with his ancestral enemy, Aigisthos. The
air is heavy and throbbing with hate; hate which is evil but has its due
cause. Agamemnon, obeying the prophet Calchas, when the fleet lay
storm-bound at Aulis, had given his own daughter, Iphigenia, as a human
sacrifice. And if we ask how a sane man had consented to such an act, we
are told of his gradual temptation; the deadly excuse offered by ancient
superstition; and above all, the fact that he had already inwardly
accepted the great whole of which this horror was a part. At the first
outset of his expedition against Troy there had appeared an omen, the
bloody sign of two eagles devouring a mother-hare with her unborn
young.... The question was thus put to the Kings and their prophet: Did
they or did they not accept the sign, and wish to be those Eagles? And
they had answered Yes. They would have their vengeance, their full and
extreme victory, and were ready to pay the price. The sign once accepted,
the prophet recoils from the consequences which, in prophetic vision, he
sees following therefrom: but the decision has been taken, and the long
tale of cruelty rolls on, culminating in the triumphant sack of Troy,
which itself becomes not an assertion of Justice but a whirlwind of
godless destruction. And through all these doings of fierce beasts and
angry men the unseen Pity has been alive and watching, the Artemis who
"abhors the Eagles' feast," the "Apollo or Pan or Zeus" who hears the
crying of the robbed vulture; nay, if even the Gods were deaf, the mere
"wrong of the dead" at Troy might waken, groping for some retribution upon
the "Slayer of Many Men" (pp. 15, 20).

If we ask why men are so blind, seeking their welfare thus through
incessant evil, Aeschylus will tell us that the cause lies in the
infection of old sin, old cruelty. There is no doubt somewhere a
_[Greek: protarchos hAte ]_, a "first blind deed of wrong," but in
practice every wrong is the result of another. And the Children of Atreus
are steeped to the lips in them. When the prophetess Cassandra, out of her
first vague horror at the evil House, begins to grope towards some
definite image, first and most haunting comes the sound of the weeping of
two little children, murdered long ago, in a feud that was not theirs.
From that point, more than any other, the Daemon or Genius of the
House--more than its "Luck," a little less than its Guardian
Angel--becomes an Alastor or embodied Curse, a "Red Slayer" which cr