"'I smote him! nor deny that thus I did it;
So that he could not flee or ward off doom.
A seamless net, as round a fish, I cast
About him, yea, a deadly wealth of robe,
Then smote him twice; and with a double cry
He loosed his limbs; and to him fallen I gave
Yet a third thrust, a grace to Hades, lord
Of the under-world and guardian of the dead.'"
But the most finished of the tragedies of Æschylus is Choëphoroe, which is made the subject of the revenge of Ores'tes, son of Agamemnon, who avenges the murder of his father by putting his mother to death. For this crime the Eumenides represents him as being driven insane by the Furies; but his reason was subsequently restored. It is the chief object of the poet, in this tragedy, to display the distress of Orestes at the necessity he feels of avenging his father's death upon his mother. To this BYRON refers in Childe Harold:
O thou! who never yet of human wrong
Left the unbalanced scale—great Nem'esis!
Thou who didst call the Furies from the abyss,
And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss
For that unnatural retribution—just,
Had it but been from hands less near—in this,
Thy former realm, I call thee from the dust!
At the close of an interesting characterization of Æschylus and his works—much too long for a full quotation here—PROFESSOR MAHAFFY observes as follows:
"We always feel that Æschylus thought more than he expressed, that his desperate compounds are never affected or unnecessary. Although, therefore, he violated the rules that bound weaker men, it is false to say that be was less an artist than they. His art was of a different kind, despising what they prized, and attempting what they did not dare, but not the less a conscious and thorough art. Though the drawing of character was not his main object, his characters are truer and deeper than those of poets who attempted nothing else. Though lyrical sweetness had little place in the gloom and terror of his Titanic stage, yet here too, when he chooses, he equals the masters of lyric song. So long as a single Homer was deemed the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, we might well concede to him the first place, and say that Æschylus was the second poet of the Greeks. But by the light of nearer criticism, and with a closer insight into the structure of the epic poems, we must retract this judgment, and assert that no other poet among the Greeks, either in grandeur of conception or splendor of execution, equals the untranslatable, unapproachable, inimitable Æschylus." [Footnote: "Classical Greek Literature," vol. i., p.275.]
SOPHOCLES.
Æschylus was succeeded, as master of the drama, by Sophocles—the Raffaelle of the drama, as Bulwer calls him—who was also one of the generals of the Athenian expedition against Samos in the year 440 B.C. He brought the drama to the greatest perfection of which it was susceptible. In him we find a greater range of emotions than in Æschylus—figures more distinctly seen, a more expanded dialogue, simplicity of speech mixed with rhetorical declamation, and the highest degree of poetic beauty. Says a late writer: "The artist and the man were one in Sophocles. We cannot but think of him as specially created to represent Greek art in its most refined and exquisitely balanced perfection. It is impossible to imagine a more plastic nature, a genius more adapted to its special function, more fittingly provided with all things needful to its full development, born at a happier moment in the history of the world, and more nobly endowed with physical qualities suited to its intellectual capacity."
Sophocles composed one hundred and thirteen plays, but only seven of them are extant. Of these the most familiar is the tragedy of OEd'ipus Tyran'nus—"King Œdipus." It is not only considered his masterpiece, but also, as regards the choice and disposition of the fable on which it is founded, the finest tragedy of antiquity. A new interest has been given to it in this country by its recent representation in the original Greek. Of its many translations, it is conceded that none have done, and none can do it justice; they can do little more than give its plan and general character. The following, in brief, is the story of this famous tragedy:
Œdipus Tyrannus.
La'i-us, King of Thebes, was told by the Delphic oracle that if a son should be born to him, by the hand of that son he should surely die. When, therefore, his queen, Jocasta, bare him a son, the parents gave the child to a shepherd, with orders to cast it out, bound, on the hill Cithæ'ron to perish. But the shepherd, moved to compassion, deceived the parents, and intrusted the babe to a herdsman of Pol'ybus, King of Corinth; and the wife of Polybus, being childless, named the foundling Œdipus, and reared it as her own.