Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/357

335 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 335 sea-monsters, an adventure which is known to us from Homer. The useless wanderings of Menelaus, who on his return home left his brother behind, and thereby arrived too late not only to save, but even to avenge him,* might give room for abundant mirth and en- tertainment, without disturbing or effacing the impressions which had been produced by the tragic fate of the house of the Atridae. § 14. These short accounts of those trilogies of ./Esehylus which have been preserved, in whole or in part, will suffice, we conceive, to give as much insight into the mind of that great poet as can be expected in a work of this kind. It must be confessed, however, that there is a wide difference between these cold abstracts of the dramas of ^Esehylus and the tone and character of the works themselves, which, even in the minutest details of execution, show all the power of a mind full of poetic inspiration, and impressed with the truth and profoundness of its own conceptions. As all the persons brought on the stage by iEschylus ex- press their feelings and characters in strong and forcible terms, so also the forms of speech they make use of have a proud and lofty tone ; the diction of these plays is like a temple of Ictinus, constructed solely of huge rectangular blocks of polished marble. In the individual expres- sions, the poetical form predominates over the syntactical ; this is brought about by the employment of metaphorical phrases and new compounds :f and here the poet's great knowledge and true compre- hension of nature and human life give to his expressions a vividness and warmth which only differs from the naivete of the epic stjle by the greater admixture of acute reflection which it displays, and by which he has contrived to mark at once a feeling of connexion and a conscious- ness of difference.! The forms of syntax are rather those which rest upon a parallel connexion of sentences (consequently, copulative, ad- versative, and disjunctive sentences) than those which result from the subordination of one sentence to another (as in causal and conditional periods, &c). The language has little of that oratorical flow which at a later period sprung up in the courts and assemblies, and just as little of a subtle developement of complicated connexions of thought. It is throughout better calculated to display powerful impulses of the feelings and desires, and the instinctive actions of prompt and decided character, than the reflection of minds impelled by various motives. Hence in each piece we find some leading thoughts frequently repeated, particu- larly in the different forms of speech, dialogue, anapssts, lyric measures, f We may also mention his employment of obsolete expressions, especially those borrowed from epic poetry—™ y co<r<rZiu r~, lS x'i%ius. /Esehylus is a few degrees more epic in his language than Sophocles or Euripides. % Hence arise the oxymora of which yEschylus is so fond : fur instance, when he calls dust " the dumb messenger of the army."
 * Comp. above chap. VI. § 5. and Agam. 624, 839.