Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/415

Rh pride, wounded honour, remorse, jealousy, and self-will are traced remorselessly to their inevitable results. Yet the outlook is not all black; the picture is relieved by instances of noble courage and loyal devotion. Œdipus passes from unreasoning confidence to equally unreasoning despair. In his misery and self-inflicted blindness he still retains the hard inflexible temper towards his disloyal sons, which no amount of personal failure or horror for an unwitting sin has served to soften. Ajax is driven to madness by wounded self-love. Philoctetes is weak in everything but resentment. Clytemnestra is a woman whose wickedness is unredeemed by any touch of tenderness or natural feeling. But Electra is a noble nature, though placed in circumstances too difficult for her strength. Antigone is altogether great in affection and courage; Tecmessa shows touching loyalty and devotion to her husband; and Neoptolemus, though persuaded by the cunning of Odysseus to enter upon an ungenerous intrigue, in the end retrieves his good name and proves the real nobility of his nature. Of love scenes in the modern sense there is little or nothing in the tragedians. Nearest to the picture of a lover, as we regard him, is perhaps Hæmon in the Antigone of Sophocles. But though he kills himself upon Antigone's death, it is more from horror than love. It leaves us cold after all. The love of the tragedians is mostly a baneful passion—irresistible, it is true, and divine, but almost always harmful in its effects—rather a heaven-sent plague than a divine blessing. In the famous invocation to "invincible love" in the Anti-