Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/252

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS Attic drama a thing of power and life, affecting the entire range of Greek literature and the sentiment of his people and the State. By this time the simplicity of Homer's history,—or of the Homeric legends, if you choose,—had been superseded. Upon Herbert Spencer's theory of progress a great advance was made—the change from epic plainness to the complexity of the drama, and especially to the abstract impersonations and psychological grandeur of the choric mythology. A still more refined and complex group of ideas came in with Sophokles and Euripides. Whether owing to the lapse of time or to the imagination of these sublime tragedians, the tales of Homer became intermingled with a variety of heroic lore, glossed over with a new dramatic interest and thoroughly infused with a philosophy that was but dimly perceived by the father of epic song. Among the ideas powerfully worked out by Æchylos, and heightening the gloom and glory of his dramas, were those of Tendency governing the history of a person, family, or race; of Nemesis waiting upon crime; of Remorse, and Expiation; finally, of a Destiny to which the Gods themselves must bow. To utilize these, and make them effective elements, he and his compeers took liberties with the record and legends of their country; liberties greater than Shakespeare has taken with the chronicles of Lear, Hamlet, or Macbeth.

The murder of Agamemnon, it is already seen, involved the great accessories of the highest drama, and necessarily became the leading tragic theme in Greek literature. It was the royalest chieftain of his age [238]