to despair the triumph of victory.
Hereupon enter the chorus of Argive elders, chanting as they move to the
measure of a stately march. They sing how ten years before Agamemnon and
Menelaus had led forth the host of Greece, at the bidding of the Zeus
who protects hospitality, to recover for Menelaus Helen his wife,
treacherously stolen by Paris. Then, as they take their places and begin
their rhythmic dance, in a strain of impassioned verse that is at once a
narrative and a lyric hymn, they tell, or rather present in a series of
vivid images, flashing as by illumination of lightning out of a night of
veiled and sombre boding, the tale of the deed that darkened the
starting of the host--the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the goddess whose
wrath was delaying the fleet at Aulis. In verse, in music, in pantomime,
the scene lives again--the struggle in the father's heart, the
insistence of his brother chiefs, the piteous glance of the girl, and at
last the unutterable end; while above and through it all rings like a
knell of fate the refrain that is the motive of the whole drama:

"Sing woe, sing woe, but may the Good prevail."

At the conclusion of the ode enters Clytemnestra. She makes a formal
announcement to the chorus of the fall of Troy; describes the course of
the signal-fire from beacon to beacon as it sped, and pictures in
imagination the scenes even then taking place in the doomed city. On her
withdrawal the chorus break once more into song and dance. To the music
of a solemn hymn they point the moral of the fall of Troy, the certain
doom of violence and fraud descended upon Paris and his House. Once more
the vivid pictures flash from the night of woe--Helen in her fatal
beauty stepping lightly to her doom, the widower's nights of mourning
haunted by the ghost of love, the horrors of the war that followed, the
slain abroad and the mourners at home, the change of living flesh and
blood for the dust and ashes of the tomb. At last with a return to their
original theme, the doom of insolence, the chorus close their ode and
announce the arrival of a messenger from Troy. Talthybius, the herald,
enters as spokesman of the army and king, describing the hardships they
have suffered and the joy of the triumphant issue. To him Clytemnestra
announces, in words of which the irony is patent to the audience, her
sufferings in the absence of her husband and her delight at the prospect
of his return. He will find her, she says, as he