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suited to his heroic themes: as when he says of his "Seven against Thebes"—

and describes how they all mutually pledged themselves without flinching to die. Sometimes, however, his thoughts are unshapen, and as it were rough-hewn and rugged. Not observing this, Euripides, from too blind a rivalry, sometimes falls under the same censure. Aeschylus with a strange violence of language represents the palace of Lycurgus as possessed at the appearance of Dionysus—

Here Euripides, in borrowing the image, softens its extravagance —

Sophocles has also shown himself a great master of the imagination in the scene in which the dying Oedipus prepares himself for burial in the midst of a tempest, and where he tells how Achilles appeared to the Greeks over his tomb just as they were