Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/270

246 of the living. The love-motive in Hæmon is not likely to be due to Sophocles's invention; it is unlike his spirit, and he makes little use of it, much less than Euripides did in his lost Antigone.* The idea would naturally come from Mimnermus or one of the erotic elegists.

The Trachiniæ and the Philoctêtes show clearly the influence of Euripides. The former deals with the death of Heracles by the coat of burning poison which his enemy the centaur Nessus has given to the hero's wife Dêianîra, professing that it is a love-charm. Dêianîra finds that Heracles is untrue to her, and that an unhappy princess whom he has sent as captive of war to her house is really the object for whom he made the war. She bethinks her of the love-charm and sends it, and the burly demi-god dies raging. The Dorian hero, a common figure in satyr-plays, had never been admitted to tragedy till Euripides's Heracles, where he appears as the lusty conquering warrior, jovial and impulsive, with little nobleness of soul to fall back upon. There are some definite imitations of the Heracles in the Trachiniæ, apart from the Euripidean prologue and the subtly dramatic situation between Dêianîra and her husband's unwilling mistress. One would like to know if there can be any connection between the writing of this play and the history contained in Antiphon's speech On Poisoning (p. 335).

The Philoctêtes (409 ) is markedly a character-play. The hero, once the companion of Heracles, and now owner of his unerring bow, had been bitten by a noxious snake. The festering wound seemed about to breed a pestilence, and the Greeks left the sick man marooned on Lemnos. Long years afterwards an oracle reveals