Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/421

Rh daughters to the six sons of Æolus is of Homeric origin, and stands now, though briefly stated, in the Odyssey: but the incestuous passion of Macareus and Canacê, embodied by Euripidês in the lost tragedy called Æolus, drew upon him severe censure. Moreover, he often disconnected the horrors of the old legends with those religious agencies by which they had been originally forced on, prefacing them by motives of a more refined character, which carried no sense of awful compulsion: thus the considerations by which the Euripidean Alkmæôn was reduced to the necessity of killing his mother appeared to Aristotle ridiculous. After the time of this great poet, his successors seem to have followed him in breathing into their characters the spirit of common life, but the names and plot were still borrowed from the stricken mythical families of Tantalus, Kadmus, etc.: and the heroic exaltation of all the individual personages introduced, as contrasted with the purely human character of the Chorus, is