Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/249

Rh by Athenian law. Compare it with the passage in Euripides (Tro. 884):—

That is the same spirit in a further stage: further, first because it is clearer, and because of the upsetting alternative in the third line; but most, because in the actual drama the one rag of orthodoxy which the passage contains is convicted as an illusion! The Justice for which thanks are given conspicuously fails: the 'noiseless paths' lead to a very wilderness of wrong—at least, as far as we mortals can see.

The only orthodox Greek writer preserved to us is Pindar. Sophocles held a priesthood and built a chapel, but the temper of his age was touched with rationalism, and the sympathetic man was apt unconsciously to reflect it.

About the positive ideas, religious and moral, implied in the plays of Æschylus, too much has been written already; it is difficult to avoid overstatement in criticism of the kind, and the critics have generally been historians of philosophy rather than lovers of Greek poetry. One may perhaps make out rather more strongly in Æschylus than in other writers three characteristic ways of looking at life. His tragedies come, as perhaps all great tragedies do, from some 'Hubris,' some self-assertion of a strong will, in the way of intellect or emotion or passion, against stronger outside forces, circumstances or laws or gods. Æschylus was essentially the man to feel the impassable bars