28 P. df: Preye 
occasional inconsistencies could they be reconciled on the whole 
with the ideal of an absolute and impartial justice? 
Such was the problem which the dramatists inherited. In the 
case of Aeschylus, however, it is evident that this attempt at the 
moralization of fate has by no means met with perfect success. 
In what remains of the Promethean trilogy, which is with the 
Oresteia the most significant in this respect of all his extant work, 
the result looks very much like a compromise. The atmosphere 
of Prometheus Bound is, it must be confessed, a pretty uncertain 
medium for the conveyance of clear ideas. It is the day after 
the deluge, and the air is still thick and troubled. Even Aeschy- 
lus himself is shaken. It would be hard to say how much of 
the modern feeling of security is due to a belief in the uniformity 
of nature, how much to a faith in the beneficence of an over- 
ruling providence. The latter serves to guarantee the moral 
order in as far as it has not become a matter of total indifference 
to us, for we seem to have given up any very serious thought of 
the establishment of such an order in the world at large; while 
the former acts as warranty for the physical order, with whose 
ascendency we seem to have made up our minds to rest content. 
But however this may be and whatever their relative proportions, - 
take away these two convictions and our world would fall to 
pieces. And yet Aeschylus had neither of them. He had no 
sense of the mechanical concatenation of nature and he had no 
surety for his gods. Divinity, as his religion and traditions rep- 
resented it, might be poetic; it was anything but moral. In a 
word, it was a divinity quite in the present aesthetic taste—an 
artistic being without moral irrelevances, which would heartily 
have applauded the programme, l’art pour l'art, but would hardly 
have made a reliable guardian of manners. In default, then, of 
a deity to whom the regulation of such matters might safely be 
entrusted, Aeschylus could only fall back upon fate itself as above 
and beyond the gods—or else let the moral order go by the board, 
and with it the only law and security for existence of which he 
had any conception. But if Zeus’ treatment of Prometheus was 
shocking, was it not equally shocking of fate to permit, to say 
nothing of ordaining, such an atrocity? What possible justice 
326 
