Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/417

 335 gods a kind of airy grandeur, so neither do his men or neroes appear like tenants of the common earth : the mythical world from which he borrows his characters is peopled only with " the immediate seed of the gods, in close contact with Zeus, in whom the divine blood has not yet had time to degenerate i" 1 his indi- viduals are taken, not from the iron race whom Hesiod acknow- ledges with shame as his contemporaries, but from the extinct heroic race which had fought at Troy and Thebes. It is to them that his conceptions aspire, and he is even chargeable with fre- quent straining, beyond the limits of poetical taste, to realize his picture. If he does not consistently succeed in it, the reason is because consistency in such a matter is unattainable, since, after all, the analogies of common humanity, the only materials which the most creative imagination has to work upon, obtrude them- selves involuntarily, and the lineaments of the man are thus seen even under a dress which promises superhuman proportions. Sophokles, the most illustrious ornament of Grecian tragedy, dwells upon the same heroic characters, and maintains their grandeur, on the whole, with little abatement, combining with it a far better dramatic structure, and a wider appeal to human sym- pathies. Even in Sophokles, however, we find indications that an altered ethical feeling and a more predominant sense of artistic perfection are allowed to modify the harsher religious agencies of the old epic ; occasional misplaced effusions' 2 of rhetoric, as well metheum ct in seqnente fabula reconciliato Jove, rcstitutam arbitrantur divinam justitiam. Quo invcnto, vereor ne non optime dignitati consulue- rint supremi Deorum, quern decuerat potius non soevire omnino, quam pla- cari ea Icge, ut alius Promethei vice lueret." 1 JEschyl. Fragment. 146, Dindorf; ap. Plato. Repub. iii. p. 391 ; compare Strabo. xii. p. 580. Ol Zrjvbf yyi>f, otf kv 'Idaiu itdy^ Atof iraTppov (3u(i6(EOT' kv al&epi, KOVTTU atyiv e^trj/xW alfia fiainovuv. There is one real exception to this statement the Persae which ia founded upon an event of recent occurrence ; and one apparent exception the Prometheus Vinctus. But in that drama no individual mortal is made to appear; we can hardly consider 16 as an tyf/pepof (253). 2 For the characteristics of ^Esohylus sec Aristophan. Ran. 755, ad fin. passim. The competition between JEschylus and Euripides turns upon yvw- VOL. i. 17 25oc.