Des pleurs sont mes trésors, des pleurs ma nourriture,
Ils ne me verront pas outrageant la nature,
A mon père infidèle, indigne de mon nom,
Boire avec eux dans l'or le sang d'Agamemnon."[1]
Chrysothemis is too well accustomed to her sister's reproaches to attempt any further justification. In reply, she tells her the strange mission on which she has now come from the palace. On the previous night Clytemnestra had dreamed a dream, in which she had seen her husband, tall and majestic as in his lifetime, and carrying the sceptre which had descended from prince to prince in the dynasty of Argos,[2] and was now wielded by the murderer Ægisthus. In her vision, Clytemnestra sees him plant this sceptre in the hearth of his palace, and there it had seemed to take root downwards and bear fruit upwards, spreading forth into boughs and branches, and overshadowing all Mycenæ. So terribly significant had been this vision of the night, and so accordant with the restless dread of her son's return which has haunted the guilty woman,
- ↑ Chénier's Electre, act i. sc. 3. (Quoted by M. Patin.)
- ↑ Homer gives us the history of this sceptre:—
"His royal staff, the work of Vulcan's art,
Which Vulcan to the son of Saturn gave,
To Hermes he, the heavenly messenger;
Hermes to Pelops, matchless charioteer;
Pelops to Atreus; Atreus at his death
Bequeathed it to Thyestes, wealthy lord
Of num'rous herds; to Agamemnon last
Thyestes left it—token of his sway
O'er all the Argive coast and neighbouring isles."
—Iliad, ii. 100 (Lord Derby).
