Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/383

Rh SOPHOCLES

Sophocles, the tragedian who represents the purest type of the classical Greek, was in his teens when the Battle of Salamis was won. Beautiful in person and clear sighted in intellect, he was the first to use the new Greek art in the theater. For he introduced scene painting. Heretofore even Æschylus had been content with only the altar in the orchestra and a few statues of gods on the outer edge away from the audience. Sophocles now erected a scene building, the front of which showed to the audience the facade of a temple or palace, pierced by a single door. The two side entrances were retained. Æschylus adopted the innovation readily, and thus we find the scenery of the "Agamemnon," simple as it is, far advanced from the earlier conditions. Sophocles also enlarged the chorus from twelve to fifteen singers, securing greater volume of tone and variety of motion and gesture. But from this time onward we note a steady diminution of the choral parts and the greater prominence of the actors, whose number Sophocles increased to three.

EURIPIDES

In Euripides we have the boldest innovator, both in the resources of dramaturgy and in the moral problems which he treats. Even he cannot break entirely with tradition, and it is a curious chance that the latest play of this great period, "The Bacchae," harks back to the theme of the earliest tragedies, the savage triumph of Dionysus over his persecutors. But the method of Euripides leads him to devices for which he was bitterly criticized. His characters are no longer gods, the motive power in his plots no longer divine. They are men and women, often moved by sordid and trivial causes, yet none the less pathetic. To Aristotle he is the most tragic of the three, and his appeal to sympathy is strong because his personages are human. The effects of tragedy, pity and terror, become more vivid because the sufferers are made of the same stuff as the audience. In plot he is less skillful than Sophocles at his best, and he sometimes has recourse to the deus ex machina to cut the complicated knot of his own tying. Yet even here the appearance of the god, as at the end of the "Hippolytus," is justified by its spectacular effect.