888
$50
C7
1871
PADAMUTM

jer i et b
masala matkennettu
:
ARTES
LIBRARY
STHILLEKIKIKIKLI
1817)
VERITAS
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
E PLURIBUS
PAKEJ! 305
tự động hai trong
TULISI
HOTH
TCEBOR
CIRCUMSPICE
SCIENTIA
OF THE
SI-QUERIS-PENINSULAM-AMŒNAM
oke
LIGASUGU JI. SLI), 7
THE GIFT OF
IIIIIIING
Frederick T. Wright
له شانه
88
1 8 7/7
108
Ancient Classics for English Readers
EDITED BY THE
REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.
SOPHOCLES
CONTENTS OF THE SERIES.
HOMER: THE ILIAD,
HOMER: THE ODYSSEY,
HERODOTUS,
CÆSAR,
VIRGIL,
HORACE,
BY THE EDITOR.
BY THEODORE MARTIN.
BY THE RIGHT REV. THE BISHOP OF COLOMBO.
BY SIR ALEX. GRANT, BART., LL.D.
BY THE Editor.
BY CLIFTON W. COLLINS, M.A.
PLINY BY A. CHURCH, M.A., AND W. J. BRODribb, M.A.
BY WILLIAM BODHAM DONNE.
BY EDWARD WALFORD, M.A.
BY THE Editor.
ÆSCHYLUS,
XENOPHON,
CICERO,
SOPHOCLES,
EURIPIDES.
JUVENAL,
BY THE EDITOR.
BY THE Same.
BY GEORGE C. SWAYNE, M.A.
BY ANTHONY TROLLOPE.

ARISTOPHANES,.
HESIOD AND THEOGNIS, BY THE REV. JAMES DAVIES, M.A.
PLAUTUS AND TERENCE,
BY THE Editor.
TACITUS,
BY WILLIAM BODHAM Donne.
BY THE Editor.
LUCIAN,
PLATO,
BY CLIFTON W. COLLINS.
THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY,
BY LORD NEAVES.
LIVY,
BY THE EDITOR.
OVID,
•
ARISTOTLE, .
THUCYDIDES,
LUCRETIUS,
PINDAR,
•
BY THE REV. A. CHURCH, M. A.
CATULLUS, TIBULLUS, & PROPERTIUS, BY J. DAVIES, M.A.
DEMOSTHENES, . BY THE REV. W. J. BRODribb, M.A.
BY SIR ALEX. GRANT, BART., LL.D.
BY THE EDIT
BY W. H. MALLOCK,
BY THE REV. F. D. MORICE, M
SOPHOCLES
BY
aina radionice
84125
CLIFTON W. COLLINS, M.A.
H.M. INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS.
PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.
THE Writer desires to express his acknowledgments
to Professor Plumptre for permission to make use of
his translation of these tragedies; and to Mr D'Arcy
Thompson for a similar courtesy in the case of his
'Sales Attici.'
Use has also been made of M. Patin's 'Studies on
Sophocles,' Mr Jebb's edition of the 'Ajax and Electra,'
and the last chapter of Lord Lytton's Athens.'
Of the translations, those marked (A.) are by the
late Professor Anstice; those marked (D.) are by
Dale; and those distinguished by (P.) are from Pro-
fessor Plumptre's translation, to which reference has
been made above.
CJIAP.
11
10
11
"I
#1
of
CONTENTS.
I. INTRODUCTION,
II. EDIPUS THE KING,
III. DIPUS AT COLONUS,
IV. ANTIGONE,
V. THE DEATH OF AJAX,
VI. THE MAIDENS OF TRACHIS,
VII. PHILOCTETES,
VIII. ELECTRA,
Ի
•
PAGE
1
20
45
70
98
123
136
162
¡
SOPHOCLE S.
S
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
THE materials for our poet's life are few and untrust-
worthy. The real biographies have perished; and all that
we have in their place is a brief anonymous memoir,
some notices in Suidas, and a few anecdotes retailed to
us from different sources by Athenæus, the great col-
lector of the scandal and gossip of his day-and these
last probably belong to the mock pearls of history.
The mere attempt, then, to compile a detailed life of
Sophocles out of this "rubbish heap of tradition," is
(to use Professor Plumptre's illustration) like "making
bricks without straw." As in the case of Shakspeare,
we know little of the man except what we can glean
from his writings. Some few facts, however, rest on
higher testimony; and these may be shortly noticed.
Colonus, a small village about a mile to the north of
Athens, was the birthplace of Sophocles; and every
feature of its scenery has been vividly described by
him in a famous choral ode, to be hereafter noticed.
A. C. vol. x.
A
2
SOPHOCLES.
The landscape must have been strikingly picturesque,
with its white limestone cliffs, its dark grove sacred to
"the gentle goddesses," and echoing with "all throats
that gurgle sweet," with the pure clear stream of the
Cephisus, never failing in the hottest summer, and
watering this garden of Attica.
Whatever may have been his father's calling, Sopho-
cles was himself a gentleman. "His natural gifts,"
says Lord Lytton, were the rarest that nature be-
stows on man, genius and beauty." Body and mind
were carefully trained under the best masters; and he
received the complete liberal education of his age.
We can imagine how the boy grew up to manhood,
feeding his poetic fancy with those ancient founts of
inspiration, the adventures of the Argonauts or the
"tale of Troy divine;" just as the genius of Spenser and
Milton was nourished on the old romances of our
country. We can imagine, too, how he must have
been inspired with the eternal ideas of truth and
beauty-wafted, as in Plato's State, "like gales of
health blowing fresh from salubrious lands," *by the
constant sight and presence of that noble city, robed
in her "imperial mantle of architecture," adorned by
the paintings of Panæanus and by the sculpture of
Phidias, her streets crowded with strangers from all
lands, and her harbours filled with the masts of a
thousand triremes.
(C
Sophocles made an early entrance on public life. At
the age of sixteen his grace and beauty were such that
he was selected from the youth of Attica to lead the
* Republ. iii. 401.
INTRODUCTION.
3
1
choral dance around the altar which had been raised
in honour of the victory of Salamis. Ten years later,
we find him coming forward as the rival of Æschylus
at the great festival of Bacchus, at which the prizes for
tragedy were awarded. Cimon and his nine colleagues
had just returned from Samos, bringing with them the
bones of Theseus, which were to serve as a talisman
against plague and pestilence. The generals entered
the theatre just before the commencement of the per-
formances, and the Archon, estimating rightly the
greatness of the occasion, swore them in to judge the
case between the rival dramatists. They unanimously
awarded the first prize to Sophocles; and Eschylus,
it is said, in deep resentment of their verdict, left
Athens, and retired to the court of Hiero at Syracuse.
A first success is everything in literature; and So-
phocles, like others, found himself famous in a day.
For more than forty years he continued to exhibit
plays-sometimes winning the first prize, sometimes
defeated in his turn by some younger candidate for
fame, but never once degraded to the third place. So
prolific was his genius, that he is said to have composed
upwards of a hundred tragedies. Of these but seven
are extant.
He had inherited a moderate income, and it is said
this independence was necessary to the poet, for custom
and etiquette prevented him from making money by
his plays. "The crown of wild olive" was the only
stimulus to genius; for the "two obols" paid by each
citizen for admission went to the lessees of the theatre,
and served to defray the necessary expense of scenery

4
SOPHOCLES.
and decorations, as well as to pay the actors. The
Greek would have regarded with the same disfavour
the tragedian who made a profit on his plays, as the
Sophist who might (as many of them in fact did) take
money for his lectures, or the statesman who should
accept salary or pension for what should have been a
labour of love.* All such sordid gains, they held,
should be left to the base-born mechanic; no gentle-
man should degrade his profession to the level of a
trade. In the case of the poet, who was supposed
to receive his inspiration direct from heaven, it would
have been simple profanation to sell, as it were, the
very bread of life.
It was sufficient glory and recom-
pense for him if the State—or some rich citizen repre-
senting the State-should defray the expenses of a
Chorus, that he might see his poetry put into action
-assisted with all the pomp of spectacle and music,
hallowed by the solemnity of a religious festival, and
breathed, by artists elaborately trained to heighten
the eloquence of words, into the ear of assembled
Greece."+
(6
Like every other Athenian, Sophocles was a poli-
tician, and he took his part in the stirring scenes of
* We
e may judge how mercenary, in a Greek point of view,
would have seemed such an exhibition as that of the Royal
Academy, from the analogous case of Zeuxis, the Millais of his
day, who exhibited his picture of Helen, and took money at the
doors. Crowds flocked to see the painting, and the painter
cleared a large sum-but the name of 'Helen' was changed by
a satirical public to 'The Courtesan.' (See St John, Manners
and Customs of Ancient Grecce, i. 303.)
Lord Lytton's Athens, ii. 516.
INTRODUCTION.
5
public life, personally serving in more than one cam-
paign. But public life palled upon him, as it palls
His
on every ardent and enthusiastic character.
temper was too gentle and his principles too chivalrous
for him to grapple with the unscrupulous party spirit
of the times. Not even the charm of a friendship
with Pericles, or the honour of a statesman's position,
could console him for the loss of literary ease; and
we can understand how gladly he must have left the
restless and busy Athens for the peaceful and lovely
scenery of Colonus. There, like Pope on his lawn
at Twickenham, like Wordsworth in the solitude of
Grasmere,—or, to use a more classical illustration, like
Horace at his Sabine farm, he was free to follow the
bent of his genius, and to draw from nature his purest
and most perfect picture of a Greek landscape.
Yet the scenes which he had left might well have
attracted a more ambitious spirit
"To scorn delights, and live laborious days."
Athens was then teeming with all the exuberant life
which marked the renaissance in modern times.
Thought found its utterance in action, in the passion
for war and in the restless spirit of enterprise, in all
that many-sided energy which marked the Athenians
-a people of whom their own historian speaks as
،،
never quiet themselves, and never allowing others
to be so." * Assuredly Sophocles was born under a
lucky star; for his life was coeval with the greatness
of his country, and he did not live to see the Long
Thucydides, i. 70.
*
6
SOPHOCLES.
{
Walls-the symbol of that greatness-levelled in the
dust to the sound of Spartan music.
He lived in an
age of heroes. All round him were the very men who
had made his country what it was, and with most of
these men he was on terms of the most familiar inter-
course. Doors were not then, as now, "barred with
gold;" and Athenian society opened its arms to the
graceful and engaging poet, so genial in his temper, so
lively in conversation, so true a friend, so pleasant a
guest. We can imagine Sophocles in his old age recal-
ling the memories of his youth; recounting to his chil-
dren, with pardonable pride, the historic names and
scenes with which he had been so familiar: he would
tell them how he had listened to the thunder of
Olympian Pericles;" how he had been startled by
the chorus of Furies in the play of Æschylus; how
he had talked with the garrulous and open-hearted
Herodotus; how he had followed Anaxagoras, the
great Sceptic, in the cool of the day among a throng
of his disciples; how he had walked with Phidias,
and supped with Aspasia.
(6
Sophocles enjoyed a rare popularity in Athens.
Even that prince of satirists, Aristophanes, can find
neither flaw nor blemish in his moral armour against
which to launch an arrow. He directs unsparing
raillery against the bombast of Eschylus and the
sophistry of Euripides; but he has nothing to say
against this "good easy man"-" as gentle below the
earth as he was gentle in his lifetime."*
The scan-
dalous anecdotes of Athenæus may be taken for what
Aristoph. Ranæ, 82.
*
F
:
INTRODUCTION.
7
1
:
they are worth; and it is difficult for any one who has
read his plays, with all their purity of passion, their
delicacy of feeling, their chivalrous principles of hon-
our, to believe them, with Lord Lytton, to have been
written by a "profligate" or a "renegade.'
"1 *
He died full of years and honour, loved (as his
biographer tells us) in every way by all men; and
his fellow-citizens paid due reverence to the tomb of
him who was truly "the prince of poets in his time."
The god Bacchus, himself, the divine patron of the
tragic drama, was said to have appeared to Lysander,
whose armies were then beleaguering Athens, and to
have demanded that a safe-conduct should be given
to the poet's friends to bear his body beyond the
city walls to Decelea, and there bury it in the sepul-
chre of his fathers.
Sacrifices were offered to his Manes, and a statue of
bronze was erected to his memory; but "more endur-
ing than brass or marble" has been the epitaph com-
posed in his honour by Simmias of Thebes, thus
gracefully translated by Professor Plumptre :—
"Creep gently, ivy, ever gently creep,
Where Sophocles sleeps on in calm repose;
Thy pale green tresses o'er the marble sweep,
While all around shall bloom the purpling rose.
There let the vine with rich full clusters hang,
Its fair young tendrils fling around the stone;
Due meed for that sweet wisdom which he sang,
By Muses and by Graces called their own."
We now pass to the inner life of Sophocles-to his
* Athens, ii. 520, note.
8
SOPHOCLES.
character and work. It is but a step from Eschylus
to him, yet the step involves an immensity of change,
not only in the man, but in the age. Instead of the
rough son of Mars-the hero of Marathon-who (as
Sophocles himself said) "did what was right with-
out knowing it," we have the graceful and artistic
poet, skilled in weaving plots and in delineating char-
acters. The change is like passing from storm to sun-
shine. The wild imagery, the unearthly conceptions,
the heroes and the heroines, human indeed, but with
the human image dilated to colossal proportions, like
the spectre of the Brocken, and with the passions of
the Titans who scaled Olympus-the "ox-horned Io,"
the blood-stained Furies, and the "wild Cassandra,”
all these have disappeared. In their stead the scene
is occupied by creations of flesh and blood, with
human sympathies and affections, true and real in
character, because their types were taken from the
gallery of life. The serenity which marked the poet.
seems to influence his readers and spectators. So true
is he to nature, so gradual is his development of each
legend, however wonderful or monstrous it may be,
that we have no alternative but to believe and sympa-
thise. It is with Sophocles as with Spenser. "Au plus
fort de l'invention il reste serein. Sa bonne foi nous
gagne; sa sérénité devient la nôtre. Nous devenons
'C'est une
crédules et heureux par contagion.
fantasmagorie,' dira-t-on ? Qu'importe? si nous la
voyons, et nous la voyons, car 'Sophocle' la voit.” *
M
* Taine (Hist. de la Littérature Anglaise, i. 334), who thus
speaks of Spenser.

INTRODUCTION.
9
،،
"""
The poet fell in with the change that had come over
the spirit of his time. The generation of Eschylus-
stout warriors who had fought at Marathon, and sturdy
seamen who knew nothing" (as Aristophanes said)
except to call for barley-cake, and shout 'yo-heave-
110' had been content to believe implicitly all
that Homer and their poets had taught them; and
seeing around them traces of some mysterious force
whose agency and purpose they were powerless to
explain, they made a god of this Necessity or Des-
tiny, and called it Nemesis. She was, in truth, a
jealous deity, causing the rich and prosperous to foun-
der like a vessel on a sunken reef, and in one short
day changing their joy to sorrow,-striking them piti-
lessly down in the plenitude of their grandeur, as a
child in mere wantonness strikes down the tallest
poppies in the corn-field. It was in vain to attempt
to coax or cajole this capricious power by tears or
offerings. History had taught men the futility of
such bribes. Polycrates had thrown his precious ring
into the sea; Croesus had filled the treasury of Delphi
with his gold; but "no sacrifice or libation could
save a man's soul from Death," and "on Death alone,
of all divinities, Persuasion had no power."+ And
Herodotus, the most pious of historians, draws the
obvious moral from the downfall of kings and the
collapse of empires. "Envy," he says, "clings to
all that mortal is. . . . Even a god cannot escape
from Destiny."‡
* Esch., Eumen. 565.
Esch., Fragm. of Niobe.
Hist. i. 35, 91; vii. 46.

10
SOPHOCLES.
Such was the "tremendous creed" of which Eschy-
lus was a fitting exponent; with him the Furies are
the satellites of Fate, and it is their eternal duty
to pursue the murderer till death and after death.
The complaint which Corneille puts into the mouth of
Theseus, in his 'Edipe,' might have been more truly
uttered by Eteocles in the Seven against Thebes,' as
he feels the blast of his father's curse which is wafting
him to Hades :
"Quoi! la nécessité des vertus et des vices
D'un astre imperieux doit suivre les caprices,
Et Delphes malgrè nous conduit nos actions
Au plus bizarre effet de ses predictions?
L'âme est donc toute esclave; une loi souveraine
Vers le bien ou le mal incessament l'entraine;
Et nous ne recevons ni crainte, ni désir,
De cette liberté qui n'a rien à choisir;
Attachés sans relâche à cet ordre sublime,
Vertueux sans mérite, et vicieux sans crime.”*
—'Edipe,' Act iii. sc. 5.
It is true that in the 'Prometheus' we have the
spectacle of an indomitable will, proof against all
suffering; yet it is in this very play that Eschylus
most insists on the "invincible might of Necessity,"
* Readers of Shakspeare may remember Edmund's descrip-
tion of the "excellent foppery of the world, that when we are
sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behaviour), we
make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars;
as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compul-
sion, knaves and thieves by spherical predominance, and
all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on."—King Lear,
Act i. sc. 2.
INTRODUCTION.
11
tɔ which wise men pay homage, and which is "a
higher power than Jove." Prometheus defies the
lightning, but he bows to Destiny, as the gladiators.
bowed to the autocrat in the imperial box, with their
chant of morituri te salutunt, knowing themselves to
be doomed men, but dying with a good grace, and
scorning to ask for quarter.
Gradually the Greek mind expanded. The seas
were opened, commerce increased, men travelled far
and saw much; and thus the same stimulus was given
to national thought and feeling by maritime enterprise
as to the Jews under Solomon, and to the English
under Elizabeth.* And as the Athenians grew adven-
turous, so they grew self-reliant. They doubted and
questioned where they had before been content to
shudder and believe. They attributed more to them-
selves and less to the blind agency of Destiny; and
thus, in this progress of rationalism, there ensued that
momentous change in thought represented by the
transition in history from Herodotus to Thucydides,
and in poetry from Eschylus to Sophocles.
With this new generation, man is no longer hound
hand and foot, powerless to move against his inevitable
doom. He has liberty of choice in action, and by his
knowledge or his ignorance, by his virtues or his vices,
has made himself what he is. It is not so much a
1
malignant power tormenting men in sheer envy at
their wealth or happiness; but it is men themselves,
who "play the fool with the times. while the spirits of
* See Stanley's Lectures on the Jewish Church, ii. 185;
Froude's History of England, viii. 426.
12
SOPHOCLES.
the wise sit in the clouds and mock them." A long
train of disastrous consequences often follows from a
single impious speech or guilty deed-nay, even from
a hot word or a hasty blow. Thus the idea of Destiny
passes into that of retribution. Punishment surely
follows sin, if not in a man's own day, yet descending,
like an heirloom of misery, upon his children.
"In life there is a seesaw; if we shape
Our actions to our humours, other hands
May shape their consequences to our pain."*
In fact, Sophocles seems to have asked himself the
question put by Nisus to Euryalus in the Eneid,
and to have answered it in his treatinent of men in
their relations to God:
"Dîne hunc ardorem mentibus addunt,
Euryale? an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido ?"+
In each of his plays he shows how passion works out
its own end-whether it be the pride of Edipus, the
stubbornness of Creon, the insane fury of Ajax, or the
*
So says Sophocles, Ajax, 1085 (translated in Mr D'Arcy
Thompson's 'Sales Attici '), anticipating the well-known words
of Shakspeare:—
"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to scourge us.'
19
-King Lear, Act v. sc. 3.
+ Virgil, Æn. ix. 184. Professor Conington translates the
passage thus:—
'Can it be Heaven,' said Nisus then,
( That lends such warmth to hearts of inen
'Or passion surging past control
'That plays the god to each man's soul?'
INTRODUCTION.
13
-..
jealousy of Dejanira. All these passions are simple
and natural; there are no eccentricities of genius, no
abnormal mental states, such as furnish the material of
the modern drama. The Greek would not have under-
stood the melancholy of Hamlet or the madness of
Lear; still less would he have entered into the spirit
of Timon's declaration,-
"I am misanthropos, and hate mankind.”
The Athenian audience, with the joyous instincts of
children—ever ready to "make believe"-gave them-
selves up to all the illusions of the scene and story,
delighting, and freely expressing their delight, in the
picturesque and ever-shifting series of graceful tableaux,
so different from the still life of a statue or a painting.
They were "as gods," knowing all the good and evil
in the future of the play-such knowledge only increas-
ing the expectancy with which they looked forward to
(Edipus blinding himself, or Ajax falling on his sword.
The manner in which the poet treated each old familiar
tale was the test of his art, just as a modern preacher
might discuss and illustrate, after his own proper taste
and fashion, some well-known text. If we want a
modern example of the keen interest and sympathy
which may be excited in a large and intelligent audi-
ence by the lifelike representation of a history familiar
to them from their childhood, we have not to go far to
seek. The Passion-Play now acted at Ober-Ammer-
gau has many points of resemblance to the Greek
drama. In both there is the same reality and majestic
slowness in the acting, the same rhythmical dialogue,
14
SOPHOCLES.
the same melodious choral songs, the same large stage,
with architectural scenery half-open to the sky, and,
above all, the same intensity of religious feeling, which
thrills the actor, and passes from him, like an electric
current, to an enthusiastic audience. And if this
resemblance is apparent now, how much stronger must
it have been in the middle ages, when the Bible was
a sealed book to the poorer classes, while the Passion-
Play embodied for them to the life the personages and
scenes of Scripture-when, as a German critic describes
it, "cloister and church were the first theatres, priests
the first actors, the first dramatic matter was the Pas-
sion, and the first dramas the Mysteries."*
Sophocles developed this religious aspect of the
drama; and no Athenian citizen could have seen his
'Ajax' or 'Antigone' without feeling their hearts
burn within them, or without being touched and ele-
vated by the mingled sweetness and purity and pathos
which earned for the poet the title of the "Attic Bee."
From his pages can be gleaned sentences which read
like fragments from the inspired writings, and which
might have furnished texts for a hundred sermons.
With him the Deity is a personal and omnipresent
being, far removed from that sombre and vindictive
Nemesis which haunted Æschylus,-"neither sleeping
nor waxing faint in the lapse of years, but reigning
for ever in the splendour of Olympus,"-"speaking
in riddles to the wise, but leaving the foolish in their
own conceits." "Nothing is impossible with Him.”
"His works may perish, but He lives for all eter-
* Gervinus, Comment. on Shakspeare, i. 66.
i
INTRODUCTION.
15
nity." "Happiness is a fruit that grows in His
garden only." "To honour Him is the first and
greatest of commandments.' Here are lines which
might have been written by a Christian divine :-
11%
"Speak thou no word of pride, nor raise
A swelling thought against the gods on high;
For Time uplifteth and Time layeth low
All human things; and the great gods above
Abhor the wicked as the good they love.
*
Be blameless in all duties towards the gods;
For God the Father in compare with this
Lightly esteemeth all things else; and so
Thy righteousness shall with thee to the end
Endure, and follow thee beyond the grave." †
These sentiments pervade every play. It is only
when unmanned by despair that his heroes are tempted,
like Job, in the anguish of their hearts, to " curse God
and die." Even then such impiety meets with its own
reward. Well, therefore, might his unknown bio-
grapher declare Sophocles to have been "dear to the
gods as no other man was;' and with equal truth
may Professor Plumptre hail him as one of those
who were, in their degree, "schoolmasters unto
>>
Christ."
Mingled with this strong religious feeling in Sopho
cles was that melancholy supposed to be engendered
only in the poets of the north. He is oppressed by
Fragments of lost plays of Sophocles.
+ Philoctetes, 1441. This and the preceding translations
are mainly taken from 'Sales Attici.'
16
SOPHOCLES.
his sense of the feebleness of human intellect and
the impotence of human foresight, as compared with
the omnipotent wisdom of an eternal being. Like
some master-spirit, he views the actions and passions
of the characters which he has created with a half-
contemptuous pity. He heaps upon mankind every
epithet of scorn-" phantoms," "shadows," "creatures
of a day,” “börn to misery as the sparks fly upwards."
Hence springs what has been called his "Irony," so
admirably illustrated in Bishop Thirlwall's well-known
essay. "Men promise much and perform little. They
think they are marching onward to fame and greatness,
when the ground is opening beneath their feet, and
they are sinking to destruction. They boast of their
strength when they are really displaying their weak-
ness. Like Edipus, they solve the riddle of the
Sphinx, and are blind to the riddle of their own
lives." And there had been sufficient historical ex-
amples, even within his own experience, to point the
moral of this Irony. Scarcely one of those great
statesmen whom he had personally known, command-
ing the armies or guiding the councils of his country,
had either lived long or had seen good days. Defeat,
disaster, or dishonour, had been the lot of all. Them-
istocles had died in a strange land, a pensioner on the
Great King's bounty; Pericles had fallen a victim to
the plague which was decimating his besieged country-
men; his nephew, the gay and gallant Alcibiades, was a
traitor in the Spartan camp; while Nicias had perished
Plumptre's Introd. to Sophocles, lxxxviii.
"'*
*
INTRODUCTION.
17
miserably, with the flower of his army, after the fatal
night-march from Syracuse.
Many improvements are said to have been intro-
duced by Sophocles on the Athenian stage. We are
told that he raised the number of actors present at
once upon the scene from two to three; that he attired
them in splendid dresses-robes of saffron and purple,
falling in long and graceful folds,-jewelled chaplets,
and broad embroidered girdles. But above all, he
increased the number of the Chorus, and gave a new
form and spirit to the music which accompanied their
odes. We, in our cold climate, can hardly appreciate
the effect which music produced on the enthusiastic
Greek temperament. The French are more susceptible
to such influence; and few who have ever heard it can
forget the sublime effect of the Marseillaise thundered
out by a vast revolutionary throng. To the Greek,
music was a passion and a necessity.
Even now, a
modern traveller compares their life to an opera, where
men sing from birth to death; and perhaps the case
was even stronger in the days of Sophocles, when
"song rose from an Hellenic village as naturally as
from a brake in spring." Whether the peasant might
be watching by the cradle, working in the vineyard,
or toiling at the oar, the labour was in each case
lightened by some appropriate song. Their bards
told how Arion charmed the dolphin, how the walls
of Troy rose to the sound of Apollo's flute, as those of
Jericho fell before the trumpets of the priests, and
A. C. vol. x.
B
18
SOPHOCLES.
ence.
how trees and rocks followed Orpheus as he sang.
Even philosophers recognised this all-pervading influ
Aristotle has devoted a long and learned
chapter of his Politics to the "moral influence of
music;" and it was in music also (as most likely to
be corrupted by innovation) that Plato, in his ideal
State, places the watch-tower of his "guardians." The
marriage hymn, the funeral dirge, the incantation of
the witch, the chant of the physician, the solemn
and melodious invocation of the priest, merely illus-
trate this universal passion. Ion, the rhapsodist,
describes the strong emotion produced in himself and
in his hearers by the recitation of Homer. "When
that which I recite is pathetic," he says, "my eyes
are filled with tears; when it is awful or terrible, my
hair stands on end and my heart leaps. Moreover, I
see the spectators also weeping in sympathy with my
emotion, and looking aghast with terror. If the mere
recitation of hexameter verse could produce this effect,
far more powerfully must the simple but passionate
music of the Tragic Chorus, sung in unison by well-
trained singers, have impressed the audience in the
theatre, where the masks of perfect beauty, the grace-
ful robes, and the majestic stature of the actors gave a
solemn and almost unearthly character to the scene.
Though Sophocles had a weak voice, he was himself
a skilled musician; and in his choral odes (purposely
shortened by him that they might not interrupt the
current of the story) we can faintly trace the echo of
that sweet and majestic melody which must once have
* Grote's Plato (Ion).
INTRODUCTION.
19
entranced all hearers-we can almost hear the harmony
of voices, now rising loud and clear as they hail a
prince or victor, and then dying away with a solemn
Memnonian cadence as
"They mourn the bridegroom early torn
From his young bride, and set on high-
Strength, courage, virtue's golden morn,
Too good to die."*
* Horace, Od. iv. 2 (Conington's Transl.)
CHAPTER II.
DIPUS THE KING.
No tragedy in history or in fiction can equal the
horror of the tale of Edipus. The plot is so simple
as to be told in a sentence. An oracle foretells that
Edipus shall slay his father and be married to his
mother; and, against his own will and knowledge, he
fulfils his destiny. By a sudden revolution of fortune
we see a man, to all appearance as wise as Solomon and
as blameless as Job, hurled into an abyss of misery
and despair; and this by a chain of circumstances of
whose real import he is himself unconscious until the
final catastrophe. It is a case where the punishment
seems out of all proportion to the crime. Even when
we take into account the passion, the pride, and the
iosity of Edipus, we still feel that the criminal has
been in a measure "the victim of a mistake "-that he
is a mere puppet in the hands of some superior and
relentless power. And yet this Fatality, to which
Edipus is subject, is not so great or capricious as at
first sight it seems to be. It is true that chance and
misfortune are the means which it makes use of for

ŒDIPUS THE KING.
21
•
►
the accomplishment of its purpose, but it uses them
“ The real instruments," says
for the ends of Justice.
M. Girardin, "by which Fate works, are men's un-
bridled passions; it strikes down the murderer by the
murderer, and punishes the crime by the crime. But
Justice appears beyond and above these furious im-
pulses, and directs them, in spite of themselves, to that
To the
mysterious goal towards which it tends."*
audience, who knew the story well, no suspense could
have been so agonising as to watch the misguided
king rushing headlong to his doom-to see him weav-
ing himself the fatal chain of evidence which was to
convict him of murder and incest,-and this without
their being able to raise a voice to warn, or to stretch
out a hand to save. And mingled with this feeling
was that indefinable sympathetic fear-always strongly
excited by the sight of sufferings to which we may be
ourselves exposed the dread which haunted each
man among the audience lest he might himself some
day prove an Edipus. No one would have disclaimed
the idea of his committing such monstrous sins with a
more fervent sincerity than the criminal in this tragedy.
"Is thy servant a dog, that he should do these things?"
he would have asked; and yet, influenced by some
mysterious impulse, he had done them all. And,
lastly, the spectators must have felt that natural-but
selfish pleasure of looking down, like the gods of Epi-
curus, from the vantage-ground of their tiers of seats,
on the storm of conflicting passions, the love and the
rage, the hatred and the despair, which convulsed the
* Cours de Lit. Dramat., i. 189.
22
SOPHOCLES.
{
actors on the stage. Lucretius describes this common-
est of all feelings in well-known lines: "Sweet it is,"
says he, "when on the great sea winds are troubling
the waters, to behold from land another's deep distress.
'Tis sweet again to look upon armies battling on
the plains without sharing in the danger." *
It was the skilful manner in which all these emo-
tions are worked up by Sophocles in this play that
caused Aristotle, the great critic, to select 'Elipus the
King' as the model and masterpiece of Tragedy.
We are carried back by the poet to the same
mythic period, with no pretence to historical date,
to which Shakspeare carries us back in his kindred
play of King Lear'+-an age of giants, when men's
passions were at blood-heat, when atrocious crimes
were followed by atrocious vengeance, and when the
general violence and brutality of manners is only re-
lieved by brighter touches in such characters as Theseus
and Kent, Cordelia and Antigone. Edipus himself
might well say with Lear, that "the best and soundest
of his time had been but rashness."
Laius, king of Thebes, took for his wife Jocasta,
"daughter of the wise Menoceus," but she bore him.
no children. Then in his distress he asked help of
the god of Delphi; and the god declared that a son
should be born to him, but by the hands of this son
he should surely die. As soon as the child, the hero
of this tragedy, is born, his mother intrusts him to a
servant, with strict charge that he should be left to
Lucretius, ii. 1 (Munro's Transl.)
+ Gervinus, Comment. on Shakspeare, ii. 204.
EDIPUS THE KING.
23
die in the wilderness. This cruel command is obeyed.
The child's feet are pierced, cords are passed through
them, and it is left hanging from a tree in the wildest.
pass of Mount Citharon. There a shepherd finds it,
and, moved with pity, carries it to his master Polybus,
king of Corinth. The wife of Polybus, being child-
less, resolves to adopt the foundling as her own son,
and thus the stranger is received into the palace, and
is given the name of Edipus-"Swell-foot." He grows
up to manhood, never doubting that he is the son and
heir of Polybus.
In the mean time King Laius had grown old, and
thirty years after his child had been thus exposed,
he made a second pilgrimage to consult the god of
Delphi. From this pilgrimage he never returned, for
on his way home he was attacked and slain by some
unknown hand, at the spot where the road from
Delphi branches off to Phocis and Boeotia. Creon
succeeds him; but his reign is brief, for a monster,
with the face of a woman, the wings of a bird, and
the tail and claws of a lion, was bringing desolation
on the city of Thebes. The Sphinx (as this monster
was called) proposed a riddle which no Theban could
solve; and the life of a citizen was the penalty for
every failure.
So terrible was the visitation, that
Creon, in despair, offered the crown of Thebes and the
hand of his sister Jocasta to any who could unravel
the enigma and save the state.
At this crisis Edipus, like the "fated fairy prince,"
comes to the rescue. He had left the court of
Polybus, indignant at an insult offered him on the
►
24
SOPHOCLES.
score of his unknown birth, and chance or destiny had
brought him to Thebes. Corneille makes him tell his
own story-how on his arrival at the foot of the fatal
rock he sees the ground covered with the mangled
limbs of former unlucky interpreters-how, in their
despair, the perishing citizens make large proffers to
the man who shall deliver them :-
"Le peuple offre le sceptre, et la reine son lit;
De cent cruelles morts cette offre est tôt suivie;
J'arrive, je l'apprens, j'y hazarde ma vie.
Au pied du roc affreux semé d'os blanchissants,
Je demande l'énigme, et j'en cherche la sens;
Et ce qu'aucun mortel n'avait encore pu faire,
J'en devoile l'image, et perce le mystère.
Le monstre, furieux de se voir entendu,
Venge aussitôt sur lui tout de sang répandu,
Du roc se lance en bas, et s'écrase lui-même,
La reine tint parole, et j'eus le diadême."
-Edipe, Act i. sc. 4.
Both the riddle and the answer given have become
matter of popular and well-known story; and it is
difficult to understand the perplexity of the Thebans,
for the enigma was of the simplest kind: "A being
with four feet has two feet and three feet and only
one voice; but its feet vary, and, when it has most,
it is weakest." Professor Plumptre has thus trans-
lated the answer of Edipus :—
"Hear thou against thy will, thou dark-winged Muse of
the slaughtered ;
Hear from my lips the end bringing a close to thy crime:
MAN is it thou hast described, who, when on earth he
ļ
appeareth,
Ta
C
EDIPUS THE KING.
* Atteste OVAL J
25
First as a babe from the womb, four-footed creeps on his
way,
M
Then when old age cometh on, and the burden of years
weighs full heavy,
Bending his shoulders and neck, as a third foot useth his
staff.” *—(P.)
And so the successful adventurer is made king, and
takes for his wife Jocasta, who had been the wife of
Laius, and by her he has both sons and daughters.
For some years all went well with dipus. He had
children, and lands, and wealth, and honour, and
all that helps to make life precious. He was happy in
the affections of his family and in the loyalty of his
subjects. “Heaven and earth are silent for a gener-
ation; one might fancy that they are treacherously
silent, in order that Edipus may have time for build-
ing up to the clouds the pyramid of his mysterious
offences. His four children incestuously born-sons.
that are his brothers, daughters that are his sisters-
have grown up to be men and women before the first
mutterings are becoming audible of that great tide
slowly coming up from the sea, which is to sweep
away himself and the foundations of his house. Hea-
* De Quincey ingeniously suggests that, after all, the truer
answer to the riddle lay in the word Edipus, since he more
than any other fulfilled the conditions of these three ages of
man, first crawling helplessly on his swollen feet; then
<C
walking upright at noonday" in the vigour of manhood, van-
quishing the Sphinx, and winning crown and bride by his own
unaided natural powers; then, in the closing scene, thrust forth
from home and country, guided by his devoted daughter, "the
third foot that should support his steps when the deep shadows
of his sunset were gathering and settling about his grave."
26
SOPHOCLES.
ven and earth must now bear joint witness against
him. Heaven spoke first."* For some cause un-
known to the inhabitants, the wrath of the gods fell
upon the state, and every source of life was blasted
with that curse which was believed to follow upon
crime. Thebes groaned under the worst plagues which
smote the land of Egypt. Pestilence came upon the
cattle; mildew blighted the fruits of the earth; the
first-born of women were swept away by some fatal
and mysterious malady. The whole city-and those
among the poet's audience who had been in Athens
during the Great Plague could realise the description
-was "full of the dead and dying." It was to no
purpose that unceasing prayers were offered, and that
incense steamed upon the altars. The gods remained
The citizens in the
deaf and dumb to all entreaties.
first chorus tell the tale of their sufferings thus :-
"The nurslings of the genial earth
Wane fast away;
The children, blighted ere the birth,
See not the day,
And the sad mother bows her head,
And, with her treasure lost, sleeps 'mid the crowded dead.
One upon another driven,
Fleeter than the birds of heaven,
Fleeter than the fire-flood's might,
Rush they to the realms of night,
Where, beyond the western sea,
Broods the infernal Deity,
While our-city makes her moan
O'er her countless children gone.”—(A.)
* De Quincey, The Theban Sphinx (Works, ix. 249).
EDIPUS THE KING.
27
Then at last the people, in their sorrow and despair,
turn-as the plague - stricken Athenians turned to
Perivies-to him who seemed to be the favourite of
fortune, to the prince whose sagacity had once rescued
them from the talons of the Sphinx and in the opening
scene of the play, a throng of citizens-young men and
elders, priests and boys-are seated before the palace-
doors of Edipus, with boughs of laurel and olive, the
emblems of supplication, in their hands. When the
prince asks them the reason of their coming, they tell
him of the plague and pestilence which "desolate the
house of Cadmius," and implore him to lend his aid
in this hour of their dire distress. Whether he be
inspired by heaven, or trust to the "might of unas-
sisted genius," let him repeat his former good work,
and earn a second time the title of "Saviour of the
State."
و
The answer of Edipus is generous and dignified,
and has all the complacency of gratified patriotism.
Upon none (he says) have these evil days weighed
more heavily than on himself: they have caused him
many tearful and restless hours. He has long pon-
dered over all possible modes of deliverance; and he
has done what piety suggested has laid his case before
the gods, and is hourly expecting an answer from
Delphi, whither Creon had been sent. Even as he
speaks, Creon is seen approaching, with joy beaming
from his eyes, and with his brows bound with a wreath
of "Apollo's bays "-a badge which then bore the
same sacred import as the palm-branch in the middle
ages, for it marked the happy return of the pilgrim
1
28
SOPHOCLES.
from the shrine of Delphi, believed by the Greek to
be the centre of the earth, just as Jerusalem was by
medieval Christendom.
For once (Creon avers) Apollo has spoken plainly.
It is the guilt of innocent blood which troubles the
land. Laius had been foully murdered by unknown
hands; and until the murderer was banished, or blood
was repaid by blood, there should be neither peace nor
rest for the people of Cadmus. Edipus then asks a
train of questions, which (as critics remark) show a
strange ignorance of circumstances which must have
been well known to every Theban. Creon tells him
how, when, and where the murder had taken place, as
far as rumour went. One eyewitness had escaped,
who talked of a "band of robbers" falling on the
king; but these, like Falstaff's "men in buckram,”
were afterwards shown to have been invented to screen
his own cowardice. Edipus then reproaches the
Thebans for their previous neglect, and announces
that he will take upon himself the office of discover-
ing and punishing the unknown criminal:
“Right well hath Thebes, and right well hast thou
Shown for the dead your care, and ye shall find,
As is most meet, in me a helper true,
Aiding at once my country and my God.”—(P.)
Then the deputation of citizens, having secured a
champion, withdraws in procession from the stage, and
Edipus is left alone. "During this panse," says one
of the most acute of modern critics, "the spectator
has leisure to reflect how different all is from what it
A
EDIPUS THE KING.
29
seems. The wrath of heaven has been pointed against
the devoted city only that it might fall with concen-
trated force on the head of a single man; and he, who
is its object, stands alone calm and serene. Uncon-
scious of his own misery, he can afford pity for the
unfortunate; and, as if in the plenitude of wisdom
and power, he undertakes to trace the evil, of which
he is himself the sole author, to its secret source.
The Chorus of Theban citizens now enters, and, as in
every chorus in Sophocles, their first ode is a solemn
Prayer. They draw a piteous picture of the miseries
of Thebes, and they invoke its guardian gods to stay
the plague which is wasting the inhabitants. Let
them rise in defence of the city which has honoured
them so well, and drive far away to the gloomy shores
of Thrace the destroying angel who rides on the
wings of pestilence.
'Lord of the starry heaven,
Grasping the terrors of the burning levin!
Let thy fierce bolt descend,
Scathe the Destroyer's might, and suffering Thebes be-
friend.
*
Speed thou here, Lycæan king,—
Archer, from whose golden string
Light the unerring arrows spring-
Apollo, lend thine aid!
And come, ye beams of wreathèd light,
Glancing on the silent night,
In mazy dance, on Lycia's height,
When roves the huntress maid.

Bishop Thirlwall, "On the Irony of Sophocles," Philol.
Museum, ii. 496.
30
SOPHOCLES.
Thou, the golden chaplet fair
Braiding 'mid thy clustering hair,
To thy native haunts repair,
Thy name that gave;
Thou, whose brow the vine-lees stain,
Thou, to whom on star-lit plain
Evoe!' sing the frenzied train,—
Bacchus the brave!
With thy torch of pine defy
(Hated by the powers on high)
War's unhallowed deity :
Haste thee to save !”—(A.)
Then Edipus addresses the Chorus, as representing
the people of Thebes; and to the audience, who knew
the story well, every word in his speech must have
sounded like the bitterest irony, as they listened to the
speaker unconsciously invoking upon his own head a
curse as solemn and emphatic as that of Kehama.
He speaks as one of themselves—a citizen to citizens
"a stranger to the tale, a stranger to the deed."
Should the murderer confess at once, banishment shall
be his only punishment. Should any give a clue to
his discovery, the informant shall have a reward and
thanks. But if, after this gracious offer, the criminal
or accomplice hold their peace-
"That man I banish, whosoe'er he be,
From out the land whose power and throne are mine;
And none may give him shelter, none speak to him,
Nor join with him in prayers and sacrifice,
Nor give him share in holy lustral stream ;
But all shall thrust him from their homes, declared
Our curse and our pollution."-(P.)
All things conspire, continues Edip is, to make
ŒDIPUS THE KING.
31
him stand forth as the champion of the state, and "a
helper to the god and to the dead." An illustrious
prince has fallen, the land is smitten by the wrath of
heaven ; "and therefore," says the king and his
words carry with them a terrible significance-
“And therefore will I strive my best for him,
As for my father, and will go all lengths
To seek and find the murderer; and for me,
If in my house, I knowing it, he dwells,
May every curse I spake on my head fall!"
The Chorus at once protest their innocence and ignor-
ince. They "neither slew, nor knew who slew."
Besides sending Creon to Delphi, Edipus had also
summoned Teiresias, the great Theban seer, who, like
Calchas in the 'Iliad,'
"Knew all that is, and was, and is to be."
'He had been deprived of his eyesight by Minerva for
some offence, but the goddess, by way of atonement,
had gifted him with such acute powers of hearing that
he understood the language of all the birds of heaven.
Even after death he retained his prophetic powers, and
Ulysses himself sought the lower world to learn from
his lips the secrets of the future, being, as the Chorus
describe him here,
"The seer inspired of God,
With whom alone of all men truth abides."
Teiresias is led in by a boy, bearing the golden
staff which was the badge of his augurial office.
Edipus addresses him with dignified courtesy, speak-

32
SOPHOCLES.
،،
ing as a king to a king." The Theban seer (he
declares) is the only saviour to whom they can look
in their hour of need. Let him therefore use all his
powers of prophecy, and rescue the city from the curse
which troubles it, by pointing out the murderer of
Laius. But Teiresias, who knows but too well the
horror of the actual truth, refuses to answer. Edipus
vainly protests and implores; and at last, imputing his
silence to conscious guilt, angrily charges him with
having himself instigated or actually committed the
crime. Then the prophet is in his turn roused to
anger; the fire kindles, and he speaks with his tongue,
It is Nathan's denunciation of David: "Thou art th
man." (Edipus is not only incredulous, but furious,
to think that an augur can be at once so old and sc
vile a slanderer, since he can neither see the brightness
of earthly sunshine nor the pure light of inward truth,
and is blind at once in mind and body. And then
he moralises on the envy that haunts greatness. It
must be Creon, his own familiar friend, who has con-
spired with this "juggling mountebank," and has
hired him thus to prophesy deceit.* His very art of
* Seneca, in his tragedy of 'Edipus,' introduces a wild
scene of incantation, in which both Creon and Teiresias take
part. They repair at midnight to a valley outside the walls of
Thebes, where a grove of oak and cypress overhangs a stagnant
pool of water. There the prince and the prophet dig a trench,
light a fire, and offer a libation of wine and blood, accompanied
by a solemn prayer, to Hecate and the Queen of Night. Then,
amid the howling of dogs and the rolling of thunder, the earth
heaves and is rent asunder, and the spirits of the legendary
heroes of the house of Labdacus (father of Laius) rise from the

EDIPUS THE KING.
33
augury is a lie; for it was Edipus, and not Teiresias,
who had expounded the fatal riddle of the Sphinx.
If it were not for his hoary hairs (such is the
king's last threat), he should have had such a bitter.
lesson as would have taught him the peril of false-
hood.
Then Teiresias, "strong in the might of truth," de-
nounces that infatuation and blindness of heart which
is far worse than the loss of eyesight. His own mind
and reason are clairvoyant, while Edipus is ignorant
of his own birth, ignorant of the sin in which he is
living. Fatal continues the prophet, using a bold
metaphor is the harbour in which the king has moored
his barque, lulled by a vain security, and terrible is
the storm which shall soon break upon himself and
on his children. A light shall be thrown on this
mysterious murder; but
("No
"No delight to him
Shall that discovery bring. Blind, having seen—
Poor, having rolled in wealth,-he, with a staff
Feeling his way, to a strange land shall go.”—(P.)
And with this terrible prediction of the truth echoing
in the ears of his audience, the prophet is led from the
stage. Even Edipus, scoffer and sceptic though he
be, is struck by the reality of the augur's manner, and
remains silent and perplexed, pondering over the last
lower world. Among this shadowy throng is the ghost of Laius,
his grey hair still dabbled with blood; and, being conjured by
Teiresias to declare the truth, he denounces Edipus as his
murderer.
A. C. vol. x.
0
:
34
SOPHOCLES.
mysterious words relating to his birth, which Voltaire
has well rendered
"Ce jour va vous donner la naissance et la mort".
while the Chorus cannot restrain their terrible an-
xiety.
66
(C
Who," they ask, can this unknown criminal be,
that has dared deeds of such unutterable horror? It
is high time for him to fly, swifter than the swiftest
steed; for the god of prophecy is already on his
track with the tardy but resistless power of doom.
Though he lurks in some lonely cave or mountain glen,
the living curse will haunt him.”
It is hard (they conclude) to disbelieve the prophet
of truth-harder still to believe that their king, the
wise and good, is a guilty and polluted wretch; and
so, until he be convicted by the clearest proofs, they
will remember only the good deeds of Edipus.
Creon now enters, and protests his innocence of
the charge of conspiracy which Edipus had brought
against him; but hardly has he made his protest to
the Chorus, when Edipus appears, and angrily upbraids
him with treasonable schemes. Creon rests his defence
on grounds of common-sense-much in the style of
Henry IV.'s famous speech to his son. Who could be
so foolish (Creon asks) as to prefer
"To reign with fears than sleep untroubled sleep"?
As things are, he shares with Jocasta the counsels of
!
EDIPUS THE KING
35
the king. All men court and flatter him; why should
he barter his ease and pleasure for
"The polished perturbation, golden care,
That keeps the ports of slumber open wide
To many a sleepless night”?*
He has no motive for acting a traitor's part, or for
conspiring with Teiresias—
"Then charge me not with crime on shadowy proof;
For to thrust out a friend of noble heart
Is like the parting with the life we love.”—(P.)
But, as Voltaire † observes with regard to this pas-
sage, if a courtier accused of conspiracy should defend
himself by such a commonplace, he would stand in
great need of the clemency of his master. Certainly
Edipus is neither convinced nor reassured. Creon's
skilful pleading only seems to him to prove that he
can show equal skill in weaving plots; and he is
proceeding to further accusations, when Jocasta her-
self enters, and strives to act the peacemaker between
her husband and her brother. The Chorus join with
her in urging Edipus to forego his unjust suspicions.
This is not the first time, says the queen, wishing to
reassure her husband, that oracles have played men
false. Laius had been warned that he should perish
by the hands of his son—
"And yet, as rumour tells, where three ways meet,
By foreign rullians was the monarch slain ;"---(D.)
* King Henry IV., P. I. Act iv. sc. 4.
+ Lettres sur Edipe, quoted by M. Patin, Etudes sur
Sophocle.
36
SOPHOCLES.
while the son who was to have killed his father was
left to die in the wilderness.
Up to this moment we may suppose Edipus to have
been fully assured of his own innocence, and to have
regarded the denunciation of Teiresias as the words of
a madman or a traitor; but suddenly a chance expres-
sion of Jocasta causes a gleam of the real truth to
flash across his mind. Where (he asks hurriedly and
anxiously) was this spot "where three ways meet”?
And the fatal answer comes-
"They call the country Phocis, and the roads
From Delphi and from Daulia there converge."
Then Edipus, his suspicions being thus confirmed,
in an agony of doubt asks question after question of
the queen.
Time, place, circumstances, all agree.
Link after link in the fatal chain of evidence is closed
about him, and each answer only makes it clearer that
the words of Teiresias have been all too true. The king
in his turn recounts his flight from Corinth, in dismay
at the hideous destiny foretold to him by the Delphic
god. He tells how on his journey he came to a place
where three roads met; how he had been pushed
from the road by an old grey-haired man, riding in a
chariot, attended by a herald and servants; how blows
had followed the insult; and how he had "slain
them all." And, oh! the mockery of fate-the fearful
"irony" of his threatened vengeance! It is on his
own head that he has invoked that binding and irre-
vocable curse, which would be executed to the full by
EDIPUS THE KING.
37
the relentless powers of destiny. What man upon
earth can be more utterly miserable?
"Am I not born to evil, all unclean?
If I must flee, yet still in flight my doom
Is never more to see the friends I love,
Nor tread my country's soil; or else to bear
The guilt of incest, and my father slay;
Yea, Polybus, who brought me up.
May I ne'er look
On such a day as that, but far away
Depart unseen from all the haunts of men."-(P.)
There is still a faint chance that, after all, Edipus
may be innocent; but it rests upon the chance expres-
sion of the slave, who had talked of "a band of rob-
bers." Jocasta, indeed, is still incredulous, and is
confident that this oracle will be proved as idle as
the others; but, at any rate, the slave shall be sum-
moned and examined.
In the pause of the action of the drama, the Chorus,
left alone in possession of the stage, draw the same
moral from the tale of Edipus which the Chorus in
'Samson Agonistes' draws from him who had been
"The glory late of Israel, now the grief"
Woe to the man who walks proudly, fearing neither
justice nor the eternal laws of a God who grows not
old-who neither keeps his life from impious speech,
nor his hands from profaning holy things. His down-
fall must be speedy and inevitable—
?
38
SOPHOCLES.
Climbing oft, Pride seeks to dwell
Throned on Fortune's pinnacle ;
Hurried from the summit straight
Down the vast abrupt of Fate
Hurled from realms of highest bliss,
Sinks she in the dark abyss.
;
God, in whom for aye I'll trust,
Holds His shield before the just !
But for the man whose heart is known
By haughty deed and lofty tone,
Spurning Heaven, and wrapt in self,
Led by sordid lust of pelf,-
Unto them may Fate dispense
Pride's unfailing recompense.
Conscience! thou to such canst deal
Heavier stroke than blade of steel;
Else, if man may Heaven defy,
If sleeps the vengeance of the sky-
Why this idle chant prolong?
Still be the dance, and hushed the song!"-(A.)
Sp
At this point begins the dénouement or disentangle-
ment of the plot, in which Sophocles was thought espe-
cially to excel.
A messenger arrives from Corinth, bringing what
he conceives to be good news. Polybus is dead, and
Edipus has been elected by acclamation king of "the
city on two seas." Jocasta-who, with a woman's
fickleness, is on her way bearing flowers and incense.
to the altars of the god whom she had just insulted—-
meets the messenger, and is wild with joy when she
hears her own opinion of the falsity of oracles, as she
believes, thus undoubtedly confirmed; and she sum-
DIPUS THE KING.
39
=-
mons her husband, who, like her, exults at the tidings.
Who need now believe that there is any truth in the
Delphic god? Chance rules all; human foresight
avails nothing; and oracles do but oppress the mind
like a hideous dream.
But it is a false joy and a short-lived triumph.
Edipus himself is still haunted by a misgiving that
the latter part of the prophecy may yet prove true; for
Meropa, his reputed mother, is yet alive. Then the
messenger, wishing to relieve him from this remaining
dread, tells him the whole story of his birth-how he
was in reality no son of Polybus, but a foundling ex-
posed on Mount Citharon; how he had been delivered
by a shepherd of Laius to the very witness who now
tells the tale; and how he in his turn had carried the
child to Polybus.
There is one question still to be answered-one link
still requisite to complete the chain of circumstantial
evidence: "Who was the mother, and from whom
had the shepherd received the child?"
Jocasta, who had at once realised the truth from the
story of the Corinthian messenger, and who knows but
too well what the answer of the shepherd must be,
vainly tries to dissuade her husband from inquiring
farther; and then, finding him obstinately bent on
discovering the fatal secret of his birth, she can endure
her grief no longer, but rushes from the stage in a
silent agony of despair.
After a short interval of what must have been tor-
turing suspense to Edipus-an interval occupied by
the Chorus in idle guesses as to what nymph or god-

40
SOPHOCLES.
• Find y
dess could have nursed this "child of fortune "-tho
last fatal witness, the aged shepherd who, half a cen-
tury before, had received the child of Laius from its
mother, is led before the king. Forced to give his
evidence on pain of death and torture, slowly and re-
luctantly-for he realises the horrible import of his
words he reveals all that he knows. And then
Edipus utters a wail of agony (and even across the
lapse of years that loud and bitter cry pierces us with
terrible reality)-
"Woe ! woe! woe! woe! all cometh clear at last.”—(P.)
Then he too flies in horror from the stage.
Again the Chorus mourn over the vanity of life, and
again their lament is like that of the sons of Dan in
'Samson Agonistes'-
"O mirror of our fickle state,
Since man on earth unparalleled!
The rarer thy example stands,
By how much from the top of wondrous glory,
To lowest pitch of abject fortune thou art fallen."
Their king, who had once proved a tower of defence
to his country in her hour of need, is now beset him-
self by countless sorrows. Would that the sin and
death could be forgotten, and those guilty nuptials!
True to the principle of the Greek tragic drama,
that horrors should not be acted in the presence of the
audience, the rest of this miserable story is narrated
by messengers. Jocasta, as we have seen, had left
the scene suddenly and in ominous silence: she had

CEDIPUS THE KING.
41
dashed open the doors of the fatal bridal chamber; and
when dipus had followed her, raging for a sword to
slay her who had been the innocent cause of his misfor
tunes, he finds her, his wife and mother, hanging by
noose from the ceiling, already dead. Then he tears
the body down with a wild cry, and wrenching the
golden buckle from her dress, he dashes the point into
the pupils of his eyes-thus condemning himself to
that perpetual darkness with which he had taunted
Teiresias. "His feeling," says Bishop Thirlwall, "is
not horror of the light and of all the objects it can
present to him, but indignation at his own previous
blindness. The eyes which have served him so ill,
which have seen without discerning what it was most
important for him to know, shall be extinguished for
ever."
Well might the messenger say, at the close of his
speech, that in the tragedy which he had just re-
counted,
"Wailing and woe, and death and shame, all forms
That man can name of evil, none have failed."—(P.)
All the rivers of the earth could not wash away the
pollution which clings to the house and family.
The palace-doors are now rolled back, and (Edipus
comes forward with wild gestures, the gore still stream-
ing from eyes that are "irrecoverably dark amid the
blaze of noon." The Chorus, horror-stricken, cannot
endure the sight, and hide their faces in their robes.
Pity and consolation are out of place in the pre-
sence of such misery as his. They can only utter

42
SOPHOCLES.
broken exclamations of sorrow and dismay. What,"
they ask, "has prompted such an outrage? Why
has he thus doomed himself to blindness"
(C
"As in the land of darkness, yet in light,
To live a life half-dead, a living death" ?*
No man's hand has smitten him, replies Edipus, save
his own; but he has been fast bound to the wheels of
a cruel necessity, and it is Apollo who has prompted
such grim handiwork. Corneille gives the spirit of
is justification:-
"Aux crimes malgré moi l'ordre du ciel m'attache,
Pour m'y faire tomber a moi-même il me cache;
Il offre, en m'aveuglant sur ce qu'il a prédit,
Mon père à mon épée et ma mère à mon lit.
Hélas! qu'il est bien vrai qu'en vain on s'imagine
Derober notre vie à ce qu'il nous destine!"
Edipe, Act v. sc. 7.
Then he breaks out into passionate self-reproach, as he
recalls with remorseful tenderness those old familiar
scenes of his youth—
"All fair outside, all rotten at the core;"
the woodlands of Citharon, the court of Polybus, and
that "narrow pass where three ways met." No
guilt or misery, he declares, can be like his. Let
them then drive him forth from the city of his fathers,
and let them hide him for ever from the sight of men,
and from the light of day.
Creon now enters, and, with a nobility alien to his
* Samson Agon., l. 99.

>
EDIPUS THE KING.
43
D
character in the succeeding play, refrains from casting
either scorn or reproach on the fallen greatness of the
king; and Edipus, grateful for this kindness, makes
his last request. Let them bury her who lies dead
within the palace as becomes a king's daughter; for
himself he prays he may be allowed a "lodge in some
vast wilderness," far removed from the scenes of his
misery his sons can take good care of themselves ;
but let pity be shown to his two daughters, who are
left desolate, and to whom he wishes to bid farewell.
Creon had anticipated this wish, and Antigone and
Ismene now enter. Edipus is touched by this fresh
kindness, and shows it :-
"A blessing on thee! May the Powers on high
Guard thy path better than they guarded mine!”—(P.)
Then, embracing his children, he mournfully dwells.
upon the dreary life that must await them, uncheered
either by a parent's love or by a husband's affection; for
the shame of their birth must mar all possible happi-
ness. It lies in Creon's power to act a noble part, and
prove himself a father to these fatherless children.
Then the Chorus, turning to the spectators, bid them
learn a lesson from the tale of Edipus, who more than
any other prince had
"Trod the paths of greatness,
And sounded all the depths and shoals of honour.”
Let them mark how the favourite of fortune, the
spoiled child of destiny, had fallen miserably from his
high estate :-

44
SOPHOCLES.
1
"Mark him now dismayed, degraded, tossed on seas of
wildest woes;
Think on this, short-sighted mortal, and, till life's decid
ing close,
Dare not to pronounce thy fellow truly happy, truly blest,
Till, the bounds of life passed over, still unharmed he
sinks to rest.”—(D.)
(
Here ends Edipus the King,' as Sophocles has pre-
sented it to us. Its "sensational" character caused it
to be frequently imitated. Julius Cæsar, Lucullus,
and Seneca all wrote plays bearing the same name.
Corneille adapted it to suit a French audience, intro-
ducing a host of minor characters, and improving the
plot, according to his own ideas, by "the pleasing epi-
sode of the loves of Theseus and of Dirce "-the latter
of whom he supposes to be the daughter and heiress of
Laius. Dryden and Lee again adapted it for the Eng-
lish stage, with the inevitable ghost and "confidant;
and it was so performed at Drury Lane, when Mr
Kemble took the part of Edipus. But of all these
translations and adaptations, none comes near the majes-
tic simplicity of the story as told by Sophocles.
""

CHAPTER IIL
CEDIPUS AT COLONUS.
YEARS are supposed to have passed away since the
curtain fell on the horrors of the preceding tragedy.
In the first burst of his despair, the one wish of Edi-
pus had been to leave Thebes with all its associations
of guilt and misery, and to bury himself far from the
haunts of men in the solitude of the desert. But an
oracle forced him to remain on the scene of his crimes.
Time gradually cooled his passion, and taught him
resignation. Life once more gave him a taste of plea-
sure in the tender affection of his daughters; and it
seemed as if the gods themselves had relented, and
would allow him to die in peace. But Creon (his
successor on the throne), with the consent, if not at
the suggestion, of his own sons, Eteocles and Polynices,
drove the aged king forth from Thebes, to be a wan-
derer on the face of the earth. Their excuse for this
unnatural cruelty was, that they feared lest he should
bring pollution on the land; but why (as Edipus him-
self asks) had they waited these many years before
they discovered the danger?
46
SOPHOCLES.
1
And so it came to pass that Edipus left Thebes,
bitterly denouncing the ingratitude of his sons, and
praying that sooner or later they might feel the weight
of a father's curse. (In the "Seven against Thebes
of schylus, it has already been told how terribly this.
curse was fulfilled.*) The daughters proved kinder
than the sons. Ismene indeed stayed at Thebes, but
her heart was with her father in his exile; while
Antigone, with unflinching affection, had guided his
steps in his wanderings from city to city. Edipus.
himself, in this play, describes how her tender affection
for him knew no rest, and how she,
“Still wandering sadly with me evermore,
Leads the old man through many a wild wood's paths,
Hungry and footsore, threading on her way.
And many a storm, and many a scorching sun,
Bravely she bears, and little recks of home,
So that her father find his daily bread."—(P.)
The reader of Dickens-and the modern novelist is not
unworthy, perhaps, of comparison with the Athenian
poet-will remember the picture of "little Nell."
But,. in spite of all these hardships, we can well
imagine the delight it must have been to escape from
the polluted city to the fresh pure breezes of Citharon
or Hymettus, and how
"The pair
Wholly forgot their first sad life, and home,
And all that Theban woe, and ever stray
Through sunny glens, or on the warm sea-shore,
* See vol. vii. of this Series, Eschylus,' p. 104.
EDIPUS AT COLONUS.
47
In breathless quiet after all their ills;
Nor do they see their country, nor the place
Where the Sphinx lived among the frowning hills,
Nor the unhappy palace of their race,
Nor Thebes, nor the Ismenus, any more."*
For many months the father, led by the child, had
roamed, dependent on the chance liberality of stran-
gers, until they reach the spot where the play opens,
the village of Colonus, a mile to the north of Athens,
the birthplace of the poet.
And here let us notice the contrast, shown even in
the first few lines of the play, between Edipus the
king and Edipus the exile. It is as great as that
between Lear in his palace and Lear in the hovel on
the heath. The hot and furious temper has been
chastened; the proud heart has been humbled in the
dust; the spirit which had been so impatient of the
advice of Creon and of the warnings of Teiresias—which
had thrown impious doubt on the truth of heaven—
has been taught a lesson of patience and contentment,
as Edipus says himself, "by his afflictions, by the
hand of time, by the force of a noble nature."
"Edi-
pus the Great," as he had proudly termed himself to
the admiring Thebans, is no more; and we see instead
an aged and sightless exile, clothed in rags, leaning on
the arm of his helpless daughter. But he has gained
more than he has lost. Those powers of destiny which
had tried him, as he thought, with such wanton and
relentless cruelty in former days, are changed to benefi-
* Matthew Arnold's 'Empedocles on Etna.'
has been taken of slightly altering the first few lines.
The liberty
48
SOPHOCLES.
cent spirits who guide him by the hand to the bourne
of his earthly pilgrimage. Though stripped of his
kingdom, he has acquired peace and serenity of mind.
"The storm of passion has subsided, and left him calm
and firm. He is conscious of a charmed life, safe
from the malice of men and the accidents of nature,
and reserved by the gods for the accomplishment of
high purposes."* Ducis, in his play of Edipe,' makes
the king himself describe the change which had come
over his troubled spirit in some eloquent lines :-
"Sur mon front, cependant, dis-moi, reconnais-tu
L'inaltérable paix qui reste à la vertu ?
Je marche sans remords vers mon dernier asile:
Œdipe est malheureux, mais (Edipe est tranquille."
-Acte iii., sc. 5.
The scenery of Colonus has scarcely changed since
the days when Sophocles described his birthplace.
The landscape has that enduring beauty which Byron.
noticed as characteristic of Greece in a well-known
passage-
"Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild,
Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,
Thine olive ripe, as when Minerva smiled,
And still his honied wealth Hymettus yields." +
A modern traveller has in the same way described
the rich contrast of colours which pervades this spot-
the sombre green of the bay and myrtle relieved by
the golden orange-bloom, the red pomegranate, and
* Bishop Thirlwall.
+ Childe Harold, ii. 87.
+ Hughes's Travels in Greece.

EDIPUS AT COLONUS.
49
the purple clusters of the vine. Colonus was, besides,
rich in sacred associations; all around it lay "holy
ground." Not only had Poseidon, the god of horses,
and the Titan Prometheus, made the place their own,
but there was here also a grove dedicated to the
"Gentle Goddesses" (as those whom we otherwise
know as the Furies were called, by one of those pious
euphemisms common in Greek speech), within whose
precincts no profane foot might tread, whose awful
name no mortal might presume to utter, and by whose
shrine their very worshippers pass "in silence and
with averted eyes."
But Edipus and his daughter know nothing of the
sacred character of the spot to which they have wan-
dered; and Antigone cannot even tell her father the
name of the stately city, whose "diadem of towers" is
seen in the distance. The aged king, wearied by his
journey, sits down to rest his limbs on a rough un-
hewn stone within the sacred precinct of the god-
desses. Then there enters a wayfarer from Athens,
who, horror-struck at the apparent profanation, bids
him leave a spot where "6 man neither comes nor
dwells." But Edipus, who has caught the name of
the dread goddesses, recognises the "sign of his fate,"
and will not move; and at length the Athenian,
impressed by the dignified earnestness of his tone and
manner, leaves the stage to summon his townsmen of
Colonus.
Then Edipus, left alone with his daughter, ad-
dresses a solemn prayer to the dread powers at whose
shrine he is a suppliant :-
A. C. vol. x.
D

50
SOPHOCLES.
"O dread and awful beings, since to halt
On your ground first I bent my wearied limbs,
Be ye not harsh to Phœbus and to me!
For he, when he proclaimed my many woes,
Told of this respite after many years,
That I should claim a stranger's place, and sit
A suppliant at the shrine of dreaded gods,
And then should near the goal of woe-worn life,—
To those who should receive me bringing gain;
To those who sent me-yea, who drove me—evil;
And that sure signs should give me pledge of this,
Earthquake, or thunder, or the flash of Zeus.
Come, ye sweet daughters of the Darkness old!
Come, O thou city bearing Pallas' name,
O Athens, of all cities most renowned!
Have pity on this wasted spectral form
That once was Edipus."—(P.)
or to
The aged citizens of Colonus, who form the Chorus,
now enter, in a fever of indignation that any stranger
should have ventured to set foot within the holy grove
of the "Virgin Goddesses;" and at last Edipus,
aught by his adversity not to “ war with fate "
offend pious scruples, allows Antigone to lead him from
the precinct. The Chorus, with an undignified curi-
osity which contrasts with the simple yet refined
courtesy of the Homeric times, ask a string of questions
as to the stranger's name and birth. When Edipus
reluctantly confesses that he is "the son of Laius,"
they bid him instantly depart from their coasts, lest
he bring the same pollution upon Attica which he had
brought on Thebes; and not even the piteous entreaties.
of Antigone can prevail on them to change this decision.
EDIPUS AT COLONUS.
51
Edipus indignantly protests against such churlish
denial of hospitality. What will become, he says, of
the "fame and fair report" which Athens has earned
as the chivalrous protector of the helpless and op-
pressed, if they refuse shelter to a poor outcast like
himself, who, after all, has been "more sinned against
than sinning"? Let them not bring shame upon a
city which boasts itself to be especially favoured by
the gods, by dishonouring a suppliant whom these very
gods protect, and who brings with him blessing and
profit to the land. And then Edipus wisely “appeals
to Cæsar." Theseus, their king, shall hear his story,
and his subjects must bow to his decision.
At this point a fresh channel is given to the current
of the action by the sudden advent of a woman, who is
seen riding towards Colonus mounted on a horse of Sicil-
ian breed; and almost before Antigone has recognised
her for certain, she is in the arms of her "own dear sister
Ismene." She brings news from Thebes. The curse
of the father is already being fulfilled to the destruc-
tion of his sons. An "evil spirit from the gods,"
working upon their own vile passions, has driven them
into open war for the crown of Thebes. Polynices,
exiled by his younger brother, has
"Fled to the vales of Argos, and contracts
A new alliance, arms his martial friends,
And vaunts that Argos shall requite his wrongs
On guilty Thebes, and raise his name to heaven.”—(D.)
Moreover, continues Ismene, an oracle has declared
that the issue of the struggle depends on dipus.
52
SOPHOCLES.
"Dead or living," his body will decide the fortunes of
the war; and Creon is even now on his way to take
possession of his person, and to bring him near the
borders of the Theban land, intending to keep him a
prisoner there until his death, when his tomb would
serve as a fortress against the enemies of Thebes.
Edipus is more bitterly incensed than ever at the
heartless and selfish conduct of his sons. They had
acquiesced in the sentence which had doomed him to
poverty and exile; they had suffered him to be cast
forth from his home and country, when "
one small
word," spoken by them in his defence, would have
saved him from such dishonour; they had rioted in
luxury while he wandered a miserable outcast, de-
pendent on his daughter's aid;—and now, to suit their
own ambitious purposes, they would force him to re-
turn to Thebes. Never will he so return, he emphati-
cally declares-so help him those dread powers who
are now his guardians. He will remain on the spot to
which his destinies have brought him, and prove him-
self in very truth the "great deliverer" of Athens, the
city which has given him refuge.
The Chorus now instruct him that, if he really
wishes to befriend their city, he must first make his
peace with the Avengers of the dead, and offer liba-
tions in their honour according to a solemn and mys-
terious ritual. From a vase crowned with " "a wreath
of snow-white lamb's-wool" he must pour streams of
pure water mingled with honey, turning to the east,
and strew on either side of him "thrice nine olive-
branches." Then he may utter a whispered prayer
EDIPUS AT COLONUS.
53
to the goddesses, and so obtain at their hands rest and
pardon.
But Edipus has not the strength for this ceremonial,
and he deputes his daughters to pour the libations in
his stead-giving as his reason what seems an uncon-
scious prophecy of One whose life was offered as a
ransom for many
"
"For one soul working in the strength of love
Is mightier than ten thousand to atone."*
Perhaps, too, there was mingled with this reluctance the
same feeling which made David shrink from consecrat-
ing the Temple. The offering to the Virgin Goddesses
would surely be more acceptable from the pure hands of
his daughters than from his, who had been "a man of war
from his youth." So Horace afterwards declared that
the flowers and meal-cakes of his village maiden had a
sweeter savour than all the burnt-offerings of the rich.
"The costliest sacrifice that wealth can make,
From the incensed Penates less commands
A soft response, than doth the poorest cake,
If on the altar laid with spotless hands." †
Gay
Scarcely have Antigone and Ismene left the scene to
make the offering in their father's stead, when Theseus,
the king of Athens, enters, and his chivalrous demean-
our strikingly contrasts with the garrulous importu-
nities of the Chorus.
He will not cause fresh pain to Edipus, he says, by
recalling his sorrows. This "abject garb and aspect of
* Plumptre's Introd., lxxxv.
✦ Ode iii. 23 (Martin's Transl.)
54
SOPHOCLES.
despair" tell their own tale. An exile's misfortunes
touch him keenly, for he has himself been schooled in
adversity---
"I know that I am man, and I can count
No more than thou on what to-morrow brings."—(P.)
Edipus, grateful for this generous forbearance, tells
the king that, though outwardly it is but "a sorry
gift" that he brings-namely, his own feeble body, in
bitter truth a "heritage of woe" to its master—yet its
possession should bring no small gain to the land of
his refuge; and not small either (he adds, with a touch
of his ancient pride) will be the conflict waged for it
between his own sons and the citizens of Athens.
Truly, as Ismene says,
"The gods now raise the head they once laid low."
It was with his body as with the bones of Orestes-
another so-called victim of Fate-which an oracle had
declared would bring success to the arms of Sparta.*
"Such is the force attached to expiation and the expia-
tory victim. In his lifetime men pitilessly strike him.
in the name of God, as the scapegoat of the evil which
his death is destined to abolish; and in his death all
men revere him as the symbol of re-established justice.Ӡ
Theseus doubts if any strife can spring up between
himself and his trusty allies of Thebes; but Edipus
knows better, from sad experience, the uncertainty of
earthly friendship, and how soon there arise "
un-
* Herod., i. 67.
+ Girardin, Cours de Littérature Dramat., i. 189.
EDIPUS AT COLONUS.
55
naturalness between the child and the parent; death,
dearth, dissolutions of ancient amities."*
"O son of Ægeus, unto Gods alone
Nor age can come, nor destined hour of death;
All else the almighty ruler Time sweeps on.
Earth's strength shall wither, wither strength of limb,
And trust decays, and mistrust grows apace;
And the same spirit lasts not among them
That once were friends, nor joineth state with state.
To these at once, to those in after-years
Sweet things grow bitter, then turn sweet again.
And what, if now at Thebes all things run smooth,
And well towards thee, Time, in myriad change,
A myriad nights and days brings forth; and thus
In these, for some slight cause, they yet may spurn
In battle all their pledge of faithfulness.
And then this body, sleeping in the grave,
All cold and stiff shall drink warm blood of men,
If Zeus be Zeus, and his son Phoebus true."—(P.)
Theseus is convinced by the sincerity of Edipus, and
declares that he will never give up a suppliant guest,
bound to him by ancient friendship-so rich in the
present favour of the gods, and in the future blessings
which will flow from his presence in the land. He
will not give him up, despite of the threats of Creon
and all his host; "for," he adds, with all the pride of a
Bayard, "my heart knows no fear
""
"C
'My very name will guard thee from all harm."
The famous chorus which follows is associated with
a personal anecdote of the old age of Sophocles. It is
* King Lear, Act i. sc. 2.
|
56
SOPHOCLES.
said that Ariston, his eldest son, had in a fit of jealous
suspicion brought an action against his father, as being
imbecile and incapable of managing his own affairs.
The poet, then, as tradition tells us, in his hundredth
year, entered the court, leaning on his favourite grand-
child (who probably suggested the filial devotion of
Antigone's character), and, scorning to otherwise defend
himself against the insult offered to his mental powers,
recited the passage from his then unfinished play
which describes the glories of Colonus. And the story
goes on to say that, before Sophocles had finished reciting
these noble lines, the Athenian jury, always susceptible
to an "appeal to their feelings," broke into irrepres-
sible applause. "A dotard cannot have written this,"
was their verdict; and the case was dismissed-we will
hope "with costs."
Anstice gives-as far as can be given in English—
the spirit of the original; and we make no excuse for
borrowing largely from his version (too little known)
of this ode:—
"Stranger, thou art standing now
On Colonus' sparry brow
All the haunts of Attic ground,
Where the matchless coursers bound,
Boast not, through their realms of bliss,
Other spot as fair as this.
Frequent down this greenwood dale
Mourns the warbling nightingale,
Nestling 'mid the thickest screen
Of the ivy's darksome green.
:
DIPUS AT COLONUS.
57
Here Narcissus, day by day,
Buds in clustering beauty gay :
Here the golden Crocus gleams,
Murmur here unfailing streams,
Sleep the bubbling fountains never,
Feeding pure Cephiseus' river,
Whose prolific waters daily
Bid the pastures blossom gaily,
With the showers of spring-tide blending,
On the lap of earth descending."
Then, after paying a tribute to the olive, a tree peculi-
arly sacred in Attica, and the especial care of "Morian
Jove" and "blue-eyed Pallas," the chorus concludes :—
"Swell the song of praise again;
Other boons demand my strain,
Other blessings we inherit,
Granted by the mighty Spirit;
On the sea and on the shore,
Ours the bridle and the oar.
Son of Saturn old, whose sway
Stormy winds and waves obey,
Thine be honour's well-earned meed,
Tamer of the champing steed;
First he wore on Attic plain
Bit of steel and curbing rein.
Oft too, o'er the waters blue,
Athens, strain thy labouring crew;
Practised hands the bark are plying,
Oars are bending, spray is flying,
Sunny waves beneath them glancing,
Sportive Nereids round them dancing,
With their hundred feet in motion,
Twinkling 'mid the foam of ocean."
The praises lavished on Athenian chivalry are now
58
SOPHOCLES.
put to the proof; for Creon, whom Ismene had de-
scribed as already on his way to seize and carry off
Edipus to Thebes, enters in person at the head of an
armed force. As the Chorus shrink back from him in
alarmed surprise, he deprecates their fears in a speech-
masterly, whether we regard the purpose of the orator
or the policy of the statesman. He compliments the
citizens on their noble city; he condoles with the
sightless king on his many sorrows; he commiserates
the forlorn condition of the maidens. All may yet be
well, he argues, if dipus will take heart of grace,
and accept the proffered invitation of the Thebans to
return. But Edipus is not to be easily convinced.
He sees through the polished insincerity of Creon's
speech, and denounces those specious promises made
with "feigned lips"-
Goodly in show, but mischievous in act.”
(6
As to his returning to Thebes, merely that he may
bring profit to his ungrateful country and his unnat-
ural kindred—
"That shall not be ; but this shall be thy lot,
My stern Avenger dwelling with thee still;
And these my sons shall gain of that my land
Enough to die in; that-and-nothing more."-(P.)
Then Creon throws off the mask: since fair words
have failed him, he will use force; and in spite
of the indignation of the Chorus, the outcry of the
maidens, and the feeble resistance of Edipus, the
Theban guards drag off Antigone and Ismene as host-
ages for their father; and Creon even threatens that
CDIPUS AT COLONUS.
59
he will lay hands on Edipus himself. The aged king's
wrath boils over at this last outrage, and he reiterates
his curse upon the robber of his children :—
"May these Goddess Powers
Not smite me speechless till I speak my curse
On thee, thou vile one, robbing me by force
Of that last light when other lights were quenched.
For this may yon bright Sun-god, scanning all,
Grant thee thyself, and all thy race with thee,
To wear thy life in dreary age like mine."
Just as Creon is actually about to force Edipus
along with him, Theseus enters. On hearing what
has passed, he at once gives orders to summon horse
and foot, who may rescue the maidens from the Theban
guards before they cross the borders. He then addres-
ses Creon with a dignified rebuke for his violence and
lawless conduct, outraging the sacred character of sup-
pliants, and wronging a state which "without laws
does nothing: "—
"Thou must have deemed my city void of men,
Slave-like, submissive, and myself as nought.
Thou tramplest on my rights, defiest Gods,
And rudely seizest these poor suppliants."
Creon, by way of justification, insults Theseus and
Edipus in the same sentence. He had never supposed
that the holy city, with its supreme tribunal on the
Hill of Mars, would give shelter to a parricide, "whose
marriage had been incest." The curse of Edipus had
provoked his anger—
"For headstrong wrath knows no old age but death."
60
SOPHOCLES.
Edipus in his turn recriminates the foul reproaches
which the brother had uttered against the sister.
The shame in such a case rested more on the re-
viler than on the unwilling victim of an evil destiny.
Even his father's spirit, if it could return from
Hades, would hardly upbraid him for crimes which
had been wrought so unwittingly.
But Theseus breaks off this angry dialogue. They
are standing idle, he says, while the captive maidens
are being hurried across the Athenian borders; and
then, with a parting promise to Edipus that he will
restore his children or die in the attempt, the chiv-
alrous king starts in pursuit, taking with him his
Athenian attendants, and Creon to serve as an unwill-
ing guide.
The Chorus fill up the interval by a bold flight of
song, in which they picture to themselves the pursuit,
the battle, and the recovery of the maidens. The
following again is Anstice's spirited translation of the
ode:
"Waft me hence, and set me down
Where the lines of battle frown;
Waft me, where the brazen shout
Of the Lord of War rings out
On the Pythian coast, or where
Flickering torches wildly glare,
Where on mystic rites have smiled
Ceres and her honoured child.
Many a priest attends their shrine,
Sprung of old Eumolpus' line,
While discretion's golden key
Locks their lips in secrecy.
EDIPUS AT COLONUS.
61
Round the virgin sisters twain
Soon shall fall the crowded slain,
Theseus soon in mailed might
Wake the terrors of the fight.
Now I ween in haste they glide
Ea's snowy rocks beside;
There beneath the western sky,
Swift their straining coursers fly;
Rapid roll their whirling cars ;
Fleeter speeds pursuing Mars;
Theseus' train is on its way,
Keen to grasp the destined prey;
Every bit like lightning glancing,
Every mailed knight advancing,
Every charger's arching neck
Princely spoils and trappings deck,
Yours the vow for victory won,
Hippian Pallas! Rhea's son !
Thou who, throned in coral caves,
Claspest earth, and rulest waves!
Is the awful stillness past?
Have they closed in fight at last ?
Answer, my prophetic soul !
Thou canst secret fate unroll.
Soon I ween shall warrior sword,
Wielded by Athena's lord,
Free the maid by sorrow bowed,
Mocked and scorned by brethren proud:
So across my spirit's dreams
Joy anticipated gleams.
Might I, like the soaring dove,
Roam the aerial fields above,
Her who borne on tempest wings
Forth with nestling pinion springs.
62
SOPHOCLES.
Sweet it were from clouds on high
Battle's changeful tide to spy.
Jove! whose everlasting sway
Heaven's unchanging gods obey,
Grant to Athens' champions brave
Might to vanquish, strength to save.
Pallas! Jove's majestic child;
Phoebus! hunter of the wild ;
Dian! still the woodland wooing,
Still the dappled stag pursuing,—
Archer lord, and mountain maid,
Haste ye, haste ye to our aid! !"
arms.
These triumphal strains are not premature, for
Theseus is now seen returning, having, like a true
knight- errant, rescued the maidens by his feats of
Great is the father's joy at the restoration of
his daughters, and fervent are his expressions of grati-
tude to their deliverer. But Theseus modestly cuts
short his thanks, being, as he says, "given more to
deeds than words;" and then he tells Edipus that
there is a suppliant sitting at the altar of Poseidon
craving an audience with him. Edipus knows too
well that this nameless suppliant must be Polynices,
the elder of his sons, and is unwilling even to listen
to his voice. But Antigone joins her gentle pleading
to the request of Theseus, and Edipus can gainsay
nothing to his daughter's arguments-
"He is thy child;
And therefore, O my father, 'tis not right,
Although his deeds to thee be basest, vilest,
To render ill for ill. But let him come.”—(P.).
While Polynices is being summoned, the Chorus
EDIPUS AT COLONUS.
63
again moralise on the vanity of life; and, like the
preacher, they "praise the dead, which are already
dead, more than the living, which are yet alive."
Who would pray for length of days, which can bring
nothing but sorrow? Death, after all, is man's last
and best friend :—
"Of all the dreams of bliss that are,
Not to be born is best by far;
Next best, by far the next, for man
To speed as fast as speed he can,
Soon as his eyes have glanced on earth,
To where he was before his birth."
And then they point their moral by the fate of
Edipus, thus stricken with age and misery; and pos-
sibly, in writing the last lines of the chorus, the poet
may have been thinking of his own approaching end:-
"As billows, by the tempest tossed,
Burst on some wintry northern coast,
So toppling o'er his aged form,
Descends the fury of the storm ;
The troublous breakers never rest;
Some from the chambers of the west,
Some from the orient sun, or where
At noon he sheds his angry glare,
Or where the stars, faint twinkling, light
The gloomy length of Arctic night.”—(A.)
Then, with faltering steps and shrinking gesture,
Polynices enters; and if eloquent self-reproach and
protestations of sorrow could have atoned for years of
unfilial insult and neglect, he might have gained his
end. He throws himself at his father's feet, and appeals
64
SOPHOCLES.
to him, in the name of that divine mercy which "is
the attribute of God Himself," to forego his just resent-
ment:
"But since there,
Sharing the throne of Zeus, compassion dwells,
Regarding all our deeds; so let it come
And dwell with thee, my father; more we cannot add.
Why art thou silent? Speak, my father, speak!
Turn not away.”—(P.)
But Edipus answers him not a word. Then Poly-
nices tells the story of the wrong done him by his
brother, of his flight to Argos, of his fresh alliance,
and, trembling with martial ardour, he describes
"The seven great armies, by seven captains led,
That gird the plain of Thebes;"
and he implores his father, in the name of these chief-
tains, to forget his ancient wrongs, and to join his
strength with theirs, that so they may break the might
of "the despot lord at home."
Edipus has listened with brows bent and lips close
set to this passionate appeal, and at last he breaks his
silence. The repentance of Polynices has come too
late. He has sown the wind, and must reap the whirl-
wind. Then the sightless king, with all the passion
of Lear, reiterates those awful curses which he had
before pronounced. Ruin and disaster await the host
that is marshalled against Thebes. Polynices shall
never return again to "Argos in the vale," but shall slay
his brother, and be slain by his brother's sword, and
no man shall bury him :-

EDIPUS AT COLONUS.
65
"Yea, curses shall possess thy seat and throne,
If ancient justice o'er the laws of earth
Reign with the Thunder-god. March on to ruin '
Spurned and disowned, the basest of the base,
And with thee bear this burden: o'er thine head
I pour a prophet's doom; nor throne nor home
Waits on the sharpness of thy levelled spear :
Thy very land of refuge hath no welcome;
Thine eyes have looked their last on hollow Argos."
*Lord Lytton's Athens, ii. 542.
+ Patin, Etudes sur Sophocle, p. 243.
A. C. vol. x.
Heartless renegade though he is, Polynices is not
without some touch of a nobler spirit. He has learned
his fate, and must return; but he will not discourage
his friends by imparting to them the old man's words
of doom. And so he tears himself from the embraces
of his sisters, rejecting almost angrily the advice of
Antigone, that he should lead his army back to Argos.
"How," he asks, can he
(6
"Lead back an army that could deem I trembled ?"
He makes a last request of his sisters-that they
will give his body seemly burial; the next play will
show how faithfully this charge was kept by one of
them. And then, with a blessing on his lips, and a
prayer that the gods will keep them at least from all
harm, he goes forth as Saul went forth to Gilboa, as
Otho headed his legions at Bedriacum-knowing him-
self to be a doomed man. So touching is the heroism,
that (as a French critic observes) we know not whether
we ought to condemn Polynices with Edipus, to pity
him with Theseus, or to love him with Antigone. †
"'*
28

66
SOPHOCLES.
The father, in the modern drama, however justly
incensed he might have been, would have relented at
the sight of so much real sorrow. Accordingly, in the
play of Ducis, Edipus and Polynices mutually embrace
in the French fashion. With us, Christianity transfers
the penalty for sin to a future life. But if Edipus
had pardoned Polynices, he would in a Greek point
of view have destroyed the very principle of filial
piety. With them, the expiation for impious wrongs
must be made by the actual criminal in his own person,
and in this world.*
Suddenly the sky grows black with storm-clouds,
the lightning flashes, and peals of thunder, in quicker
and louder succession, denote that the end which
Edipus had prayed for at last draws nigh. The
Chorus, terrified by "the fire from heaven" and the
incessant roll of thunder, call loudly upon Theseus;
and the Athenian king, amazed at the tumult, enters
hurriedly, in obedience to the summons. Edipus
bids him follow where he leads; for to his eyes alone
shall be revealed that secret grave which should prove
a bulwark against his foes-"stronger than many
shields"-and to his ears alone shall those mystic
words be uttered, which shall be transmitted at the
hour of death to his son, and to his son's sons after
him. "Follow me," he cries to his daughters; "fol-
low me, who have so often followed you-but touch
me not. Let me find for myself the sepulchre, where
the gods have willed that I shall rest in peace. Fol-
* Girardin, Lit. Dramat., i. 195.
CEDIPUS AT COLONUS.
67
low me, my children, whither Mercury and the Queen
of Night are leading me." Then, directed by some
mysterious agency, Edipus moves slowly onwards and
upwards along the sloping ridge, towards the "steps.
of brass," followed at a little distance by Theseus and
by his daughters, and at last he disappears from view.
Then the Chorus utter a solemn requiem for his
soul, addressed to the Dark King and his bride, who
rule the lower world :—
"If to thee, eternal queen,
Empress of the worlds unseen,
Mighty Pluto, if to thee,
Hell's terrific deity,
Lips of mortal mould may dare
Breathe the solemn suppliant prayer,—
Grant the stranger swift release,
Bid the mourner part in peace ;
Guide him, where in silence deep
All that once were mortal sleep.
Since relentless Fate hath shed
Sorrows o'er thy guiltless head,
In thy pangs let mercy stay thee,
In the grave let rest repay thee ! ”—(D.)
A messenger, who had followed as near as he might
the small company that had attended Edipus, tells
the sequel of this mysterious drama. They had
reached the brazen steps, and there, near 'the Thori-
cian rock and the hollow pear-tree" (both probably
consecrated by tradition), Edipus had sat down;
and after bathing his limbs in pure water from the
stream, had doffed the mean rags of his exile, and
clothed himself in a clean white robe, "meet for the
68
SOPHOCLES.
sepulchre." Then came the sound of subterranean
thunder; and the wanderer, recognising the sign, had
clasped his daughters in a last passionate embrace, as
they clung to him, wailing in grief and terror :——
"But when their piercing cries an instant ceased,
And the first thrill was hushed, silence ensued—
A silence, oh, how awful! From beneath,
With deep mysterious voice, called one unseen.
Again and yet again the god exclaimed:
'Come, Edipus, why pause we to depart?
Come, Edipus, for thou hast tarried long. ”—(D.)
Then Edipus bids all leave the spot, save Theseus
only; and when, after a short interval, they return,
the Athenian king is found alone, shading his eyes as
if dazzled by some unearthly vision, and then prostrat-
ing himself in fervent prayer to the gods of light and
day. He alone has seen and knows the manner of the
death of dipus—
"For neither was it thunderbolt from God,
With flashing fire that slew him, nor the blast
Of whirlwind sweeping o'er the sea's dark waves;
But either some one whom the gods had sent
To guide his steps, or gentleness of mood.
Had moved the Powers beneath to ope the way
To earth's deep centre painlessly. He died
No death to mourn for-did not leave the world
Worn out with pain and sickness; but his end,
If any ever was, was wonderful."”—(P.) *
*
* The following is De Quincey's eloquent description of this
"call," like nothing else in history or fiction. "What lan-
guage of earth or trumpet of heaven could decipher the woe of
that unfathomable call, when from the depth of the ancient
EDIPUS AT COLONUS.
69
woods a voice, that drew like gravitation, that sucked in like a
vortex, far off, yet near-in some distant world, yet close at
hand-cried, Hark, Edipus! King Edipus! come hither;
thou art wanted!' Wanted! for what? Was it for death?
was it for judgment? was it for some wilderness of pariah eter-
nities? No man ever knew. Chasms opened in the earth
dark gigantic arms stretched out to receive the king; clouds
and vapour settled over the penal abyss; and of him only,
though the neighbourhood of his disappearance was known, no
trace or visible record survived-neither bones, nor grave, nor
dust, nor epitaph."-The Theban Sphinx (Works, ix. 250).
;

CHAPTER IV.
ANTIGONE.
Of all the plays of Sophocles, this has had the most.
long-lived popularity. Not only was it frequently
acted on the Athenian stage, but it has been translated,
imitated, and "adapted" by successive generations of
dramatists, from Seneca to Racine. The plot has been
illustrated by Alfieri, and the choruses have been set
to music by Mendelssohn; and only so recently as
1845, the play was actually represented on the boards
of Covent Garden Theatre, with all the accessories of
classical costume and scenery, and with Helen Faucit
as the heroine.
It is not hard to discover the secret of the enduring
favour with which the 'Antigone' has been regarded.
The heroine, who absorbs the interest of the piece, is
the purest and noblest idea of womanhood that ever
inspired a poet. In reading the play we have some-
thing of the same feeling as when we look at Dela-
roche's famous picture of Marie Antoinette. All else
in the painting—whether judges, guards, or spectators
-sinks into shade and insignificance before the one
,
J
1

ANTIGONE.
95
ance with the usual machinery of Greek tragedy,
the messenger of evil tidings enters, and in one line
tells his story
"Bathed in his blood, all lifeless, Hæmon lies."
Eurydice, the queen - mother, passing by on her way
to the shrine of Minerva, overhears his words, and in
an agony of terror demands to be told the whole truth.
Then follows the tale of doom.
Creon had hurried to make what atonement he
might to the outraged corpse of Polynices. It still
lay upon the plain where the watchmen had left it,
torn and mangled by the dogs, holding their carnival
around the dead. After prayer had been made to
the "Goddess of Pathways,"* Creon's attendants rever-
ently wash the body in pure water, burn the remains,
and raise a mound of earth. Then they take their
way to "death's marriage-chamber," in which Antig
one had been immured. Even before they reach it, a
shrill cry of lamentation breaks upon their ears; and
with a heart foreboding the worst, Creon bids his
slaves roll away the stones and widen the entrance
to the tomb. The sight which meets their eyes, as
the set scene in the background opens, is piteous be-
yond all expression. The messenger continues :—
"In the farthest corner of the vault
We saw her hanging by her neck, with cord
Of linen threads entwined, and him we found
Clasping her form in passionate embrace."-(P.)
* Proserpine or Hecate-the goddess who guarded the high-
ways which were polluted by the unburicd body of Polynices.
96
SOPHOCLES.
Then Creon, groaning in the bitterness of his heart,
entreats his son to leave the body and to come forth
from the ill-omened chamber. Hæmon answers not,
but, glaring with angry eyes, draws his sword; and
as his father, believing his own life to be threatened,
starts back in terror, the unfortunate youth buries the
blade in his own body, and falls forwards on the earth,
still clasping the dead Antigone:-
"Yet ever, while dim sense.
Struggled within the fast-expiring soul,
Feebler and feebler still his stiffening limbs
Clung to that virgin form, and every gasp
Of his last breath with bloody dews distained
The cold white cheek that was his pillow. So
Lies death embracing death."-(Lord Lytton.)*
*
But the doom of the house of Edipus is not yet
consummated. Eurydice had heard to the end the
tale of the messenger, and had then rushed into the
palace without a word or cry. The Chorus argue the
worst from this ominous silence; and their fears are
fulfilled, for hardly has Creon again come upon the
stage, bearing the dead body of his son in his arms,
when he is met by a second messenger with the news
that the queen, his wife, has stabbed herself to the
heart with a mortal blow.
And here the horror culminates. Nothing can be
* We are at once reminded of the last scene in Romeo and
Juliet,' where rescue and explanation come too late to save the
lovers, and where the tomb of the Capulets is, as the Friar
says,
"a nest
"Of death, contagion, and unnatural sleep."
ANTIGONE.
97
added to increase the agony and remorse of Creon—
left living, it is true, but more to be pitied than the
dead themselves,—crushed and humbled in the dust,
all joy in life, all domestic happiness, all peace of
mind gone for ever. Above all, he is tormented by
the consciousness that it is his own stubborn pride,
and not his evil destiny, that has thus made him the
murderer of son and wife. "Heaven has sorely smitten
me," he says,-
"And I know not
Which way to look or turn. All near at hand
Is turned to evil; and upon my head
There falls a doom far worse than I can bear."-(P.)
A. C. vol. Z
CHAPTER V.
THE DEATH OF AJAX.
Of all heroic families, perhaps none were more famous
than that of the acidæ, to which Ajax, the hero of
this tragedy, belonged. Eacus, the founder of the
race, was a son of Jove, and he married a daughter of
the centaur Chiron, from whom two sons were born to
him, Peleus and Telamon. Peleus married the sea-
nymph, "silver-footed" Thetis, and by her had Achil-
les; while Telamon took to wife Eriboea, who bore
him Ajax. The cousins were both mighty warriors,
renowned beyond all the other Greeks in the siege of
Troy; but in character and appearance they were as
different as Athelstane and Ivanhoe. Achilles was the
true knight of chivalry, brave, graceful, and courteous,
but high-spirited and passionate. Ajax was a man of
war, of huge bulk and ponderous strength, taller than all
the rest by the head and shoulders. More than once his
single right arm had saved the army from destruction,—
"Stemming the war as stems a torrent's force
Some wooded cliff far reaching o'er the plain,"*.
* Lord Derby's Homer, Il. xvii. 847.
THE DEATH OF AJAX.
99
keeping his foes at bay, and then slowly retreating,
covered by his shield of bull's hide, "huge as a tower."
But he had waxed insolent in the pride of his strength,
and more than once (as we are told in the play) his
arrogant and impious words had provoked the anger of
the gods. When he first left Salamis, his father, per-
haps foreseeing the trouble which his haughty spirit
was doomed to bring upon him, had given him pru-
dent advice:—
er Seek, my son, in fight,
To conquer, but still conquer through the gods.”
But Ajax, like the old Norseman, "put his trust
neither in idols nor demons, but in his own battle-
axe," and his reply was,-
Ma
"Father, with heavenly aid a coward's hand
May grasp the prize of conquest; I confide
To win such trophies e'en without the gods."—(D.)
Again, in the heat of battle, when Minerva herself had
urged him to turn his arms where she led the way,
he had defiantly rejected her gracious offer of assist-
ance :—
"O Queen! to other Argives lend thine aid;
No hostile might shall break where Ajax stands.”—(D.)
It would seem as if his sullen and haughty temper
had estranged the friendship of men as well as the
favour of the gods. He was certainly unpopular
among his brothers in arms. To Agamemnon he was
"most hateful;" Menelaus bore him no love; and
the Ulysses of Homer, like the Ulysses of Shakspeare,
100
SOPHOCLES.
despised this "beef-witted lord "* for being as stolid as
he was arrogant. On the death of Achilles, it was de-
cided that the celestial armour forged by Vulcan for the
hero at the prayer of Thetis should be given to the
bravest warrior in the host. Only two chieftains pre-
sumed to lay claim to it on the score of their personal
valour, Ajax and Ulysses. But whatever Ajax might
have been in the battle-field, in council or debate he
was far inferior to his rival; and the other princes,
after listening to the claims urged by the two candi-
dates, influenced partly by personal feeling, partly by
the eloquence of Ulysses himself, and partly by the in-
spiration of Minerva, adjudged the armour to the "king
of rocky Ithaca.”
Ajax left the council and retired to his tent, in
bitter wrath at what he considered the unjust decision
of the judges; and it is on the following morning that
the play opens.
The scene represents the historic plain of Troy.
The sea sparkles in the distance, and the shore is
fringed by a line of boats-one larger than the others
in the centre of the foreground. There is only one
person on the stage-a chieftain narrowly scanning, as
it seems, footprints on the ground. Suddenly there.
is a flash of light high up in the background of the
scene, and the audience see a majestic form in radiant
* Troilus and Cressida, act i. sc. 3. M. Taine is even more
uncomplimentary. In his classification of Shakspeare's char-
acters, he places Ajax between Caliban and Cloten among "les
brutes et les imbéciles."—(Lit. Angl., ii. 206.)
THE DEATH OF AJAX.
101
armour; and by the spear in her hand, the Gorgon's
head upon her shield, and, above all, by the clear-cut
face and by the " azure eyes," they recognise their
own virgin goddess, Pallas Athene, or, as we may call
her, Minerva.
Then, in that musical and sonorous Greek of which we
shall never know the true sound or accent, she addresses
the warrior on the stage. Why (she asks)—why does
Ulysses scan these freshly - imprinted footsteps, as
though, “like a keen-scented Spartan hound," he were
tracking his foe to his lair? Ulysses recognises the
voice, "clear as a Tyrrhenian trumpet," and makes
answer. He is on the track of his foe, the hero of the
seven-fold shield. In the night just past, the herds
and herdsmen have been butchered by some unknown
hand, and rumour points to Ajax, who was seen
"The fields o'erleaping with a blood-stained sword.”
Ulysses has come to spy out the truth, and is now
ready to learn it from one whose wisdom he has proved
of old.
Then Minerva tells him all,—how Ajax, burning
with wrath at the loss of these much-coveted arms,
had gone forth sword in hand at the dead of night,
and was on the point of bursting into the tent of the
Atreidæ, thirsting for their blood, when (says the
goddess)
"I held him back from that accursed joy,
Casting strange glamour o'er his wandering eyes,
And turned him on the flocks, and where with them
The herd of captured oxen press in crowds,
102
SOPHOCLES.
Not yet divided. And on these he falls,
And wrought fell slaughter of the hornèd kine,
Smiting all round; and now it seemed to him
That he did slay the Atreide with his hand,
Now this, now that, of other generals.
And I still urged the wild and moon-struck man
With fresh access of madness, and I cast
After this,
An evil net around him.
When he had ceased that slaughter, binding fast
The oxen that still lived, and all the flocks,
He leads them to his dwelling, counting them
No troop of hornèd cattle, but of men ;
And now within he flouts his prisoners."—(P.)
Minerva is not even satisfied with having blinded
the eyes and deluded the senses of the rash man who
had insulted her. She wishes to humiliate her victim
before her favourite hero, and loudly summons Ajax to
come forth from the tent. At the second summons he
appears, his eyes still glaring with a ferocious joy,
carrying the scourge of cords with which he has been
lashing his prisoners. No translation can express the
bitter mockery with which the goddess humours his
fancied triumph, "first gazing on her victim, while the
depths of his mental ruin are lighted up by her irony,
then turning in more benignant majesty to point the
moral for her favourite." *
Ajax warmly thanks Minerva for her aid. His
revenge has been glorious. Not only has he reddened
his sword with the blood of the Atreidæ, but he has
Ulysses, his bitterest foe (it is a ram which to his mad
fancy represents him), bound to a pillar within, and
* Jebb's Ajax, p. 8, note.
THE DEATH OF AJAX.
103
he intends presently to scourge him to death. Then
he re-enters the tent to complete his vengeance.
The real Ulysses, whom Minerva has hidden in a
cloud from his rival's sight, cannot resist expressing
his pity that so stout a warrior should have been
brought so low; but the goddess has no such compas-
sion. It is his impious pride that has brought these
evils on the victim of her wrath. Let his fate be a
warning to all, and let Ulysses himself take heed :-
"Do thou, then, seeing this, refrain thy tongue
From any lofty speech against the gods,
Nor boast thyself, though thou excel in strength
Or weight of stored-up wealth. All human things
A day lays low, a day lifts up again;
But still the gods love those of ordered soul,
And hate the evil.”—(P.)
Þ
N
And with these parting words the goddess is borne
upwards by some ingenious mechanism, and Ulysses
departs, having learnt the object of his quest, and
marvelling much at the strange frenzy which had
come upon his unsuccessful rival.
“Tis said that, rushing to the plain,
By thee the captured herds were slain
To Grecian valour due;
Music in the "Dorian mode" is heard, and the
Chorus, here composed of Salaminian sailors, the faith-
ful comrades of Ajax, enter in search of their chieftain.
They have been much perplexed and disquieted by an
evil rumour, tending to the dishonour of their much-
loved prince.
104
SOPHOCLES.
All that of martial spoils remain
Thy hand infuriate slew.
Such slanders does Ulysses bear,
Such whispers breathe in every ear:
His calumnies glad credence gain ;
As he who speaks, so they who hear,
Insulting mock thy pain.
He rarely errs who flings on high
At gallant souls his contumely;
Whilst I of lowlier lot evade
The penalty by greatness paid;
For envy steals with silent aim
On nobler birth and loftier fame.”—(D.)
Let their chief but come forth from his tent, and he
will confound his enemies by his presence; at sight of
him they will scatter "like a flock of birds."
Then the Chorus pause, waiting for an answer;
but no word of response comes from the closed cur-
tains of the tent of Ajax. They are alarmed by this
strange silence. Can there be, after all, they ask,
some truth in this dark rumour? Can Diana or the
god of war have sent this curse of madness on their
prince? Heaven help him, if this be so! But if
Ulysses has invented the story,-"Up from thy seat,"
is their last appeal, "where all too long thou hast
been tarrying, while the insolence of thy foes sweeps on
like a breeze through wind-swept dells, mocking thee
to thy heart's grief and to my abiding sorrow."
There is still no answer from Ajax, but a woman
comes forth from his tent, weeping bitterly. The
sailors know her well. It is Tecmessa, a captive of the
THE DEATH OF AJAX.
105
spear, whom Ajax, according to the existing rules of
war, "deigned to take for his bride." She has to tell
them of "a sorrow sharp as death." The rumour is
all too true, for Ajax, the valiant, the mighty, the broad-
shouldered hero (and she dwells fondly on each epithet),
is the victim of a heaven-sent frenzy; and then she
tells them all she knows of the wild work of the
pre-
vious night. When the evening lamps burnt no
longer, and all was darkness and silence through the
camp, Ajax had taken his sword and gone forth alone,
cutting short her remonstrances with a proverb (familiàr
to the Greeks, but which would find little favour in
our days),-
"Silence, O woman, is a woman's grace.”—(D.)
After a space he had returned, driving before him the
sheep and oxen. Some of these he had slain, hacking
and mangling them with insensate fury; others he had
bound and lashed with the scourge, laughing madly
the while, and threatening his fancied enemies. Then
at last reason and remorse came upon him ;-
"And when he saw the tent with slaughter filled,
He smote his head and groaned; and, falling down,
He sat among the fallen carcasses
Of that great slaughter of the flocks and herds,
Tearing his hair by handfuls with his nails.
And for a long, long time he speechless sat;
And then with those dread words he threatened me,
Unless I told him all the woeful chance,
And asked me of the plight in which he stood ;
And I, my friends, in terror told him all,
All that I knew of all that he had done.
106
SOPHOCLES.
And he forthwith sent out a bitter cry,
Such as till now I never heard from him;
For ever did he hold such loud lament
Sure sign of one with coward heart and base;
And holding back from shrill and wailing cries,
Would groan with deep, low muttering, like a bull;
But now, thus fallen on an evil chance,
Tasting nor food nor drink, among the herds
Slain with his sword, he sits in silent calm,
And looks like one on some dire mischief bent."—(P.)
This burst of anguish followed by a sullen despair is,
as Tecmessa fears, more dangerous than his first fran-
tic state of madness. What help can they, his old
and true friends, bring to their king in this extremity?
But the Chorus have not time to answer her; for
groan after groan comes from the closed tent, and Ajax
is heard piteously calling on his child Eurysaces, and
on Teucer his foster-brother, then far away, to come to
him. Then Tecmessa can refrain no longer, but throws
open the door of the tent, and discovers Ajax seated
in gloomy silence, with his head buried in his hands,
while all about him lie the carcasses of the slaughtered
sheep and oxen. Disturbed by the light entering the
tent, he lifts up his head and sees his faithful sailors;
but they can bring him no comfort. His baffled ven-
geance, the insulting joy of his foes,-more than all,
of that wheedling knave Ulysses, whom he pictures to
himself as "laughing long and loudly for very joy of
heart," all these thoughts rankle in his breast, and
render life itself unbearable. How, he asks, can he
endure the light of day? how can he look on the face
of men any longer? Let his own true friends, the
THE DEATH OF AJAX.
107
sailors of his fleet, come near and slay him with the
sword. The sight of the mangled carcasses around
him aggravates this sense of shame; to think that he,
the hero of a hundred fights, should have dyed his
sword in the blood of dumb and defenceless beasts!
There is only one escape open to him now ;—
"Fair death it is, to shun more shame, to die."*
And he welcomes the thought. "O darkness," he con-
tinues, "my light! O gloom of Erebus, bright as day
to such as me! Take me, take me to dwell with you;
for I am no longer worthy to look on the race of gods
or mortals for any profit that I can bring to man, since
the warrior-daughter of Jove torments me to my death.
Whither, then, can I fly? whither can I go and be at
rest? for my glory is gone, my friends, and vengeance.
presses hard upon me."
Then he turns (as every hero in Sophocles turns) to
Nature-to the familiar plains of Troy-and bids them
all an affectionate farewell.
"O paths by the ocean waves, and caverns on the
shore, and grove o'ershadowing the beach, too long,
too long have ye held me here a weary while! but
no longer shall ye hold me, while I have breath of
life. Let him who is wise know this. O streams of
Scamander, old friends of mine, never shall ye see me
more; the bravest warrior of all the host that came
from Greece !"
And then there crowd upon him the sweet and
bitter memories of the past, the promises of glory so
Faery Queen, III. v. 45.
108
SOPHOCLES.
frustrated.
soon cut short, the hopes of vengeance so ruinously
How can he return to Salamis, and meet
the questioning looks of his father Telamon, deprived
of the meeds of valour? He is hated by the gods;
he is hated by the Greek host; "yea," he says, "all
Troy and these plains hate me."
“I must seek out some perilous emprise,
To show my father that I sprang from him,
In nature not faint-hearted. It is shame
For any man to wish for length of life,
Who, wrapped in troubles, knows no change for good.
For what delight brings day still following day,
Or bringing on, or putting off our death?
I would not rate that man as worth regard,
Whose fervour glows on vain and empty hopes:
But either noble life or noble death
Becomes the gentle born. My say is said."—(P.)
Then Tecniessa implores him, in the name of all
that he regards as dearest and most sacred upon earth,
not to leave her and his child desolate, to eat the
bread of slavery and bear the bitter insults of his
enemies.
"For very shame,
Leave not thy father in his sad old age;
For shame, leave not thy mother, feeble grown
With many years, who ofttimes prays the gods
That thou may'st live, and to thy house return.
Pity, O king, thy boy, and think if he,
Deprived of childhood's nurture, live bereaved
Beneath unfriendly guardians, what sore grief
Thou in thy death dost give to him and me;
For I have nothing now on earth save thee
To which to look.”—(P.)
THE DEATH OF AJAX.
109
The Chorus-themselves moved to tears-implore
Ajax to listen to this touching appeal, and to forego
his deadly purpose. But Ajax, if he is touched at
all, is too proud to show it. If Tecmessa loves him,
let her bring his child Eurysaces,-and Eurysaces is
brought. Then Ajax, taking the child upon his knee,
looks tenderly on him, as Hector looked on Astyanax,
-so happily unconscious of his father's misery, and
scarcely heeding the carnage with which the ground
was strewed; and then addressing the child as though
it could understand his words, he pictures it growing
up in careless innocence, " as a young plant," sheltered
from all rough winds under the guardianship of Teucer,
rejoicing its widowed mother's heart, and perhaps
hereafter (and the warrior's heart swells at the thought)
avenging his father's wrongs. "O my child," he says,
almost in the words of Æneas to the young Ascanius,—
"Learn of your father to be great,
Of others to be fortunate.” *
Eurysaces, he concludes, shall inherit the famous
shield—from which he takes his name: all his other
arms shall be buried in his own grave. Then, with a
hint that " sore wounds need sharp remedies," he bids
her take the child within and fasten the tent-doors.
Again Tecmessa implores him to relent"in the
name of the gods." "The gods!" bitterly repeats
Ajax-what duty or allegiance does he owe the gods,
who so plainly hate him? and once more he angrily
orders her to leave him to himself.
* Virgil, Eneid, xii. 435 (Conington's Transl.)
110
SOPHOCLES.
But Tecmessa still lingers-finding it, perhaps, im-
possible to tear herself from the presence of one whom
she loves with all a woman's devoted affection-and
she stays near the tent-door, clasping the hands of
Eurysaces.* Ajax does not look to see whether she has
obeyed him; but, relapsing into profound melancholy,
covers his face in his hands. And so the three remain,
motionless as statues; while the Chorus, in their song,
contrast the peaceful happiness of the island-home which
they have left with the weary travail of the siege, and
the gloom and dishonour of their king. "Blessed art
thou," their chant begins, "glorious Salamis, where
thou liest by the beating waves, famous in the sight of
all for ever;"-and they deplore the fate which has
befallen so noble a warrior-doomed to perish in his
prime, though sprung from a race in which "prince
after prince had lived out his span, and gone to the
grave full of years and honours.” †
"Oh! when the pride of Græcia's noblest race
Wanders, as now, in darkness and disgrace,
When reason's day
Sets rayless-joyless-quenched in cold decay,
Better to die, and sleep
The never-waking sleep, than linger on,
And dare to live, when the soul's life is gone:
But thou shalt weep,
Thou wretched father, for thy dearest son,
Thy best beloved, by inward furies torn,
The deepest, bitterest curse, thine ancient house hath
borne !"
Bishop Thirlwall's view of the scene is here followed.
+ Jebb's Ajax, p. 88.
Praed's Poems, ii. 349.
.
į
THE DEATH OF AJAX.
111
Then Ajax comes forward again. His better nature
has been touched-perhaps more by the allusions to
his beloved island than by any awakened tenderness
for Tecmessa. He addresses the Chorus, and there is
no necessity for supposing his speech to be spoken
with studied artifice: if there is artifice, it is the poet's
"irony." Or it may be that he "desires, half in pity
and half in scorn, to disguise from his listeners a pur-
pose too great for their sympathy. But whatever
may have been the intention of the words, their pur-
port is that his heart has been melted within him: he
will atone for his rash deeds: he will purify himself
from the stain of blood, that so he may find rest for
his soul.
"'*
This famous farewell speech is worthy of being
given in full, and the following is Mr Calverley's
admirable translation :—
"All strangest things the multitudinous years
Bring forth, and shadow from us all we know.
Falter alike great oath and steeled resolve;
And none shall say of aught, 'This may not be.'
Lo! I myself, but yesterday so strong
As new-dipt steel, am weak and all unsexed
By yonder woman. yea I mourn for them,
Widow and orphan, left amid their foes.
But I will journey seaward-where the shore
Lies meadow-fringed-so haply wash away
My sin, and flee that wrath that weighs me down,
And, lighting somewhere on an untrodden way,
I will bury this my sword, this hateful thing,
Deep in some earth-hole where no eye shall see→→
Night and hell keep it in the under-world!
* Jebb's Ajax.
112
SOPHOCLES.
t
For never to this day, since first I grasped
The gift that Hector gave, my bitterest foe,
Have I reaped aught of honour from the Greeks.
So true that byword in the mouths of men,
'A foeman's gifts are no gifts, but a curse.'
Wherefore henceforward shall I know that God
Is great; and strive to honour Atreus' sons.
Princes they are, and should be obeyed. How else?
Do not all terrible and most puissant things
Yet bow to loftier majesties? The Winter,
Who walks forth scattering snows, gives place anon
To fruitage-laden Summer; and the orb
Of weary Night doth in her turn stand by,
And let shine out, with her white steeds, the Day:
Stern tempest-blasts at last sing lullaby
To groaning seas: even the arch-tyrant, Sleep,
Doth loose his slaves, not hold them chained for ever.
And shall not mankind, too, learn discipline?
I know, of late experience taught, that him
Who is my foe I must but hate as one
Whom I may yet call friend: and him who loves me
Will I but serve and cherish as a man
Whose love is not abiding. Few be they
Who reaching friendship's port have there found rest.
But, for these things they shall be well. Go thou,
Lady, within, and there pray that the gods
May fill unto the full my heart's desire;
And ye, my mates, do unto me with her
Like honour; bid young Teucer, if he comes,
To care for me, but to be your friend still.
For where my way leads, thither must I go;
Do ye my bidding; haply ye may hear,
Though now is my dark hour, that I have peace."
"*
The Chorus are convinced that Ajax has shaken off
the sullen despair which had brooded over his spirit,
* Verses and Translations, p. 177.
THE DEATH OF AJAX.
113
and give vent to their delight in a passionate burst
of joy, which must have been far more effective in
the original music of the ode than it can ever be in
an English translation, however gracefully rendered.
Once more they may see the "white glory of happy
days;" and they call on Pan himself to lead their
dance of triumph.
“I thrill with eager delight,
And with passionate joy I leap ;
Io Pan! Io Pan! Io Pan!
Come over the waves from the height
Of the cliffs of Cyllene, where sweep
The storm-blasts of snow in their might!
Come, come, O King, at the head
Of the dance of the Gods as they tread.
And over Icarian wave,
Coming with will to save,
May Delos' king, Apollo, gloriously advance!
Yes, the dark sorrow and pain
Far from me Ares hath set;
Io Pan! Io Pan! once more ;
And now, O Zeus! yet again
May our swift-sailing vessels be met
By the dawn with clear light in its train.”—(P.)
But hardly have these joyous strains died away,
when a messenger from the Greek camp enters, in-
quiring for Ajax. Teucer has just returned from the
foray, and has with difficulty made his way through
the crowd of soldiers, who assailed him with a storm
of insults and threats as "the madman's brother."
On his entering the council chamber, Calchas, the
A. C. vol. x.
H
114
SOPHOCLES.
seer, had drawn him aside, and earnestly warned him
to keep Ajax within doors till sunset. The wrath
of Minerva would last for the space of this one day,
which was destined to bring him death or life. But
the warning and the message have come too late.
Ajax has already gone forth, and the Chorus-realising
the irony of his farewell speech to them-hurriedly
summon Tecmessa, and disperse themselves to seek
their prince, and stay his hand while there may yet
be time.
For a moment the stage is vacant; then, by a
skilful appliance of machinery, the scene changes.
The sea still heaves in the distance; but, instead
of the tents of the Salaminian sailors, there is seen
the dark and lonely "grove by the shore," and near
it stands Ajax himself, looking steadfastly at his
sword, which is fixed point upwards with the hilt
buried in the earth. All things, he says, are ready
for the sacrifice. The sword that is to slay him-
Hector's fatal gift, but his best friend now-is ready
sharpened, and fixed where it may strike the surest
blow. Then he invokes the gods, with whom he
makes his peace by his blood. Let Zeus summon
Teucer by a "swift rumour," that he may protect his
body from the insults of his enemies; let Mercury
guide his soul to a home of rest, after it has parted
from his body "at one swift bound without a
struggle;" let the Furies avenge his wrongs, and
spare not the Greek host, but lap their fill of slaugh
ter." Then a softer spirit comes over him, and he bids
farewell to life-not with the bitter and half-affected
،،
THE DEATH OF AJAX.
115
disdain of Romeo and Hamlet, but affectionately
appealing to the bright daylight, and to Nature, with
all their pleasant memories of the past :-
"And thou that mak'st high heaven thy chariot-course,
O Sun, when gazing on my Fatherland,
Draw back thy golden rein, and tell my woes
To the old man my father, and to her
Who nursed me at her bosom-my poor mother!
There will be wailing through the echoing walls
When-but away with thoughts like these! the hour
Brings on the ripening deed. Death, death' look on me-
Did I say Death ?-it was a waste of words;
We shall be friends hereafter.
'Tis the DAY,
Present and breathing round me, and the car
Of the sweet sun, that never shall again
Receive my greeting!—henceforth time is sunless,
And day a thing that is not! Beautiful Light,
My Salamis-my country-and the floor
Of my dear household-hearth; and thou, bright Athens,
Thou-for thy sons and I were boys together-
Fountains and rivers, and ye Trojan plains,
I loved you as my fosterers-fare ye well!
Take in these words, the last earth hears from Ajax-
All else unspoken; in a spectre-land
I'll whisper to the Dead."-(Lord Lytton.)
And we must remember, says a French critic, that
this appeal was made in a theatre with the blue
heaven for its canopy, and the mountains and sea for
its decorations. When he saluted for the last time
the sun and the sweet light of day, the real sun was
actually shedding a radiance on the features of the
dying hero, and the entranced faces of the audience.
116
SOPHOCLES.
CC
Salamis, sacred land of my fathers!" cried Ajax, and
all the spectators could see Salamis and its glorious
gulf. There it lay, sparkling in the sunshine, in
the midst of the waves, which still murmur the name
of Themistocles; there it lay, with all the memories
which its name and sight could recall to the Athenians.
"Fair and glorious Athens, sweet sister of my father-
land!" again cried the hero; and not only did he say
this in Athens, but Athens was all there centred
beneath his gaze.*
With one last look at the sunlight, Ajax falls for-
wards on his sword, and his body lies concealed from
the audience by the underwood of the grove. The
Chorus enter hurriedly in two bands, right and left of
the stage.
They have wearied themselves with a vain
search, far and wide, on the eastern and western sides
of the camp, but they have not found their prince;
and they appeal to the "children of the sea "-the
nymphs and naiads of the springs-to aid their quest.
Suddenly a woman's cry is heard from the grove. It
is Tecmessa, who, searching nearer home, has just
stumbled on the body of Ajax, as it lies "with the life-
blood streaming from the nostrils ;" and they see her
covering it with her robe from the eyes of his friends.
Teucer enters in the midst of their grief, warned by
a mysterious rumour from some god of the death of
Ajax. He uncovers the body; and, gazing steadfastly
at it, he too bursts into a passionate lament. As the
sons of Jacob feared to return to their father without
* Translated from Girardin, Cours de Littérature Dramat.,
i 29.
THE DEATH OF AJAX.
117
bringing Benjamin with them, so the foster-brother
shrinks from returning alone to Salamis and facing the
aged Telamon-fierce even in his gentlest mood; and he
foresees, what actually happened, that he will be driven,
like a slave and an outcast, from his doors. And then he
moralises over the fatality of an enemy's gifts, which
have brought death and dole to giver and receiver.
"Mark, by the gods, these hapless heroes' fate.
Bound by the very belt which Ajax gave
To the swift chariot, Hector breathed his last:
He too, possessing Hector's fatal gift,
By it hath perished with a mortal wound.
Did not some Fury forge that sword, and Death-
A stern artificer-that baldric weave?
Such fates, I ween, the gods for man ordain
Yea, and all strange vicissitudes of life.”—(D.)
Here it seems as if the play should end; but it is
carried on into another act. To an Athenian audi-
ence, Ajax was more than a hero of tragedy: he was
almost a tutelary god, the deified ancestor of one of
their noblest families, to which not only Miltiades, but
Alcibiades, and Thucydides the historian-perhaps ac-
tual spectators of the play—all belonged. Divine hon-
ours were paid to his tomb; and a yearly festival was
held in his memory at Salamis. His burial, therefore,
even on the stage, had almost the sanctity of a religious
rite; and Menelaus and his brother (as types of Argos
and Sparta, the national enemies of Athens) appropri
ately "fill the posts of Devil's Advocates' at this
process of canonisation.”*
C
Bishop Thirlwall.
118
SOPHOCLES.
Just as Teucer is about to remove the body in order
to prepare it for burial, Menelaus, accompanied by a
herald, appears, and haughtily bids him leave the
corpse as it lies upon the sand. "There," he says, "it
shall remain, food for the birds that haunt the shore ;
for in his lifetime Ajax had been a worse foe to the
Greeks than all the Trojans." Then follows an angry
dialogue, in which the speakers, with Homeric rough-
ness, exchange all degrees of insult, from the "reply
churlish" to the "lie direct." Teucer is a fearless
champion of the dead, and cares nothing for the rank
of his opponent or for the consequences to himself.
“Come, therefore," he replies, in a spirit as haughty
as the Spartan's,—
Come, therefore, bring with thee a host of heralds ;
Yea, bring the King of men himself. I care not
For all thy stir, while thou art-what thou art."
Menelaus, accordingly, goes to summon his brother
Agamemnon; and Teucer calls Tecmessa and Eury-
saces to watch the body while he prepares the grave.
Then he bids the young child sit as a suppliant, with
one hand on the corpse, and holding in the other a lock
of his father's hair.
"And should one
In all our army tear thee from the dead,
May he thus bare, unburied, basely die,
An exile from his home, with all his race
As utterly cut off, as I now cut
This braided lock.”—(P.)
The Chorus deplore the weary length of the siege, and
curse the memory of him who first taught war to the
THE DEATH OF AJAX.
119
!
Greeks, and thereby cut them off from all the joys of
life—“garlands, and brimming wine-cups, and the
flute's sweet music, and sleep, and love.”
"Yes, he from love and all its joy
Has cut me off, ah me! ah me!
And here I linger still in Troy,
By all uncared for, sad to see.
Till now, from every fear by night,
And bulwark against darts of foe,
Ajax stood forward in his might,
But now the stern god lays him low.
Ah! would that I my flight could take
Where o'er the sea the dark crags frown,
And on the rocks the wild waves break,
And woods the height of Sunium crown,
That so we might with welcome bless
Great Athens and her holiness !"—(P.)
Teucer enters again, and at the same moment there
is seen approaching from the Greek camp a tall chief-
tain of stately bearing, in resplendent armour. It is
"the King of men, the commander of the host," Aga-
memnon himself. He addresses Teucer with studied
insolence, affecting not even to understand his "bar-
barous tongue." "Does the son of the bondmaid," he
asks, "presume to set himself up as champion of a
hero no whit better than his fellow-captains? Let
him bring a free-born Greek to plead his cause."
Teucer replies half in anger, half in sorrow, that the
valour and the good services of Ajax should so soon
have faded from men's remembrance. He apostrophises
Teucer was the son of Telamon by a captive princess.
120
SOPHOCLES.
the dead before he will even condescend to notice the
taunt of the living.
"Alas! how swiftly doth man's gratitude
Turn traitor to the memory of the dead!
Lo, hath this prince not even one little word
Of thought for thee, O Ajax, who didst oft
In his behalf aforetime gage thy life?"*
Then he turns indignantly to the great king-"What,
does he not remember? It was Ajax who had saved
the ships from destruction, when wrapped in flames. It
was Ajax who had confronted Hector himself-and the
'son of the bondmaid' had then stood by his brother's
side." Then he retorts the charge of mean descent on
Agamemnon-sprung from the "godless Atreus," and
from a mother who played her husband false. He will
die himself sooner than desert the dead—and it would
be more glorious, he adds, to die for his gallant foster-
brother than for Helen, the faithless wife.
At this point Ulysses enters, and acts as peacemaker
between the angry disputants. His shrewd sense had
argued that nothing could be gained by outraging the
body of the dead warrior; and he appeals to Agamemnon
not to press his hatred beyond the grave-basing his
appeal upon common humanity and reason-
.
"Unto me
This man of all the host was greatest foe,
Since I prevailed to gain Achilles' arms;
"But yesterday the name of Cæsar might
Have stood against the world: now lies he there,
And none so poor to do him reverence.”
-Julius Cæsar, act iii. sc. 2.
THE DEATH OF AJAX.
121
But though he were so, being what he was,
I would not put so foul a shame on him,
As not to own I looked upon a man
The best and bravest of the Argive host,
Of all that came to Troia, saving one,
Achilles' self. Most wrong 'twould therefore be
That he should suffer outrage at thy hands;
Thou wouldst not trample upon him alone,
But on the laws of God.”—(P.)
scene.
Agamemnon reluctantly gives way, and leaves the
Then Ulysses, turning to Teucer, offers him his
hand in friendship, with a generosity which is in strong
contrast to the bitter insolence of the son of Atreus;
he offers also to assist in paying the last honours to the
noble dead. But this Teucer cannot allow, "lest it
displease the dead himself;" and so Ulysses departs,
having, so far as he could, made his peace with the
manes of his ancient enemy.
M
Ulysses and Ajax met once more so says the
Homeric legend-in the lower world. While all the
other heroes, in "the asphodel meadow," press forward
to greet their old comrade in arms who has come to
visit them in the flesh, the shade of Ajax stands aloof
from all the others, brooding over the injuries of his
lifetime, and sullenly turns away from the proffered
courtesy of his rival.
Teucer returned to Salamis, taking with him Tec-
messa and Eurysaces; but, as he had foreseen, Telamon
received him with angry reproaches for allowing Ajax
to perish. Then Teucer set sail for Cyprus, and there
he founded a city which he called Salamis, after his
…………………………….
122
SOPHOCLES.
old home. Horace describes his farewell banquet, and
his spirited address to the companions of his voyage:
"Where fortune bears us, than my sire more kind,
There let us go, my own, my gallant crew:
'Tis Teucer leads, 'tis Teucer breathes the wind;
No more despair; Apollo's word is true.
Another Salamis in kindlier air
Shall yet arise. Hearts, that have borne with me
Worse buffets! drown, to-day, in wine your care;
To-morrow we recross the wide, wide sea!” *
* Odes, I. 7 (Conington's Transl.)
$
CHAPTER VI.
THE MAIDENS OF TRACHIS.
THIS play, like many of the Greek tragedies, takes
its name not from the plot or the hero, but from
the personages of the Chorus-that very important
element in the Greek drama. The vague title tells
nothing to an English reader, but every Athenian
knew, at least by name, the little Thessalian town of
Trachis, nestling at the foot of Mount Eta, not far
from the famous pass of Thermopyla; and many, like
Plutarch, had visited the spot, and seen for themselves
what tradition had consecrated as the tomb of De-
janira. But what, after all, mattered to them the title
of the play, even if Trachis had been as distant as
Babylon, when its subject was perhaps the best-known
story in all mythology?
Hercules in his wanderings had come to Pleuron in
Ætolia. There he saw and fell in love with Dejanira,
the king's daughter, whose hand was sought by a
suitor of a strange sort—the river-god Achelous. This
potent rival had, as she tells us, wooed her in various
shapes (none of them, it must be confessed, attractive),
124
SOPHOCLES.
now coming as a bull, now as a scaly dragon, now
in human form, with a bull's head, "with streams
of water flowing from his shaggy beard." Hercules
wrestled with Achelous, while the maiden looked on
at a prudent distance; and the river-god, after being
nearly strangled and losing one of his horns, gave way,
and the victor bore away his bride in triumph. On
their way homewards they came to the river Evenus,
where the centaur Nessus dwelt, who was wont to
carry travellers across. Hercules himself breasted the
stream, and reached the further bank in safety, carry-
ing his lion's skin, his bow, and the famous arrows
which had been dipped in the poison of the hydra.
Hearing a cry, he looked back, and saw Nessus offer-
ing violence to Dejanira, as he was bearing her across.
Ovid-who has told the whole story-describes the
prompt vengeance of the hero, as the centaur tries to
fly. "Think not, thou," exclaims Hercules-
"With all the speed of all thy hoofs to 'scape!
My wounds are swifter than my feet!' The act
Followed the word, and through his flying back
Impelled before his breast the barb outstood.
And as he plucked it thence, from either wound
Mingled with Lerna's venom gushed the blood,
And steeped his mantle's fold. 'Not unavenged,'
He muttered,' will I perish !' and to her
He would have ravished gave the robe, yet warm
With poisoned gore, and bade her with that gift
At need assure her husband's wavering love." *
Dejanira herself comes forward, and, as the single
actor was wont to do in the earlier drama, tells the
* Ovid's Metam. ix. ii. (transl. by King.)
THE MAIDENS OF TRACHIS.
125
audience the history of her troubles. All these years
of her married life, though her husband has treated her
kindly, and children have been born to her, she has
known little peace of mind.
of mind. Hercules was constantly
absent, fulfilling the labours imposed on him by Eurys-
theus. He was seldom at Trachis, and saw his chil-
dren as rarely as "the husbandman who visits his
distant fields at seed-time and at harvest." For fif-
teen months he has now been away from home, and
his wife is sorely troubled at heart; for on his last
departure he had made disposition of his wealth, and
left with her a tablet, on which was engraved an
oracle to the effect that the next year would be the
crisis of his life-bringing him either death or rest
from all his toils. But month after month has passed,
and still Dejanira has heard nothing of her husband,
and she fears the worst.
.
Then her eldest son Hyllus enters, and bids his
mother be of good cheer, for Hercules is even now
close at hand, in the island of Euboea, which could
almost be seen from Trachis. There, as rumour said,
he was making war on the town of Eurytus; and
there, at the suggestion of Dejanira, Hyllus sets out,
like Telemachus, to obtain more certain tidings of his
father.
The Chorus enter-young girls from the town of
Trachis; and in their opening song they endeavour to
console and reassure their neighbour with warm sym-
pathy. They beseech the Sun-god to tell them where
the hero is at that moment.
126
SOPHOCLES.
"Thou flaming Sun! whom spangled Night,
Self-destroying, brings to light,
Then lulls to sleep again ;
Bright Herald, girt with beaming rays,
Say, where Alcmena's offspring strays;
Say, lurks he on the main?
Or lays his head to rest
On Europe or on Asia's breast?
In pity deign reply,
Thou of the lordly eye!
His bride, erst won by desperate fray,
Muses where lies his dangerous way;
Like some sad bird, her soul is set
On constancy and vain regret :
Sleep never seals those eyes, where woe
Lies all too deep for tears to flow,
While thought and boding Fancy's dread
Flit ever round her lonely bed.
Oft when the northern blast,
Or southern winds unwearied rave,
Ye see the ocean cast
In quick succession wave on wave ;
So to whelm old Cadmus' son,
Rush redoubled labours on,
Thick as round the Cretan shore
The swoln and turbid billows roar:
Yet his step from Pluto's halls
Still some unerring God recalls.
My Queen! disdain not thou to brook
My chidings kind, and soft rebuke,
Nor cast away, in morbid mood,
The cheering hope of future good.
For universal nature's lord,
Saturn's great son, by all adored,
THE MAIDENS OF TRACHIS.
127
Enjoyment willed not to bestow
On human lot, unmixed with woe:
Grief and delight, in endless change,
Round man in mazy circles range,
Like never-setting stars, that roll
In ceaseless courses round the pole.
Soon spangled night must yield to day,
Soon wealth, soon trouble flits away;
In turn, so fixed the eternal plan,
Bliss and bereavement wait on man.
My Queen on hope thy soul be stayed,
Nor yield thee to despair;
When hath not Jove his children made
His providential care?"—(A.)
But Dejanira, though she appreciates their kindness,
is but half-convinced by the words of the Chorus.
They are but young girls, she says, and know little
of the sad experiences of a wife and mother. Night
after night she has started up in an agony of terror,
lest she should be bereaved of the "noblest man on
earth;" and that mysterious tablet causes her grave
misgivings.
Suddenly comes a messenger with good news. Her-
cules is not only alive, but is on the point of returning
home after victory, and has sent his herald Lichas with
the captives on before him. Then Lichas himself
enters, and behind him follow a train of women, the
unfortunate prizes of the war. Dejanira turns eagerly
to the herald. "Tell me," she asks, "O dearest of
messengers, what I most wish to know,-shall I re-
ceive Hercules again alive?" "Yes," is the answer;
"I left him alive and strong, and smitten of no
(6
128
SOPHOCLES.
She can-
disease." Dejanira is made happy by the answer-
so happy, that she fears some fresh disaster.
not help contrasting her own joy with the forlorn and
helpless state of these captive women. Heaven grant,
is her prayer, such sorrow may never come on her or
hers!
Then her attention is caught by one of the captives
standing somewhat apart from the others, and a
woman's instinct impels her to ask of Lichas the name
and history of this pale and graceful stranger-
"For, more than all, my own heart pities her,
And, more than all, her soul is quick to feel."—(P.)
But Lichas professes ignorance. He knows nothing of
this maiden, except that she has done nothing but weep
and wring her hands ever since she left her home on
the "windy heights" of Echalia; and she has been
possessed by a dumb spirit, and will answer no
questions. And then he leads his retinue off the
stage.
Then the same old messenger who had preceded the
herald enters again. He is, as M. Girardin terms him,
an "indiscreet Iago," whose meddlesome loquacity
produces graver mischief than the machinations of a
hardened villain. With a mysterious and important
air he begs an audience; he tells his mistress that
Lichas has deceived her; that this fair and grace-
ful maiden is none other than Iole, the daughter of
Eurytus; and that it was love of her which had im-
* Cours de Litt. Dramat., v. 255.
THE MAIDENS OF TRACHIS.
129
pelled Hercules to attack and storm Echalia. Such
is the whole truth, concludes this ancient mischief-
maker, which it has been his painful duty to tell-at
all costs.
Lichas now comes to ask his mistress if she has any
parting message for Hercules; and Dejanira confronts
him with his falsehood. He protests and denies, and
repeats his former story. Then Dejanira, with a
woman's duplicity, bids him speak out and fear no-
thing. She knows the ways of men-she knows the
power of love—she knows the amorous temper of her
husband:
"Has he not,
Our Hercules, of all the men that lived,
Wedded most wives, and yet not one of them
Has had from me or evil speech or taunt?
Nor will she have; though she in love for him
Should melt and pine-for lo! I pitied her
When first I saw her, for her beauty's sake:
For it, I knew, had wrecked her life's fond hope,
And she, poor soul, against her will, had wrought
The ruin of her fatherland, and brought
Its people into bondage. Let all this
Go to the winds. For thee, I bid thee, I,
Be false to others, but to me be true."—(P.)
Lichas is completely deceived by this speech, and is
persuaded that Dejanira will resign herself quietly to
her fate. Accordingly he confirms what the messenger
had already told her; but, like a good servant, he
makes out the best case he can for his master.
"Well then, dear mistress, since I see that thou,
Being human, hast a human heart, and know'st
A. C. vol. x.
X.
1
130
SOPHOCLES.
j
No stubborn pripose, I will tell thee all,
The whole truth, nought concealing. All is so
As this man tells thee. Strong desire for her
Did seize on Heracles, and so her land,
Echalia, was laid waste by armèd host,
And brought full low. And this (for I must tell
His doings also) he nor bade conceal
Nor yet denied; but I myself, dear lady,
Fearing to grieve thy heart with these my words
Did sin, if thou dost count it as a sin.
And now, since thou dost know the whole of things
For his sake and for thine, full equally
Treat the girl kindly, and those words of thine
Thou saidst of her, be firm and true to them;
For he whose might prevails in all things else,
In all is conquered by his love for her."—(P.)
Then he takes his leave. Dejanira bethinks herself
of some means by which she may recall the waning
affections of her husband, and she remembers that she
has still preserved the blood which had flowed from
the wound of Nessus, but has never yet used it, though
the Centaur had assured her it would prove a resistless
love-charm. After taking counsel with the Chorus,
who advise her to make experiment before putting her
project into action, she smears an embroidered robe
with the blood, and intrusts it to Lichas, with strict
charge that none should wear it before Hercules him-
self :—
"Nor must the light of sunshine look on it,
Nor sacred shrine, nor flame of altar hearth,
Before he stands, conspicuous, showing it
On day of sacrifice, in sight of gods.
For so I vowed, if I should see him safe
THE MAIDENS OF TRACHIS.
131
At home, or hear his safety well assured,
To clothe him with this tunic, and send forth
The glorious worshipper in glorious robe.”—(P.)
But hardly has Lichas departed, carrying with him
the fatal gift, than Dejanira enters again in an agony
of alarm. She had, according to the Centaur's instruc-
tions, kept the blood in a bronze vessel "untouched
by fire or sunlight "-even when she smeared it on
the robe, it had been in a dark chamber within the
house; but she had thrown the wisp of wool which
she had used for the purpose on the ground in the
sunshine. There it had melted and crumbled into
dust in a strange fashion—
"And from the earth where it had lain, there oozed
Thick clots of foam, as when in vintage bright
Rich must is poured upon the earth from vine
Sacred to Bacchus; and I know not now
Which way of thought to turn, but see too well
That I have done a deed most perilous.”—(P.)
Why, she reasons, should the Centaur have wished her
well? No-the philtre must have been given with
a purpose, and her husband will die of that "black
poison" in which his own arrows have been steeped.
And at that moment Hyllus rushes in, and charges
her with being his father's murderess. He has just
come from witnessing the agony which had convulsed
Hercules in the midst of his triumphal sacrifice to
Jove. The blaze of fire from the altar had excited the
latent and deadly power of the venom in which the
robe had been steeped; maddened with pain, the hero
had seized on Lichas, the unlucky bringer of the pre-
132
SOPHOCLES.
sent, and had dashed his brains out against the rocks;
then he had burst away from his attendants, and—
Ovid gives even a more vivid picture of the giant's
sufferings than Sophocles—
"And filled all leafy Eta with his groans,
Striving to rend away the deadly robe
That with it rent the skin, and horribly
Or to his limbs inseparably glued
Refused to part, or, as it parted, bare
From the big bones the quivering muscle tore!
And in that poisonous heat his very blood,
Like white-hot steel in cooling water plunged,
Seethed hissing in his veins ;—the greedy fire
Devoured his inmost vitals ;-audible snapped
The crackling sinews; and from every limb
The lurking venom broke in livid sweat,
And sucked the melting marrow from his bones." *
Then Hyllus, in compliance with his prayer, had
placed him in a ship, and he was even now on his
way to Trachis.
But may all the curses of the gods
fall on his mother's head, he concludes, for
"Murdering the noblest man of all the earth,
Of whom thou ne'er shalt see the like again."
Dejanira had listened in silence, both to the tale of
her husband's agony, and to the cruel reproaches of
her son.
All her happiness had been bound up with
the wellbeing of Hercules. She had loved him with
devoted affection, in spite of his long absences and
his countless amours; and now by her own thought-
less act she has destroyed this idol of her heart, and
* Ovid, Metam. ix. iii. (King.)
THE MAIDENS OF TRACHIS
133
has plunged the man whom she so faithfully loved into
bodily torment such as she could not have devised
even for her bitterest enemy. She is powerless to
avert or to heal the sufferings which she has so un-
wittingly inflicted; and the voice of conscience within
tells her that she can give but one real proof of her
affection. It is the resolve which forms the refrain in
the pathetic epistle which Ovid imagines her to have
written to her husband-
"Impia, quid dubitas, Deianira, mori ?”*
And so, without answering her son, she leaves the
stage, and soon her nurse comes to tell the maidens
that all is over. After wandering restlessly from room
to room, mourning for the evil fate which had come
upon her, she had thrown herself upon the bed of
Hercules, and there ended her sorrow by a mortal
wound from his sword; and then Hyllus, learning her
innocence too late, had embraced the insensate body,
with idle tears and kisses.
As the Chorus are lamenting her cruel death, the
tramp of approaching steps is heard, and Hyllus and
some attendants are seen carrying a litter, on which
the huge frame of Hercules lies stretched. The convul-
sive pains which had so cruelly tortured him are lulled
for the moment, and he is plunged in a death-like
stupor; but he is roused by his son's voice, and with
consciousness his agony revives, and he groans aloud
in his despair. Will none, he asks, smite him with the
"Why, guilty Dejanira, why not die?"
*
134
SOPHOCLES.
sword, and give him the death he longs for? Then his
thoughts turn to her who has wrought these sufferings,
and it angers him to think that the gigantic strength,
which, Samson-like, had overcome all forms of death,
and had tamed even the lion in his wrath, should have
fallen victim to the snares of a Delilah—
"For she a woman, woman-like in mind,
Not of man's strength, alone, without a sword,
She hath destroyed me.
Come, iny son, be bold,
And pity me, in all ways pitiable,
Who like a girl must weep and shriek in pain;
And yet lives there not one, who, ere it came,
Could say that he had seen this man thus act,
But ever I bore pain without a groan.”—(P.)
Let Hyllus, therefore, if he loves him, bring this false
woman near him, that he may slay her before he dies
himself.
Then Hyllus tells him of the fatal mistake of De-
janira, and how fatally the mistake had been atoned.
When Hercules hears that the robe had been dipped
in the Centaur's blood, he recognises the will of the
gods, and bows to his fate. It had been foretold to
him long before, that, like Macbeth, he should die by
the hand of "none of woman born".
"And thus the centaur monster, as was shown,
Though dead did slay me, who till now did live."
This knowledge seems to teach him resignation. He
utters no more groans or cries of anguish, but conjures
Hyllus to bear his body to the top of Eta, and there
THE MAIDENS OF TRACHIS.
135
to place it on a pile of wood, and kindle the flames
himself:-
"Let no tear
Of wailing enter in, but do thy deed,
If thou art mine, without a tear or groan;
Or else, though I be in the grave, my curse
Shall rest upon thee grievous evermore."-(P.)
One more demand he makes (according to our ideas,
a revolting request)-Hyllus must take Iole to wife.
The son, after much reluctance, promises obedience;
and so the drama ends. Ovid tells us how one of
these commands was obeyed-how the pile was reared;
how calm, "as though at a banquet," the hero spread
his lion's skin over it and reclined thereon; how the
roaring flames rose upwards and around him—
"And as some serpent casts his wrinkled skin
Rejuvenate, and with new burnished scales
Delighted basks, so, of these mortal limbs
Untrammelled, all the Hero's nobler part
In nobler shape and loftier stature rose
Renewed, august, majestic, like a God!
Whom with those four immortal steeds that whirl
His chariot-wheels, the Sire omnipotent
Upbore sublime above the hollow clouds,
And set amid the radiant stars of Heaven."*
Ovid, Metam. ix. iv. (King.)
CHAPTER VIL
PHILOCTETES.
ALL that was mortal of Hercules, as we have seen,
perished in the flames on Mount Eta; but his famous
bow and the arrows with the hydra's blood were
not burnt with the hero. Philoctetes, his armour-
bearer, had been among the few who had aided Hyllus
in carrying his father up the steep sides of the moun-
tain; he had gathered the wood for the funeral-pile;
and it was said that he had with his own hands
applied the torch and kindled the flames. In grati-
tude for these last offices, Hercules had given him the
bow and the poisoned arrows; which proved a posses-
sion almost as full of trouble to their new owner as
they had to the hero himself.
Philoctetes had sailed for Troy with the rest of the
armament; but on the voyage it happened that the
Greek fleet touched at Chrysa, and there, while rashly
treading on consecrated ground, he had been bitten in
the foot by a venomous serpent. The wound gangrened
and festered-and so noisome was the stench from it,
and so terrible were the sufferer's cries of agony, that,
PHILOCTETES.
137
by the advice of Ulysses, he was landed while asleep on
the desert isle of Lemnos, and there left alone in his
misery.
It is at Lemnos, accordingly, that the scene of this
tragedy is laid. Instead of the usual palace or ances-
tral mansion in the background-with the city on one
side and the open country on the other-the spectators
have nothing before them but rocks and waves; and
these for nine weary years had been the sole compan-
ions of Philoctetes.* From time to time some stray
ship had come, and the sailors had so far pitied him as
to give him some scanty supplies of food and clothing;
but none would listen to his prayers that they would
carry him home with them to Greece. And so he had
lingered on, tortured by his rankling wound,—satisfy-
ing his hunger with the birds that he brought down
with his bow, and with difficulty dragging his limbs
to the spring to quench his thirst.
Meanwhile Troy was still being besieged, though
many of the great heroes of the war had met their
* We may compare a similar passage in Tennyson's Enoch
Arden, p. 32,-
"The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns
And winding glade high up like ways to heaven,
The glories of the broad belt of the world,
All these he saw; but what he fain had seen
He could not see, the kindly human face,
Nor ever heard a kindly voice, but heard
The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,
The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long
Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,
A shipwrecked sailor, waiting for a sail."
138
SOPHOCLES.
deaths around its walls. Hector had fallen by the
sword of Achilles. Achilles himself had been struck
with an arrow from the bow of Paris, guided by his
enemy the Sun-god. Ajax, as we have seen, had
slain himself in his despair. But the surviving chief-
tains maintained the war with the same obstinacy as
before; and recently a new aspect had been given to
the struggle. They had captured Helenus, son of
Priam, endowed like Cassandra with the gift of pro-
phecy; and from him they learned that an oracle had
disclosed that Troy should never be taken but by the
son of Achilles and with the bow of Hercules.
Accordingly, when the play opens, a Greek vessel
has just reached Lemnos, bearing a deputation from the
camp, to fetch Philoctetes and his fated arrows. At
last in their own need the Greeks have bethought them
of the comrade whom they had so cruelly deserted.
And it is Ulysses, of all men,-Ulysses, by whose ad-
vice the unhappy man had been left behind,-who
now comes to induce him-by persuasion if possible,
by force if need be—to give the allies the aid of his
weapons. Such an ambassador on such an errand
would have seemed of all men the least likely to succeed.
Sophocles probably did but take this part of the tale
as he found it; and loyalty to the epic tradition, that
no enterprise which required diplomacy, eloquence, or
subtle device, could possibly be undertaken by the
Greeks without the aid of "the man of many wiles,"
led the story-tellers, and Sophocles after them, to make
him the envoy on this as on similar occasions. With
him, however, is a comrade of a very different charac-
PHILOCTETES.
139
ter. This is the young Neoptolemus (better known to
us, perhaps, by his surname of Pyrrhus-"the Red"),
son of the dead Achilles. The poet's reasons for thus
associating him with Ulysses (for here the dramatist
takes original ground of his own) are sufficiently clear.
The young chief was wholly guiltless of any compli-
city in the injury done to the hero by the older Greeks
in deserting him; for he was then a boy in Phthiotis,
far from the scene of action. Neoptolemus, too, has
a special interest in procuring the charmed weapons,
for it is to him the Fates point as the hero who is to
win the town of Troy.
The two voyagers have landed, and they commence
the dialogue of the piece. Ulysses knows the locali-
ties well. The cave with double entrance, with the
fountain close at hand-it was here that, so many years
ago, they had left their wretched comrade asleep. He
bids Neoptolemus advance along the rocks and explore
the neighbourhood, and look cautiously into the cavern,
to ascertain whether he whom they seek lies within.
He keeps himself in the background, for to be dis-
covered by Philoctetes would be ruin to his plan. The
younger chief easily finds the place-the bed of leaves,
the wooden drinking-vessel, the few rags for dressing
the wounded foot-such is the poor wealth of the oc-
cupant; but he is not within. Ulysses, then, after
setting one of the crew to watch, discloses to his young
companion-very conveniently for the audience-the
plan which he wishes him to pursue in order to get
Philoctetes and his arrows on board their vessel. If the
too prosaic and curious reader should remark that this
140
SOPHOCLES.
disclosure comes very late, when there had been such
ample time during the voyage for Ulysses to explain
his whole design, it may be very fairly answered, that the
wily Greek was aware that there was much in it which
was sure to disgust the young chief's ingenuous nature, as
it presently does; and that he was anxious not to enter
into these awkward details until the last moment, when
it would be almost too late for the other to draw back.
The plan is this: Ulysses himself is to keep out of
sight entirely, for him to show his face on the island
would be quite enough to determine the sufferer never
to set foot on board the same vessel as his enemy, and
probably to make them both a mark for his terrible
arrows. Neoptolemus is to approach him, with a very
plausible tale; how the Greeks, after bringing him to
Troy, had refused to give him the arms of his father
Achilles, awarding them instead to Ulysses, upon
whose name he receives full permission to shower
every term of scorn and reproach. Ulysses will take
it rather as a compliment, under the circumstances,
that he should do so. He is to add that, stung by
this insult, he had left the fleet, and is now on his voy-
age homewards, and to offer Philoctetes a safe passage
to his own country.
The younger chief at first repudiates utterly any such
falsehood and treachery :-
"The thing which even in word I loathe to hear,
Son of Laertes,-that I scorn to do.
My nature was not made for crooked guile;
Nor mine, nor, as men say, his that begot me.
I am content to take the man by force,
PHILOCTETES.
141
So not by treachery; for his single strength
Were scarce a match, I trow, for all our crew.
Still, having shared thine errand, I were loath
To seem a recreant now; yet would I rather
Fail through fair deeds than win a foul success."
The reader wants little more to put him in posses-
sion of the character of Neoptolemus. Gallant and
impetuous, open and chivalrous, he is the true son of
the ideal knight of Greek romance, the great Achilles,
who had declared, in Homer's words-which we can
sce, from the brief passing allusion, were in the mind
of the dramatist, as he knew they surely would be in
those of his audience-
"Who dares think one thing and another tell,
My heart detests him as the gates of hell."*
Not so Ulysses. The crafty man of the world sneers
at the youthful enthusiast for honesty and straightfor
wardness. Such things are very well-in their time
and place. He himself had tried them :-
"Son of a gallant sire, I was young once,
And used my tongue not much, my hand full promptly;
But now, schooled by experience, I can see
That in all mortal dealings 'tis the tongue
And not the hand that wins the mastery."
After a brief parley, the plausible counsels of
Ulysses prevail over the better feelings of his com-
rade. The argument which the latter cannot resist is,
that without these arrows of Hercules he will lose the
* Iliad, ix. 312-Pope's translation, which even Mr Glad-
stone pronounces "not quite unworthy" of the original.
142
SOPHOCLES.
glory of taking Troy. So Ulysses leaves the stage,
commending his young friend with a calculating
piety which unhappily is not peculiar to pagan dra-
matists to the care of the goddess of Wisdom, his
own special protectress, and to Hermes, the god of
guile. The piety of Ulysses (for he was pious after
his own fashion) breathes the spirit of the famous
prayer in the 'Critic,'-
"Grant us to accomplish all our ends,
And sanctify whatever means we use
To gain them.”
The Chorus, who now take up the action, are com-
posed in this play of the crew of Neoptolemus's vessel,
and appear, from their reminiscences, to be some of the
veteran "Myrmidons" who had served at Troy under
his father Achilles. They proceed, by the young
chief's permission, to explore the island; keeping a
careful watch, however, lest its solitary inhabitant
should suddenly surprise them, and launch against
such intruders his poisoned shafts. Neoptolemus
shows them the opening in the rock which leads to
the cavern, but tells them that the sufferer is not now
within. They soon hear the cry of one in pain; as
they listen, the sound comes nearer, and, dragging his
steps painfully along the rocky pathway, Philoctetes
makes his appearance. He hails the strangers, and
inquires their country and their errand :-
"Your outward guise and dress of Hellas speak,
To me most dear, and yet I fain would hear
Your speech; and draw not back from me in dread,
As fearing this my wild and savage look,
PHILOCTETES.
143
But pity one unhappy, left alone,
Thus helpless, friendless, worn with weary ills:
Speak, if it be ye come to me as friends.
Neop. Know this then first, O stranger, that we come
Of Hellas all; for this thou seek'st to know.
Phil. O dear-loved sound! Ah me! what joy it is
After long years to hear a voice like thine!
What led thee hither, what need brought thee here?
Whither thy voyage, what blest wind bore thee on?
Tell all, that I may know thee who thou art.
Neop. By birth I come from sea-girt Skyros' isle,
And I sail homeward, I, Achilles' son,
Named Neoptolemos. Now know'st thou all.”—(P.)
And does Neoptolemus know the wretched man
before him? asks Philoctetes. The young chief, of
course, professes entire ignorance; and Philoctetes
proceeds to tell his miserable history, which we have
told before; and he invokes curses on the Atreidæ and
on Ulysses, who planned his wrongs.
Then Neoptolemus tells his story, as arranged be-
tween himself and Ulysses previously. He, too, has
reason to curse the brother-kings and the false Ulysses.
But his very first words remind Philoctetes, and re-
mind the audience, of the long years which have
elapsed since he was here deserted by his comrades,
"When the Fates ruled it that Achilles died."
What-breaks in the exile-is Achilles dead? He is
indeed, and Ulysses and the Atreidæ have rejected his
son's rightful claim to the hero's armour. Nothing
which he hears of Ulysses, in the way of baseness or
falsehood, can surprise Philoctetes. Nor had he ever
much confidence in the justice of the sons of Atreus.
144
SOPHOCLES.
But there was one chief among the Greeks who would
surely, he thought, have prevented this wrong. Ajax
was honest surely, if none else—
"He was no more, O stranger.
Had he lived,
I had not thus been cheated of my right."
True-the questioner had again forgotten the changes
of ten years. Is it then possible (he grasps eagerly at
the hope) that his bitter enemy Ulysses-" the bastard
of Sisyphus," as he calls him-and Diomed, who had
been his abettor in the treachery, are they too dead? for
at least they were unfit to live. Neoptolemus replies—
"In sooth, not they be sure they flourish yet,
Holding high place amid the Argive host."
And Nestor-the noble old warrior, his personal friend,
whose prudent counsel was wont to curb the rashness
of the younger captains-he is probably dead also?
No; the old man lives, but lives to mourn the loss of
Antilochus, the son of his old age, whom death, in its
bitter irony, has taken before the father. And Patro-
clus, the trusty friend of Achilles?—
"He, too, has fallen. Lo! in one brief word
I tell thee all: War never, with good will,
Doth choose the evil man, or leave the good.
Phil. I hold it true; and for that very cause
Will ask thee yet as to one worthless wretch,
Of subtle tongue and crafty, how he fares?
He must mean Ulysses, says Neoptolemus,-follow-
ing his chief's instructions to abuse him, apparently
with considerable zest. But it is Thersites, the mob-
orator of Homer, the man who boldly speaks evil of
PHILOCTETES.
145
1
dignities, who is in Philoctetes' mind. Every Athen-
ian in the audience would remember the description of
him in the Iliad. He is alive, of course? Neoptole-
mus understands that he is, though he has never seen
him. Philoctetes replies bitterly—
"Well may he live, for nothing bad will die,
So well the gods do fence it round about;
And still they joy to turn from Hades back
The cunning and the crafty, while they send
The just and good below."—(P.)
Neoptolemus purposes ostensibly to return to his
ship, to wait for the rising of the breeze which is to
bear him home to Scyros. For he will never see the
Greek camp and the sons of Atreus more. Never
again will he be found amongst a company
"Where still the evil lord it o'er the good,
And honour starves, and cowardice bears sway."
A. C. vol. x.
He bids farewell to Philoctetes, and prays that heaven
may soon send some cure for his pains. Then follows
a scene which, in the hands of a good actor, must have
been one of the most effective in the play. Seeing
himself about to be thus a second time deserted, Phil-
octetes breaks into an agonised entreaty that the young
chief and his sailors will take him on board their
vessel. Put him where they will, "in hold, or stem, or
stern," he cares not, so he may see once more his father
and his native land. It will be a noble deed, and
"Noble souls
Still find the base is hurtful, and the good
Is full of glory."
K
146
SOPHOCLES.
The young chief acts his assumed part well. It is
easy to imagine, from the frequent breaks in the appeal
made to him by Philoctetes, the by-play of hesitation-
now turning to depart, and now apparently half relent-
ing-with which he listens to the sufferer's entreaties.
The Chorus are moved to pity. They pray their young
captain to assent. They, for their own part, are quite
willing to bear the inconvenience of such a passenger,
though his grievous affliction will, as he warns them,
make him no very pleasant companion on ship-board.
So he yields to this double solicitation, and Philoctetes
turns to bid a pathetic farewell to the scene of his long
and miserable exile, to which he nevertheless bears
some sort of affection, when two men are seen ap-
proaching. They are two of the ship-guard-one of
them disguised as a merchant, who professes to have
just landed on the island, and, hearing of Neoptole-
mus's presence there, has come to bring him important
news from the coast of Troy, whence he himself has
lately sailed. It is, in fact, an additional stratagem of
Ulysses, brought into play apparently for the purpose
of hurrying Philoctetes on board the vessel. The pre-
tended merchant's tale is that the Greeks, in their
wrath at the defection of Neoptolemus, have despatched
an expedition to overtake him and bring him back by
force. Another party has also sailed under Ulysses and
Diomed, in quest of a certain Philoctetes, without
whom the Fates have declared Troy cannot be taken,
and whom Ulysses has pledged himself-and offered
his own head as a forfeit if he fails-to bring into the
Grecian camp either by force or by persuasion. Great
PHILOCTETES.
147
is the apparent dismay of the stranger at being told
that Philoctetes stands before him; and great the
indignation of Philoctetes to hear that he is to be
taken now to Troy, as he had been before left in
Lemnos, at the pleasure of his detested enemy :—
'Wretch that I am! this villain, most accursed,
Hath he then sworn to lure me back to Greece?
As soon shall he persuade me, when no more,
Like his false father, to return to earth."*
The agent of Ulysses is far too discreet to under-
stand the sneer at his master's birth. He makes
answer sedately,—
*
"Of this I nothing know, but to my ship
Depart. The gods aright direct you both."-(D.)
The object of this particular scene, which seems, in
point of fact, rather to throw difficulties in the way of
Neoptolemus and rouse the obstinacy of Philoctetes, is
by no means easy to understand. It serves to compli-
cate the action, and that is all. It may be that the
poet wishes to show, in the character of Ulysses, that
insolence of conscious power which does not care so
much to accomplish its object easily, as to enjoy the
discomfiture of a weaker opponent. If this was the
intention, and if, as seems possible, Ulysses is all the
while supposed to be within car-shot (as he certainly
is at a later stage of the action), then there would be
produced upon the audience, as is not uncommon in
Sisyphus, who (and not Laertes) was said to have been the
real father of Ulysses.
148
SOPHOCLES.
the Attic tragedies, a half-comic effect by the protest
of Philoctetes, delivered, as it were, in the very pre-
sence of the man between whom and himself he is
determined to put the wide barrier of the sea, and into
whose very arms he is thus about to rush in his eager
haste to escape him.
The wind is against them as yet, says Neoptolemus—
they must wait a while. Nay, replies the other,—
"All winds are fair to him who flies from woe."
But before he embarks, he has some poor treasures
which he must needs get together and take with him.
A herb there is which he has found on the island,
which in some sort soothes the anguish of his wounded
foot. And he must take good heed that he leaves
behind no one of the fateful arrows. Then, for the
first time, Neoptolemus seems to remark the bow which
he carries. Is this the wondrous bow of Hercules?
May he be allowed to handle it for a moment,—nay,
to print a reverent kiss upon the sacred relic of so
renowned a hero? And while the sufferer, leaning on
his new-found friend, withdraws into his cavern to
seek what he requires, the Chorus, as they tread the
stage in measured time to the accompanying music,
chant an ode expressive of their kindly sympathy.
And now the pair reappear upon the scene, to begin
their way to the ship, when suddenly Philoctetes stops,
and utters a suppressed cry. One of those paroxysms
of agony which his wound causes him from time to
time has come on at this moment. Dreading the effect
which it may have upon Neoptolemus and his crew, as
PHILOCTETES.
149
reminding them of the annoyance which the close
companionship of such a wretch is sure to prove to
them throughout their voyage, he strives for a while to
conceal his anguish. "'Tis but a trifle "-"he is
better again." But at last the trial is too much for
him. Maddened by the pain, be begs of his friend to
draw his sword and smite off the miserable limb,-nay,
if it cost him his life, the deed will be a charity. But
no,-these paroxysms are terrible while they last, but
after a while, having run their course, they will sub-
side. He cannot bear even the touch of the hand
which Neoptolemus extends to support him :-
Nay, not so:
But take my bow and arrows, which but now
Thou askedst for, and keep them till the force
Of the sharp pain be spent ; yea, guard them well,
For slumber takes me when this evil ends,
(C
Nor can it cease before; but thou must leave me
To sleep in peace; and should they come meanwhile
Of whom we have heard, by all the gods I charge thee
Nor with thy will, nor yet against it, give
These things to them, by any art entrapped,
Lest thou shouldst deal destruction on thyself
And me who am thy suppliant.
Neop.
Take good heart,
If forethought can avail. To none but thee
And me shall they be given. Hand them to me,
And good luck come with them!
Phil. (giving the bow and arrows.) Lo there, my son !
Receive thou them; but first adore the power
Whose name is Jealousy, that they may prove
To thee less full of trouble than they were
To me, and him who owned them ere I owned.
Neop. So be it, O ye gods, to both of us;
150
SOPHOCLES.
And may we have a fair and prosperous voyage
Where God thinks right, and these our ships are bound !"
-(P.)
Alas! the prayer, Philoctetes fears, will be in vain.
The spasms have come on afresh; and his great fear is
lest his new-found friend shall desert him after all :-
"And wilt thou stay?
Neop. Deem that beyond all doubt.
Phil. I do not care to bind thee by an oath.
Neop. I may not go from hence apart from thee.
Phil. Give me thy hand as pledge.
Neop.
I give it thee
As pledge of our remaining."-(P.)
At length-after a scene of physical suffering pro-
tracted to a length which proves that the taste of an
Athenian audience for sensation was as keen as that of
any modern play-goer, though the sensation is of a dif-
ferent type-nature is exhausted, and the sufferer sinks
into a death-like sleep. As he lies there, while Neop-
tolemus retires into the background, the Chorus take
up their chant again. It is in part an invocation
to sleep, mingled with hints to Neoptolemus (whose
instructions from Ulysses they seem partly to under-
stand, partly only to suspect) that now, while he lies
thus helpless, there is an opportunity to carry him
off bodily, or to make safe prize of the coveted weapons
of Hercules:
"O sleep that know'st not pain!
O sleep that know'st not care!
Would thou mightst come with blessed balmy air,
And blessing long remain,
PHILOCTETES.
151
And from his eyes ward off the noontide blaze,
Now full upon him poured.
Come as our healer, lord!
And thou, my son, look well to all thy ways;
What next demands our thought?
What now must needs be wrought ?
Thou seest him ;—and I ask
Why we delay our task;
Occasion that still holds to counsel right
With quickest speed appears as conqueror in the fight.”
M
They continue their chant in this strain of innuendo,
while Philoctetes lies stretched in the sleep of physical
exhaustion.
The conflict between the better nature of the young
chief and the uncongenial task he has undertaken, has
begun long before the sufferer awakes. It is shown
but faintly in the dialogue; but an actor who threw
himself into the part would no doubt express it very
intelligibly by his movements and gestures, while he
watched the sleeper and listened to the strains of the
Chorus. Loyalty to what he holds to be the public
interest of the Greek cause, the overwhelming import-
ance of the capture of Troy, the renown which awaits
him personally as its conqueror,—all these have to be
weighed in the scale against an act of unquestionable
treachery, yet after all, it might be said, a treachery
rather to the advantage of the victim. His embar-
rassment is completed by the words of Philoctetes,
when at length he awakes from his troubled sleep,
the agony subdued for a while, and addresses his
deliverers, as he thinks them, with simple gratitude
and confidence :-
152
SOPHOCLES.
“Phil. (waking.) O light that follows sleep! O help, my
thoughts
Had never dared to hope for from these strangers!
For never had I dreamt, O boy, that thou
With such true pity wouldst endure to bear
All these my sorrows, and remain and help.
The Atreida ne'er had heart to bear with them
As well as thou hast borne. Brave generals they!
But thou, my son, who art of noble heart,
And sprung from noble-hearted ones, hast made
But light of all.”—(P.)
Philoctetes begs that they may sail at once. And
Neoptolemus assists him to rise and move in the
direction of the ship. But suddenly the young man
stops; he can endure to keep up this deception no
longer.
"Neop. O heavens! what now remains for me to do?
Phil. What ails thee, O my son? what words are these?
Neop. I know not how to speak my sore distress.
Phil. Distress from what? Speak not such words, my
son.
Neop. And yet in that calamity I stand-
Phil. It cannot be my wound's foul noisomeness
Hath made thee loath to take me in thy ship?
Neop. All things are noisome when a man deserts
His own true self, and does what is not meet.
Phil. But thou, at least, nor doest aught nor say'st,
Unworthy of thy father's soul, when thou
Dost help a man right honest.
I shall seem
Basest of men. Long since this tortured me.”—(P.)
Neop.
At length he tells Philoctetes the truth, he is com-
missioned to carry him to Troy. Then Philoctetes
PHILOCTETES.
153
breaks out into very natural indignation, and demands
his weapons back. "That may not be," says Neop-
tolemus. His victim's wrath, mingled with an unwil-
lingness to believe in such treachery under so fair an
outside seeming, is expressed in one of the finest pas-
sages in the play :-
"Thou loathed inventor of atrocious fraud,
What hast thou done-how wronged my easy faith?
Doth it not shame thee to behold me thus,
A suitor and a suppliant, wretch, to thee?
Stealing my bow, of life thou hast bereft me.
Restore, I pray thee, O my son, restore it!
By thine ancestral gods, take not my life!
Wretch that I am, he deigns not e'en reply,
But still looks backward, as resolved to spurn me.
Ye ports, ye beetling crags, ye haunts obscure
Of mountain-beasts, ye wild and broken rocks,
To you I mourn, for I have none beside!
To you, who oft have heard me, tell the wrongs,
The cruel deeds Achilles' son hath wrought!
Pledged to convey me home, he sails to Troy;
Plighting his hand in faith, he meanly steals
My bow, the sacred arms of Jove's great son,
And would display them to the Grecian host.
By force he takes me, as some vigorous chief,
Nor knows his triumph is achieved o'er one
Long helpless as the dead—a shadowy cloud-
An empty phantom. In my hour of might
He ne'er had seized me thus, since, in my ills,
He but by fraud entrapped me. I am now
Deceived to my despair. What shall I do ?—
Ah! yet restore them, be again thyself.
What dost thou say?-Yet silent ?-Then I perish.
Thou double portal of the rock, again
154
SOPHOCLES.
I enter thee, of arms, of life, deprived.
But I must pine forsaken in the cave;
Nor winged bird, nor mountain-ranging beast,
Shall these good darts bring down. I yield in death
To those a banquet, who supplied my own.
I will not curse thee, ere I learn if yet
Thou wilt relent-if not, all evil blast thee!"—(D.)
Neoptolemus makes a motion to restore the bow,
when Ulysses (who, we must suppose, has been a
listener to at least the latter portion of the dialogue)
rushes in between them :—
"Vlys.
What wouldst thou do,
O vilest of mankind? Wilt thou not hence,
The sacred arms resigning to my hand?
Phil. Ha! who is this? Ulysses do I hear?
Ulys. Ay, I who stand before thee am Ulysses.
Phil. O, I am sold, undone ! This is the wretch
Who snared and hath despoiled me of mine arms.
Ulys. "Tis I, in sooth-none else. I own the deed.
Phil. Restore, give back the arms to me, my son !
Ulys. This, did he wish, he would not dare to grant.
But thou must hence with us, or those around
By force must drag thee."-(D.)
In vain does the sufferer appeal to Heaven against
such wrong; it is Heaven, says Ulysses, whose will he
and Neoptolemus are obeying in forcing him to Troy.
Then he will throw himself headlong from the rock,
and end his misery at once, rather than be thus dis-
graced. But he is seized and overpowered by order
of Ulysses, who listens with a calm composure to the
PHILOCTETES.
155
bitter invectives which his prisoner hurls at him.
When Philoctetes at last pauses in his denunciation,
Ulysses replies in measured words which are a
perfect index to his character, as drawn by the
poct :-
"I might say much in answer to his words,
If there were time. Now this one word I speak :
Where men like this are wanted, such am I ;
But when the time for good and just men calls,
Thou couldst not find a godlier man than me.
In every case it is my bent to win,
;
Except with thee. To thee of mine own will
I yield the victory. Ho, leave him there!
Lay no hand on him,-let him here remain.
With these thy arms, we have no need of thee:
Teucros is with us, skilled in this thine art
And I, too, boast that I, not less than thou,
This bow can handle, with my hand shoot straight;
What need we thee? In Lemnos walk at will,
And let us go. And they perchance will give
As prize to me what rightly thou mightst claim.”—(P.)
The character of Ulysses is drawn in stronger and
less favourable colours by the dramatist than as he
appears in either of the Homeric poems. There is a
cold cruelty in his treatment of Philoctetes, from first
to last, which does not characterise him in either the
Iliad or Odyssey. It is true that he is serving no
selfish end; it is in the cause of Greece that he under-
takes this commission, as it was in the same interest
(we must suppose) that he advised the desertion of
Philoctetes at Lemnos. We must not wonder that,
like many diplomatists, he is little scrupulous as to
I
156
SOPHOCLES.
means.
But he seems almost to revel in the odious-
ness of his self-imposed duty.
He withdraws again from the scene, taking with him.
the reluctant and repentant Neoptolemus, who is half
inclined to listen to the appeal of their victim. The
crew, by Neoptolemus's permission, remain, and strive
to console the sufferer, who laments his miserable fate
in strains to which the Chorus make such reply as they
can:
"Ah me! upon the shore,
Where the wild waters roar,
He sits and laughs at me,
And tosseth in his hand
What cheered my misery,
What ne'er till now another might command.
O bow most dear to me,
Torn from these hands of mine,
If thou hast sense to see,
Thou lookest piteously
At this poor mate of thine,
The friend of Heracles,
Who never more shall wield thee as of old ;
And thou, full ill at ease,
Art bent by hands of one for mischief bold,
All shameful deeds beholding,
Deeds of fierce wrath and hate,
And thousand evils from base thoughts unfolding
Which none till now had ever dared to perpetrate."
—(P.)
But they are interrupted by the sudden return of
Neoptolemus, in high dispute with Ulysses, who is
trying to hold him back. The young chief has made
up his mind. He will do the right, come what may.
PHILOCTETES.
157
The glory of taking Troy will be no compensation for
the loss of self-respect. He will at once give back the
weapons of Hercules. In vain Ulysses threatens him
with the vengeance of the allied Greeks; in vain―or
worse than in vain he lays his hand significantly
upon his sword. The young chief replies to the threat
by a fierce grasp of the hilt of his own weapon; and
Ulysses, too wary to involve himself in a dangerous
and discreditable brawl, contents himself with an ap-
peal to the Greeks in council. Neoptolemus will not
spare him a natural sarcasm on his discretion :-
“Thou hast shown prudence; be as prudent ever,
And thou mayest chance to keep thyself from harm.”
But Ulysses, as he turns off in disgust, either does not
hear, or affects not to hear, the taunt. Then the other
calls Philoctetes out of his cave, and restores to him.
the weapons. Ulysses comes forward again, and loudly
protests against such weakness; but Philoctetes, once
more master of his bow, vengefully prepares to launch
an arrow at his enemy, when Neoptolemus stays his
hand. Once more the latter tries to urge upon him to
go with them to Troy of his own free will, and so reap
the glories which await him there; but arguments on
this point have no avail, and he prepares to redeem
his pledge to carry the exile home.
The perplexity is solved by an expedient allowable.
in the Greek drama, though it would be held inartistic
in our own. Hercules himself intervenes. The hero-
god appears suddenly in mid-air (and we have reason to
believe the scenic appliances were complete enough for
158
SOPHOCLES.
such appearance to be highly effective), and stands before
the mortal captains radiant in the glories of Olympus.
Such a visitor is, after all, not a bolder appeal to the
supernatural than the ghost in Hamlet; and perhaps
the half-imaginative belief of the educated portion
of an Athenian audience in the continual existence,
in some higher state, of their national heroes, might
correspond pretty nearly to the belief in ghosts which
would have been found amongst the same class of
Englishmen in Shakspeare's day. It would be suffi
cient-indeed, it is practically sufficient still-for the
sentiment of the tragedy. The tableau on the stage
was no doubt highly effective when Hercules, with a
commanding gesture, arrests the steps of Philoctetes as
he is moving off :—
"Not yet, O son of Pæas, ere once more
Our accents reach thine ear.
Know 'tis the voice of Hercules thou hearest,
His form thine eyes behold.
To watch thy fortunes I awhile have left
My own celestial seat,
That Jove's almighty mandate I may breathe,
And in his name forbid thy purposed course.
-(Dale)
He tells his friend of the glory which yet awaits him,
-how he shall be healed of his wound, shall slay
Paris with one of the fateful arrows, and be judged the
bravest of the Greek host. And when Troy has fallen by
his hands and those of Neoptolemus, let them not for-
get, in the hour of their triumph, to reverence the gods ;
for that alone can bring lasting happiness to mortals.
PHILOCTETES.
159
Philoctetes cannot resist the voice of the great hero
whom he still loves and honours. He accompanies
Neoptolemus to the ship; but before they go, he
chants his last words of farewell to the scene of his
long banishment :-
6C
Come, then, and let us bid farewell
To this lone island where I dwell:
Farewell, O home that still didst keep
Due vigil o'er me in my sleep;
Ye nymphs by stream or wood that roam;
Thou mighty voice of ocean's foam,
Where oftentimes my head was wet
With drivings of the South wind's fret;
And oft the mount that Hermes owns
Sent forth its answer to my groans,
The wailing loud as echo given
To me by tempest-storms sore driven;
And ye, O fountains clear and cool,
Thou Lykian well, the wolves' own pool-
We leave you, yea, we leave at last,
Though small our hope in long years past:
Farewell, O plain of Lemnos' isle,
Around whose coasts the bright waves smile,
Send me with prosperous voyage and fair
Where the great Destinies may bear,
Counsels of friends, and God supreme in Heaven
Who all this lot of ours hath well and wisely given."
-(P.)
This tragedy has been highly praised both by French
and by English critics, and it has undoubtedly the
merit of being simple and natural, though the interest
is of a weaker quality than in most of the plays of
Sophocles. The character of Neoptolemus is well
160
SOPHOCLES.
drawn; and the struggles between interest and duty-
or rather between what seem to him two conflicting
duties are interesting, if not highly tragic. But the
play has one prominent feature which mars the whole
effect to our English taste. No man can be a hero, to
our notions, whose sufferings are wholly physical; and
far less one who demands our sympathies for such
sufferings by physical expressions of pain. Upon a
Greck audience, no doubt, the effect was different.
The enjoyment of life was very keen among the Athen-
ians: they also felt bodily pain more keenly, with
their sensitive organisations, than we do, and they
certainly expressed their feelings with far less reticence.
For them, the diseased foot, and the cries of agony to
which it gives occasion, had possibly a real tragic
interest. To us it is not so. All the ingenuity and
ability of critics fails to make such a subject anything
but distasteful to an ordinary English mind. We
almost forgive the Greeks for leaving Philoctetes be-
hind, if he was always shrieking and bemoaning him-
self after the fashion assigned to him in the play. It
is one of the hardest things connected with continued
bodily suffering, when it finds vent in audible groans
and complaints, that instead of rousing the sympathies
of those in attendance on the sufferer, it is too apt to
dull and weary them. Cries and complaints may be
unavoidable, but to our notions they are always un-
dignified and unmanly. Our cold and stern temper
demands that pain be borne in silence ignored
altogether, so far as possible. Its audible expressions
belong with us to comedy, not to tragedy. Even in
PHILOCTETES.
161
S
of the heroes.
the Iliad, we are not touched with the dying groans
Our ideal hero is mute in suffering--
he must have more of the nature of the Roman wolf-
cub-
"He dies in silence, biting hard,
Amid the dying hounds."
But in this respect, the Philoctetes of Sophocles is
not only at variance with modern tastes and sympa-
thies; it stands also in strong contrast with an earlier
Greek tragedy of a severer type, in which the hero is
also represented in the extremity of physical suffering
-the Prometheus of Eschylus. The Titan is brought
upon the stage to be fastened to his rock, there to
waste away for long years in sufferings compared with
which those of Philoctetes are but ordinary: the ada-
mantine rivets are driven through his chest, but he
utters no cry of physical anguish. Nay, so long as his
tormentors are present, he is mute altogether. When
he utters his grand appeal to Earth, and Sky, and
Sea, it is against the injustice of his doom, rather
than the bitterness of the torture. He launches de-
fiance against his torturer, not complaints. Therefore,
even across the gulf of centuries, we feel almost as an
Athenian audience felt the grandeur of the conception.
It is true enough, as has been said, that Sophocles is
far more human in his tragic pathos than the elder
poet; but there are phases of humanity, intensely
natural, which are yet no fit subjects for dramatic
representation; and it is surely not a decline but a
development of critical taste, which reckons physical
pain as one of them.
A. C. vol. x.
L
CHAPTER VIL
ELECTRA.
In this drama Sophocles has selected a portion of
the same story which formed the subject of the famous
trilogy of Æschylus. The Electra is simply the return
of Orestes, and the vengeance which he takes on
Clytemnestra and Ægisthus. By both poets this act
of vengeance is elevated to a religious duty. The gods
above and the shades of the dead below demand that
a "foul unnatural murder" shall not go unpunished.
Accordingly Orestes never swerves for a moment from
his deadly purpose. Pity and tenderness have no
place in his breast, nor do we ever find him reasoning
with himself after the manner of Hamlet-
"O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom;
Let me be cruel, not unnatural;
I will speak daggers, but will use none.
Once more as in the trilogy of Eschylus-the
scene is the royal palace of the Pelopidae, "rich in
* Hamlet, act iii. sc. 3.
"'*
ELECTRA.
163
gold and rich in slaughter," as Electra describes it,
fronted by the stately "Gate of Lions" which then
guarded the statue of Apollo, and built in that stupen-
dous Cyclopæan style which still impresses every tra-
voller. But Agatharchus, or whatever artist Sophocles
employed, has given us on this occasion more than the
usual architectural background. There is the grove of
Io, "the tormented wanderer," and the market-place
sacred to Apollo as the "Wolf-god;" on the left is
the famous temple of Juno, while in the far distance
are seen the towers of Argos.* The time is early morn-
ing in Athens as well as on the stage, and it is suck
a morning as Chaucer would have loved, with the hills
and greenwood bright and fresh in the sunlight, as one
of the speakers describes it,-
"Which wakes the birds to tune their matin song,
And star-decked night's dark shadows flee away.—(P.)
Two young men enter. They are the famous friends,
whose names, like those of David and Jonathan, have
consecrated all later friendships,-Orestes and Pylades.
With them comes an old and faithful servant (perhaps
"the watchman" of Eschylus's 'Agamemnon'), who
had saved the young Orestes at the time of his father's
murder, had reared him up to manhood, and is now
* Mr Jebb quotes Clark's Peloponnesus (p. 72), with refer
ence to the famous historic localities which Sophocles has thus
brought together in one picture, irrespectively of distance, and
which Clark compares with a stage direction in Victor Hugo's
play of Marie Tudor.' "Palais de Richmond: dans le fond
à gauche l'Eglise de Westminster, à droite la Tour de Londres.”
-Jebb's Electra, p. 3.
164
SOPHOCLES.
guiding him back, after his long exile, to the familiar
scenes of Argolis. Orestes has returned to Mycena
(as he tells his friends and the audience) on a holy
mission of vengeance, consecrated by Apollo himself;
but in order to gain his ends he must use a pious fraud.
His old attendant must enter the palace, and represent
himself as a Phocian stranger, sent by an old friend
of the family-
“And tell them—yea, and add a solemn oath—
That some fell fate has brought Orestes' death
In Pythian games, from out the whirling car
Rolled headlong to the earth. This tale tell thou;
And we, first honouring my father's grave,
As the God bade us, with libations pure
And tresses from our brow, will then come back,
Bearing the urn well wrought with sides of bronze,
Which, thou know'st well, 'mid yonder shrubs lies hid,
That we with crafty words may bring to them
The pleasant news that my poor frame is gone,
Consumed with fire, to dust and ashes turned.
So I, from out this rumour of my death,
Shall, like a meteor, blaze upon my foes.”—(P.)
Then the three retire, for the purpose of pouring a
libation at Agamemnon's grave. Pylades, it should.
be observed, owing to the strict rule of the Athenian
drama limiting the speakers on the stage to three,
never takes part in the dialogue throughout the play.
Even before they left the stage, they had heard the
wailing of women from the palace; and now there
issues from the gates Electra, the sister of Orestes,
ELECTRA.
165
meanly clad and with dishevelled hair, followed by a
train of Argive maidens. Her history had been a sad
one. Years had passed away since that day of horror,
when her father had been cut off in his glory—not
slain by the sword on the battle-field, but felled by
the axe of Ægisthus, "as the woodman fells the oak-
tree in the forest." Years had passed away, but each
year had only imbittered the resentment of Electra,
and turned to gall all the sweetness of her woman's
nature. She can neither tear from her heart the re-
membrance of that deed of blood, nor forgive those
who wrought it. It had needed no message from the
grave, no spirit returned from limbo, to keep alive this
memory. Always before her was the same repulsive
contrast which tortured the keener sensibilities of
Hamlet, the cowardly Ægisthus, sitting in the dead
man's place, and receiving the caresses of the perjured
wife; while the guilty pair had seemed to glory in
their shame, the one pouring libations on the very
hearth where the king had fallen, and the other, with
an impious and unnatural joy, celebrating each month.
the day of her husband's murder, as though it were a
religious festival, with sacrifices and solemn dances.
Meanwhile, the portion of Electra had been mockery
and insult; for her proud spirit had scorned such
submission as her more facile sister Chrysothemis had
been ready to give. She had been a living protest
against the sin of Clytemnestra and Ægisthus; her
incessant grief had provoked their hatred, and this
hatred had found its vent in bitter and continual re-
166
SOPHOCLES.
proach. Day and night, as she tells the Chorus, she
had been mourning over the ruin of her race in the
plaintive strains of the nightingale, whose note was
proverbial among the Greeks for a never-ending grief;
and she had been rated by her mother much in the
same style as Hamlet is lectured by his uncle :—
"To persevere
In obstinate condolement is a course.
Of impious stubbornness.
'Tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature;
To reason most absurd; whose common theme
Is death of fathers."*
Then, again, these tears had been followed by a
sterner feeling, and soon
"Vengeance, deep-brooding o'er the slain,
Had locked the source of softer woe."
She had cherished the thought of a day of retribu-
tion, and had implored all the gods of the lower world
not to overlook the shedding of innocent blood, or to
allow "the guile which devised and the lust which
struck the blow" to go for long unpunished. But
years had passed, and still Orestes, for whose coming
she had prayed, came not; and Electra, in her despair,
had begun to question the justice of those careless gods.
who allowed the guilty to flourish in their sin, and
murder to go unavenged-
"For if the dull earth cover thus the blood
Of him who basely died,
*Hamlet, act i. sc. 2.
ELECTRA.
167
And they who wrought his fall
Repay not life for life ;-
Then perish shame for aye,
And piety be banished from mankind!"—(D.)
The Chorus vainly try to comfort her. No tears or
prayers, they say, can recall the dead from "the lake
of darkness." Let her trust to Time, that "calm and
patient deity," to bring her brother home at last.
Then there enters to her "bright Chrysothemis with
golden hair,"* bearing funeral offerings. The scene be-
tween the sisters recalls a similar one in a former play, with
the difference that here the characters are more strongly
drawn. Electra is cast in a harsher and sterner mould
than her counterpart, Antigone, for it is hatred rather
than love which hardens her resolution. Chrysothemis,
again, is more deliberately selfish than Ismene.
"She
should have been the ally, but is only the temptress of
her sister, a weaker Goneril or Regan, serving as a foil
to a more masculine Cordelia."+ Electra cannot con-
ceal her scorn and indignation at this unworthy daugh-
ter of a king, who attempts to justify her baseness, and
whose cowardly spirit can endure to sit at the same
table with her father's murderers. For her own part,
she prefers the isolation of a slave to the gifts and
delicacies which Chrysothemis accepts at such hands.
"Loin d'eux, à ces festins, leur esclave préfère
Le pain de la pitié qu'on jette à sa misère,
A leur table insolente allez courber le front;
Flattez les meurtriers, mes pleurs me suffiront.
* Iliad, ix. 145 (Pope).
+ Jebb's Ajax, p. 34, note.
168
SOPHOCLES.
Des pleurs sont mes trésors, des pleurs ma nourriture,
Ils ne me verront pas outrageant la nature,
A mon père infidèle, indigne de mon nom,
Boire avec eux dans l'or le sang d'Agamemnon."
"'*
Chrysothemis is too well accustomed to her sister's
reproaches to attempt any further justification. In
reply, she tells her the strange mission on which she
has now come from the palace. On the previous night
Clytemnestra had dreamed a dream, in which she had
seen her husband, tall and majestic as in his lifetime,
and carrying the sceptre which had descended from
prince to prince in the dynasty of Argos,† and was
now wielded by the murderer Ægisthus. In her vision,
Clytemnestra sees him plant this sceptre in the hearth
of his palace, and there it had seemed to take root
downwards and bear fruit upwards, spreading forth
into boughs and branches, and overshadowing all My-
cenæ. So terribly significant had been this vision of
the night, and so accordant with the restless dread of
her son's return which has haunted the guilty woman,
* Chénier's Electre, act i. sc. 3. (Quoted by M. Patin.)
+ Homer gives us the history of this sceptre:-
"His royal staff, the work of Vulcan's art,
Which Vulcan to the son of Saturn gave,
To Hermes he, the heavenly messenger;
Hermes to Pelops, matchless charioteer;
Pelops to Atreus; Atreus at his death
Bequeathed it to Thyestes, wealthy lord
Of num'rous herds; to Agamemnon last
Thyestes left it-token of his sway
O'er all the Argive coast and neighbouring isles."
-Iliad, ii. 100 (Lord Derby).
ELECTRA.
169
that after rising early in the morning, and telling her
dream to the Sun-god, she had sent Chrysothemis to
carry libations to the tomb of Agamemnon, in the hope
of appeasing the manes of the murdered king.
Electra can hardly restrain the fiery wrath which
consumes her, as she hears of what she considers a
fresh act of impious effrontery on the part of Clytem-
nestra. Her sister must never insult the dead by pre-
senting these offerings from the guilty wife :—
"Cast them forth
To the wild winds, or hide them in the earth
Deep, deep; that never to my father's tomb
The accursed thing may reach; but when she dies,
Lie hid in earth to grace her sepulchre.
For had she not been formed of all her sex
The most abandoned, never had she crowned
These loathed libations to the man she slew.
Think'st thou the dead entombed could e'er receive
In friendly mood such obsequies from her
By whom he fell dishonoured, like a foe,
While on her mangled victim's head she wiped
His blood for expiation ?”—(D.)
Let her rather offer at her father's tomb locks of
hair cut from his daughters' heads, accompanied by a
prayer that the son may speedily return to avenge his
death. Chrysothemis assents, but begs her sister to
keep her counsel.
Then follows a noble choral ode-almost rising to
the grandeur of Eschylus. The dream which had
terrified the queen animates the dying hopes of the
170
SOPHOCLES.
·
Argive maidens. Something in their hearts tells them
that the day of vengeance is nigh at hand. Neither
the spirit of the murdered man, nor the axe which
struck that felon stroke, "though dimmed by the rust
of years," has ever forgotten the deed of blood.
They can already see the shadow-nay, they can
almost feel the breath and hear the approaching tramp
of the "brazen-footed fury with many hands and
feet." And then their thoughts revert to the fountain-
head of all these troubles-the curse invoked on the
treacherous Pelops by Myrtilus, as he was "dashed
headlong from his golden chariot, and sent to his last
sleep beneath the waves.” *
،،
There is a pause upon the stage, and a low murmur
of expectancy runs through the audience, as the Chorus
respectfully move back to make way for Clytemnestra,
who comes forward with a haughty and defiant mien,
and whose speech shows that she is as man-minded
as of old. She at once sharply rebukes Electra for
taking her ease abroad in the absence of Ægisthus;
and then she vindicates her murder of Agamemnon.
He had slain his daughter, and she had only slain her
husband in retaliation; and why should she not?
""
Electra is not slow to reply, and her tone and
manner are as defiant and insulting as her mother's.
It was the wrath of Diana, she says, reverting to a
"wasted theme," and the contrary winds at Aulis,
* Myrtilus was the charioteer of Enomaus, and was bribeč
by Pelops to take out the linch-pins from his master's chariot.
Pelops won the race, but, unwilling to give him his reward,
threw him from Cape Geræstus.
ELECTRA.
171
that forced the king, sorely against his will, to sacri-
fice Iphigenia. And as to the doctrine of "blood for
blood," if it were put in force, Clytemnestra herself
would be the first victim. "Yes," says the maiden,
with a fierce look,
"And I own,
Had I but strength, be sure of this, 'twere done.'
The Chorus stand too much amazed and terrified at
this stormy altercation between mother and daughter
to offer advice, or even to speak, and at last Electra's
passion exhausts itself. She turns her back upon her
mother, and stands aloof in gloomy silence. Then
Clytemnestra makes her secret prayer to the Sun-
god:-
"Hear thou the while, Phoebus who guard'st our gates,
My secret prayer; for not to friendly ears
Can I speak forth, nor dare I breathe in air
All that I mean, while she stands here beside me.
Yet hear me—thus
-thus-as I with heed will speak.
Those visions of the night, whose two-edged sense
I dimly read,—if they be good, O King
Grant them fulfilment but, if they be evil,
Then launch them back upon mine enemies!
And if there be who by their cunning plots
Would strip me of this wealth, suffer it not;
But grant me still, living an unharmed life,
To wield the sceptre here in Atreus' halls,
Consorting still with whom I consort now,
And happy in such children as may nurse
No secret hate or bitter grudge against me.
Such boon, Apollo, Slayer of the wolf,
Grant of thy grace as fully as we ask it!
And, for the rest, even though I be silent,
172
SOPHOCLES.
Thou art a god-and needs must understand me.
For they see all things who are born of Jove."
It would seem as if her prayers were to be quickly
answered; for at this moment the old attendant enters,
and announces, according to the previous agreement,
the death of Orestes. Clytemnestra, strangely dis-
turbed herself by conflicting feelings, cuts short the
bitter cry of grief which bursts from the lips of Electra,
and bids the messenger tell the manner of his death.
Then follows a false but closely circumstantial
account of the death of Orestes in the Pythian games
at Delphi-a tragedy within a tragedy, so real and
life-like, that it is difficult to believe that it is not
a description of some actual catastrophe. The lists.
were set, says the supposed Phocian stranger; the
herald made proclamation; all Greece was there; every
nation had sent its representatives, and among them
came Orestes, winning the hearts of the spectators by
his grace and noble bearing. His achievements on the
first day were worthy of his name and lineage, for he
came off victorious in five contests. On the second
day followed the fatal tournament of chariots, in which
there were ten competitors.
"They took their stand where the appointed judges
Had cast their lots and ranged the rival cars.
Rang out the brazen trump! Away they bound,
Cheer the hot steeds and shake the slackened reins ;
As with a body the large space is filled
With the huge clangour of the battling cars.
High whirl aloft the dust-clouds; blent together,
Each presses each, and the lash rings; and loud
ELECTRA.
173
Snort the wild steeds, and from their fiery breath
Along their manes and down the circling wheels
Scatter the foam."-(Lord Lytton.)
Six times they had rounded the goal at the end
of the course; but in the seventh the horses of one
chariot had proved unmanageable, and dashed against
the next.
"Then order changed to ruin,
Car crashed on car; the wild Crissæan plain
Was sea-like strewed with wrecks; the Athenian saw,
Slackened his speed, and, wheeling round the marge,
Left the wild tumult of that tossing storm.
Behind Orestes, hitherto the last,
Had yet kept back his coursers for the close;
Now one sole rival left-on, on he flew,
And the sharp sound of the impelling scourge
Rang in the keen ears of the flying steeds.
He hears, he reaches-they are side by side-
Now one-the other-by a length the victor.
The courses all are past--the wheels erect-
All safe-when, as the hurrying coursers round
The fatal pillar dashed, the wretched boy
Slackened the left rein: on the column's edge
Crashed the frail axle: headlong from the car,
Caught and all meshed within the reins, he fell;
And masterless the mad steeds raged along!
Loud from that mighty multitude arose
A shriek-a shout! But yesterday such deeds,
To-day such doom! Now whirled upon the earth,
Now his limbs dashed aloft, they dragged him—those
Wild horses-till all gory from the wheels
Released,—and no man, not his nearest friends,
Could in that mangled corpse have traced Orestes.
They laid the body on the funeral-pyre ;
174
SOPHOCLES.
And while we speak, the Phocian strangers bear,
In a small brazen melancholy urn,
That handful of cold ashes to which all
The grandeur of the Beautiful hath shrunk.
Hither they bear him, in his father's land
To find that heritage-a tomb !"-(Lord Lytton.)
So circumstantial is this narrative, that no doubt is
left on the minds of the hearers as to its truth. Even
Clytemnestra is touched and impressed by the sudden
end of one
"So young, so noble, so unfortunate.”—(P.)
After all, she is a woman and a mother. Orestes is
dead, and the secret prayer of her heart is thus ful-
filled. Orestes is dead, and she is at once delivered
from those terrors which had haunted her sleep. But,
hardened and guilty as she is, there is sorrow in the
thought that her peace of mind should be regained
only by the death of her first-born, "the child of her
own life."
Wondrous," she exclaims, almost against
her will, as if excusing her emotion-
"Wondrous and strange the force of motherhood!
Though wronged, a mother cannot hate her children."
-(P.)
It is a finer touch like this which stamps the poet.
"These few words of genuine grief," says Mr Jebb,
'humanise, and therefore dramatise, Clytemnestra
more vividly than anything in Eschylus."
But the queen's better nature does not assert itself
for long. A question put by the messenger as to

ELECTRA.
175
whether his news be not welcome, and the sight of
Electra's unfeigned sorrow, rouse in her a feeling of
triumph and relief. Now at last, she says, she may
sleep soundly, and pass her days in peace. Then,
bidding the disguised attendant follow her, she retires
within the palace, while Electra bemoans her own fate,
left thus desolate and friendless. Her day-dreams of
vengeance have come to an end for ever, since the
brother on whom she had built her hopes has died
cruelly, trampled to death under horses' feet, in a
strange land-
"By strangers honoured and by strangers mourned."
Suddenly Chrysothemis runs eagerly in with what
she conceives to be good news. She had found her
father's tomb covered with flowers, and moist with
freshly-poured libations, while on its summit lay a
lock of hair, which she at once divines to be a token
from Orestes. "My poor sister!" says Electra, “your
Orestes is dead ;"—and then she tells the story she has
heard; but though he be dead, she continues, let us,
women as we are, take upon ourselves the work of
vengeance, and earn a glorious renown by slaying
Ægisthus, our mother's paramour.
"All men love to look
On deeds of goodness. Dost not see full clear
All the fair fame thou'lt gain for thee and me,
If thou obey my counsels? Who, seeing us,
Or citizen or stranger, will not greet us
With praises such as these: Behold, my friends,
Those sisters twain, who saved their father's house,
176
SOPHOCLES.
And on their foes who walked in pride of strength,
Regardless of their lives, wrought doom of death!
These all must love, these all must reverence;
These in our feasts, and when the city meets
In full assemblage, all should honour well
For this their manly prowess.' Thus will all
Speak of us, so that fame we shall not miss,
Living or dying.”—(P.)
But Chrysothemis recoils from the suggestion. Her
spirit is too weak to venture on such a hazardous
enterprise. Besides, she says, our foes are stronger
than we are ;—
"And nothing does it help or profit us,
Gaining fair fame, a shameful death to die.”—(P.)
Then the pretended Phocians enter, carrying, as
they say,
"In one small urn
All that is left, sad relics of the dead.”—(P.)
The sight only increases Electra's sorrow, for it con-
firms what she had at first hoped might have been
only an evil rumour. She takes the urn from the
stranger-(we must remember that the brother and
sister had not met for years)—and she muses over her
shattered hopes, and over the untimely death of the
Orestes whom she had loved with such devoted affec-
tion:*
* An anecdote is told of the great actor Polus, that once,
when playing the part of Electra (for no woman ever appeared
on the Athenian stage), he embraced an urn containing the real
ashes of a much-loved son who had lately died, and, affected by
ELECTRA.
177
"But now all joy has vanished in a day
In this thy death, for, like a whirlwind, thou
Hast passed and swept off all. My father falls;
I perish; thou thyself hast gone from sight;
Our foes exult. My mother-wrongly named,
For mother she is none-is mad with joy.
How hast thou brought me low, thou dearest one!
Therefore receive thou me to this thy home,
Ashes to ashes, that with thee below
I may from henceforth dwell."—(P.)
Then the disguised stranger knows that this maiden
—noble even in her mean dress-must be his sister;
and his heart yearns towards her, and he can contain
himself no longer. He burns with indignation as he
looks on one whom he had left a light-hearted and inno-
cent girl, now worn and wasted, as she says herself,
"By blows, by hardships, and all forms of ill.”
"Funeral urns,” he cries, "are not for the living, and
Orestes is alive." Then he shows his father's signet-
ring, and Electra knows that he must be indeed her
brother. The haughty spirit which had defied Ægis-
thus, and repaid the queen with scorn for scorn, is at
once softened. She bursts into tears, and with wild
exclamations of joy throws herself into the arms of
"her own, her dear Orestes."
Even when told through the cold medium of a dead
language without a stage direction, without the aid
of dress or scenery-no "recognition" in any drama
uncontrollable emotion, burst into genuine tears, and uttered
a cry of sorrow which deeply moved the sympathies of the
audience.
A. C. vol. x.
M
178
SOPHOCLES.
comes up to the simple reality of this, although critics
may object that it is not in the highest style of art.*
But this is not a time for caresses and embraces.
Orestes remembers that there is sterner work before
them, and that
"Much speech might lose occasion's golden hour.”—(P.)
And while Electra still clings to her brother, as though
loath to leave him even for a moment, the old attendant
roughly breaks in upon their dialogue. Are they
weary of their lives, he asks, that they stand thus
idly prating on the brink of danger? It is well that
he has kept good watch. Let them go in, and they
will find Clytemnestra alone within the palace. Then
Orestes and Pylades obey his advice and enter. For
a while there is a dead silence; but suddenly the
silence is broken by a woman's shriek, and Electra
turns exultingly to the Chorus :—
"A cry goes up within; friends, hear ye not?
Cho. I heard what none should hear-ah, misery !—
And shuddered listening.
Ah me! ah me! Woe, woe!
Ha! List again.
Clytem. (within.)
Ægisthus, where art thou?
Elec.
I hear a bitter cry.
Clytem. (within.) My son, my son,
Have pity on thy mother!
Thou hadst none
Elec.
On him, nor on the father that begat him.
* Aristotle (Poet. xi. 30) calls recognition by signs "most
inartistic."
ELECTRA.
179
Clytem. (within.) Ah, I am smitten!
Elec.
If thou hast strength for it.
Clytem. (within.)
Elec. Would that Ægisthus shared them!
Cho.
Is now fulfilled. The buried live again;
For they who died long since now drain in turn
The blood of those that slew them.”—(P.)
Smite her yet again,
Ah! blow on blow!
Yes; the curse
The shrieks from within have grown fainter and
fainter; and then follows the stillness of the grave,
until Orestes and Pylades come forth from the palace,
carrying their swords unsheathed and dripping with
blood. Almost at the same moment Ægisthus is
seen coming from the country, and Electra hurriedly
pushes back her brother and his friend behind the
scene. The usurper has heard on the way a rumour of
the death of Orestes, and is radiant with triumphant
joy. He asks for the Phocian strangers, that he may
hear these good tidings from their own lips. "And so
they really report," he asks Electra, half incredulously,
"that your brother is dead?" 'You may see the
corpse," is her guarded answer. Then he bids the
palace-doors be thrown open, that all Mycena may
behold the welcome sight. The set scene in the
background opens, and the interior of the palace
is discovered. There, on a bier, lies a body covered
with a veil.
CC
"Egis. Great Jove! a grateful spectacle-if thus
May it be said unsinning; yet if she,
The awful Nemesis, be nigh and hear,
180
SOPHOCLES.
I do recall the sentence. Raise the pall,—
The dead was kindred to me, and shall know
A kinsman's sorrow.
S
Ores.
Lift thyself the pall;
Not mine, but thine, the office to survey
That which lies mute beneath, and to salute,
Lovingly sad, the dead one.
Be it so,-
Egis.
It is well said. Go thou and call the queen.
Is she within ?
Ores.
Look not around for her.-
She is beside thee."-(Lord Lytton.)
Then Ægisthus lifts the veil, and recognises the
body of Clytemnestra. He knows at once that it must
be Orestes who stands before him, and that he is a
doomed man. "Let me speak one little word," he
pleads; but Electra fiercely cuts him short, and bids
her brother "slay him out of hand, and cast his body
to the dogs and vultures: "—
66
'Qu'il tombe, il en est temps, sous vos glaives vengeurs !
Que son corps soit privé des funébres honneurs !
Aux oiseaux dévorants qu'il serve de pâture,
Et trouve dans leurs flancs sa digne sépulture! " *
Orestes accordingly forces him within the palace, that
the murderer may die by the son's hand on the same
spot where the father had fallen. And thus "poetical
justice elevates what on the modern stage would have
been but a spectacle of physical horror into the deeper.
terror and sublimer gloom of a moral awe; and vin-
(
* From the Electre' of M. Léon Halévy, acted on the stage
at Paris in 1863 and 1865.

ba
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
3 9015 06693 1919
74
KATINAL DELIHARING

2.)