Sister! Again? Why standest at the door
Holding this language? Will no span of years
Teach thee at length to grudge thy foolish spleen
Such empty comfort? Yet mine own heart too
Knows how it sorrows for our present state....
I avow
That in thy spirit dwelleth righteousness
Not in my words. Yet, if I would be free
I must in all things bend to those in power.
As for the plots themselves, their main feature is that deliberate complexity which we have called intrigue and which was made possible by the poet’s use of a third actor. After the great achievements of Æschylus it became necessary to add some fresh kind of interest; this Euripides found in a readjustment of sympathies, Sophocles in an increase of dramatic thrill. It is an exciting moment in the Trachiniæ when, just as Deianira is about to re-enter the palace, the messenger mysteriously draws her apart and reveals the truth about the captive Iole. The magnificent death-scene of Ajax is the outcome of the cunning wherewith he has thrown his friends off the scent. The Electra is full of this method; the mission of Chrysothemis is turned into a weapon against the murderess who sent her, and the episode of Orestes’ funeral-urn is a magnificent piece of dramatic artistry. In the Œdipus Tyrannus the king brings about his own fatal illumination by sending for the herdsman. The Philoctetes, above all, is filled with the deliberate plotting of Odysseus. The marked increase in complexity which Sophocles’ work thus shows as compared with that of Æschylus is undoubtedly the chief (perhaps the only) reason for his desertion of the trilogy form.[400] Side by side with this attention to mechanism is that curious indifference to the fringes of the plot which we have had occasion to notice in several places.