depth and subtlety. Yet it still remains something more than a play. Its
atmosphere is not quite of this world. In the long lyrics especially one
feels that the guiding emotion is not the entertainer's wish to thrill an
audience, not even perhaps the pure artist's wish to create beauty, but
something deeper and more prophetic, a passionate contemplation and
expression of truth; though of course the truth in question is something
felt rather than stated, something that pervades life, an eternal and
majestic rhythm like the movement of the stars.

Thus, if Longinus is right in defining Sublimity as "the ring, or
resonance, of greatness of soul," one sees in part where the sublimity of
the _Agamemnon_ comes from. And it is worth noting that the faults which
some critics have found in the play are in harmony with this conclusion.
For the sublimity that is rooted in religion tolerates some faults and
utterly refuses to tolerate others. The _Agamemnon_ may be slow in getting
to work; it may be stiff with antique conventions. It never approaches to
being cheap or insincere or shallow or sentimental or showy. It never
ceases to be genuinely a "criticism of life." The theme which it treats,
for instance, is a great theme in its own right; it is not a made-up story
ingeniously handled.

The trilogy of the _Oresteia_, of which this play is the first part,
centres on the old and everlastingly unsolved problem of

The ancient blinded vengeance and the wrong that amendeth wrong.

Every wrong is justly punished; yet, as the world goes, every punishment
becomes a new wrong, calling for fresh vengeance. And more; every wrong
turns out to be itself rooted in some wrong of old. It is never
gratuitous, never untempted by the working of Peitho (Persuasion), never
merely wicked. The _Oresteia_ first shows the cycle of crime punished by
crime which must be repunished, and then seeks for some gleam of escape,
some breaking of the endless chain of "evil duty." In the old order of
earth and heaven there was no such escape. Each blow called for the return
blow and must do so _ad infinitum_. But, according to Aeschylus, there is
a new Ruler now in heaven, one who has both sinned and suffered and
thereby grown wise. He is Zeus the Third Power, Zeus the Saviour, and his
gift to mankind is the ability through suffering to Learn (pp. 7 f.)

At the opening of the _Agamemnon_ we find Clytemnestra alienated from her
husband and secretly befriended