Performance Of The Agamemnon Of Aeschylus At Balliol College, Oxford.

PERFORMANCE OF THE AGAMEMNON OF AESCHYLUS AT BALLIOL COLLEGE , OXFORD .

WE take this interesting account of an unusual performance from tbe Guardian , a paper not much read by the majority of those who peruse the Masonic Magazine , as Ave think it refers to " an episode " in dramatic annals which may interest possibly some of our friends , and deserves to be noted and recorded in our " niaga ., " which supports all that elevates the taste , or love of the classical drama .

MORE than two thousand three hundred years ago ( in 458 B . C . ) an audience of , perhaps , 25 , 000 persons , Athenian citizens , men and women ( the latter sitting apart in tbe uppermost tiers of seats ) , with such Greeks from other cities as had come to the famous Dionysiac festiA'al , ivitnessed in the great open-air theatre of Dionysus , on tbe sloping ground at tbe south-east foot of the Acropolis , the first performance of the Agamemnon . Tbe grand "Trilogy " of which it formed the opening act was the lastas it was the crownineffort

, g of tbe sublime imagination of yEscb ylns , tbe leader of that trio of poets AA'hose works remain for a sample of the marvellous development , within the space of some fifty years , of tragic art at Athens , the originality of which development , no less than its extraordinary fertility , must ever be a subject of wonder . Tbe authors of the Agamemnon and tbe Persce , the ( Edipus Tyrannus , ancl tbe ( Edipus Goloneusthe Ion and the Iphigenia in Taurisstand bthe common consent of

, , y tAvo thousand years upon a level which , perhaps , has since been reached by one dramatic poet alone—b y the author of Macbeth and Hamlet . But when we know that the thirty-one tragedies which have been saved to us are the remnant of no less than 275 ascribed to these three poets alone ; that many of the best plays that we have were vanquished in public competition by rivals ivhose very names are lost—the ( Edipus Tyrannus , for example , the acknowledged

masterpiece of tragic structure from the clays of Aristotle to our OAVII , having only gained a second prize—and that many tragic poets , in the estimation of their contemporaries , must have been nearly on a par with iEsch yliis , Sophocles , and Euripides ; we may form some idea of the intellectual and artistic atmos-2-ihere which made such creations as the Agamemnon possible , and ivh y it is that nothing " simile aut secundum " has sprung . into being in the centuries that have passed . The tragic art reached its highest dei'elopment once for all in those far-off clays Avhen—¦ Gorgeous Tragedy

In sceptred pall came sweeping by , Presenting Thebes or Pelops' line . Or the tale of Ti-oy divine;—" rare , " indeed , as Milton felt , being that Avhich of later age

Ennobled bath the bustined stage . From 458 B . C . to 1880 A . D . is a wide stretch of years ; but wider still is the gulf that lies between tbe theatre of Dionysus and the Hall of Balliol ; Avider tbe difference between tbe spirit of both actors ancl spectators in ancient Athens and in modern Oxford . It is like the difference between tbe clear blue Grecian