Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/263

Rh and the Heracles of Euripides (l. 1232). In the Heracles, the hero rebukes Theseus for lifting him from his despair and unveiling his face; he will pollute the sunlight! That is not a metaphor, but a real piece of superstition, Theseus replies that a mortal cannot pollute the eternally pure element. Later he asks Heracles for his hand. "It is bloody," cries Heracles; "it will infect you with my crime!" "Let me clasp it," answers Theseus, "and fear not." Now, Sophocles knew of these ideas—that the belief in a physical pollution of blood is a delusion, and that a man cannot, if he tries, make the sun impure; but to him they were wicked scepticism, and he uses them as a climax of blasphemy in the mouth of the offending Creon! No impulse to reason or analyse was allowed to disturb his solemn emotional effects. Another typical difference between the two poets is in their treatment of the incest of Œdipus. Sophocles is always harping on it and ringing the changes on the hero's relationships, but never thinks it out. Contrast with his horrified rhetoric, the treatment of the same subject at the end of Euripides's Phœnissæ, the beautiful affection retained by the blind man for Iocasta, his confidence that she at any rate would have gone into exile at his side uncomplaining, his tender farewell to her dead body. What was the respectable burgher to say to such a thing? It was defrauding him of his right to condemn and abominate Iocasta. No wonder Sophocles won four times as many prizes as Euripides! A natural concomitant of this lack of speculative freedom is a certain bluntness of moral imagination which leads, for instance, to one structural defect in the Œdipus Tyrannus. That piece is a marvel of construction: every detail follows naturally, and yet every detail depends on the