Page:The Dramas of Aeschylus (Swanwick).djvu/33

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The Trilogy.
xxiii

A plea, the justice of which is admitted by Achilles, who echoes the sentiment of Agamemnon:

"Father Jove, great frenesies | to men thou truly sendest."

Moreover, on the first transference of human passion and emotion, together with the conditions of human existence, to the super-mundane sphere, the very conception of divine existence, as absolved from restraint, would lead to the deification of human infirmity together with the higher attributes of humanity: of this we have a memorable example in the character of the Homeric Zeus. This tendency would doubtless be accelerated by the phenomena expounded by Prof. Max Müller, in his "Lectures on Language." As the several branches of the Aryan stock dispersed, migrating from their common home in Central Asia, the original signification of words was forgotten or obscured; and thus, language originally descriptive of natural phenomena became transferred to the conditions of human life—a translation which totally metamorphosed the character of the occurrence.

The transference of human faith and worship from the vague nature-powers of the Vedas to the humanized deities of Olympus, together with the association of the latter into a celestial hierarchy, under the supremacy of Zeus, assumed in Grecian mythology the form of a revolution, and was symbolized under the grand old allegory of the battle between the Titans and the Olympian gods. This revolution, involving a variety of complex phenomena, especially the fusion of the