Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/253

Rh Suppliants and Persæ. He simply represents a situation, steeps himself in it, and lights it up with the splendour of his lyrics. Euripides tried that experiment too, in the Suppliants and Heracleidæ, for instance. Sophocles seems never to have risked it, except perhaps in the Demanding of Helen.* It is curious that Æschylus, unlike his successors, abstained entirely from the local legends. Perhaps it was that he felt the subjects to be poor, and that the realities of the Persian War had blotted out all less vivid things from the horizon of his patriotism.

It is interesting to compare the fragments of the three tragedians: fragments are generally 'gnomic,' and tend to show the bent of a writer's mind. Sophocles used gnomes but little. Reflection and generalisation did not interest him, though he has something to say about the power of wealth (frag. 85) and of words (frag. 192) and of wicked women (frag. 187). Euripides notoriously generalises about everything in heaven and earth. He is mostly terse and very simple—so simple that an unsympathetic reader misses the point.

Sometimes, as in the opening speeches of Phædra and Medea, he treats subtly a point in psychology. He has much to say about wealth and slavery and power of speech. Æschylus simply never thinks about such things. He has some great lines on love (frag. 44), but his typical gnome is like that in the Niobe:*—