Page:A general history for colleges and high schools (Myers, 1890).djvu/228

194 and especially that of Athens, was strung to the highest tension. This lent nervous power and intensity to almost all they wrote, particularly to the tragedies of Æschylus and Sophocles. Of the two hundred and more dramas produced by these poets, only thirty-two have escaped the accidents of time.

Æschylus (525–456 B.C.) knew how to touch the hearts of the generation that had won the victories of the Persian war; for he had fought with honor both at Marathon and at Salamis. But it was on a very different arena that he was destined to win his most enduring fame. Eleven times did he carry off the prize in tragic composition. The Athenians called him the "Father of Tragedy." The central idea of his dramas is that "no mortal may dare raise his heart too high,"—that "Zeus tames excessive lifting up of heart." Prometheus Bound is one of his chief works. Another of his great tragedies is Agamemnon, thought by some to be his masterpiece. The subject is the crime of Clytemnestra (see p. 96). It is a tragedy crowded with spirit-shaking terrors, and filled with more than human crimes and woes. Nowhere is portrayed with greater power the awful vengeance with which the implacable Nemesis is armed.

Sophocles (495–405 B.C.) while yet a youth gained the prize in a poetic contest with Æschylus. Plutarch says that Æschylus was so chagrined by his defeat that he left Athens and retired to Sicily. Sophocles now became the leader of tragedy at Athens. In almost every contest he carried away the first prize. He lived through nearly a century, a century, too, that comprised the most brilliant period of the life of Hellas. His dramas were perfect works of art. The leading idea of his pieces is the same as that which characterizes those of Æschylus; namely, that self-will