Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/359

 KTincs IN Tin: DRAMA. 337 previous wrong suffered, all these are the favorite themes of ^schylus and his two great successors. Klytaemnestra kills her husband Agamemnon on his return from Troy : her defence is, that he had deserved this treatment at her hands for having sac rificed his own and her daughter, Iphigeneia. Her son Orestes kills her, under a full conviction of the duty of avenging his father, and even under the sanction of Apollo. The retributive Eumenides pursue him for the deed, and JEschylus brings all the parties before the court of Areopagus, with Athene as presi- dent, where the case is fairly argued, with the Eumenides as accusers, and Apollo as counsel for the prisoner, and ends by an equah'ty of votes in the court: upon which Athene gives her casting-vote to absolve Orestes. Again ; let any man note the conflicting obligations which Sophokles so forcibly brings out in his beautiful drama of the Antigone. Kreon directs that the body of Polyneikes, as a traitor and recent invader of the coun- try, shall remain unburied : Antigone, sister of Polyneikes, denounces such interdict as impious, and violates it, under an overruling persuasion of fraternal duty. Kreon having ordered her to be buried alive, his youthful son Hoemon, her betrothed lover, is plunged into a heart-rending conflict between abhor- rence of such cruelty on the one side, and submission to his father on the other. Sophokles sets forth both these contending rules of duty in an elaborate scene of dialogue between the father and the son. Here are two rules both sacred and respect- able, but the one of which cannot be observed without violating the other. Since a choice must be made, which of the two ought a good man to obey ? This is a point which the great poet is well pleased to leave undetermined. But if there be any among the audience in whom the least impulse of intellectual speculation is alive, he will by "no means leave it so, without some mental effort to solve the problem, and to discover some grand and comprehensive principle from whence all the moral rules emanate ; a principle such as may instruct his conscience in those cases generally, of not unfrequent occurrence, wherein two obligations conflict with each other. The tragedian not only ippeals more powerfully to the ethical sentiment than poetry lad ever done before, but also, by raising these grave and touch- VOL. viii. In 22oc.