was no better than his murderous wife, since he had been
willing to kill her daughter and his own, Iphigenia, to please his
brother, curb a storm, and expedite the Trojan war. In the words of
the Chorus,

"Thus he dared to become the sacrificer of his daughter
to promote a war undertaken for the avenging of a
woman, and as a first offering for the fleet: and the
chieftains, eager for the fight, set at naught her
supplications and her cries to her father, and her
maiden age. But after prayer her father bade the
ministering priests with all zeal, to lift, like a kid,
high above the altar, her who lay prostrate wrapped in
her robes, and to put a check upon her beauteous mouth,
a voice of curses upon the house, by force of muzzles
and strength which allowed no vent to her cry."

The barbarous sacrifice of an innocent maiden is of course a myth, but
it is a myth which doubtless had many counterparts in Greek life.
Aeschylus did not live so very long after Homer, and in his age it was
still a favorite pastime of the Greeks to ravage cities, a process of
which Aeschylus gives us a vivid picture in a few lines, in his _Seven
against Thebes_:

"And for its women to be dragged away captives, alas!
alas! both the young and the aged, like horses by their
hair, while their vestments are rent about their
persons. And the emptied city cries aloud, while its
booty is wasted amid confused clamors.... And the cries
of children at the breast all bloody resound, and there
is rapine, sister of pell-mell confusion ... And young
female slaves have new sorrows ... so that they hope
for life's gloomy close to come, a guardian against
these all-mournful sorrows."

For women of rank alone is there any consideration--so long as they
are not among the captives; yet even queens are not honored as women,
but only as queens, that is, as the mothers or wives of kings. In _The
Persians_ the Chorus salutes Atossa in terms every one of which
emphasizes this point: "O queen, supreme of Persia's deep-waisted
matrons, aged mother of Xerxes, hail to thee! spouse to Darius,
consort of the Persians, god and mother of a god thou art," while
Clytaemnestra is saluted by the chorus in _Agamemnon_ in these words:
"I have came revering thy majesty, Clytaemnestra; for it is right to
honor the consort of a chieftain hero, when the monarch's throne has
been