and feebleness of the state of the dead, and Darius exhorts his ancient comrades to cheer their spirits with comforts even in affliction day by day, before they go hence and are no more seen. (See Prefatory Note to Aeschylus, Eng. Trans. pp. xxii.-xxiv.) VI. It is almost an impertinence to talk separately of style in speaking of Aeschylus. The style is already taken into account in what has been said, because in his case, as in that of all great original geniuses, "the style is the man," and if the man is known, the style is a matter of But it is well to advert to two popular misapprehensions. His admirers sometimes call him rugged, and even so great a critic as Aristophanes has accused him of bombast. course. 1. The language of Aeschylus has not the polished smoothness of Sophocles, nor the liquid transparency of Euripides, but that which intimate acquaintance makes more and more felt is the harmoniousness which underlies the superficial inequalities. To call it rugged is like accusing the "mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies" of roughness as compared with Shakespeare. What ruggedness or inequality there is, is accidental merely, and was less felt by contemporary Greeks than by the stumbling tyro, to whom perhaps the last thing clearly perceptible is the full continuous flow, as of an uncooled lava stream. 2. The language is highly figurative, and the "grand manner" is pervasive, an inferior person being sometimes made the mouthpiece of a great thought poetically expressed. This may be dramatically inconvenient, but the grandeur is native, not assumed, -the poet's voice behind the mask, not an exaggeration due to the artificial organ. If there is awkwardness in this, it is the clumsiness of Alfred allowing the cakes to burn while he thinks of driving out the Dane, or of Heracles mismanaging the distaff in some daydream of a tussle with the Nemean lion. The fearless naturalness of some passages may be set off against the apparent turgidity of others. CHAPTER XII SOPHOCLES-THE SEVEN EXTANT PLAYS 1 IF the supposed ruggedness of Aeschylus is deceptive because it covers an underlying continuity of harmony, the smooth grace and finish. of Sophocles is attended with a corresponding illusion, in so far as it tends to favour the assumption that in his hands tragedy has suffered any considerable loss of strength. A contest between the two poets must have resembled one between a wrestler of gigantic proportions and a well-knit, lithe, and sinewy adversary: as between Acheloüs and Heracles, or Orlando and Charles. Sophocles seems at first sight less than he really is, because he deliberately discards everything but what is directly conducive to the purpose of his art. Epic breadth, spectacular magnificence, prophetic eloquence, these are not his own peculiar qualities, and he rather dissembles that share of them which he inherits. Relying absolutely as 1 Books to consult : Müller's History of Greek Literature; Green's "Classical Writers"; Sophocles in English Verse, etc. he does on dramatic and tragic presentation, his secret lies in the profound truth with which the central situation of each fable, with its essential human motive, is felt and realised. The attempt to fix the chronological order and position of his extant plays is attended with more uncertainty than exists in the case of Aeschylus. But the problem is also one of less importance, as all the seven belong to the maturity of the tragic art and of the poet's industry. Internal probability rather points to the Antigone as the earliest of them, and a fairly corroborated tradition assigns it to the most brilliant period of the career of Pericles, when the poet had attained his fifty-fifth year-eighteen years after the date of his first tragic victory. The Philoctetes is known, with whatever of certainty attaches to the didascaliae, to have been produced in 409 B.C., when the author was at least eighty-five. The Oedipus Coloneus, which tradition likewise attributes to his old age, is said to have been put upon the stage still later; in fact, after the writer's death. But those were troublous times in Athens, and it seems probable on the whole that the great drama, then first produced, had been composed in 411 B.C., the year of the revolution of the Four Hundred. There remains an interval of about thirty years, at uncertain points in which are to be placed the Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus, and Trachiniae. Р The Ajax may possibly be earlier even than the Antigone; the Electra is probably subsequent to them both; but the use of the ekkyklema, which occurs only in the Ajax, Antigone, and Electra amongst the plays of Sophocles, may be taken as indicating a comparatively early date for all three. In the Oedipus Tyrannus this crude expedient is dispensed with. The blinded Oedipus is not "discovered," but enters falteringly, groping his way. The ekkyklema is likewise absent from Trachiniae, Philoctetes, Oedipus Coloneus. It is probable enough that Sophocles should have anticipated Aristophanes in discrediting this somewhat clumsy feature of the early stage. The description of the plague in the Oedipus Tyrannus has been thought by some critics to have remote reference to the visitation in 430 B.C., the second year of the Peloponnesian war; and I have myself suspected an obscure allusion, in the Trachiniae, to the Spartan captives from Sphacteria. This would give to this play a date which is otherwise not improbable, about 423 B.C. These considerations taken together may justify the order Antigone Oedipus Tyrannus |