kaikobad the Great and Kaikhusru. Too remote for all scholars even to agree that it existed; set by those who do believe in it at about 1100 B.C.—we hear of a "Powerful empire in Bactria"— which is up towards Afghanistan; I take it that it was from this the Persian tradition came—last down to, and through, the period of the Achaemenidae. What arts, what literature, these latter may have had, are lost; nothing is known of their creative and mental culture; but, to quote Mahaffy once more, it is exceedingly unlikely they had none. Dio Chrysostom, in the first century B.C., says that "neither Homer nor Hesiod sang of the chariots and horses of Zeus so worthily as Zoroaster"; which may mean, perhaps, that a tradition still survived in his time of a great Achaemenian poetry. Why then is this culture lost, since if it existed, it was practically contemporary with that of the Greeks? Because contemporaneity is a most deceiving thing; there is nothing in it. Persia now is not contemporary with Japan; nor modern China with Europe or America. The Achaemenians are separated from us by two pralayas; while between us and the Greeks there is but one. When our present Europe has gone down, and a new barbarism and Middle Ages have passed over France, Britain and Italy, and given place in turn to a new growth of civilization—what shall we know of this Paris, and Florence, and London? As much and as little as we know now of Greece and Rome. We shall dig them up and reconstruct them; found our culture on theirs, and think them very wonderful for mere centers of (Christian) paganism; we shall marvel at their genius, as shown in the fragments that go under the names of those totally mythological poets, Dante and Milton; and at their foul cruelty, as shown by their capital punishment and their wars. And what shall we know of ancient Athens and Rome? Our scholars will sneer at the superstition that they ever existed; our theologians will say the world was created somewhat later.

Or indeed, no; I think it will not be so. I think we shall have established an abiding perception of truth: Theosophy will have smashed the backbone of this foolish Kali-Yuga as a little, before then.

So that Creasy is all out in his estimate of the importance of Marathon and the other victories. Wars are only straws to show which way the current flows; and they do that only indifferently. They are not the current themselves, and they do not direct it; and were men wise enough to avoid them, better than the best that was ever won out of war would be won by other means that the Law would provide. And yet the Human Spirit will win something out of all eventualities, even war, if Kama and the Cycles permit. In a non-political sense the Persian Wars bore huge harvest for Greece; the Law used them to that end. The great effort brought out all the latent resources of the Athenian mind: the successes heightened Greek racial feeling to a pitch. —What! we could stand against huge Persia?—then we are not unworthy of the men that fought at Ilion, our fathers; the race and spirit of anax andron Agamemnon is not dead! Ha, we can do anything; there are no victories we may not win! And here is the dead weight and terror of the war lifted from us; and there is no anxiety now to hold our minds. We may go forth conquering and to conquer; we may launch our triremes on immaterial seas, and subdue unknown empires of the spirit!—And here is Athens the quick-witted, hegemon of Greece; her ships everywhere on the wine-dark seas; her citizens everywhere; her natural genius swelled by an enormous sense of achievement; her soul, grown great under a great stress, now freed from the stress and at leisure to explore:—in contact with opposite-minded Sparta; in contact with conservative and somewhat luxuriously-living slow Thebes;—with a hundred other cities;—in contact with proud Persia; with Egypt, fallen, but retaining a measure of her old profound sense of the Mysteries and the reality of the Unseen; —from all these contacts and sources a spirit is born in Athens that is to astonish and illumine the world. And Egypt is now in revolt from the Persian; and intercourse with her is easier than ever before in historical times; and the triremes, besides what spiritual cargoes they may be bringing in from her, are bringing in cargoes of honest material papyrus to tempt men to write down their thoughts.—So the flowering of Greece became inevitable; the Law intended it, and brought about all the conditions.



IV—AESCHYLUS AND HIS ATHENS

Greece holds such an eminence in history because the Crest-Wave rolled in there when it did. She was tenant of an epochal time; whoever was great then, was to be remembered forever. But the truth is, Greece served the future badly enough.

The sixth and fifth centuries B. C. were an age of transition, in which the world took a definite step downward. There had been present among men a great force to keep the life of the nations sweet: that which we call the Mysteries of Antiquity. Whether they had been active continuously since this Fifth Root Race began, who can say? Very possibly not; for in a million years cycles would repeat themselves, and I dare say conditions as desolate as our own have obtained. There may have been withdrawals, and again expansions outward. But certainly they were there at the dawn of history, and for a long time before. What their full effect may have been, we can only guess; for when the history that we know begins, they were already declining:—we get no definite news, except of the Iron Age. The Mysteries were not closed at Eleusis until late in the days of the Roman Empire; and we know that such a great man as Julian did not disdain to be initiated. But they were only a remnant then, an ever-indrawing source of inspiration; already a good century before Pericles they must have ceased to rule life. Pythagoras—born, probably, in the five-eighties—had found it necessary, to obtain that with which spirituality might be reawakened, to travel and learn what he could in India, Egypt, Chaldaea, and, according to Porphyry and tradition, among the Druids in Gaul—and very likely Britain, their acredited headquarters. From these countries he brought home Theosophy to Greek Italy; and all this suggests that he—and the race—needed something that Eleusis could no longer give. About the same time Buddha and the founder of Jainism in India, Laotse and Confucius in China, and as we have seen, probably also Zoroaster in Persia, all broke away from the Official Mysteries, more or less, to found Theosophical Movements of their own; —which would indicate that, at least from the Tyrrhenian to the Yellow Sea, the Mysteries had, in that sixth century, ceased to be the efficient instrument of the White Lodge. The substance of the Ancient Wisdom might remain in them; the energy was largely gone.

Pisistratus did marvels for Athens; lifting her out of obscurity to a position which should invite great souls to seek birth in her. He died in 527; two years later a son was born to the Eupatrid Euphorion at Eleusis; and I have no doubt there was some such stir over the event, on Olympus or on Parnassus, as happened over a birth at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, and one in Florence in the May of 1265. In 510, Hippias, grown cruel since the assassination of his brother, was driven out from an Athens already fomenting with the yeast of new things. About that time this young Eleusinian Eupatrid was set to watch grapes ripening for the vintage, and fell asleep. In his dream Dionysos, God of the Mysteries, appeared to him and bade him write tragedies for the Dionysian Festival. On waking, he found himself endowed with genius: beset inwardly with tremendous thoughts, and words to clothe them in; so that the work became as easy to him as if he had been trained to it for years.

He competed first in 499—against Choerilos and Pratinas, older poets—and was defeated; and soon afterwards sailed for Sicily, where he remained for seven years. The dates of Pythagoras are surmised, not known; Plumptre, with a query, gives 497 for his death. I wonder whether, in the last years of his life, that great Teacher met this young Aeschylus from Athens; whether the years the latter spent in Sicily on this his first visit there, were the due seven years of his Pythagorean probation and initiation? "Veniat Aeschylus," says Cicero, "non poeta solum, sed etiam Pythagoreus: sic enim accepimus ";—and we may accept it too; for that was the Theosophical Movement of the age; and he above all others, Pythagoras having died, was the great Theosophist. They had the Eleusinian Mysteries at Athens, and Most of the prominent Athenians must have been initiated into them—since that was the State Religion; but Aeschylus alone in Athens went through life clothed in the living power of Theosophy.

Go to the life of such a man, if you want big clues as to the inner history of his age;—the life of Aeschylus, I think, can interpret for us that of Athens. There are times when the movement of the cycles is accelerated, and you can see the great wheel turning; this was one. Aeschylus had proudly distinguished himself at Marathon; and Athens, as the highest honor she could do him for that, must have his portrait appear in the battle-picture painted for a memorial of the victory. He fought, too, at Artemisium and Salamis; with equal distinction. In 484 he won the first of thirteen annual successes in the dramatic competitions. These were the years during which Athens was really playing the hero; the years of Aristides' ascendency. In 480 Xerxes burned the city; but the people fought on, great in faith. In 479 came Plataea, Aeschylus again fighting. Throughout this time, he, the Esotericist and Messenger of the Gods, was wholly at one with his Athens—an Athens alive enough then to the higher things to recognize the voice of the highest when it spoke to her—to award Aeschylus, year after year, the chief dramatic prize. Then in 478 or 477 she found herself in a new position: her heroism and intelligence had won their reward, and she was set at the head of Greece. Six years later Aeschylus produced The Persians, the first of the seven extant out of the seventy or eighty plays he wrote; in it he is still absolutely the patriotic Athenian. In 471 came the Seven against Thebes; from which drama, I think, we get a main current of light on the whole future history of Athens.

Two men, representing two forces, had guided the city during those decades. On the one hand there was Aristides, called the Just—inflexible, incorruptible, impersonal and generous; on the other, Themistocles—precocious and wild as a boy; profligate as a youth and young man; ambitious, unscrupulous and cruel; a genius; a patriot; without moral sense. The policy of Aristides, despite his so-called democratic reforms, was conservative; he persuaded Greece, by sound arguments, to the side of Athens: he was for Athens doing her duty by Greece, and remaining content. That of Themistocles was that she should aim at empire by any means: should make herself a sea-power with a view to dominating the Greek world. Oh, to begin with, doubtless with a view to holding back the Persians; and so far his policy was sane enough; but his was not the kind of mind in which an ambitious idea fails to develop in ambitious and greedy directions; and that of mastery of the seas was an idea that could not help developing fatally. He had been banished for his corruption in 471; but he had set Athens on blue water, and bequeathed to her his policy. Henceforward she was to make for supremacy, never counting the moral cost. She attacked the islands at her pleasure, conquered them, and often treated the conquered with vile cruelty. The Seven against Thebes was directed by Aeschylus against the Themistoclean, and in support of the Aristidean, policy. Imperialistic ambitions, fast ripening in that third decade of the fifth century, were opposed by the Messenger of the Gods.

His valor in four battles had set him among the national heroes; he had been, in The Persians, the laureate of Salamis; by the sheer grandeur of his poetry he had won the prize thirteen times in succession.—And by the bye, it is to the eternal credit of Athenian intelligence that Athens, at one hearing of those obscure, lofty and tremendous poems, should have appreciated them, and with enthusiasm. Try to imagine Samson Agonistes put on the stage today; with no academical enthusiasts or eclat of classicism to back it; but just put on before thirty thousand sight-seers, learned and vulgar, statesman and cobbler, tinker and poet; the mob all there; the groundlings far out-numbering the elite:—and all not merely sitting out the play, but roused to a frenzy of enthusiasm; and Milton himself, present and acting, the hero of the day. That, despite Mr. Whistler and the Ten O'Clock—seems really to have been the kind of thing that happened in Athens. Tomides was there, with his companions— little Tomides, the mender of bad soles—and intoxicated by the grand poetry; understanding it, and never finding it tedious;— poetry they had had no opportunity to study in advance, they understood and appreciated wildly at first hearing. One cannot imagine it among moderns.—And Milton is clear as daylight beside remote and difficult Aeschylus. To catch the latter's thought, we need the quiet of the study, close attention, reading and re-reading; and though of course time has made him more difficult; and we should have understood him better, with no more than our present limited intelligence, had we been his countrymen and contemporaries; yet it remains a standing marvel, and witness to the far higher general intelligence of the men of Athens. The human spirit was immensely nearer this plane; they were far more civilized, in respect to mental culture, than we are. Why?—The cycles have traveled downward; our triumphs are on a more brutal plane; we are much farther from the light of the Mysteries than they were.

And yet they were going wrong: the great cycle had begun its down-trend; they were already preparing the way for our fool-headed materialism. In the Seven against Thebes Aeschylus protested against the current of the age. Three years later, Athens, impatient of criticism, turned on him.

He is acting in one of his own plays—one that been lost. He gives utterance, down there in the arena, to certain words— tremendous words, as always, we must suppose: words hurled out of the heights of an angry eternity—

"Aeschylus' bronze-throat eagle-bark for blood,"

—and Athens, that used to thrill and go mad to such tones when they proclaimed the godlike in her own soul and encouraged her to grand aspirations—goes mad now in another sense. She has grown used to hear warning in them, and something in alliance with her own stifled conscience protesting against her wrong courses; and such habituation rarely means acquiescence or soothed complacency. Now she is smitten and stung to the quick. A yell from the mob; uproar; from the tiers above tiers they butt, lurch, lunge, pour forward and down: the tinkers and cobblers, demagogs and demagoged: intent—yes—to kill. But he, having yet something to say, takes refuge at the altar; and there even a maddened mob dare not molest him. But the prize goes to a rising star, young Sophocles; and presently the Gods' Messenger is formally accused and tried for "Profanation of the Mysteries."

Revealing secrets pertaining to them, in fact. And now note this: his defense is that he did not know that his lines revealed any secret—was unaware that what he had said pertained to the Mysteries. Could he have urged such a plea, had it not been known he was uninitiated? Could he have known the teachings, had he not been instructed in a school where they were known? He, then, was an initiate of the Pythagoreans, the new Theosophical Movement upon the new method; not of Orthodox Eleusis, that had grown old and comatose rather, and had ceased to count.—Well, the judges were something saner than the mob; memory turned again to what he had done at Marathon, what at Arternisium and Plataea; to his thirteen solid years of victory (national heroism on poetico-dramatic fields); and to that song of his that "saved at Salamis":

"O Sons of Greeks, go set your country free!"

—and he was acquitted: Athens had not yet fallen so low as to prepare a hemlock cup for her teacher. But meanwhile he would do much better among his old comrades in Sicily than at home; and thither he went.

He returned in 458, to find the Age of Pericles in full swing; with all made anew, or in the making; and the time definitely set on its downward course. 'Reform' was busy at abolishing institutions once held sacred; was the rage;—that funeral speech of Pericles, with its tactless vaunting of Athenian superiority to all other possible men and nations, should tell us something. When folk get to feel like that, God pity and forgive them!—it is hard enough for mere men to. Aeschylus smote at imperialism in the Agamemnon—the first play of this last of his trilogies; and at the mania for reforming away sacred institutions in the Eumenides—where he asserts the divine origin of the threatened Areopagus. Popular feeling rose once more against him, and he returned to Sicily to die.

Like so many another of his royal line, apparently a failure. And indeed, a failure he was, so far as his Athens was concerned. True, Athenian artistic judgment triumphed presently over the Athenian spite. Though it was the rule that no successful play should be performed more than once, they decreed that 'revivals' of Aeschylus should always be in order. And Aristophanes testifies to his lasting popularity—when he shows little Tomides with a bad grouch over seeing a play by Theognis, when he had gone to the theater "expecting Aeschylus";—and when he shows Aeschylus and Euripides winning, because his poetry had died with him, and so he had it there for a weapon—whereas Aeschylus's was still alive and on earth. Yes; Athens took him again, and permanently, into favor: took the poet, but not the Messenger and his message. For she had gone on the wrong road in spite of him: she had let the divine force, the influx of the human spirit which had come to her as her priceless cyclic opportunity, flow down from the high planes proper to it, on to the plane of imperialism and vulgar ambition; and his word had been spoken to the Greeks in vain—as all Greek history and Karma since has been proclaiming. But in sooth he was not merely for an age, but for all time; and his message, unlike Pindar's whom all Greece worshiped, and far more than Homer's or that of Sophocles—is vital today. Aeschylus, and Plato, and Socrates who speaks through Plato, and Pythagoras who speaks through all of them, are the Greeks whose voices are lifted forever for the Soul.

Even the political aspect of his message—the only one I have touched on—is vital. It proclaims a truth that underlies all history: one, I suspect, that remains for our Theosophical Movement to impress on the general world-consciousness so that wars may end: namely, that the impulse of Nationalism is a holy thing, foundationed upon the human spirit: a means designed by the Law for humanity's salvation. But like all spiritual forces, it must be kept pure and spiritual, or instead of saving, it will damn. In its inception, it is vision of the Soul: of the Racial or National Soul—which is a divine light to lure us away from the plane of personality, to obliterate our distressing and private moods; to evoke the divine actor in us, and merge us in a consciousness vastly greater than out own. But add to that saving truth this damning corolary: I am better than thou; my race than thine; we have harvests to reap at your expense, and our rights may be your wrongs:—and you have, though it appear not for awhile, fouled that stream from godhood:—you have debased your nationalism and made it hellish. Upon your ambitions and your strength, now in the time of your national flowering, you may win to your desire, if you will; because now the spirit is quickening the whole fiber of your national self; and the national will must become, under that pressure, almost irresistibly 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:

'Aeschylus' bronze-throat eagle-bark for blood,'

which compensates for the more than Greek—unintelligibility of Browning's version of the Agamemnon: it gives you some color, some adumbration of the being and import of the man. How shall we compare him with those others, his great compeers on the Mountain of Song? Shakespeare—as I think—throned upon a peak where are storms often, but where the sun shines mostly; surveying all this life, and with an eye to the eternal behind: Dante—a prophet, stern, proud, glad and sorrowful; ever in a great pride of pain or agony of bliss; surveying the life without,—only to correlate it with and interpret it by the vaster life within that he knew better;—this Universe for him but the crust and excoriata of the Universe of the Soul. Milton—a Titan Soul hurled down from heaven, struggling with all chaos and the deep to enunciate—just to proclaim and put on everlasting record— those two profound significant words, Titan and Soul, for a memorial to Man of the real nature of Man. Aeschylus—the barking of an eagle—of Zeus the Thunderer's own eagle out of ominous skies above the mountains: a thing unseen as Karma, mysterious and mighty as Fate, as Disaster, as the final Triumph of the Soul; sublime as death; a throat of bronze, superhumanly impersonal; a far metallic clangor of sound, hoarse or harsh, perhaps, if your delicate ears must call him so; but grand; immeasurably grand; majestically, ominously and terribly grand;— ancestral voices prophesying war, and doom, and all dark tremendous destinies;—and yet he too with serenity and the Prophecy of Peace and bliss for his last word to us: he will not leave his avenging Erinyes until by Pallas' wand and will they are transformed into Eumenides, bringers of good fortune.

Something like that, perhaps, is the impression Aeschylus leaves on the minds of those who know him. They bear testimony to the fact that, however grand his style—like a Milton Carlylized in poetry—thought still seems to overtop it and to be struggling for expression through a vehicle less than itself.

Says Lytton, not unwisely perhaps: "His genius is so near the verge of bombast, that to approach his sublime is to rush into the ridiculous"; and he goes on to say that you might find the nearest echo of his diction in Shelley's Prometheus; but of his diction alone; for "his power is in concentration—that of Shelley in diffuseness." "The intellectuality of Shelley," he says, "destroyed; that of Aeschylus only increased his command over the passions. The interest he excites is startling, terrible, intense." Browning tried to bring over the style; but left the thought, in an English Double-Dutched, far remoter than he found it from our understanding. The thought demands in English a vehicle crystal-clear; but Aeschylus in the Greek is not crystal-clear: so close-packed and vast are the ideas that there are lines on lines 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 race a woe insatiable. But I, apart from all, Hold this my creed alone: Ill deeds along bring forth offspring of ill Like to their parent stock."

Needless to say the translation—Dean Plumptre's in the main— fails to bring out the force of the original.

We must remember that for his audiences the story he had to tell was not the important thing. They knew it in advance; it was one of their familiar legends. What they went to hear was Aeschylus' treatment of it; his art, his poetry, his preaching. That was what was new to them: the thing for which their eyes and ears were open. We go to the theater, as we read novels, for amusement; the Athenians went for aesthetic and religious ends. So Aechylus had ready for him an efficient pulpit; and was not suspect for using it. We like Movies shows because they are entertaining and exciting; the Athenian would have damned them because they are inartistic.

I said, he had a pulpit ready for him; yet, as nearly as such a statement can come to truth, it was he himself who invented the drama. It was, remember, an age of transition: things were passing out from the inner planes: the Mysteries were losing their virtue. The Egyptian Mysteries had been dramatic in character; the Eleusinian, which were very likely borrowed or copied or introduced from Egypt, were no doubt dramatic too. Then there had been festivals among the rustics, chiefly in honor of Dionysos not altogether in his higher aspects, with rudimentary plays of a coarse buffoonish character. By 499, in Athens, these had grown to something more important; in that year the wooden scaffolding of the theater in which they were given broke down under the spectators; and this led to the building of a new theater in stone. It was in 499 Aeschylus first competed; the show was still very rudimentary in character. Then he went off to Sicily; and came back with the idea conceived of Greek Tragedy as an artistic vehicle or expression—and something more. He taught the men who had at first defeated him, how to do their later and better work; and opened the way for all who came after, from Sophocles to Racine. He took to sailing this new ship of the drama as near as he might to the shore-line of the Mysteries themselves;—indeed, he did much more than this; for he infused into his plays that wine of divine life then to be found in its purity and vigor only or chiefly in the Pythagorean Brotherhood.—And now as to this new art-form of his.

De Quincey, accepting the common idea that the Dionysian Theater was built to seat between thirty and forty thousand spectators (every free Athenian citizen), argues that the formative elements that made Greek Tragedy what it was were derived from these huge dimensions. In such a vast building (he asks) how could you produce such a play as Hamlet?—where the art of the actor shows itself in momentary changes of expression, small byplay that would be lost, and the like. The figures would be dwarfed by the distances; stage whispers and the common inflexions of the speaking voice would be lost. So none of these things belonged to Greek Tragedy. The mere physical scale necessitated a different theory of art. The stature of the actors had to be increased, or they would have looked like pygmies; their figures had to be draped and muffled, to hide the unnatural proportions thus given them. A mask had to be worn, if only to make the head proportionate to the body; and the mask had to contain an arrangement for multiplying the voice, that it might carry to the whole audience. That implied that the lines should be chanted, not spoken;—though in any case, chanted they would be, for they were verse, not prose; and the Greeks had not forgotten, as we have, that verse is meant to be chanted. So here, to begin with, the whole scheme implied something as unlike actual life as it well could be. And then, too, there was the solemnity of the occasion—the religious nature of the whole festival.

Thus, in substance De Quincey; who makes too little, perhaps, of the matter of that last sentence; and too much of what goes before. We may say that it was rather the grand impersonal theory of the art that created the outward condition; not the conditions that created the theory. Mahaffy went to Athens and measured the theater; and found it not so big by any means. They could have worked out our theories and practice in it, had they wanted to, so far as that goes. Coarse buffoonish country festivals do not of themselves evolve into grand art or solemn occasions; you must seek a cause for that evolution, and find it in an impulse arisen in some human mind. Or minds indeed; for such impulses are very mysterious. The Gods sow their seed in season; we do not see the sowing, but presently mark the greening of the brown earth. The method of the Mysteries—drama serious and religious—had been drifting outwards: things had been growing to a point where a great creative Soul could take hold of them and mold them to his wish. If Aeschylus was not an Initiate of Eleusis, he had learnt, with the Pythagoreans, the method of the Mysteries of all lands. He knew more, not less, than the common pillars of the Athenian Church and State. I imagine it was he, in those thirteen consecutive years of his victories, who in part created, in part drew from his Pythagorean knowledge, those conventions and circumstances for Tragedy which suited him—rather than that conventions already existing imposed formative limits on him. His genius was aloof, impersonal, severe, and of the substance of the Eternal; such as would need precisely those conventions, and must have created them had they not been there. Briefly, I believe that this is what happened. Sent by Pythagoras to do what he could for Athens and Greece, he forged this mighty bolt of tragedy to be his weapon.

The theory of modern drama is imitation of life. It has nothing else and higher to offer; so, when it fails to imitate, we call it trash. But the theory of Aeschylean Tragedy is the illumination of life. Illumination of life, through a medium quite unlike life. Art begins on a spiritual plane, and works down to realism in its decadence; then it ceases to be art at all, and becomes merely copying what we imagine to be nature,—nature, often, as seen through a diseased liver and well-atrophied pineal gland.

True art imitates nature only in a very selective and limited way. It chooses carefully what it shall imitate, and all to the end of illumination. It paints a flower, or a sunset, not to reproduce the thing seen with the eyes, but to declare and set forth that mood of the Oversoul which the flower or the sunset expressed. Flower-colors or sunset-colors cannot be reproduced in pigments; but you can do things with pigments and a brush that can tell the same story. Or it can be done in words, in a poem; or with the notes of music;—in both of which cases the medium used is still more, and totally, unlike the medium through which the Oversoul said its say in the sky or the blossom.

Nature is always expressing these moods of the Oversoul; but we get no news of them, as a rule, from our own sight and hearing; we must wait for the poets and artists to interpret them. Life is always at work to teach us life; but we miss the grand lessons, usually, until some human Teacher enforces them. His methods are the same as those of the artists: between whose office and his there was at first no difference;—Bard means only, originally, an Adept Teacher. Such a one selects experiences out of life for his pupils, and illumines them through the circumstances under which they are applied; just as the true artist selects objects from nature, and by his manner of treating them, interprets the greatness that lies beyond.

So the drama-theory of Aeschylus. He took fragments of possible experience, and let them be seen through a heightened and interpretative medium; with a light at once intense and somber- portentous thrown on them; and this not to reproduce the externalia and appearance of life, but to illumine its inner recesses; to enforce, in plays lasting an hour or so, the lessons life may take many incarnations to teach. This cannot be done by realism, imitation or reproduction of the actual; than which life itself is always better.

What keeps us from seeing the meanings of life? Personality. Not only our own, but in all those about us. Personality dodges and flickers always between our eyes and the solemn motions, the adumbrations of the augustness beyond. We demand lots of personality in our drama; we call it character-drawing. We want to see fellows like ourselves lounging or bustling about, and hear them chattering as we do;—fellows with motives (like our own) all springing from the personality. Human life is what interests us: we desire to drink deep of it, and drink again and again. The music that we wish to hear is the "still, sad music of humanity";—that is, taking our theory at its best, and before you come down to sheer 'jazz' and ragtime. But what interested Aeschylus was that which lies beyond and within life. He said: 'You can get life in the Agora, on the Acropolis, any day of the week; when you come to the theater you shall have something else, and greater.'

So he set his scenes, either in a vast, remote, and mysterious antiquity, or—in The Persians—at Susa before the palace of the Great King: a setting as remote, splendid, vast, and mysterious, to the Greek mind of the day, as the other. Things should not be as like life, but as unlike life, as possible. The plays themselves, as acted, were a combination of poetry, dance, statuesque poses and motions and groupings; there was no action. All the action was done off the scenes. They did not portray the evolution of character; they hardly portrayed character—in the personal sense—at all. The dramatis personae are types, symbols, the expression of natural forces, or principles in man. In our drama you have a line, an extension forward in time; a progression from this to that point in time;—in Greek Tragedy you have a cross-section of time—a cutting through the atom of time that glimpses may be caught of eternity. There was no unfoldment of a story; but the presentation of a single mood. In the chanted poetry and the solemn dance-movements a situation was set forth; what led up to it being explained retrospectively. The audience knew what was coming as well as the author did: that Agamemnon, for instance, was to be murdered. So all was written to play on their expectations, not on their surprise. There was a succession of perfect pictures; these and the poetry were to hold the interest, to work it up: to seize upon the people, and lead them by ever-heightening accessions of feeling into forgetfulness of their personal lives, and absorption in the impersonal harmony, the spiritual receptivity, from which the grand truths are visible. The actors' masks allowed only the facial expression of a single mood; and it was a single mood the dramatist aimed to produce: a unity; one great word. There could be no grave-diggers; no quizzing of Polonious; no clouds very like a whale. The whole drama is the unfoldment of a single moment: that, say, in which Hamlet turns on Caudius and kills him—rather, leads him out to kill him. To that you are led by a little sparse dialog, ominous enough, and pregnant with dire significance, between two or three actors; many long speeches in which the story is told in retrospect; much chanting by the chorus—Horatio multiplied by a dozen or so—to make you feel Hamlet's long indecision, and to allow you no escape from the knowledge that Claudius' crime would bring about its karmic punishment. It is a unity: one thunderbolt from Zeus;—first the growl and rumbling of the thunders; then the whirr of the dread missile,—and lo, the man dead that was to die. And through the bolt so hurled, so effective, and with it—the eagle-bark—Aeschylus crying Karma! to the Athenians.

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.

Clytemnestra is not like Gertrude, but a much grander and more tragical figure. Shakespeare leaves you in no doubt as to his queen's relation to Claudius; he enlarges on their guilty passion ad lib. Aeschylus never mentions love at all in any of his extant plays; only barely hints at it here. It may be supposed to exist; it is an accessory motive; it lends irony to Clytemnestra's welcome to Agamemnon—in which only the audience and the Chorus are aware that the lady does protest too much. But she stands forth in her own eyes as an agent of Karma-Nemesis; there is something very terrible and unhuman about her. Early in the play she reminds the Chorus how Agamemnon, is setting out for Troy, sacrificed his and her daughter Iphigenia to get a fair wind: a deed of blood whose consequences must be feared—something to add to the Chorus's misgivings, as they chant their doubtful hope that the king may safely return. In reality Artemis had saved Igphigenia; and though Clytemnestra did not know this, in assuming the position of her daughter's avenger she put herself under the karmic ban. And Agamemnon did not know it: he had intended the sacrifice: and was therefore, and for his supposed ruthlessness at Troy, under the same ban himself. Hence the fate that awaited him on his return; and hence because of Clytemnestra's useless crime—when she and Aegisthos come out from murdering him, and announce what they have done, the Chorus's dark foretellings—to come true presently —of the Karma that is to follow upon it.