Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/45

Rh the critic of Greek dramatic art than an examination of this first and most successful play. As it is, however, Plutarch, who tells the story, does not give even the name of the drama; and it is only by an inference from an isolated notice that later criticism has fixed on the Triptolemos. Of this play a few fragments have come down to us, and, scanty as they are, they serve, in connexion with the subject itself, to explain its popularity. It appealed directly to a strong local feeling. Triptolemos, the hero of Eleusis, the chief figure in the mysteries, the favourite of Demêter, who had gone over the earth, east and west, in his fiery chariot, scattering the barley and the wheat which she had given him, was sure to attract an eager interest; and his wanderings in the far west enabled the poet to bring together pictures of strange lands and their products—Œnotria, and the Tyrrhenian Gulf, and Liguria, and Carthage, maize, and pulse, and rice, and beer—such as would command the attention of a sea-faring and commercial people. What were the real excellences of the play we can, of course, form no judgment. One phrase has come down to us, containing an image which was afterwards among the common-places of poetry, but which had then the freshness of