That cast, as well as everyone connected with the performance, did have ovation after ovation. Anyone might have thought we had beaten Yale.

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Mr. George Riddle--is it by direct interposition of Divine Providence, or, more likely, of Pallas Athene?--the distinguished actor who first made his reputation as Oedipus Rex, which he played in the Greek of Sophocles at Sanders Theatre in 1881, a nationally notable event, and now retired from the stage, is living in Cambridge. He coached the student players. They have confided to me in strict confidence, which I never would dream of violating, that while members of the Department of Classics were anxiously consulting about the correct syllabic "quantities" of verse readings (after the manner of their so pronounced devotion to methods of Teutonic scholarship), Mr. Riddle was anxiously consulting with these players how to send chills up the spines of the audience. They settled for the chills.

So did we. Has the scene of Cassandra's clairvoyance and departure to death ever been equalled? If so, where? Ophelia's mad scene is, by comparison, that of a namby-pamby nitwit. To the great credit of Mr. Arunah Brady be it said that he was able to convey much of its pity and terror. This scene has everything. She is not mad; on the contrary, she is the one person sane. Seeress, she can see the crimes already wreaked under that roof, and foresee the two about to follow, the murder of Agamemnon and of herself. Her speeches begin with little more than unintelligible bird-like cries of mantic possession, but gradually clarify to explicit prophecy, yet all opaque to the listeners ... The Queen reappears to order her indoors. Cassandra stands still, rapt and benumbed, in her chariot where she has been left when the King, quiting his, has walked into his palace on that fatal Purple Carpet, very symbol of mortals trampling on that which belongs to the gods only. "I can't stand here wrangling with a slave," says Klytemnestra, and goes back into the palace where she has more urgent work in hand.

Cassandra's farewell to the Sun-a characteristically Aeschylean touch of grandeur, like Prometheus's appeal to the elements--was delivered while half kneeling on the Earth. It concludes with that heart-piercing line, "It is not myself, but the life of man I pity." So saying, this Cassandra, pulling her mantle over her face, rushes with outspread arms to the palace doors, blindly throws them open, and disappears without another sound. But Agamemnon's death cries are heard.

* * *

Does this greatest of tragic dramas, grand though it is, sound to us as being of merely antiquarian interest? A brochure, first printed in England in 1901, republished in New York in 1903, is now fairly well known to have been written by Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson, the distinguished Hellenist, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Purporting to be Letters From a Chinese Official,on its seventeenth page is this:

"The competition for markets bids fair to be a more fruitful cause of war than was ever in the past the ambition of princes or the bigotry of priests. The peoples of Europe fling themselves, like hungry beasts of prey, on every yet unexploited quarter of the world... But always while they divide the spoil, they watch one another with a jealous eye; and sooner or later, when there is nothing left to divide, they will fall upon one another. That is the real meaning of your armaments; you must devour or be devoured. And it is precisely these trade relations which it was thought would knit you in the bonds of peace, while, by making every one of you cut-throat rivals of the others, have brought you within reasonable distance of a general war of extermination."

Are not we modern nations, on a planet already in train to be unified by speed of communication and travel, by science and the arts, still living in a state of primitive hereditary blood feud? Are not our independent national sovereignties already obsolete? Are we not sick from centuries of mutual slaughter, heedless of our Cassandras, and only to be rescued from pursuing Furies by refuge in an orderly court of law where the wisdom of Pallas Athene can cast the deciding vote? Is the Oresteia of Aeschylus mere antiquarianism? Would that it were!

(This review, written fifty-seven years after the performance, is in part to ask whether a university which in 1906 could magnificently produce the Agamemnon in Greek in the Stadium cannot now in the Loeb Theatre, annually at Easter, stage performances in English of Goethe's Faust.)

Ed. note: The CRIMSON'S 1906 crystal ball told us that Mr. Price would be graduated magna cum laude the following year; would later write, among many other books, "The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead" and serve for many years as a member of the Overseers' Committee to visit the Department of Philosophy; and would in 1964 complete fifty years as editorialist for the Boston Globe and fifty-seven years as a Boston journalist.