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 waters of the Malian Gulf. As generation after generation came to the struggle with plagues against which there arose no new deliverer, weary eyes must often have been turned to the height on which the first champion of men had won his late release from the steadfast malignity of fate; where, in the words of the Chorus foreboding the return of Philoctetes to Trachis, "the great warrior, wrapt in heavenly fire, drew near to all the gods." It is Sophocles in the "Trachiniæ" who has given the noblest and the most complete expression to this legend; showing Heracles, first, as the son of Zeus suffering for men and sharing their pain; then, towards the end of his torments, as already god-like in the clear knowledge of his Father's will and of his own coming change to perfect godhead.

One aspect of the poetry of Sophocles has now been noticed; the character of the treatment applied by him to those legends which supplied the chief material of Greek tragedy. It has been pointed out that the heroes of Æschylus are essentially superhuman; that the heroes of Euripides are essentially human, and often of a low human type; that the heroes of Sophocles are at once human and superhuman: human generically, by the expression of certain general human qualities; superhuman, partly by the very strength in which these qualities are portrayed, partly by the direct relation of the persons with supernatural powers. It has been seen further that these three styles of handling correspond with successive phases of contemporary belief; the