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52 To Æschylus, the new rulers of Olympus, and the Titans they supplanted, were persons as real as Miltiades or Themistocles. To him, Olympus was but a yet more august court of Areopagus, and Fates and Furies were dread realities, not metaphysical abstractions. Sophocles lived for art: in his devotion to it, and in the unruffled calmness of his temper, he was an Hellenic Goethe; one, the central fire of whose genius, while it glowed under all he wrote, rarely disturbed the equanimity of his spirit. Moral or theological problems vexed him not. He cared not for the physics of Anaxagoras. Protagoras's sceptical disquisitions touched him no nearer than Galileo's discoveries touched Shakespeare, or Hume's Essays Samuel Johnson. The Jupiter of Sophocles was the Jupiter of Phidias; his Pallas Athene, the living counterpart of her image on the Acropolis. In abstaining from such questions, he and Æschylus were perhaps wiser than Euripides—considered as an artist—was in his fondness for them. Had Shakespeare been deeply versed in Roger Bacon's works, or in those of Aquinas, his plays would not have been better, and might have been worse, for such physical or metaphysical studies. Entertainments of the stage are meant for the many rather than for the few; and subjects that the many, if they listen to them at all, can scarcely fail to misinterpret, it is safer, as well as more artistic, to avoid.

There were, however, at the time when Euripides was writing for the theatre, especially after he had passed middle age, changes silently at work in Athens