Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/345

 THE THREE TRAGEDIANS. 323 In JEschylus, the ideality belongs to the handling not less than to the subjects : the passions appealed to are the masculine and violent, to the exclusion of Aphrodite and her inspirations : l the figures are vast and majestic, but exhibited only in half-light and in shadowy outline : the speech is replete with bold metaphor and abrupt transition, " grandiloquent even to a fault," as Quin- tilian remarks, and often approaching nearer to Oriental vague- ness than to Grecian perspicuity. In Sophokles, there is evidently a closer approach to reality and common life : the range of emo- tions is more varied, the figures are more distinctly seen, and the action more fully and conspicuously worked out. Not only we have a more elaborate dramatic structure, but a more expanded dialogue, and a comparative simplicity of speech like that of living Greeks : and we find too a certain admixture of rhetorical decla- mation, amidst the greatest poetical beauty which the Grecian drama ever attained. But when we advance to Euripides, this rhetorical element becomes still more prominent and developed. The ultra-natural sublimity of the legendary characters disap- pears : love and compassion are invoked to a degree which JEs- chylus would have deemed inconsistent w r ith the dignity of the heroic person : moreover, there are appeals to the reason, and argumentative controversies, which that grandiloquent poet would have despised as petty and forensic cavils. And what was worse still, judging from the JEschylean point of view there was a certain novelty of speculation, an intimation of doubt on reigning opinions, and an air of scientific refinement, often spoiling the poetical effect. Such differences between these three great poets are doubtless referable to the working of Athenian politics and Athenian philos- ophy on the minds of the two later. In Sophokles, we may trace the companion of Herodotus; 2 in Euripides, the hearer of 1 Sec Aristophan. Kan. 104G. The Antigone (780, scq.) and the Trachi- niic (498) are sufficient evidence that Sophokles did not agree with^Eschy- lus in this renunciation of Aphrodite. 2 The comparison of Ilcrodot. iii, 119 with Soph. Antig. 905, proves a community of thought which seems to me hardly explicable in any other way. Which of the two obtained the thought from the other, we cannot determine. The reason given, by a woman whoso father and mother wcie dead, foi