Chapter 7

Æschylus is incommensurate. There is in him something of India. The wild majesty of his stature recalls those vast poems of the Ganges which walk through art with the steps of a mammoth, and which have, among the Iliads and the Odysseys, the appearance of hippopotami among lions. Æschylus, a thorough Greek, is yet something else besides a Greek. He has the Oriental immensity.

Saumaise declares that he is full of Hebraisms and Syrianisms.[1] Æschylus makes the Winds carry Jupiter’s throne, as the Bible makes the Cherubim carry Jehovah’s throne, as the Rig-Veda makes the Marouts carry the throne of Indra. The winds, the cherubim, and the marouts are the same beings, —the Breezes. Saumaise is right. The double-meaning words so frequent in the Phœnician language, abound in Æschylus. He plays, for instance, in reference to Jupiter and Europa, on the Phœnician word ilpha, which has the double meaning of “ship” and “bull.” He loves that language of Tyre and Sidon, and at times he borrows the strange gleams of its style; the metaphor, “Xerxes with the dragon eyes,” seems an inspiration from the Ninevite dialect, in which the word draka meant at the same time dragon and clear-sighted. He has Phœnician heresies. His heifer Io is rather the cow of Isis; he believes, like the priests of Sidon, that the temple of Delphi was built by Apollo with a paste made of wax and bees’-wings. In his exile in Sicily he often drank religiously at the fountain of Arethusa, and never did the shepherds who watched him hear him name Arethusa otherwise than by this mysterious name, Alphaga, —an Assyrian word signifying “source surrounded with willows.”

Æschylus is, in the whole Hellenic literature, the sole example of the Athenian mind with a mixture of Egypt and Asia. These depths were repugnant to the Greek intelligence. Corinth, Epidaurus, Œdepsus, Gythium, Cheronea, which was to be the birth-place of Plutarch, Thebes, where Pindar’s house was, Mantinea, where the glory of Epaminondas shone, —all these golden towns repudiated the Unknown, a glimpse of which was seen like a cloud behind the Caucasus. It seemed as though the sun was Greek. The sun, used to the Parthenon, was not made to enter the diluvian forests of Grand Tartary under the gigantic mouldiness of the monocotyledons under the lofty ferns of five hundred cubits, where swarmed all the first dreadful models of Nature, and under whose shadows existed unknown, shapeless cities, such as that fabulous Anarodgurro, the existence of which was denied until it sent an embassy to Claudius. Gagasmira, Sambulaca, Maliarpha, Barygaza, Cavenpatnam Sochoth-Benoth, Theglath-Phalazar, Tana-Serim—all these almost hideous names affrighted Greece when they came to be reported by the adventurers on their return first by those with Jason, then by those of Alexander. Æschylus had no such horror. He loved the Caucasus. It was there he had made the acquaintance of Prometheus. One almost feels in reading Æschylus that he had haunted the vast primitive thickets now become coal mines, and that he has taken huge strides over the roots, snake-like and half-living, of the ancient vegetable monsters. Æschylus is a kind of behemoth among geniuses.