Note 282 — AGAMEMNON

As a part of the drama the whole passage that follows is an assertion by the Chorus that in this their trouble they will turn to no other God, invoke no other name, but that of the Supreme Zeus. But it can hardly be doubted that they have a meaning beyond this, and are the utterance by the poet of his own theology. In the second part of the Promethean trilogy (all that we now know of it) he had represented Zeus as ruling in the might of despotic sovereignty, the representative of a Power which men could not resist, but also could not love, inflicting needless sufferings on the sons of men. Now he has grown wiser. The sovereignty of Zeus is accepted as part of the present order of the world; trust in Him brings peace; the pain which He permits is the one only way to wisdom. The stress laid upon the name of Zeus implies a wish to cleave to the religion inherited from the older Hellenes, as contrasted with those with which their intercourse with the East had made the Athenians familiar. Like the voice which came to Epimenides, as he was building a sanctuary to the Muses, bidding him dedicate it not to them but to Zeus (Diog. Laert. i. 10), it represents a faint approximation to a truer, more monotheistic creed than that of the popular mythology.