The weird sisters are but outward personifications of the evil thoughts conceived and fermenting in the brains of Banquo and Macbeth; both high in station, both generals in the king’s army, both friends, and both nourishing evil wishes. They are visible only to these two friends; and though they are represented as having an outer existence independent of them, they are, metaphysically speaking, but embodiments of the hidden thoughts and desires of Banquo and Macbeth; as such they are a new and terrible creation, differing from the vulgar flesh-and-blood witches of Middleton. They look not like the inhabitants of the earth; they vanish into thin air; wild, vague, mysterious, they come and go, like devilish thoughts that tempt us, and take shape before us, as if they had come from the other world. The devils that haunt us and tempt us come out of ourselves, like the weird sisters of Macbeth.


INDEX.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Whether this inscription was placed there during the life of Phidias does not appear; but it is highly improbable, and not in harmony with the practice of the Greeks.

[2] Themistius, Orat. adeum qui postulaverat ut ex tempore sermonem haberet.

[3] τέκτονες, πλάσται, χαλκοτύποι, λιθουργοί, βαφεῖς, χρυσοῦ μαλακτῆρες καὶ ἐλέφαντος ζωγράφοι, ποικιλταῖ, τορευταῖ. This passage is generally cited as a statement by Plutarch that Phidias employed all these men; but in fact he is only urging, in justification of Pericles, and in answer to attacks made against him for expending such large sums of money in the public works, that these works gave employment to the enumerated classes of artists and mechanics.

[4] The date of the birth of Pericles is unknown, but he began to take part in public affairs in B. C. 469, when he could not probably have been less than twenty-one years of age. This would place his birth at 490. He died in 429; and this reckoning would make him only sixty-one at his death.