CHAPTER XIII.

_SOPHOCLES._

The Personal Beauty of Sophocles: his Life; Stories about

Him.--Athens in the Age of Pericles.--Antique Criticism

on his Style: its Perfect Harmony.--Aristotle's Respect

for Sophocles.--Character in Greek Tragedy.--Sophocles

and Æschylus.--The Religious Feeling of Sophocles.--His

Ethics.--Exquisite Proportion observed in his

Treatment of the _Dramatis Personæ_.--Power of Using

Motives.--The _Philoctetes_.--Comparison of the

_Choëphoroe_ and the _Electra_.--Climax of the _Oedipus

Coloneüs_.--How Sophocles led onward to Euripides.--The

_Trachiniæ_.--Goethe's Remarks on the _Antigone_.--The

Tale of Thebes.--_Oedipus Tyrannus_, _Oedipus Coloneüs_,

and _Antigone_ do not make up a Trilogy.--Story of

Laius.--The Philosophy of Fate contained in it.--The

Oracle.--Analysis of _Oedipus Tyrannus_.--Masterly

Treatment of the Character of Oedipus.--Change of

Situation in the _Coloneüs_.--Emergence of Antigone into

Prominence.--Analysis of the _Antigone_.--The Character of

Antigone: its Beauty.--Contrast afforded by Ismene and by

Creon.--Fault in the Climax of the _Antigone_.--The Final

Solution of the Laian Curse.--Antigone is not subject to

Nemesis.

Sophocles, the son of Sophilus, was born at Colonus, a village about

one mile to the north-west of Athens, in the year 495 B.C. This date

makes him thirty years younger than Æschylus, and fifteen older than

Euripides. His father was a man of substance, capable of giving

the best education, intellectual and physical, to his son; and the

education in vogue at Athens when Sophocles was a boy was that which

Aristophanes praised so glowingly in the speeches of the Dikaios

Logos. Therefore, in the case of this most perfect poet, the best

conditions of training (#trophê#) were added to the advantages of

nature (#physis#), and these two essential elements of a noble manhood,

upon which the theorists of Greece loved to speculate, were realized

by him conjointly in felicitous completeness. Early in life Sophocles

showed that nature had endowed him with personal qualities peculiarly

capable of conferring lustre on a Greek artist of the highest type. He

was exceedingly beautiful and well-formed, and so accomplished in music

and gymnastics that he gained public prizes in both these branches

of a Greek boy's education. His physical grace and skill in dancing

caused him to be chosen, in his sixteenth year, to lead the choir in

celebration of the victory of Salamis. According to Athenian custom,

he appeared on this occasion naked, crowned, and holding in his hand a

lyre:

#eithe lyra kalê genoimên elephantinê,

kai me kaloi paides pheroien Dionysion es choron.#[129]

These facts are not unimportant, for no Greek poet was more thoroughly,

consistently, and practically #euphyês#, according to the comprehensive

meaning of that term, which denotes physical, as well as moral and

intellectual, distinction. The art of Sophocles is distinguished

above all things by its faultless symmetry, its grace and rhythm, and

harmonious equipoise of strength and beauty. In his own person the

poet realized the ideal combination of varied excellences which his

tragedies exhibit. The artist and the man were one in Sophocles. In his

healthful youth and sober manhood, no less than in his serene poetry,

he exhibited the pure and tempered virtues of #euphuia#. We cannot

but think of him as specially created to represent Greek art in its

most refined and exquisitely balanced perfection. It is impossible to

imagine a more plastic nature, a genius more adapted to its special

function, more fittingly provided with all things needful to its full

development, born at a happier moment in the history of the world, and

more nobly endowed with physical qualities suited to its intellectual

capacity.

In 468 B.C. Sophocles first appeared as a tragic poet in contest with

Æschylus. The advent of the consummate artist was both auspicious and

dramatic. His fame, as a gloriously endowed youth, had been spread

far and wide. The supremacy of his mighty predecessor remained as yet

unchallenged. Therefore the day on which they met in rivalry was a

great national occasion. Party feeling ran so high that Apsephion, the

Archon Eponymus, who had to name the judges, chose no meaner umpires

than the general Cimon and his colleagues, just returned from Scyros,

bringing with them the bones of the Attic hero Theseus. Their dignity

and their recent absence from the city were supposed to render them

fair critics in a matter of such moment. Cimon awarded the victory

to Sophocles. It is greatly to be regretted that we have lost the

tragedies which were exhibited on this occasion; we do not know,

indeed, with any certainty, their titles. As Welcker has remarked,

the judges were called to decide, not so much between two poets as

between two styles of tragedy; and if Plutarch's assertion, that

Æschylus retired to Sicily in consequence of the verdict given against

him, be well founded, we may also believe that two rival policies in

the city were opposed, two types of national character in collision.

Æschylus belonged to the old order. Sophocles was essentially a man

of the new age, of the age of Pericles and Pheidias and Thucydides.

The incomparable intellectual qualities of the Athenians of that

brief blossom-time have so far dazzled modern critics that we have

come to identify their spirit with the spirit itself of the Greek

race. Undoubtedly the glories of Hellas, her special _geist_ in art

and thought and state-craft, attained at that moment to maturity

through the felicitous combination of external circumstances, and

through the prodigious mental greatness of the men who made Athens so

splendid and so powerful. Yet we must not forget that Themistocles

preceded Pericles, while Cleon followed after; that Herodotus came

before Thucydides, and that Aristotle, at a later date, philosophized

on history; that Æschylus and Euripides have each a shrine in the

same temple with Sophocles. And all these men, whose names are notes

of differences deep and wide, were Greeks, almost contemporaneous.

The later and the earlier groups in this triple series are, perhaps,

even more illustrative of Greece at large; while the Periclean trio

represent Athenian society, in a special and narrow sense, at its most

luminous and brilliant, most isolated and artificial, most self-centred

and consummate point of #autarkeia#, or internal adequacy. Sophocles

was the poet of this transient phase of Attic culture, unexampled

in the history of the world for its clear and flawless character,

its purity of intellectual type, its absolute clairvoyance, and its

plenitude of powers matured, but unimpaired, by use.

From the date 468 to the year of his death, at the age of ninety,

Sophocles composed one hundred and thirteen plays. In twenty contests

he gained the first prize; he never fell below the second place. After

Æschylus he only met one formidable rival, Euripides. What we know

about his life is closely connected with the history of his works. In

440 B.C., after the production of the _Antigone_, he was chosen, on

account of his political wisdom, as one of the generals associated

with Pericles in the expedition to Samos. But Sophocles was not, like

Æschylus, a soldier; nor was he in any sense a man of action. The

stories told about his military service turn wholly upon his genial

temperament, serene spirits, unaffected modesty, and pleasure-loving

personality. So great, however, was the esteem in which his character

for wisdom and moderation was held by his fellow-citizens that they

elected him in 413 B.C. one of the ten commissioners of public safety,

or #probouloi#, after the failure of the Syracusan expedition. In

this capacity he gave his assent to the formation of the governing

council of the Four Hundred two years later, thus voting away the

constitutional liberties of Athens. It is recorded that he said this

measure was not a good one, but the best under bad circumstances. It

should, however, be said that doubt has been thrown over this part of

the poet's career; it is not certain that the Sophocles in question was

in truth the author of _Antigone_.

One of the best-authenticated and best-known episodes in the life of

Sophocles is connected with the _Oedipus Coloneüs_. As an old man, he

had to meet a lawsuit brought against him by his legitimate son Iophon,

who accused him of wishing to alienate his property to the child of his

natural son Ariston. This boy, called Sophocles, was the darling of his

later years. The poet was arraigned before a jury of his tribe, and the

plea set up by Iophon consisted of an accusation of senile incapacity.

The poet, preserving his habitual calmness, recited the famous chorus

which contains the praises of Colonus. Whereupon the judges rose

and conducted him with honor to his house, refusing for a moment to

consider so frivolous and unwarranted a charge.

Personally Sophocles was renowned for his geniality and equability of

temper; #eukolos men enthad' eukolos d' ekei# is the terse and emphatic

description of his character by Aristophanes. That he was not averse to

pleasures of the sense is proved by evidence as good as that on which

such biographical details of the ancients generally rest. To slur these

stories over because they offend modern notions of propriety is feeble,

though, of course, it is always open to the critic to call in question

the authorities; and in this particular instance the witnesses are far

from clear. The point, however, to be remembered is that, supposing

them true to fact, Sophocles would himself have smiled at such

unphilosophical partisanship as seeks to overthrow them in the interest

of his reputation. That a poet, distinguished for his physical beauty,

should refrain from sensual enjoyments in the flower of his age is not

a Greek, but a Christian notion. Such abstinence would have indicated

in Sophocles mere want of inclination. The words of Pindar are here

much to the purpose:

#chrên men kata kairon erôtôn drepesthai, thyme, syn halikiâi.#[130]

All turned upon the #kata kairon#, and no one had surely a better

sense of the #kairos#, the proper time and season for all things,

than Sophocles. He showed his moderation--which quality, not total

abstinence, was virtue in such matters for the Greeks--by knowing how

to use his passions, and when to refrain from their indulgence. The

whole matter is summed up in this passage from the _Republic_ of Plato:

"How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when, in answer to the

question, 'How does love suit with age, Sophocles--are you still the

man you were?' 'Peace,' he replied; 'most gladly have I escaped from

that, and I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master.'"

A more serious defect in the character of Sophocles is implied in the

hint given by Aristophanes, that he was too fond of money. The same

charge was brought against many Greek poets. We may account for it

by remembering that the increased splendor of Athenian life, and the

luxuriously refined tastes of the tragedian, must have tempted him to

do what the Greeks very much disliked--make profit by the offspring

of his brain. To modern notions nothing can sound stranger than the

invectives of the philosophers against sophists who sold their wisdom;

it can only be paralleled by their deeply rooted misconceptions about

interest on capital, which even Aristotle regarded as unnatural and

criminal. That Sophocles was in any deeper sense avaricious or miserly

we cannot believe: it would contradict the whole tenor of the tales

about his geniality and kindness.

Unlike Æschylus and Euripides, Sophocles never quitted Athens, except

on military service. He lived and wrote there through his long career

of laborious devotion to the highest art. We have, therefore, every

right, on this count also, to accept his tragedies as the purest mirror

of the Athenian mind at its most brilliant period. Athens, in the age

of Pericles, was adequate to the social and intellectual requirements

of her greatest sons; and a poet whose earliest memories were connected

with Salamis may well have felt that even the hardships of the

Peloponnesian war were easier to bear within the sacred walls of the

city than exile under the most favorable conditions. No other centre

of so much social and political activity existed. Athens was the Paris

of Greece, and Sophocles and Socrates were the Parisians of Athens. At

the same time the stirring events of his own lifetime do not appear to

have disturbed the tranquillity of Sophocles. True to his destiny, he

remained an artist; and to this immersion in his special work he owed

the happiness which Phrynichus recorded in these famous lines:

#makar Sophokleês, hos polyn chronon bious

apethanen eudaimôn anêr kai dexios;

pollas poiêsas kai kalas tragôidias

kalôs eteleutês' ouden hypomeinas kakon.#

Thrice-happy Sophocles! in good old age,

Blessed as a man, and as a craftsman blessed,

He died: his many tragedies were fair,

And fair his end, nor knew he any sorrow.

The change effected by Sophocles in tragedy tended to mature the drama

as a work of pure art, and to free it further from the Dionysiac

traditions. He broke up the trilogy into separate plays, exhibiting

three tragedies and a satyric drama, like Æschylus before him, but

undoing the link by which they were connected, so that he was able to

make each an independent poem. He added a third actor, and enlarged

the number of the chorus, while he limited its function as a motive

force in the drama. These innovations had the effect of reducing the

scale upon which Æschylus had planned his tragedies, and afforded

opportunities for the elaboration of detail. It was more easy for

Sophocles than it had been for Æschylus to exhibit play of character

through the interaction of the _dramatis personæ_. Tragedy left the

remote and mystic sphere of Æschylean theosophy, and confined herself

to purely human arguments. Attention was concentrated on the dialogue,

in which the passions of men in action were displayed. The dithyrambic

element was lost; the choric odes providing a relief from violent

excitement, instead of embodying the very soul and spirit of the poet's

teaching. While limiting the activity of the chorus, Sophocles did not,

like Euripides, proceed to disconnect it from the tragic interest, or

pay less attention than his predecessors to its songs. On the contrary,

his choric interludes are models of perfection in this style of lyric

poetry, while their subject-matter is invariably connected with the

chief concerns and moral lessons of the drama.

The extant plays of Sophocles are all later than the year 440 B.C.

They may safely be said to belong to the period of his finished style;

or, in the language of art criticism, to his third manner. What this

means will appear from a valuable passage in Plutarch: "Sophocles used

to say that, when he had put aside the tragic pomp of Æschylus, and

then the harsh and artificial manner of his own elaborate style, he

arrived in the third place at a form of speech which is best suited

to portray the characters of men, and is the most excellent." Thus it

would appear that Sophocles had begun his career as a dramatist by

the study of the language of Æschylus; finding that too turgid and

emphatic, he had fallen into affectation and refinement, and finally

had struck the just medium between the rugged majesty of his master

and the mannered elegance which was in vogue among the sophists.

The result was that peculiar mixture of grace, dignity, and natural

eloquence which scholars know as Sophoclean. It is interesting to

notice that the first among the extant tragedies of Sophocles, the

_Antigone_, is more remarkable for studied phrase and verbal subtleties

than his later plays. The _Oedipus Coloneüs_, which is the last of the

whole series, exhibits the style of the poet in its perfect purity

and freedom. A curious critical passage in Plutarch seems to indicate

that the ancients themselves observed the occasional euphuism of the

Sophoclean style as a blemish. It runs thus: #mempsaito d' an tis

Archilochou men tên hypothesin ... Euripidou de tên lalian, Sophokleous

de tên anômalian.#[131] "One might censure the garrulity of Euripides

and the inequality of Sophocles." I am not, however, certain whether

this or "linguistic irregularity" is the right meaning of the word

#anômalia#. Another censure, passed by Longinus upon Sophocles, points

out a defect which is the very last to be observed in any of the extant

tragedies: "Pindar and Sophocles at one time burn everything before

them in their fiery flight, but often strangely lack the flame of

inspiration, and fall most grievously to earth."[132] Then he adds:

"Certainly no wise critic would value all the plays of Ion put together

at the same rate as the single tragedy of _Oedipus_." The importance

of these critiques is to prove that the ancients regarded Sophocles

as an unequal, and in some respects a censurable poet, whence we may

infer that only masterpieces belonging to his later style have been

preserved to us, since nothing, to a modern student, is more obvious

than the uniform sustained perfection of our seven inestimably precious

tragedies. A certain tameness in the _Trachiniæ_, and a relaxation of

dramatic interest in the last act of the _Ajax_, are all the faults it

is possible to find with Sophocles.

What Sophocles is reported to have said about his style will

apply to his whole art. The great achievement of Sophocles was to

introduce regularity of proportion, moderation of tone, and proper

balance into tragedy. The Greek phrases #symmetria#, #sôphrosynê#,

#metriotês#--proportion of parts, self-restraint, and moderation--sum

up the qualities of his drama when compared with that of Æschylus.

Æschylus rough-hewed like a Cyclops, but he could not at the same

time finish like Praxiteles. What the truth of this saying is, I have

already tried to show.[133] Sophocles attempted neither Cyclopean nor

Praxitelean work. He attained to the perfection of Pheidias. Thus

we miss in his tragedies the colossal scale and terrible effects of

Æschylean art. His plays are not so striking at first sight, because

it was his aim to put all the parts of his composition in their

proper places, and to produce a harmony which should not agitate or

startle, but which upon due meditation should be found complete. The

#sôphrosynê#, or moderation, exhibited in all his work, implies by its

very nature the sacrifice of something--the sacrifice of passion and

impetuosity to higher laws of equability and temper. So perfect is the

beauty of Sophocles, that, as in the case of Raphael or Mozart, it

seems to conceal the strength and fire which animate his art.

Aristotle, in the _Poetics_, observes that "Poetry is the proper affair

of either enthusiastic or artistic natures," #euphyous ê manikou#.

Now Æschylus exactly answers to the notion of the #manikos#, while

Sophocles corresponds to that of the #euphyês#. To this distinction

between the two types of genius we may refer the partiality of

Aristotle for the younger dramatist. The work of the artistic poet is

more instructive and offers more matter for profitable analysis, for

precept and example, than that of the divinely inspired enthusiast.

Where creative intelligence has been used consciously and effectively

to a certain end, critical intelligence can follow. It is clear that

in the _Poetics_, which we may regard as a practical text-book for

students, the philosopher is using the tragedy of Sophocles, and in

particular the _Oedipus Tyrannus_, as the standard of perfection.

Whatever he has to say about the handling of character, the treatment

of the fable, the ethics of the drama, the catastrophes and

recognitions (#peripeteiai# and #anagnôriseis#), that absorbed so large

a part of his dramatic analysis, he points by references to _Oedipus_.

In Sophocles Aristotle found the #mesotês#, or intermediate quality,

between two extremes, which, in æsthetics as in morals, seemed to his

Greek mind most excellent. Consequently he notes all deflections from

the Sophoclean norm as faulty; and, since in his day Euripides led the

taste of the Athenians, he frequently shows how tragic art had suffered

by a deviation from the principles Sophocles illustrated. The chief

point on which he insists is the morality of the drama. "The tragedies

of the younger poets for the most part are unethical." With his use of

the word #êthos# we must be careful not to confound the modern notion

of morality: #êthos# means, indeed, with Aristotle as with us, the

determination of the character to goodness or badness; but it also

includes considerations of what is appropriate to sex and quality and

circumstance in the persons of a work of fiction. The best modern

equivalent for #êthos#, therefore, is character. Since tragedy is an

imitation of men acting according to their character, #êthos#, in this

wide sense, is the whole stuff of the dramatist, and a proper command

of #êthos# implies real knowledge of mankind. Therefore, when Aristotle

accuses the tragedies of Euripides and his school of being "unethical,"

he does not merely mean that they were prejudicial to good manners, but

also that they were false to human nature, unscientific, and therefore

inartistic; exceptional or morbid, wavering in their conception and

unequal in their execution. The truly great poet, Sophocles, shows

his artistic tact and taste by only selecting such characters as are

suitable to tragedy. He depicts men, but men of heroic mould, men as

they ought to be.[134] When Sophocles said that he portrayed men as

tragedy required them to be, whereas Euripides drew them just as they

are, he indicated the real solution of the tragic problem.[135] The

point here raised by Aristotle has an intimate connection with its

whole theory of tragedy. Tragic poetry must purify the passions of

fear and pity; in other words, it must teach men not to fear when fear

is vile, or to pity where pity would be thrown away. By exhibiting a

spectacle that may excite the fear of really dreadful calamity, and

compassion for truly terrible misfortune, tragedy exalts the soul above

the ordinary miseries of life, and nerves it to face the darker evils

to which humanity in its blindness, sin, and self-pride is exposed. Now

this lesson cannot be taught by drawing men as they exist around us.

That method drags the mind back to the trivialities of every day.

What Aristotle says about the #êthê# of tragedy may be applied to

point the differences between Sophocles and Æschylus. He has not

himself drawn the comparison; but it is clear that, as Euripides

deflects on the one hand from the purely ethical standard, so also

does Æschylus upon the other. Æschylus keeps us in the high and mystic

region of religious fatalism. Sophocles transports us into the more

human region of morality. His problem is to exhibit the complexities

of life--"whatsoever has passion or admiration in all the changes of

that which is called fortune from without, or the wily subtleties and

reflexes of man's thoughts from within"--and to set forth men of noble

mental stature acting in subjection to the laws appointed for the

order of the world. His men and women are like ourselves, only larger

and better in so far as they are simpler and more beautiful. Like the

characters of Æschylus, they suffer for their sins; but we feel that

the justice that condemns them is less mystic in its operation, more

capable of philosophical analysis and scientific demonstration.

It must not be thought, therefore, that Sophocles is less religious

than Æschylus. On the contrary, he shows how the will and passion of

men are inevitably and invariably related to divine justice. Human

affairs can only be understood by reference to the deity; for the

decrees of Zeus, or of that power which is above Zeus, and which

he also obeys, give their moral complexion to the motives and the

acts of men. Yet, while Æschylus brings his theosophy in detail

prominently forward, Sophocles prefers to maintain a sense of the

divine background. He spiritualizes religion, while he makes it more

indefinite. By the same process it is rendered more impregnable within

its stronghold of the human heart and reason, less exposed to the

attacks of logic or the changes of opinion. The keynote to his tragic

morality is found in these two passages:[136]

"Oh! that my lot may lead me in the path of holy innocence of

word and deed, the path which august laws ordain, laws that in

the highest empyrean had their birth, of which heaven is the

father alone, neither did the race of mortal man beget them,

nor shall oblivion ever put them to sleep. The power of God is

mighty in them, and groweth not old."

The second is like unto the first in spirit:

It was no Zeus who thus commanded me,

Nor Justice, dread mate of the nether powers,--

For they, too, gave these rules to govern men.

Nor did I fondly deem thy proclamations

Were so infallible that any mortal

Might overleap the sure unwritten laws

Of gods. These neither now nor yesterday,

Nay, but from everlasting without end,

Live on, and no man knows when they were issued.

The religious instinct in Sophocles has made a long step towards

independence since the days of Æschylus. No more upon Olympus or at

Delphi alone will the Greek poet worship. He has learned that "God is

a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in

truth." The voice that speaks within him is the deity he recognizes.

At the same time the Chorus of the _Oedipus_, part of which has just

been quoted, and that of the _Antigone_, which bewails the old doom

of the house of Labdacus, might, but for their greater calmness, have

been written by Æschylus. The moral doctrine of Greek tragedy has not

been changed, but humanized. We have got rid in a great measure of

ancient demons, and brass-footed Furies, and the greed of earth for

blood in recompense for blood. We have passed, as it were, from the

shadow cast by the sun into the sunlight itself. And, in consequence

of this transfiguration, the morality of Sophocles is imperishable.

"Not of to-day nor of yesterday, but fixed from everlasting," are his

laws. We may all learn of him now, as when Antigone first stood before

the throne of Creon on the Attic stage. The deep insight into human

life, that most precious gift of the Greek genius, which produced their

greatest contributions to the education of the world, is in Sophocles

obscured no longer by mystical mythology and local superstition. His

wisdom is the common heritage of human nature.

The moral judgments of Æschylus were severe. Those of Sophocles,

implicit in his tragic situations rather than expressed, are not less

firm; but he seems to feel a more tender pity for humanity in its

weakness and its blindness. The philosophy of life, profoundly sad

upon the one side, but cheerful on the other, which draws lessons of

sobriety and tempered joy from the consideration of human impotence and

ignorance, is truly Greek. We find it nowhere more strongly set forth

than by Sophocles and Aristophanes--by the comic poet in the Parabasis

of the _Birds_, and in the songs of the Mystæ in the _Frogs_, by the

tragic poet in his choruses, and also in what is called his irony.

All that has been said about the art of Sophocles up to this point

has tended to establish one position. His innate and unerring tact,

his sense of harmony and measure, produced at Athens a new style of

drama, distinguished for finish of language, for careful elaboration

of motives, for sharp and delicate character-drawing, and for balance

of parts. If we do not find in Sophocles anything to match the passion

of Cassandra, the cry of Agamemnon, or the opening of the _Eumenides_,

there is yet in his plays a combination of quite sufficient boldness

and inventiveness with more exquisite workmanship than Æschylus could

give. The breadth of the whole is not lost through the minuteness

of the details. Unlike Æschylus, Sophocles opens very quietly, with

conversations, for the most part, which reveal the characters of the

chief persons or explain the situation. The passion grows with the

development of the plot, and it is only when the play is finished that

justice can be done to any separate part. Each of the seven tragedies

presents one person, who dominates the drama, and in whom its interest

is principally concentrated. Oedipus in his two plays, Antigone in

hers, Philoctetes in his, Deianeira in the _Trachiniæ_, Electra in her

play, and Ajax in his, stand forth in powerful and prominent relief.

Then come figures on the second plane, no less accurately conceived

and conscientiously delineated, but used with a view to supporting the

chief personages, and educing their decisive action.[137] A _rôle_ of

this kind is given to Orestes in the _Electra_, to Neoptolemus in the

_Philoctetes_, to Teucer in the _Ajax_, to Creon in the _Antigone_,

to Teiresias in the _Oedipus_. Clytemnestra and Tecmessa, Odysseus

and Theseus, play similar parts. Again, there is a third plane for

characters still more subordinate, but no less artistically important,

such as Jocasta, Ismene, Chrysothemis, Ægisthus, Hyllus. Then follow

the numerous accessory persons--_instrumenta dramatis_--the guardian of

the corpse of Polyneices, the shepherd of Laius, the tutor of Orestes,

messengers and servants, all of whom receive their special physiognomy

from the great master. In this way Sophocles made true æsthetic use of

the three agonistæ. The principle on which these parts were distributed

in his tragedies will be found to have deep and subtle analogies with

the laws of bass-relief in sculpture. Poetry, however, being a far more

independent art than sculpture, may employ a greater multiplicity of

parts, and produce a far more complex effect than can be realized in

bass-relief.

The _Philoctetes_ might be selected as an example of the power in

handling motives possessed by Sophocles. The amount of interest he has

concentrated by a careful manipulation of one point--the contest for

the bow of Herakles--upon so slight and stationary a plot, is truly

wonderful. Not less admirable is the contrast between the youthful

generosity of Neoptolemus and the worldly wisdom of Odysseus--the

young man pliant at first to the crafty persuasions of the elder, but

restored to his sense of honor by the compassion which Philoctetes

stirs, and by the trust he places in him. Nothing more beautiful can be

conceived than this moral revolution in the character of Neoptolemus.

It suited the fine taste and exquisite skill of Sophocles not only to

exhibit changes in circumstance and character, but also to compel a

change of sympathy and of opinion in his audience. Thus, in the _Ajax_,

he contrives to reverse the whole situation, by showing in the end

Ajax sublime and Odysseus generous, though at first the one seemed

sunk below humanity, and the other hateful in his vulgar scorn of a

fallen rival. The art which works out psychological problems of this

subtle kind, and which invests a plot like that of the _Philoctetes_

with intense interest, is very far removed from the method of Æschylus.

The difference between the two styles may, however, be appreciated

best by a comparison of the _Electra_ with the _Choëphoroe_. In these

two tragedies very nearly the same motives are employed; but what was

simple and straightforward in Æschylus becomes complex and involved

in Sophocles. Instead of Orestes telling the tale of his own death,

we have the narrative of his tutor, confirmed and ratified by himself

in person. Instead of Electra at once recognizing her brother, she

is brought at first to the verge of despair by hearing of his death.

Then Chrysothemis informs her of the lock of hair. This, however,

cannot reassure Electra in the face of the tutor's message. So the

situation is admirably protracted. Æschylus misses all that is gained

for the development of character by the resolve of Electra, stung to

desperation by her brother's death, to murder Ægisthus, and by the

contrast between her single-hearted daring and the feebler acquiescent

temper of Chrysothemis. Also the peripeteia whereby Electra is made

to bewail the urn of Orestes, and then to discover him alive before

her, is a stroke of supreme art which was missed in the _Choëphoroe_.

The pathos of the situation is almost too heart-rending; at one moment

its intensity verges upon discord; but the resolution of the discord

comes in that long cadence of triumphant harmony when the anagnorisis

at length arrives. Nor is the ingenuity of Sophocles, in continuing

and sustaining the interest of this one set of motives, yet exhausted.

While the brother and sister are rejoicing together, the action waits,

and every moment becomes more critical, until at last the tutor

reappears and warns them of their perilous imprudence. To take another

point: the dream of Clytemnestra is more mysterious and doubtful in

the _Electra_ than in the _Choëphoroe_; while her appearance on the

stage at the beginning of the play, her arguments with Electra, her

guarded prayers to Phoebus, and her reception of the tutor's message,

enable Sophocles fully to develop his conception of her character. On

the other hand, Sophocles has sacrificed the most brilliant features

of the _Choëphoroe_--the dreadful scene of Clytemnestra's death, than

which there is nothing more passionately piteous and spirit-quelling in

all tragedy, and the descent of his mother's furies on the murderer.

It was the object of Sophocles not so much to dwell upon the action

of Orestes as to exhibit the character of Electra; therefore, at the

supreme moment, when the cry of the queen is heard within the palace,

he shows his heroine tremendous in her righteous hatred and implacable

desire for vengeance. Such complete and exhaustive elaboration of

motives, characters, and situations, as forms the chief artistic

merit of the _Electra_, would, perhaps, have been out of place in the

_Choëphoroe_, which was only the second play in a trilogy, and had,

therefore, to be simple and stationary, according to the principles

of Æschylean art. The character of Clytemnestra, for example, needed

no development, seeing that she had taken the first part in the

_Agamemnon_. Again, it was necessary for Æschylus to insist upon the

action of Orestes more than Sophocles was forced to do, in order

that the climax of the _Choëphoroe_ might produce the subject of the

_Eumenides_. In comparing Sophocles with his predecessor, we must never

forget that we are comparing single plays with trilogies. This does

not, however, make the Sophoclean mastery of motives and of plots the

less admirable; it only fixes our attention on the real nature of the

innovations adopted by the younger dramatist.

Another instance of the art wherewith Sophocles prepared a tragic

situation, and graduated all the motives which should conduct the

action to a final point, may be selected from the _Oedipus Coloneüs_.

It was necessary to describe the death of Oedipus, since the fable

selected for treatment precluded anything approaching to a presentation

on the stage of this supreme event. Oedipus is bound to die alone

mysteriously, delivering his secret first in solitude to Theseus. A

Messenger's speech was, therefore, imperatively demanded, and to render

that the climax of the drama taxed all the resources of the poet. First

comes thunder, the acknowledged signal of the end. Then the speech of

Oedipus, who says that now, though blind, he will direct his steps

unhelped. Theseus is to follow and to learn. Oedipus rises from his

seat; his daughters and the king attend him. They quit the stage, and

the Chorus is left alone to sing. Then comes the Messenger, and gives

the sublime narration of his disappearance. We hear the voice that

called--

#ô houtos houtos Oidipous ti mellomen

chôrein? palai dê tapo sou bradynetai.#

We see the old man descending the mysterious stairs, Antigone and

Ismene grouped above, and last, the kneeling king, who shrouds his eyes

before a sight intolerable. All this, as in a picture, passes before

our imagination. To convey the desired effect otherwise than by a

narrative would have been impossible, and the narrative, owing to the

expectation previously raised, is adequate.

To compare Sophocles with Euripides, after having said so much about

the points of contrast between him and Æschylus, and to determine

how much he may have owed in his later plays to the influence of

the younger poet, would be an interesting exercise of criticism.

That, however, belongs rather to an essay dealing directly with the

third Greek dramatist in detail. It is sufficient here to notice a

few points in which Sophocles seems to have prepared the way for

Euripides. In the first place he developed the part of the Messenger,

and made far more of picturesque description than Æschylus had done.

Then, again, his openings suggested the device of the prologue by

their abandonment of the eminently scenic effects with which Æschylus

preferred to introduce a drama. The separation of the Chorus from the

action was another point in which Sophocles led onward to Euripides.

So also was the device of the _deus ex machinâ_ in the _Philoctetes_,

unless, indeed, we are to regard this as an invention adopted from

Euripides.[138] Nor, in this connection, is it insignificant that

Aristotle credits Sophocles with the invention of #skênographia#,

or scene-painting. The abuse of scenical resources to the detriment

of real dramatic unity and solidity was one of the chief defects of

Euripidean art.

It may here be noticed that Sophocles in the _Trachiniæ_ took up the

theme of love as a main motive for a drama. By doing so he broke ground

in a region that had been avoided, as far as we can judge from extant

plays, by Æschylus, and in which Euripides was destined to achieve his

greatest triumphs. It is, indeed, difficult to decide the question of

precedence between Sophocles and Euripides in this matter. Except on

this account the _Trachiniæ_ is the least interesting of his tragedies.

The whole play seems like a somewhat dull, though conscientious,

handling of a fable in which the poet took but a slight interest.

Compared with Medea or with Phædra, Deianeira is tame and lifeless.

She makes one fatal and foolish mistake through jealousy, and all is

over. Hyllus, too, is a mere _silhouette_, while the contention between

him and Herakles about the marriage with Iole, at the end, is frigid.

Here, if anywhere, we detect the force of the critique quoted above

from Longinus. At the same time the _Trachiniæ_ offers many points

of interest to the student of Greek sentiment. The phrase #tautês ho

deinos himeros# is significant, as expressing the pain and forceful

energy which the Greeks attributed to passion; nor is the contrast

drawn by Deianeira between #posis# and #anêr# without value. The

motive used by Sophocles in this tragedy was developed by Euripides

with a comprehension so far deeper, and with a fulness so far more

satisfactory, that the _Hippolytus_ and the _Medea_ must always take

rank above it.

The deepest and most decisive quality in which the tragic art of

Sophocles resembled that of Euripides is rhetoric. Sophocles was the

first to give its full value to dramatic casuistry, to introduce

sophistic altercations, and to set forth all that could be well said

in support of a poor argument. A passage on this subject may be quoted

from "Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe:"[139]

"That is the very thing," said Goethe, "in which Sophocles is

a master; and in which consists the very life of the dramatic

in general. His characters all possess this gift of eloquence,

and know how to explain the motives for their action so

convincingly that the hearer is almost always on the side of

the last speaker. One can see that in his youth he enjoyed an

excellent rhetorical education, by which he became trained to

look for all the reasons and seeming reasons of things. Still

his great talent in this respect betrayed him into faults, as

he sometimes went too far."

The special point selected by Goethe for criticism is the celebrated

last speech of Antigone:

"At last, when she is led to death, she brings forward a motive

which is quite unworthy, and almost borders on the comic. She

says that if she had been a mother she would not have done

either for her dead children or for her dead husband what she

has done for her brother. 'For,' says she, 'if my husband died

I could have had another, and if my children died I could

have had others by my new husband. But with my brother the

case is different. I cannot have another brother; for since

my mother and father are dead, there is none to beget one.'

This is, at least, the bare sense of the passage, which, in

my opinion, when placed in the mouth of a heroine going to

her death, disturbs the tragic tone, and appears to me very

far-fetched--to savor too much of dialectical calculation. As I

said, I should like a philologist to show us that the passage

is spurious."

In truth this last speech of Antigone is exactly what the severer

critics of Euripides would have selected in a play of his for

condemnation. It exhibits, after all allowance for peculiar Greek

sentiments, the rhetorical development of a sophistic thesis. In the

simple thought there is pathos. But its elaboration makes it frigid.

Sophocles, though he made the subsequent method of Euripides not only

possible but natural by the law of progressive evolution, was very

far indeed from disintegrating the tragic structure as Euripides

was destined to do. The _deus ex machinâ_ of the _Philoctetes_, for

example, was only employed because there was absolutely no other way

to solve the situation. Rhetoric and wrangling matches were never

introduced for their own sake. The choric odes did not degenerate

into mere musical interludes. Description and narration in no case

took the place of action, by substituting pictures to the ear under

conditions where true art required dramatic presentation. It remains

the everlasting glory of Sophocles that he realized the mean between

Æschylus and Euripides, sacrificing for the sake of his ideal the

passionate and enthusiastic extremes of the older dramatist, without

imperilling the fabric of Greek tragedy by the suicidal innovations of

Euripides. He and he alone knew how to use all forms of art, to express

all motives, and to hazard all varieties, with the single purpose of

maintaining artistic unity.

What remains to be said about Sophocles, and in particular about

his delineation of character, may be introduced in the course of an

analysis of his tragedies upon the tale of Thebes.

These three plays do not, like the three plays of Æschylus upon the

tale of the Atridæ, form a trilogy. That is to say, they are not so

connected in subject as to form one continued series. A drama, for

example, similar to the _Seven against Thebes_ might be interpolated

between the _Oedipus Coloneüs_ and _Antigone_; while the _Oedipus

Tyrannus_ might have been followed by a tragedy upon the subject of

the king's expulsion from Thebes. Nor, again, are they artistically

designed as a trilogy. There is no change of form, suggesting the

beginning, middle, and ending of a calculated work of art, like that

which we notice in the _Oresteia_. Moreover, the protagonist is absent

from the _Antigone_, and, therefore, to call the three plays an

_Oedipodeia_ is impossible. Finally, they were composed at different

periods: the _Antigone_ is the first extant tragedy of Sophocles; the

_Oedipus Coloneüs_ is the last.

So much it was necessary to premise in order to avoid the imputation

of having treated the three masterpieces of Sophocles as in any true

sense a trilogy. The temptation to do so is at first sight almost

irresistible; for they are written on the same legend, and the same

characters are throughout sustained with firmness, proving that, though

Sophocles composed the last play of the series first and the second

last of all, he had conceived them in his brain before he undertook to

work them out in detail. Or, if this assumption seem unwarranted, we

may at least affirm with certainty that at some point of time anterior

to the production of the _Antigone_ he had subjected the whole legend

of the house of Laius to his plastic imagination, and had given it

coherence in his mind. In other words, it was impossible for him to

change his point of view about this mythus in the same way as Euripides

when he handled that of Helen according to two different versions.

It so happens, moreover, that the climax of the _Oedipus Tyrannus_

prepares us, by the revolution in the character of the protagonist, for

the _Oedipus Coloneüs_; while the last act of the second tragedy, by

the prominence given to Antigone, serves as a prelude to the third and

final play.

The house of Laius was scarcely less famous among the Greeks than the

house of Atreus for its overwhelming disasters, the consequences of an

awful curse which rested on the family. Laius, the son of Labdacus, was

supposed to have introduced an unnatural vice into Hellas; and from

this first crime sprang all the subsequent disasters of his progeny.

He took in marriage Jocasta, the sister of Prince Creon, and swayed

the State of Thebes. To him an oracle was given that a son of his by

Jocasta should kill him. Yet he did not therefore, in obedience to

the divine warning, put away his wife or live in chastity. A boy was

born to the royal pair, who gave him to one of their shepherds, after

piercing his feet and tying them together, and bound the hind to expose

him on Cithæron. Thus they hoped to defeat the will of heaven. The

shepherd, moved by pity, saved the baby's life and handed him over to

a friend of his, who used to feed his master's sheep upon the same

hill-pastures. This man carried the infant, named Oedipus because

of his wounded and swollen feet, to Polybus of Corinth, a childless

king, who brought him up as his own son. Oedipus when he had grown to

manhood, was taunted with his obscure birth by his comrades in Corinth.

Thereupon he journeyed alone to Delphi to make inquiry concerning his

parentage from Phoebus. Phoebus told him naught thereof, but bade him

take heed lest he slay his father and wed his mother. Oedipus, deeming

that Polybus was his father and Merope his mother, determined to

return to Corinth no more. At that time Thebes was troubled with the

visitation of the Sphinx, and no man might rede her riddle. Oedipus,

passing through the Theban land, was met in a narrow path, where

three roads joined, by an old man on a chariot attended by servants.

The old man spoke rudely to him, commanding him to make way for his

horses, and one of the servants struck him. Whereupon Oedipus slew the

master, knowing not that he was his own father, Laius, and the men too,

all but one, who fled. Thereafter he passed on to Thebes, and solved

that riddle of the Sphinx, and the Thebans made him their king, and

gave him the lady Jocasta to be his wife. Thus were both the oracles

accomplished, and yet Oedipus and Jocasta remained ignorant of their

doom. For many years Oedipus ruled Thebes like a great and warlike

prince; and to him and Jocasta in wedlock were born two daughters and

two sons--Antigone and Ismene, Polyneices and Eteocles. These grew to

youth, and a seeming calm of fair weather and prosperity abode upon

their house. Yet the gods were mindful of the abomination, and in

course of time a plague was sent, which ravaged the people of Thebes.

Sorely pressed by calamity, Oedipus sent his brother-in-law Creon to

inquire at Delphi of the causes of the plague and of the means of

staying it. This brings us to the opening of _Oedipus the King_. At

this point something should be said about the mythus itself and about

the position of the several persons at the commencement of the tragedy.

The fable is obviously one of those which Max Müller and his school

describe as solar. Oedipus, who slays his father and weds his mother,

may stand for the Sun, who slays the Night and is married to the Dawn.

We know how all legends can fall into this mould, and how easy it is to

clap the Dawn on to the end of every Greek tale, like the #lêkythion

apôlesen# of the _Frogs_. This, however, is nothing to our purpose; for

Sophocles had never heard of solar myths. The tale of Thebes supplied

him with the subject of three dramas; he used it as a story well suited

for displaying passions in their strongest and most tragic workings.

As usual, he was not contented with merely following the traditional

version of the legend, nor did he insist upon its superstitious

elements. That the gods had a grudge against the Labdacidæ, that

the oracles given to Laius and Oedipus were not warnings so much as

sinister predictions of a doom inevitable, that the very powers who

uttered them were bent on blinding the victims of fate to their true

import, were thoroughly Greek notions, consistent with the divine

#phthonos#, or envy, of Herodotus, and not wholly inconsistent with

the gloomy theology of Æschylus. But it was no part of the method

of Sophocles to emphasize this horrible doctrine of destiny. On the

contrary, he moralized it. While preserving all the essential features

of the myth, he made it clear that the characters of men constitute

their fatality.

As our own Fletcher has nobly written:

Man is his own star, and the soul, that can

Render an honest and a perfect man,

Commands all light, all influence, all fate;

Nothing to him falls early or too late;

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,

Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.

What to the vulgar apprehension appears like doom, and to the

theologian like the direct interposition of the Deity, is to the tragic

poet but the natural consequence of moral, physical, and intellectual

qualities. These it is his function to set forth in high and stately

scenes, commingling with his psychological analysis and forcible

dramatic presentation somewhat of the old religious awe.

It may be urged that this is only shifting the burden of necessity,

not removing it. It is, perhaps, impossible scientifically to avoid a

fatalistic theory of some sort, since in one sense it is true that

A fish-wife hath a fate, and so have I--

But far above your finding.

Yet practically we do not act upon such theories, and, from the point

of view of ethics, there is all the difference in the world between

showing how the faults and sins of men must lead them to fearful ends,

and painting them in the grip of a remorseless and malignant deity.

Laius was warned that his son by Jocasta would kill him. Yet he begat a

son; and in his presumptuous disregard of heaven, thinking, forsooth,

that by mere barbarity a man may cheat the Omnipotent, and that the

All-seeing cannot save a child of prophecy and doom, he exposed this

son upon Cithæron. The boy lived. Thus the crime of Laius is want of

self-restraint in the first instance, contempt of God in the second,

and cruelty in the third. After this, Oedipus appears upon the theatre

of events. He, too, receives oracular warning--that he will slay his

sire and wed his mother. Yet, though well aware of the doubt which

rests upon his own birth--for it was just on this account that he

went to Delphi--he is satisfied with avoiding his supposed parents.

The first man whom he meets, while the words of the oracle are still

ringing in his ears, he slays; the first woman who is offered to him

in marriage, though old enough to be his mother, he weds. His crime

is haste of temper, heat of blood, blind carelessness of the divine

decrees. Jocasta shows her guilty infatuation in another form. Not

only does she participate in the first sin of Laius, but she forgets

the oracle which announced that Laius should be slain by his own

son. She makes no inquiry into the causes of his death. She does not

investigate the previous history of Oedipus, or observe the marks upon

his feet, but weds him heedlessly. Here, indeed, the legend itself

involves monstrous improbabilities--as, for instance, that Jocasta,

while a widow of a few days, should have been thus wedded to a stranger

young enough to be her son, that the Thebans should have made no

strict search for the murderer of their king, that Oedipus himself

should have heard nothing about the death and funeral of Laius, but

should have stepped incuriously into his place and sat upon his throne

without asking further questions either of his wife or of his subjects.

Previous to the opening of _Oedipus the King_, there is, therefore,

a whole tissue of absurdities; and to these Aristotle is probably

referring when he says: #alogon de mêden einai en tois pragmasin, ei de

mê, exô tês tragôidias, hoion ta en tôi Oidipodi tôi Sophokleous#.

Granting this, the vigorous logic wherewith the conclusions are wrought

out by Sophocles leaves nothing to be desired on the score of truth to

nature. There is, indeed, no work of tragic art which can be compared

with the _Oedipus_ for the closeness and consistency of the plot. To

use the critical terms of the _Poetics_, it would rank first among

tragedies for its #mythos# and for the #systasis pragmatôn#, even were

its #êthê# far less firmly traced. The triumph of Sophocles has been,

however, so to connect the #êthê# of his persons with the #pragmata#,

characters with plot, as to make the latter depend upon the former; and

in this kind of ethical causality lies the chief force of his tragic

art.

If questioned concerning the situation of events previous to the play

of _Oedipus_, it is possible that Sophocles would have pointed out that

the #hamartia#, or error common to all the _dramatis personæ_, was an

unwarrantable self-confidence. One and all they consult the oracle,

and then are satisfied with taking the affairs they had referred to

Phoebus into their own hands. Unlike the Orestes of Æschylus, they

do not endeavor to act up to the divine commands, and, having done

so, place themselves once more beneath the guidance of the god. The

oracle is all-important in the three plays on the tale of Thebes, and

Sophocles seems to have intended to inculcate a special lesson with

regard to the submission of the human will. Those who inquire of a god,

and who attempt to thwart his decrees by human skill and foresight,

will not prosper. The apparent success of their shifty schemes may

cause them to exclaim: "The oracle was false; how weak are those who

look for its accomplishment!" Thus they are lured by their self-conceit

into impiety. In the end, too, the oracle is found to be fearfully

exact. Those, therefore, who take the step of consulting Phoebus must

hold themselves responsible to him, must expect the fulfilment of his

prophecy; or if they seek to avert the promised evils, they must, at

all events, not do so by criminal contrivances and petty lawlessness,

such as man thinks that he may practise upon man. It was thus that

Sophocles conceived of the relation of human beings to the deity. He

delights in exhibiting the blindness of arrogance and self-confidence,

and in showing that characters determined by these qualities rush

recklessly to their own doom. At the same time he draws a clear

distinction between the man who is hardened in godless folly and one

who errs through simple haste. The impiety of Jocasta ends in suicide.

Oedipus, who has been impetuous and self-willed, finds a place for

repentance, and survives his worst calamities, to die a god-protected

and god-honored hero.

The opening scene of the _Oedipus_ serves a double purpose. While

it places the spectators at the exact point in the legend selected

by the poet for treatment, it impresses them with the greatness and

the majesty of the king. Thebes is worn out with plague. The hand of

Heaven lies heavily upon the citizens. Therefore the priest of Zeus

approaches the hero who once before had saved them from the Sphinx,

and who may now--fit representative of God on earth--find out a

remedy for this intolerable evil. Oedipus appears upon the stage, a

confident and careful ruler, sublime in the strength of manhood and

the consciousness of vast capacity, tender for the afflictions of his

people, yet undismayed by their calamity. He is just the man to sustain

a commonwealth by his firm character and favoring fortune. Flawless

in force of will and singleness of purpose, he seems incapable of

failure. To connect the notions of disgrace or guilt or shame with such

a king is utterly impossible. Yet, even so, Sophocles has hinted in the

speech of Oedipus a something overmuch of confidence and courage:

Well I know

That ye all suffer, yet, thus suffering, I

More than you all in overmeasure suffer:

For that which wounds you strikes at each man singly,

At each and not another; while my soul

For Thebes, for me, for you, feels one huge sorrow.

Even here the irony, for which the play is famous, begins to transpire.

Oedipus believes that his grief is sympathy for a vexed people

committed to his charge. Little does he know that, while he is pluming

himself upon his watchful care for others, he himself is the head and

front of all offending. In the word #kame#, almost negligently uttered,

lies the kernel of the future revelation. While he is informing the

suppliants that Creon has gone to Delphi for advice, the prince

arrives. A garland of good augury is on his brow; and in this sign

of an auspicious embassy we discern another stroke of tragic irony.

Phoebus has declared that the presence in Thebes of the hitherto

unpunished, unregarded murderer of Laius is the cause of the plague.

Oedipus, when he fully understands the matter, swears to discover

the offender. The curse which he pronounces on this guilty man is

terrible--terrible in its energy of interdiction and excommunication

from all rites of hospitality, from human sympathy, from earth and air

and water and the fruits of the field--but still more terrible through

the fact that all these maledictions are uttered on his own head. The

irony of the situation--if we are justified in giving this word to the

contrast between what seems and what really is--between Oedipus as he

appears to the burghers and Oedipus as he is known to us--rises in

the emphatic eloquence of his denunciation to a truly awful height.

At the same time his obvious sincerity enlists our sympathy upon his

side. We feel beforehand that the man who speaks thus will, when his

eyes are opened, submit to his self-imprecated doom. It now remains

to detect the murderer. Thinking that his faculty of divination may

be useful, Oedipus has already sent for the blind seer Teiresias.

Teiresias is one of the great creations of Sophocles. Twice he appears,

once in this play, once in the _Antigone_, each time in conflict with

infatuated kings. He is so aged, and the soul within him is so fixed on

things invisible, that he seems scarcely human. We think of him as of

one who dwells apart, not communing in ordinary social ways with men,

but listening to the unspoken words of God, and uttering his wisdom

in dark parable to those who heed him not. The Greek poets frequently

exhibited the indifference of prosperous persons to divine monitions.

Cassandra's prophecies were not attended to; the Delphic oracle spoke

in vain; and Teiresias is only honored when it is too late. Sophocles,

while maintaining the mysterious fascination of the soothsayer, has

marked his character by some strong touches of humanity. He is proud

and irritable to excess. His power of sarcasm is appalling, and his

indignation is inexorable. Between two stubborn and unyielding natures

like the seer and king sparks of anger could not fail to be struck; the

explosion that follows on their meeting serves to display the choleric

temper of Oedipus, which formed the main trait of his character, the

pith of his #hamartia#.

Oedipus greets Teiresias courteously, telling him that he, the king, is

doing all he can to find the murderer of Laius, and that the soothsayer

must spare no pains. To this generous patronage and protective welcome

Teiresias, upon whose sightless soul the truth has suddenly flashed,

answers with deep sighs, and requests to be led home again. This

naturally nettles Oedipus. The hastiness that drew him into his first

fault renders him now ungovernable. Teiresias keeps saying it will be

better for the king to remain ignorant, and the king retorts that he

is only a blind dotard; were he not blind, he, and no other, might be

suspected of the murder. This provokes an oracular response:

Ay! Is it so? I bid thee, then, abide

By thy first ordinance, and from this day

Join not in converse with these men or me,

Being thyself this land's impure defiler.

Thus the real state of affairs is suddenly disclosed; and were Oedipus

of a submissive temper, he would immediately have proceeded to the

discovery of the truth. This would, however, have destroyed the drama,

and have prevented the unfolding of the character of the king. Instead,

therefore, of heeding the seer's words, Oedipus rushes at once to the

conclusion that Creon and Teiresias are plotting to overthrow him in

his tyranny. The quarrel waxes hot. Each word uttered by Teiresias

is pregnant with terrific revelation. The whole context of events,

past, present, and future, is painted with intense lucidity in speech

that has the trenchant force of oracular conviction; yet Oedipus

remains so firmly rooted in his own integrity and in the belief which

he has suddenly assumed of Creon's treason, that he turns deaf ears

and a blind soul to the truth. At last the seer leaves him with this

denunciation:

"I tell thee this: the man whom thou so long

Seekest with threats and mandates for the murder

Of Laius, that very man is here,

By name an alien, but in season due

He shall be shown true Theban, and small joy

Shall have therein; for, blind, instead of seeing,

And poor, who once was rich, he shall go forth,

Staff-guided, groping, o'er a foreign land.

He shall be shown to be with his own children

Brother and sire in one, of her who bore him

Husband at once and offspring, of his father

Bedmate and murderer. Go; take now these words

Within, and weigh them; if thou find me false,

Say then that divination taught me nothing."

The next scene is one of altercation between Oedipus and Creon.

Oedipus, full of rage, still haunted by the suspicion of treason,

yet stung to the quick by some of the dark speeches of the prophet,

vehemently assails the prince, and condemns him to exile. Creon--who,

of course, is innocent, but who is not meant to have a generous or

lofty soul--defends himself in a dry and argumentative manner, until

Jocasta comes forth from the palace and seeks to quell their conflict.

Oedipus tells her haughtily that he is accused of being the murderer

of Laius. She begins her answer with a frivolous and impious assertion

that all oracles are nonsense. The oracle uttered against Laius came

to nothing, for his son died on Mount Cithæron, and robbers slew him

near Thebes long afterwards, where three ways meet. These words, #en

triplais hamaxitois#, stir suspicion in the mind of Oedipus. He asks

at once: "Where was the spot?" "In Phokis, where one goes to Delphi

and to Daulia." "What was Laius like?" "Not unlike you in shape," says

Jocasta, "but white-haired." "Who were with him?" "Five men, and he

rode a chariot." "Who told you all this?" "One who escaped, and who

begged me afterwards to send him from the palace, and who now keeps

a farm of ours in the country." Each answer adds to the certainty in

the mind of Oedipus that it was Laius whom he slew. The only hope left

is to send for the servant, and to find out whether he adheres to his

story of there having been more robbers than one. If he remains firm

upon this point, and does not confess that it was one solitary man who

slew his master and his comrades, then there is a chance that he, the

king, may not be guilty. Jocasta, with her usual levity, comforts him

by insisting that he spoke of robbers, in the plural, and that he must

not be suffered to retract his words.

While they are waiting for the servant, a messenger arrives from

Corinth with good news. Polybus, the king, is dead, and Oedipus is

proclaimed his successor. "Where now," shouts impious Jocasta, "are

your oracles--that you should slay your father? See you not how foolish

it is to trust to Phoebus and to auguries of birds? Chance is the lord

of all. Let us, therefore, live our lives as best we can." Awful is the

irony of these short-sighted jubilations; and awful, as Aristotle has

pointed out,[140] is the irony which makes this messenger of apparently

good tidings add the last link to the chain of evidence that will

overwhelm Oedipus with ruin. Oedipus exclaims: "Though my father is

dead, I may not return to Corinth: Merope still lives." "What," says

the messenger, "do you fear her because she is your mother? Set your

mind at ease. She is no mother of yours, nor was Polybus your father.

I gave you to them as a gift, when you were yet an infant." "Where did

you find me?" cries the king. "Upon Cithæron, a shepherd of the house

of Laius gave you to me; your feet were pierced, and I believe that you

were born in the royal household." Terrible word, Cithæron! It echoes

through this tragedy with horror--its scaurs and pastures, the scene

of the first crime. And now those two hinds, who had met there once,

apparently by chance, with the child of doom between them, are being

again, as though by chance, brought face to face, with the man of doom

between them, in order to make good the words of Teiresias:

#boês de tês sês poios ouk estai limên,

poios Kithairôn ouchi symphônos tacha?#

Jocasta is struck dumb by the answers of the messenger. She, and she

alone, knows now at last the whole truth; but she does not speak, while

Oedipus continues asking who the shepherd of the house of Laius was.

Then she utters words of fearful import, praying the king to go no

farther, nor to seek what, found, will plunge his soul into despair

like hers. After this, finding her suit ineffectual, she retires into

the palace. The chorus are struck by the wildness of her gestures,

and hint their dread that she is going to her doom of suicide. But

Oedipus, not yet fully enlightened, and preoccupied with the problem

which interests himself so deeply, only imagines that she shrinks from

the possible proof of his base birth. As yet, he does not suspect that

he is the own son of Laius; and here, it may be said in passing, the

sole weakness of the plot transpires. Neither the oracle first given

to him at Delphi, nor the plain speech of Teiresias, nor the news of

the Corinthian messenger, nor the pleadings of Jocasta, are sufficient

to suggest the real truth to his mind. Such profundity of blindness

is dramatically improbable. He is, however, soon destined to receive

illumination. The servant of Laius, who gave Jocasta intelligence of

the manner of her husband's death, is now brought upon the stage; and

in him the Corinthian messenger recognizes the same shepherd who had

given him the infant on Cithæron. Though reluctant to confess the

truth so long concealed, the shepherd is at last forced to reveal

all he knows; and in this supreme moment Oedipus discovers that he

is not only the murderer of his own father, but also that Jocasta

is his mother. In the madness of this revelation he rushes to the

palace. The chorus are left alone to moralize upon these terrible

events. Then another messenger arrives. Jocasta has hanged herself

within her bedchamber. Oedipus, breaking bars and bolts in the fire

of his despair, has followed her. Around him were the servants, drawn

together by the tumult. None, however, dared approach him. Led by an

inner impulse, he found the place where his wife and mother hung,

released the corpse, and tearing from her dress the golden buckles,

cut out both his eyes, crying aloud that no longer should they look

upon the light or be witness to his woe, seeing that when they might

have aided him they were as good as blind. Thus one day turned the

prosperity of Oedipus to "wailing, woe, death, disgrace, all evils that

have name--not one is absent." The speech of the messenger narrating

these events is a splendid instance of the energy of Sophocles, when he

chooses to describe a terrible event appallingly. It does not convey

the Æschylean mystery of brooding horror; but the scene is realized in

all its incidents, briefly, vividly, with ghastly clearness. Meanwhile,

the voice of Oedipus himself is heard. He bids the palace-doors be

opened, in order that all Thebes may see the parricide, the monster

of unhallowed, indescribable abominations. So the gates are rolled

asunder: and there lies dead Jocasta; and sightless Oedipus, with

bloody cheeks and beard, stands over her, and the halls are filled with

wailing women and woe-stricken men.

Here, if this had been a modern tragedy, the play of _Oedipus Tyrannus_

might have ended; but so abrupt and scenical a conclusion did not suit

the art of Sophocles. He had still further to develop the character

of Oedipus, and to offer the prospect of that future reconciliation

between the fate and the passions of his hero which he had in store.

For this purpose the last two hundred lines of the drama, though they

do not continue the plot, but rather suggest a new and secondary

subject of interest, are invaluable. Hitherto we have seen Oedipus

in the pride of monarchy and manhood, hasty, arrogant, yet withal a

just and able ruler. He is now, through a #peripeteia#, or revolution

of circumstances, more complete than any other in Greek tragedy,

revealed in the very depth of his calamity, still dignified. There is

no resistance left in the once so strong and stubborn man. The hand

of God, weighing heavily upon him, has bowed his head, and he is

humble as a little child. Yet the vehemence that marked his former

phase persists. It finds vent in the passionate lucidity wherewith he

examines all the details of the pollution he has unwittingly incurred,

and in the rage with which he demands to have his own curse carried out

against him. Let him be cast from the city, sent forth to wander on

the fells of Cithæron--#houmos Kithairôn houtos#. It was the highest

achievement of tragic art to exhibit so suddenly, and by so sharp a

transition, this new development of the king's nature. Saul of Tarsus,

when blinded by the vision, was not more immediately converted from

one mood into another, more contrite in profound sincerity of sorrow.

Still in the altered Oedipus we see the same man, the same temperament;

though all internal and external circumstances have been changed, so

that henceforward he will never tread the paths of life as once he

did. The completeness of his self-abandonment appears most vividly in

the dialogue with Creon, upon whose will his immediate fate depends.

When Creon, whom he had lately misjudged and treated with violent

harshness, comes and greets him kindly, the wretched king tastes the

very bitterness of degradation, yet he is not abject. He only prays

once more, with intensest urgency of pleading, to have the uttermost

of the excommunication he had vowed, executed upon his head. Thinking

less of himself than of the miserable beings associated with him in

disaster, he beseeches Creon to inter the queen, and, for his boys, to

give them only a fair chance in life--they will be men, and may carve

out their own fortunes in the world; but for his two poor girls, left

desolate, a scorn and mockery to all men, he can only pray that they

may come to him, be near him, bear the burden of their misery by their

father's side. The tenderness of Oedipus for Ismene and Antigone, his

yearning to clasp them, is terribly--almost painfully--touching, when

we remember who they were, how born, the children of what curses. The

words with which the king addresses them are even hazardous in their

directness. Yet it was needful that humanity should by some such strain

of passion be made to emerge from this tempest of soul-shattering woes;

and thus, too, a glimpse of that future is provided which remained for

Oedipus, if sorrowful, assuaged at least by filial love. In reply to

all his eloquent supplications Creon answers that he will not take upon

himself the responsibility of dealing with his case. Nothing can be

done without consulting the oracle at Delphi. Oedipus has, therefore,

to be patient and endure. The strong hero, who saved Thebes from the

Sphinx and swayed the city, is now in the hands of tutors and governors

awaiting his doom. He submits quietly, and the tragedy is ended.

The effect of such a tragedy as _Oedipus the King_ is to make men feel

that the earth is shaken underneath them, and that the heavens above

are big with thunder. Compassion and fear are agitated in the highest

degree; old landmarks seem to vanish; the mightiest have fallen, and

the most impious, convinced of God, have been goaded to self-murder.

Great, indeed, is the tragic poet's genius who can make the one sure

point amid this confusion the firmness of its principal fore-destined

victim. That is the triumph of Sophocles. Out of the chaos of the

_Oedipus Tyrannus_ springs the new order of the _Oedipus Coloneüs_; and

here it may be said that perhaps the most valid argument in favor of

the Æschylean trilogy as a supreme work of dramatic art is this--that

such a tragedy as the first Oedipus demanded such another as the

second. The new motives suggested in the last act were not sufficiently

worked out to their conclusion; much that happened in the climax of the

_Tyrannus_ seemed to necessitate the _Coloneüs_.

The interest of the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ centres in its plot, and that

is my only excuse for having dwelt so long on the structure of a

play familiar to every student. That of the _Oedipus Coloneüs_ is

different. It has, roughly speaking, no plot. It owes its perfect,

almost superhuman, beauty to the atmosphere which bathes it, as with

peace after tempest, with the lucid splendors of sunset succeeding

to a storm-vexed and tumultuous day. The scene is laid, as the name

indicates, in the village birthplace of the poet. Years are supposed

to have elapsed since the conclusion of the former tragedy; Oedipus,

after being detained in Thebes against his will at first, has now

been driven forth by Creon, and has wandered many miles in blindness,

led by his daughter's hand. The ethical interest of the play, so

far as it is not absorbed by Oedipus himself, centres principally

in Antigone, whereby we are prepared for her emergence into fullest

prominence in the tragedy which bears her name. Always keeping in mind

that these three plays are not a trilogy, I cannot but insist again

that much is lost, especially in all that concerns the unfolding of

Antigone's character, by not reading them in the order suggested by the

fable. At the same time, though Antigone engrosses our sympathy and

attention, Sophocles has varied the drama by a more than usual number

of persons. The generous energy of Theseus forms a fine contrast to

the inactivity forced upon Oedipus by the conditions of the subject,

and also to the meanness of Creon; while the episodes of Ismene's

arrival, of Antigone's abduction, and of the visit of Polyneices, add

movement to what might else have been too stationary. It should also

be said that all these subsidiary sources of interest are used with

subtle art by Sophocles for enhancing the dignity of Oedipus, for

arousing our sympathy with him, and for bringing into prominence the

chief features of his character. None can, therefore, be regarded as

superfluous, though, strictly speaking, they might have been detached

without absolute destruction of the drama, which is more than can be

said about the slightest incidents of _Oedipus Tyrannus_. As regards

Oedipus himself, that modification of his fiery temperament which

Sophocles revealed at the end of the first tragedy has now become

permanent. He is schooled into submission; yet he has not lost the old

impetuosity that formed the groundwork of his nature. He is still quick

to anger and vehement in speech, but both his anger and his vehemence

are justified by the occasion. Something, moreover, of fateful and

mysterious, severing him from the common race of men and shrouding him

within the seclusion of his dread calamity, has been added. The terror

of his dreadful past, and the prospect of his august future, environ

him with more than kingly dignity. The skill of Sophocles as a dramatic

poet is displayed in all its splendor by the new light thrown upon the

central figure of Oedipus. The effect of unity is not destroyed: those

painful shocks to our sense of probability so frequent when inferior

dramatists--poets of the rank of Fletcher or of Jonson--attempt

to depict a nature altered by internal reformation or by force of

circumstance do not occur. The Oedipus of both the tragedies remains

one man; we understand the change that has been wrought in him; and

while we feel that it is adequate and natural, we marvel at the wisdom

of the poet who could vary his design with so much firmness.

The oracle, which continues to play an important part in this tale

of Thebes, has warned Oedipus that he will end his days within the

precincts of the Semnai Theai, or august goddesses of retribution.

In his new phase the man of haste and wrath is no longer heedless of

oracles; nor does he let their words lie idle in his mind. It is,

therefore, with a strong presentiment of approaching death that he

discovers early in this play that his feet, led by Antigone, have

rested in the grove of the Furies at Colonus. The place itself is

fair. There are here no harpy-gorgons with bloodshot eyes, and vipers

twining in their matted hair. The meadows are dewy, with crocus-flowers

and narcissus; in the thickets of olive and laurel nightingales keep

singing; and rivulets spread coolness in the midst of summer's heat.

The whole wood is hushed, and very fresh and wild. A solemn stillness

broods there; for the feet of the profane keep far away, and none may

tread the valley-lawns but those who have been purified. The ransomed

of the Lord walk there. This solemnity of peace pervades the whole

play, forming, to borrow a phrase from painting, the silver-gray

harmony of the picture. In thus bringing Oedipus to die among the

unshowered meadows of those Dread Ladies, whom in his troubled life he

found so terrible, but whom in his sublime passage from the world he

is about to greet resignedly, we may trace peculiar depth of meaning.

The thought of death, calm but austere, tempers every scene in the

drama. We are in the presence of one whose life is ended, who is about

to merge the fever of existence in the tranquillity beyond. This

impression of solemnity is heightened when we remember that the poet

wrote the _Coloneüs_ in extreme old age. Over him, too, the genius

of everlasting repose already spread wings in the twilight, and the

mysteries of the grave were nearer to him and more daily present than

to other men.

A country fellow, who perceives Oedipus seated by his daughter on a

marble bench within the sacred precinct, bids them quit the spot,

for it is hallowed. Oedipus, however, knowing that his doom shall be

fulfilled, asks that he may be confronted with the elders of the place.

They come and gaze with mingled feelings of distrust and awe on the

blind hero, august in desolation. Before they can converse with him,

Oedipus has to quit the recesses of the grove, and gain a spot where

speech and traffic are permitted. Then, in answer to their questions,

he informs them who he is--Oedipus. At that name they start back in

horror, demanding that he shall carry the abomination of his presence

from their land. This affords the occasion for a splendid speech

from the old man, one of the most telling passages of eloquence in

Sophocles, in which he appeals to the time-long hospitality and fame

for generosity of Athens. Athens was never known to spurn the suppliant

or expel the stranger, and the deeds of Oedipus they so much dread are

sufferings rather:

#epei ta g' erga mou

peponthot' esti mallon ê dedrakota.#

The Chorus, moved by the mingled impetuosity and sound reasoning of

their suitor, perceive that the case is too grave for them to decide.

Accordingly, they send a messenger for Theseus; but, before he can be

summoned, Ismene arrives on horseback with the news that her brothers

are quarrelling about the throne of Thebes. Eteocles, the younger, has

usurped the sovereignty, while Polyneices has fled to Argos to engage

the chiefs of the Achaians in his cause. Both parties, meantime, are

eager to secure the person of Oedipus, since an oracle has proclaimed

that with him will victory abide. Oedipus, hearing these tidings,

bursts into a strain of passionate denunciation, which proves that

the old fire of his temper is smouldering still unquenched. When he

was forlorn and in misery, his unnatural sons took no thought of him.

They sent him forth to roam a pariah upon the earth, leaving to his

daughters the care and burden of supporting him. Now, basely anxious

for their selfish profit, they come to claim possession of his old,

world-wearied flesh. Instead of blessings, they shall meet with curses.

Instead of the fair land of Thebes to lord it over, they shall barely

get enough ground to die and be buried in. He, meanwhile, will abide at

Athens, and bequeath a heritage of help and honor to her soil.

The Chorus now call upon Oedipus to perform the rites of purification

required by the Eumenides--rites which Sophocles has described with

the loving minuteness of one to whom the customs of Colonus were from

boyhood sacred. Ismene goes to carry out their instructions, and in her

absence Theseus arrives upon the scene. Theseus, throughout the drama,

plays towards Oedipus the part of a good-hearted hospitable friend. His

generosity is ethically contrasted with the meanness of Creon and the

selfishness of Polyneices, while, artistically, the practical energy

of his character serves for a foil to the stationary dignity of the

chief actor. Sophocles has thus contrived to give weight and importance

to a personage who might, in weaker hands, have been degraded into a

mere instrument. Oedipus assures the Attic king that he will prove no

useless and unserviceable denizen. The children of Erechtheus, whose

interests rank first in the mind of Theseus, will find him in the

future a powerful and god-protected sojourner within their borders.

His natural sympathy for the persecuted and oppressed having been thus

strengthened by the prospect of reciprocal advantage, Theseus formally

accepts Oedipus as a suppliant, and promises him full protection. At

this point, forming, as it were, a halting-place in the action of the

play, Sophocles introduced that famous song about Colonus, which no

one has yet succeeded in translating, but which, for modern ears, has

received new value from the music of Mendelssohn.

What follows, before the final climax of the drama, consists of the

efforts made by Creon, on the part of Eteocles, and by Polyneices, to

enlist Oedipus respectively upon their sides in the war of succession

to the Theban throne. Creon displays his heartless, cunning, impudent,

sophistical, and forceful character, while Oedipus opposes indignation

and contempt, unmasking his hypocrisy, and stripping his specious

arguments of all that hides their naked selfishness. In this scene we

feel that Sophocles is verging upon the Euripidean manner. A little

more would make the altercation between Creon and Oedipus pass over

into a forensic wrangling-match. As it is, the chief dramatic value

of the episode is to exhibit the grandeur of the wrath of Oedipus in

its righteous heat when contrasted with the wretched shifts of a mere

rhetorical sophist.

After Creon, by the help of Theseus, has been thwarted in his

attempt to carry off Antigone, Polyneices approaches with crocodile

tears, fawning intercessions, and fictitious sorrow for his father's

desolation. Oedipus flashes upon his covert egotism the same light of

clear unclouded insight which had unmasked Creon. "What," he asks,

"is the value of tears now, of prayers now? Dry were your eyes, hard

as stone your heart, dumb your lips, when I went forth from Thebes

unfriended. Here is your guerdon: Before Thebes's walls you shall

die, pierced by your brother's hand, and your brother by yours." The

imprecation of the father upon the son would be unnatural, were it

not for the son's falseness, who behaved like a Regan to Oedipus in

his calamity, and who now, when the old man has become a mysteriously

important personage, seeks to make the most of him for his own uses.

The protracted dialogues with Creon and Polyneices serve to enhance

the sublimity of Oedipus. He, all the while, is seated, a blind,

travel-stained, neglected mendicant, upon the marble bench of the

Eumenides. There is horror in his very aspect. Hellas rings with the

abominations connected with his name. Yet, to this poor pariah, to this

apparent object of pity and loathing, come princes and warriors capable

of stirring all the States of Greece in conflict. He rejects them,

firm in his consciousness of heaven-appointed destiny. Sophocles seems

bent on showing how the wrath of God may be turned aside from its most

signal and notorious victims by real purity of heart and nobleness of

soul; how, from the depths of degradation and affliction, the spirit

of man may rise; and how the lot of demigods may be reserved for those

whom the world ignorantly judges worthy of its scorn. Oedipus of

late stood like the lightning-blasted tree that travellers dread--the

_evitandum bidental_ of Roman superstition. His withered limbs have now

more health and healing in them than the leaf-embowered forest oak.

The treatment of Polyneices in the _Oedipus Coloneüs_ supplies a good

example of the Sophoclean tendency to humanize the ancient myths of

Hellas. The curse pronounced by Oedipus formed an integral element

of that portion of the legend which suggested to Æschylus the _Seven

against Thebes_. By its force, the whole weight of the doom that

overhangs the house of Laius is brought to bear upon the suicidal

brethren, both of whom rush helplessly, with eyes open, to meet

inevitable fate.

#ô Zeu te kai Gê kai polissouchoi theoi,

Ara t' Erinys patros hê megasthenês#

are the opening words of the prayer of Eteocles in that tragedy; while

phrases like these, #ô ponoi domôn neoi palaioisi symmigeis kakois# and

#ô melaina kai teleia geneos Oidipou t' ara#, form the burden of the

choric songs. Sophocles does not seek to make the wrath of Oedipus less

terrible; he adheres to the old outline of the story, and heightens the

tragic horror of the curse by framing for it words intense by reason of

their very calculated calmness (1383-1396). At the same time he shows

how the obstinate temper of Polyneices, and his sense of honor, are

necessary to its operation. After the dreadful sentence, dooming him

to self-murder by his brother's spear, has been pronounced, Polyneices

stands before his father and his sister like one stunned. Antigone,

with a woman's instinct, entreats him to choose the only way still

left of safety. He may disband the army, and retire from the adventure

against Thebes. To this her brother answers:

#all' ouch hoion te. pôs gar authis an palin

strateum' agoimi tauton eisapax tresas?#

when she persists, he repeats #mê peith' ha mê dei#. Thus, instead of

bringing into strong relief the operation of blind fate, Sophocles

places in the foreground the human agencies which contribute to the

undoing of Polyneices. His crime of unfilial egotism, his dread of

being thought a coward, and his honor rooted in dishonor, drive him

through the tempest of his father's curse upon the rock of doom. The

part played by Antigone in this awful scene of altercation between her

father and her brother, first interceding for mercy, and then striving

to break the stubborn will of the rebellious youth,[141] prepares our

minds for the tragedy in which she will appear as protagonist. Hitherto

she has been remarkable for filial love. She now shows herself a gentle

and tender sister to one who had deeply wronged her. The absolute

unselfishness which gives to her the beauty as of some clear, flawless

jewel shines forth by anticipation in the _Coloneüs_, enlisting our

warmest sympathies upon her side, and tempering the impression of

hardness that might be produced by a simple study of the _Antigone_.

When Polyneices, with the curse still ringing in his ears, has fled

forth, Cain-like, from the presence of his father, thunder is heard,

and the end approaches. The chief actors, led by the blind hero, move

from the stage in order suited to the processional gravity of the Greek

theatre, while the speech of the Messenger, conveying to the Chorus

the news of the last minutes in the life of Oedipus, prepares the

spectators for the reappearance of his daughters on the scene. As in

the _Oedipus Tyrannus_, so now a new motive of interest is introduced

in the last act of the drama. The _Antigone_ is imperatively demanded

as a sequel. Our attention is riveted upon Antigone, who in losing

her father has lost all. Her first thought is that he died nobly,

peacefully, at one with God. Her next thought is that she shall never

see him again, never more bear the sweet burden of anxiety and pain

for him, never even have access to his hidden tomb. Her third thought

is a longing to be dead with him, enfolded in oblivion of the fate

which persecutes her kith and kin. Life stretches before her boundless,

homeless, comfortless, nor has she now a single memory for him whose

love might have consoled a woman of less stubborn soul--for Hæmon. It

is characteristic of his whole conception of Antigone that Sophocles

introduced no allusion to that underplot of love at this point. When

Theseus reproves her for despair, she awakes to fresh unselfishness:

"Send me to Thebes," she cries, "that I may stay, if possible, my

brothers' strife." Throughout this final scene the single-hearted heat

and firm will of Antigone, her desire for action, and her readiness to

accept responsibility are contrasted with Ismene's yielding temper and

passivity. We are thus prepared for the opening of the third drama,

which, though written first by Sophocles, is the artistic close and

climax of the tale of Thebes.

The most perfect female character in Greek poetry is Antigone. She is

purely Greek, unlike any woman of modern fiction, except perhaps the

Fedalma of George Eliot. In her filial piety, in her intercession for

Polyneices at the knees of Oedipus, in her grief when her father is

taken from her, she does, indeed, resemble the women whom most men

among us have learned to honor in their sisters or their daughters or

their mother. Of such women the Greek maiden, with her pure calm face

and virginal straight lines of classic drapery, is still the saint and

patroness. But what shall we say of the Antigone of this last drama, of

the sister who is willing, lest her brother lie unburied on the Theban

plain, to lay her own life down, disobeying the law of her sovereign,

defying Creon to the face, appealing against unjust tribunals to the

judgment-seat of powers more ancient than the throne of Zeus himself,

and marching to her living tomb with dauntless strength in order that

the curse-attainted ghost of Polyneices shall have rest in Hades? To

the modern mind she appears a being from another sphere. A strain of

unearthly music seems to announce her entrance and her exit on the

stage. That the sacrifice of the sister's very life, the breaking

of her plighted troth to Hæmon, should follow upon the sprinkling

of those few handfuls of dust--that she should give that life up

smilingly, nor ever in her last hours breathe her lover's name--is a

tragic circumstance for which our sympathies are not prepared: we can

neither divest our minds of the fixed modern prejudice that the first

duty of a woman is to her husband, nor can we fully enter into the

antique superstition of defrauded sepulture. Yet it is necessary to do

both of these things, to sequester Antigone from the sphere of modern

obligations, and to enter hand in hand with her the inner sanctuary of

antique piety, in order to do justice to the conception of Sophocles.

This effort of the imagination may be facilitated by remembering,

first, that Antigone inherited her father's proud self-will--

#dêloi to gennêm' ômon ex ômou patros

tês paidos; eikein d' ouk epistatai kakois#--

and, secondly, that disaster after disaster, the loss of Oedipus,

the death of her two brothers, has come huddling upon her in a storm

of fate, so that life is, in a manner, over for her, and she feels

isolated in a cold and cruel world. This combination of her character

and her circumstances renders her action in the _Antigone_ conceivable.

Without the hardness she inherited from Oedipus, she could not have

gone through her tragic part. Without the vow she registered above her

father's grave, to bring help to her brethren, seeing that they alone

were left, the sentiment of her last speech would sound rhetorical.

Moreover, the poet who breathed into her form a breath of life so

fiery has himself justified us in regarding her act as one removed

from the plain path of virtue. Antigone was no Hindoo widow to die

upon a husband's pyre. Her heroism, her resistance offered to the will

of Creon, had in it a splendid criminality. It was just the casuistry

of the conflict between public and private obligations, between the

dictates of her conscience and the commands of her sovereign, that

enabled Sophocles to render the peculiar stoicism of her character

pathetic. In spite of all these considerations, it is probable that she

will strike a modern reader at the first as frigid. Especially, if he

have failed to observe the _nuances_ of her portrait in the _Oedipus

Coloneüs_, he will be inclined to wish that Sophocles had softened

here and there the outlines of her adamantine statue. Yet, after long

contemplation of those perfect lineaments, we come to recognize in

her a purity of passion, a fixity of purpose, a loyalty of kinship, a

sublime enthusiasm for duty, simply conceived and self-justified in

spite of all conventions to the contrary, which soar above the strain

of modern tragic sentiment. Even Alfieri, in the noble drawing he has

sketched from the Sophoclean picture, could not abstain from violating

its perfection by this sentimental touch of common feeling:

Emone, ah! tutto io sento,

Tutto l' amor, che a te portava: io sento

Il dolor tutto, a cui ti lascio.

No such words are to be found in Sophocles upon the lips of the dying

Antigone. She is all for her father and her brothers. The tragedy of

Hæmon belongs to Creon, not to her. Her furthest concessions to the

sympathies which might have swayed a weaker woman are found in this

line,

#ô philtath' Haimon, hôs s' atimazei patêr#,

and in the passage of the Kommos where she bewails her luckless lot of

maidenhood. For the rest, Sophocles has sustained her character as that

of one "whom, like sparkling steel, the strokes of chance made hard and

firm." This steely durability, this crystalline sparkle, divide her not

only from the ideal raised by romance for womanhood, but distinguish

her, as the daughter of Oedipus, from the general sisterhood even of

Greek heroines.

The peculiar qualities of Antigone are brought into sharp relief by the

milder virtues of Ismene, who thinks it right to obey Creon, and who

has no spirit for the deed of daring, but who is afterwards eager to

share the punishment of her sister. Antigone repels her very sternly,

herein displaying the force of her nature under its less amiable

aspect: "Have courage! Thou livest, but my soul long since hath died."

The glory of the act is hers alone. Ismene has no right to share it

when the risks are past, the penalty is paid. Antigone's repulsion of

her sister seems to supply the key to her own heroism. "Oedipus," she

says, "is dead; my brethren are dead: for them I lived, and in their

death I died to life; but you--your heart is not shut up within your

father's and your brother's grave; it is still warm, still eager for

love and the joys of this world. Live, then. For me it would be no more

possible to live such life as yours than for the clay-cold corpse upon

the bier."

The character of Creon, darkened in its tone and shadow to the utmost

with a view to affording a foil of another species for Antigone, was

thought worthy of minute and careful treatment by Sophocles. In the

_Oedipus Tyrannus_ he is wronged rather than wronging. While suffering

from the unjust suspicion and hasty language of the king, he pleads

his cause with decent gravity and shows no sign of either arrogance

or cowardice. At the end, when Oedipus has fallen, his own behavior

is such as would not disgrace a generous as well as prudent prince.

The neutrality for good or evil which distinguishes Creon in this

play, marking him out in contrast with the fiery heat of Oedipus,

the impious irony of Jocasta, is, to say the least, respectable. In

the _Oedipus Coloneüs_ he plays a consistently mean and odious part;

his pragmatical display of rhetoric before the burghers of Colonus,

when tested by his violent and cruel conduct towards Antigone, proves

him to be a hollow-hearted and specious hypocrite. The light here

reflected back upon his respectability in the _Tyrannus_ is decidedly

unfavorable. In the _Antigone_ Creon becomes, if possible, still

more odious; only our animosity against him is tempered by contempt.

To the faults of egotism, hardness, and hypocritical prating, are

now added the infatuation of self-will and the godless hatred of a

dead foe. There is, indeed, a show of right in the decree published

concerning the two brothers, one of whom had brought a foreign army

against Thebes; but it would be sophistry to maintain that Creon was

actuated by patriotic motives. The defeat and death of Polyneices were

punishment enough. By pursuing his personal spite beyond the grave

Creon insults the common instincts of humanity, the sympathies of the

people, and the supposed feelings of the gods, who cannot bear to gaze

upon abominations. The pathetic self-devotion of Antigone, the voice

of the city, the remonstrances of Hæmon, and the warnings of Teiresias

are all thrown away upon his stubborn and conceited obstinacy. He shows

himself, in short, to be a tyrant of the orthodox sort. Like a tyrant,

he is, moreover, absurdly suspicious: the guardian has, he thinks, been

bought; Ismene must be hatching treason; Hæmon prefers a woman to his

duty; Teiresias is plotting for the sake of gain against him. When it

is just too late, he gives way helplessly and feebly, moved to terror

by the dark words of the seer. Creon is, therefore, a mixed character,

great neither for good nor for evil, weak through wilfulness, plausible

in words and wavering in his determinations, a man who might have

passed for excellent if he had never had to wield a kingdom's power.

His own description of himself--#mataion andra#--suits him not only in

the utter collapse of his character and rain of his fortunes, but also

in the height of his prosperity and fulness of his seeming strength.

Sophocles might fairly be censured for having made the misery of Creon

the climax of a drama which ought to have had its whole interest

centred in Antigone. Our sympathies have not been sufficiently enlisted

on the side of Hæmon to make us care much about his death. For

Eurydice it is impossible to rouse more than a languid pity. Creon,

we feel, gets no more than he deserves; instead of being sorry for

him, we are only angry that he was not swept away into the dustheap

of oblivion sooner. It was surely a mistake to divert the attention

of the audience, at the very end of the tragedy, from its heroine to

a character which, like that of Creon, rouses impatient scorn as well

as antipathy. That Sophocles had artistic reasons for not concluding

this play with the death of Antigone may be readily granted by those

who have made the crises of the _Ajax_, the _Oedipus Tyrannus_, and

the _Oedipus Coloneüs_ the subject of special study. He preferred,

it seems, to relax the strained sympathies of his audience by a

prolongation of the drama on an altered theme. Yet this scarcely

justifies the shifting of the centre of interest attempted in the

_Antigone_. We have to imagine that the inculcation of a moral lesson

upon the crime of #asebeia# was the poet's paramount object.[142] If

so, he sacrificed dramatic effect to ethics.

It should be noticed that Antigone, in whom the fate of the family of

Laius is finally accomplished, falls an innocent victim. Her tragedy is

no immediate consequence of the Oedipodean curse. While her brethren

were wilfully involved in the doom of their house, she perished in the

cause of divine charity. Finding that the immutable ordinances of

Heaven clashed with the arbitrary volition of a ruler, she preferred to

obey the law of conscience and to die at the behest of a pride-maddened

tyrant. She is technically disobedient, morally most duteous. Thus the

_Antigone_ carries us beyond the region of hereditary disaster into the

more universal sphere of ethical casuistry. Its tragic interest depends

less upon the evolution of the law of ancestral guilt than on the

conflict of two duties. By suggesting the casuistical question to his

audience, while he freed his heroine from all doubt upon the subject,

Sophocles maintained the sublime simplicity which distinguishes

Antigone above all women of romance. The retribution that falls on

Creon furnishes a powerful example of the Greek doctrine of Nemesis;

but over Antigone herself Nemesis exerts no sway. In her action there

was nothing unconsidered; in her doom there was nothing unforeseen.

FOOTNOTES:

[129] "Fain would I be a fair lyre of ivory, and fair boys carrying me

to Dionysus's choir."

[130] "Soul of mine, in due season it is meet to gather love, when life

is young."

[131] _De Aud. Poet._, p. 16 C.

[132] _De Subl._, xxxiii. 5.

[133] See above, p. 378.

[134] Notice the phrases #beltiones# in _Poet._, cap. ii., as

compared with #kath' hêmas#, and again #homoious poiountes, kallious

graphousin#, in cap. xv., together with the whole analogy of painting

in both of these places.

[135] Cap. xxvi.

[136] _Oed. Tyr._, 863; _Ant._, 450. The first translation is borrowed

from Mr. M. Arnold.

[137] See what Goethe says about the importance of Creon and Ismene in

the _Antigone_. (Eckermann, vol. i.)

[138] Our imperfect knowledge of the Attic drama prevents our forming

any opinion as to the employment of the _deus ex machinâ_ by the

earlier tragedians.

[139] English Translation, vol. i. p. 371.

[140] _Poetics_, xi.

[141] See especially 1181-1203, 1414-1443.

[142] The last six lines spoken by the Chorus seem to justify this

view. A couplet from the _Pheræi_ of Moschion might be inscribed as a

motto upon the _Antigone_:

#kenon thanontos andros aikizein skian;

zôntas kolazein ou thanontas eusebes.#

END OF VOL. I.

Transcriber's Notes:

Simple spelling, grammar, and typographical errors were

corrected.

Punctuation normalized.

Anachronistic and non-standard spellings retained as printed.

Italics markup is enclosed in _underscores_.

Gesperrt markup is enclosed in +plus signs+.

Fancy or unusual font markup is enclosed in ~tilde symbols~.

Greek text is transliterated and enclosed in #number signs#.