366 ([return])
[ See Note [Footnote 376:.
367 ([return])
[ Sophocles skilfully avoids treading the ground consecrated to Aeschylus. He does not bring the murder before us with the struggles and resolve of Orestes.
368 ([return])
[ This is very characteristic of Sophocles; he is especially fond of employing what may be called “a crisis in life” as a source of immediate interest to the audience. So in the “Oedipus at Coloneus,” Oedipus no sooner finds he is in the grove of the Furies than he knows his hour is approaching; so, also, in the “Ajax,” the Nuncius announces from the soothsayer, that if Ajax can survive the one day which makes the crisis of his life, the anger of the goddess will cease. This characteristic of the peculiar style of Sophocles might be considered as one of the proofs (were any wanting) of the authenticity of the “Trachiniae.”
369 ([return])
[ M. Schlegel rather wantonly accuses Deianira of “levity”—all her motives, on the contrary, are pure and high, though tender and affectionate.
370 ([return])
[ Observe the violation of the unity which Sophocles, the most artistical of all the Greek tragedians, does not hesitate to commit whenever he thinks it necessary. Hyllus, at the beginning of the play, went to Cenaeum; he has been already there and back—viz., a distance from Mount Oeta to a promontory in Euboea, during the time about seven hundred and thirty lines have taken up in recital! Nor is this all: just before the last chorus—only about one hundred lines back—Lichas set out to Cenaeum; and yet sufficient time is supposed to have elapsed for him to have arrived there—been present at a sacrifice—been killed by Hercules—and after all this, for Hyllus, who tells the tale, to have performed the journey back to Trachin.