Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/407

Rh trophe, are prominent, and are composed with great skill, though with increasing indication of rhetorical training as time goes on. Again, they have all three been affected by philosophical speculation. It has had a very different influence on each, as we shall see, but still it is there. Thirdly, they all take occasion to glorify Athens, either directly or by implication. Again, all alike found their plots on legends or myths already known from Homer or the Cyclic poets or by common tradition. They were, therefore, familiar to their audiences. The originality of the poets was shown in delineation of character displayed in circumstances already known, or in the rearrangement of details so as to bring about the catastrophe demanded by the dramatic situation. Euripides was distinguished from the other two by the freedom with which he treated his material, and the more human and less heroic traits of his characters.

Their point of view in regard to the deeper problems of life was also different. Aeschylus looked at things principally from the religious side. The eternal laws of God, the punishment of sin, reaching through generations, the inevitable doom waiting not only blood-guiltiness, but also impious presumption and contempt of justice. It is these doctrines rather than the delineation of character on which he is intent. Thus in the "Suppliant Women," in which Danaus and his daughters fly to Argos to avoid marriage with their cousins, the sons of Aegyptus, the women and their father are almost lay figures, the King of