Perhaps we do not sufficiently remember how real a person Agamemnon was to the Athenian audience. In Homer's verses, which were constantly in their mouths, he lived and moved as a familiar figure; they never doubted that he was all that Homer made him, chosen captain of the whole Grecian hosts, the first man in Greece (and Greece was the world), "the king of men." And here we are to see him in the hour of his triumph, the representative of Greece victorious over the barbarian world. And as the actors, from the first, are heroes great from their fame and position, so, as the play goes on, the action is caught up into the hands of the gods themselves, and we are admitted to see and hear Apollo, and Minerva, and the Furies. But this greatness of fame and position is something merely outward,—it serves to create a prejudice in favour of the persons, to insure attention to all they do or say; but their real greatness lies, of course, in their characters as depicted by the poet. In this direction we shall have to look for one of the chief elements of sublimity: in the force of intellect exhibited by the actors; the intensity—not violence, but restrained intensity—of the emotions expressed; and the strength of the wills which are shown conflicting. But even more than in the characters we must look for greatness in the action. There again there is an outer and an inner side. The mere death of Agamemnon is a tremendous event. "Kill a king, said'st thou?" A king in the old heroic days, when a real divinity hedged him round? The king of men himself?—
