of Sophocles), a certain tenderness, a want of resolution, which no inferior poet would have conceived as combined with the commission of wild and daring crimes. The poet has here departed widely from the insignificant character presented to us in the Odyssey. Thus, again, the Electra of Eschylus, in the midst of all her determination to have vengeance, does not court the sight of blood, and takes no part in the actual scene of retribution, where she does not appear. The Electra of Sophocles, on the other hand, cries out to her brother twice to slay his mother, and would, doubtless, ask to see the slain, like Penelope in the Odyssey. She shows, too, a certain hardness and bitterness in altercation, which the consent of Euripides proves to have been borrowed from actual life1. Æschylus is altogether free from this defect. The altercations are, in his plays, short, and always strictly necessary to the plot. Such are the dialogue between the Egyptian herald and Pelasgus in the Supplices, that between Antigone and the herald at the close of the Septem, that between Orestes and the Furies in the Eumenides. Far different, and truly Euripidean, are the long wrangling scenes in Sophocles' Electra, and in his Edipus Rex, where the constant sparring between the members of the same family (mother and daughter in the Electra) occupy a disproportionate place, and prove to us that such wrangling did not produce on the Periclean Athenians the impression

1 Cp. on these points V. Courdaveaux's inaccurate but clever book on the genius of Æschylus, and his contrasts with Sophocles, pp. 209, sqq.

When Aris

it produced upon Menander, or upon us. tophanes, accordingly, marshals all his strictures on Euripides, in the Frogs, and in other plays, this feature, to us so vulgar, and which Æschylus had avoided, is hardly mentioned 1.

As in the case of Sophocles' Electra, so in his Antigone, there are, I think, many disagreeable features. There is something masculine in all her actions, and hard in her words. The way in which she repels the sympathy of the gentle, but commonplace, Ismene, is very unpleasing, and shows a heroism vastly inferior to that of Euripides' Alcestis, or Macaria, where, as we shall presently see, equal heroism was not sustained by the excitement of a violent conflict, or by that av@adía which is anything but feminine. So, again, the coldness of her relations to Hæmon must strike every modern critic-a defect which Euripides very naturally avoided when he wrote his own Antigone. She is in Sophocles, at least in this play, little else than a man in female dress, undertaking female duties, but with no trace of female tenderness, or weakness, in any of her actions.

The women of Sophocles are not skilfully drawn, and were I to select any favourites, I should certainly pass by his first-class heroines, and name Dejanira and Tecmessa, who though subordinate, are truly 'female women,' as Homer would say, gentle and loving, not above jealousy, but, for that reason, a finer and clearer

2 Cp. the description of the argument in Dindorf's ed. of the Fragments.

contrast to the heroes than the coarser and more

prominent heroines. If these criticisms be just, they will show that, in the most perfect and exclusively Athenian society, that is to say among Thucydides' and Sophocles' set, the ideal of female character had degenerated; that to these men, whose affections were centred on very different objects1, the notion of a true heroine was no longer natural, but was supplanted by a hard and masculine type. The old free noblewoman, whom Eschylus had, in early days, still known, was banished from their city life to make way for the domestic slave of the Attic household, called, indeed, mistress, but, as such, contrasted with the companions (Eraípai) who gradually supplanted her in Athenian society. To this all-important social subject I shall often return, according as each successive author adds to our evidence. It gives us another strong line in the hard features of Periclean Athens-in that Athens which considered political life as the only life worth having, and despised the age and the sex that were excluded from its privileges. ·

But however scanty the social evidences left us by Eschylus, however narrow and Athenian the sympathies of Sophocles, when we come to Euripides, we find ourselves on different ground. This great poet, whose popularity stood the test of Aristophanes' travesties-a trial which must have ruined. any smaller man-this poet, whom the Athenians,

1

Σοφοκλῆς, says Athenæus, φιλομείραξ ἦν, as opposed to Euripides being piλoyúvns, a statement which I believe on internal evidence.

the best judges of poetry and of tragic poetry too, loved and delighted in, whom the philosopher Socrates acknowledged his favourite, and whom Aristotle calls of all poets the most tragic, has been of late years so depreciated by the Germans, that it is quite revolutionary to say one word in his favour. I prefer however the judgment of the Greeks, to that even of Schlegel and O. Müller. Our best English poets have of late years done much to rehabilitate this most human of writers, and I trust that the good sense of English scholars may lead them to estimate the jibes of Aristophanes at their true value, and judge Euripides through his own works, and not through those of either ancient buffoons or modern pedants.

But I am not here concerned with the reputation of Euripides as a poet, and desire rather to examine how far his plays give us an insight into the social life of his times. This is indeed a most interesting question, for he certainly differs widely from the tone and manners of his rivals, who nevertheless were themselves real enough to carry with them public sympathy and approval. Yet a saying attributed to Sophocles indicates the true relation between these poets. have represented,' said he, 'men as they ought to be, Euripides men as they are.' Sophocles therefore did not lay claim to the same realism as his younger rival, though his notion of what men ought to be, was rather a narrow Athenian ideal, than one which we, or any other civilised society, could heartily admire. His heroines, if not masculine heroines, with hard features and with no dislike for blood, are insignificant, his heroes

I

are often querulous in misfortune, and almost always given to wrangling and abuse; as to slaves and nurses, if in Eschylus they are vulgar and comic, in Sophocles they play no prominent part at all. This is quite the attitude of Thucydides, in fact of the strictly Periclean Athenian, who with much praise of antique days 1, really invented an antiquity in character with the advanced and exclusive democracy in which he lived. The splendour of Agamemnon's court, and the queenly character of Clytemnestra are foreign to him; even the dependants of the court, which have in Æschylus some significance, are to his democratic mind as nothing. But the wrangling and dicastic habit of his countrymen appears everywhere, and extended in Athens to the women as well as the men, as we can judge from the tragedies.

I have returned for a moment to the peculiar features of Sophocles, in order to qualify his statement that he painted men as they ought to be, which perhaps means no more than that he only put upon the stage such personages, and such events in their lives, as were worthy of the drama. I also desire to show by contrast the altered attitude of Euripides. Painting no ideal situations, no imaginary society of grandees, he rather felt that even the heroes of the old legends were men of like passions as he was, and that to make people interest themselves really and deeply in tragedy apart from mere antiquarian curiosity, he must attribute to his characters the passions and faults of ordinary men. Of course heroism in the highest sense was not

Soph. fr. 267, quoted by Schol. on Aristoph. Pax, 530.