In 1869, having read the Antigone with a pupil who at the time had a
passion for the stage, I was led to attempt a metrical version of the
_Antigone_, and, by and by, of the Electra and Trachiniae.[1] I had
the satisfaction of seeing this last very beautifully produced by an
amateur company in Scotland in 1877; when Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin may be
said to have 'created' the part of Dêanira. Thus encouraged, I
completed the translation of the seven plays, which was published by
Kegan Paul in 1883 and again by Murray in 1896. I have now to thank
Mr. Murray for consenting to this cheaper issue.
The seven extant plays of Sophocles have been variously arranged. In
the order most frequently adopted by English editors, the three plays
of the Theban cycle, Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus Coloneus, and Antigone,
have been placed foremost.
In one respect this is obviously convenient, as appearing to present
continuously a connected story. But on a closer view, it is in two
ways illusory.
1. The Antigone is generally admitted to be, comparatively speaking,
an early play, while the Oedipus Coloneus belongs to the dramatist's
latest manner; the first Oedipus coming in somewhere between the two.
The effect is therefore analogous to that produced on readers of
Shakespeare by the habit of placing Henry VI after Henry IV and V. But
tragedies and 'histories' or chronicle plays are not _in pari
materia_.
2. The error has been aggravated by a loose way of speaking of 'the
Theban Trilogy', a term which could only be properly applicable if the
three dramas had been produced in the same year. I have therefore now
arranged the seven plays in an order corresponding to the most
probable dates of their production, viz. Antigone, Aias, King Oedipus,
Electra, Trachiniae, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonos. A credible
tradition refers the Antigone to 445 B.C. The Aias appears to be not
much later--it may even be earlier--than the Antigone. The Philoctetes
was produced in 408 B.C., when the poet was considerably over eighty.
The Oedipus at Colonos has always been believed to be a composition of
Sophocles' old age. It is said to have been produced after his death,
though it may have been composed some years earlier. The tragedy of
King Oedipus, in which the poet's art attained its maturity, is
plausibly assigned to an early year of the Peloponnesian war (say 427
B.C.), the Trachiniae to about 420 B.C. The time of the Electra is
doubtful; but Professor Jebb has shown that, on metrical grounds, it
should be placed after, rather than before, King Oedipus. Even the
English reader, taking the plays as they are grouped in this volume,
may be aware of a gradual change of manner, not unlike what is
perceptible in passing from Richard II to Macbeth, and from Macbeth to
The Winter's Tale or Cymbeline. For although the supposed date of the
Antigone was long subsequent to the poet's first tragic victory, the
forty years over which the seven plays are spread saw many changes of
taste in art and literature.
Footnote:
1 _Three Plays of Sophocles:_ Blackwood, 1873.
* * * * *
PREFATORY NOTE TO THE
EDITION OF 1883
I. The Hellenic spirit has been repeatedly characterized as simple
Nature-worship. Even the Higher Paganism has been described as 'in
other words the purified worship of natural forms.'[1] One might
suppose, in reading some modern writers, that the Nymphs and Fauns,
the River-Gods and Pan, were at least as prominent in all Greek poetry
as Zeus, Apollo, and Athena, or that Apollo was only the sweet singer
and not also the prophet of retribution.
The fresh and unimpaired enjoyment of the Beautiful is certainly the
aspect of ancient life and literature which most attracted the
humanists of the sixteenth century, and still most impresses those
amongst ourselves who for various reasons desire to point the contrast
between Paganism and Judaism. The two great groups of forces vaguely
known as the Renaissance and the Revolution have both contributed to
this result. Men who were weary of conventionality and of the weight
of custom 'heavy as frost and deep almost as life,' have longed for
the vision of 'Oread or Dryad glancing through the shade,' or to 'hear
old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.' Meanwhile, that in which the
Greeks most resembled us, 'the human heart by which we live,' for the
very reason that it lies so near to us, is too apt to be lost from our
conception of them. Another cause of this one-sided view is the
illusion produced by the contemplation of statuary, together with the
unapproachable perfection of form which every relic of Greek antiquity
indisputably possesses.
But on turning from the forms of Greek art to the substance of Greek
literature, we find that Beauty, although everywhere an important
element, is by no means the sole or even the chief attribute of the
greatest writings, nor is the Hellenic consciousness confined within
the life of Nature, unless this term is allowed to comprehend man with
all his thoughts and aspirations. It was in this latter sense that
Hegel recognized the union of depth with brightness in Greek culture:
'If the first paradise was the paradise of nature, this is the second,
the higher paradise of the human spirit, which in its fair
naturalness, freedom, depth and brightness here comes forth like a
bride out of her chamber. The first wild majesty of the rise of
spiritual life in the East is here circumscribed by the dignity of
form, and softened into beauty. Its depth shows itself no longer in
confusion, obscurity, and inflation, but lies open before us in simple
clearness. Its brightness (Heiterkeit) is not a childish play, but
covers a sadness which knows the baldness of fate but is not by that
knowledge driven out of freedom and measure.' Hegel's Werke, vol. XVI.
p. 139 (translated by Prof. Caird). The simplicity of Herodotus, for
example, does not exclude far reaching thoughts on the political
advantages of liberty, nor such reflections on experience as are
implied in the saying of Artabanus, that the transitoriness of human
life is the least of its evils. And in what modern writing is more of
the wisdom of life condensed than in the History of Thucydides? It is
surely more true to say of Greek literature that it contains types of
all things human, stamped with the freshness, simplicity, and
directness which belong to first impressions, and to the first
impressions of genius.
Now the 'thoughts and aspirations,' which are nowhere absent from
Greek literature, and make a centre of growing warmth and light in its
Periclean period--when the conception of human nature for the first
time takes definite shape--have no less of Religion in them than
underlay the 'creed outworn'. To think otherwise would be an error of
the same kind as that 'abuse of the word Atheism' against which the
author of the work above alluded to protests so forcibly.
Religion, in the sense here indicated, is the mainspring and vital
principle of Tragedy. The efforts of Aeschylus and Sophocles were
sustained by it, and its inevitable decay through the scepticism which
preceded Socrates was the chief hindrance to the tragic genius of
Euripides. Yet the inequality of which we have consequently to
complain in him is redeemed by pregnant hints of something yet 'more
deeply interfused,' which in him, as in his two great predecessors, is
sometimes felt as 'modern,' because it is not of an age but for all
time. The most valuable part of every literature is something which
transcends the period and nation out of which it springs.
On the other hand, much that at first sight seems primitive in Greek
tragedy belongs more to the subject than to the mode of handling. The
age of Pericles was in advance of that in which the legends were first
Hellenized and humanized, just as this must have been already far
removed from the earliest stages of mythopoeic imagination. The reader
of Aeschylus or Sophocles should therefore be warned against
attributing to the poet's invention that which is given in the fable.
An educated student of Italian painting knows how to discriminate--say
in an Assumption by Botticelli--between the traditional conventions,
the contemporary ideas, and the refinements of the artist's own fancy.
The same indulgence must be extended to dramatic art. The tragedy of
King Lear is not rude or primitive, although the subject belongs to
prehistoric times in Britain. Nor is Goethe's Faust mediaeval in
spirit as in theme. So neither is the Oedipus Rex the product of
'lawless and uncertain thoughts,' notwithstanding the unspeakable
horror of the story, but is penetrated by the most profound estimate
of all in human life that is saddest, and all that is most precious.
Far from being naive naturalists after the Keats fashion, the Greek
tragic poets had succeeded to a pessimistic reaction from simple Pagan
enjoyment; they were surrounded with gloomy questionings about human
destiny and Divine Justice, and they replied by looking steadily at
the facts of life and asserting the supreme worth of innocence,
equity, and mercy.
They were not philosophers, for they spoke the language of feeling;
but the civilization of which they were the strongest outcome was
already tinged with influences derived from early philosophy--
especially from the gnomic wisdom of the sixth century and from the
spirit of theosophic speculation, which in Aeschylus goes far even to
recast mythology. The latter influence was probably reinforced,
through channels no longer traceable, by the Eleusinian worship, in
which the mystery of life and death and of human sorrow had replaced
the primitive wonder at the phenomena of the year.
And whatever elements of philosophic theory or mystic exaltation the
drama may have reflected, it was still more emphatically the
repository of some of the most precious traditions of civilized
humanity--traditions which philosophy has sometimes tended to
extenuate, if not to destroy.
Plato's Gorgias contains one of the most eloquent vindications of the
transcendent value of righteousness and faithfulness as such. But when
we ask, 'Righteousness in what relation?'--'Faithfulness to whom?'--
the Gorgias is silent; and when the vacant outline is filled up in the
Republic, we are presented with an ideal of man's social relations,
which, although it may be regarded as the ultimate development of
existing tendencies, yet has no immediate bearing on any actual
condition of the world.
The ideal of the tragic poet may be less perfect; or rather he does
not attempt to set before us abstractedly any single ideal. But the
grand types of character which he presents to the world are not merely
imaginary. They are creatures of flesh and blood, men and women, to
whom the unsullied purity of their homes, the freedom and power of
their country, the respect and love of their fellow-citizens, are
inestimably dear. From a Platonic, and still more from a Christian
point of view, the best morality of the age of Pericles is no doubt
defective. Such counsels of perfection as 'Love your enemies', or 'A
good man can harm no one, not even an enemy',--are beyond the horizon
of tragedy, unless dimly seen in the person of Antigone. The
coexistence of savage vindictiveness with the most affectionate
tenderness is characteristic of heroes and heroines alike, and
produces some of the most moving contrasts. But the tenderness is no
less deep and real for this, and while the chief persons are thus
passionate, the Greek lesson of moderation and reasonableness is
taught by the event, whether expressed or not by the mouth of sage or
prophet or of the 'ideal bystander'.
Greek tragedy, then, is a religious art, not merely because associated
with the festival of Dionysus, nor because the life which it
represented was that of men who believed, with all the Hellenes, in
Zeus, Apollo, and Athena, or in the power of Moira and the Erinyes,--
not merely because it represented
'the dread strife
Of poor humanity's afflicted will
Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny,'
but much more because it awakened in the Athenian spectator emotions
of wonder concerning human life, and of admiration for nobleness in
the unfortunate--a sense of the infinite value of personal uprightness
and of domestic purity--which in the most universal sense of the word
were truly religious,--because it expressed a consciousness of depths
which Plato never fathomed, and an ideal of character which, if less
complete than Shakespeare's, is not less noble. It is indeed a 'rough'
generalization that ranks the Agamemnon with the Adoniazusae as a
religious composition.
II. This spiritual side of tragic poetry deserves to be emphasized
both as the most essential aspect of it, and as giving it the most
permanent claim to lasting recognition. And yet, apart from this,
merely as dramas, the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
will never cease to be admired. These poets are teachers, but they
teach through art. To ask simply, as Carlyle once did, 'What did they
think?' is not the way to understand or learn from them.
Considered simply as works of art, the plays of Sophocles stand alone
amongst dramatic writings in their degree of concentration and complex
unity.
1. The interest of a Sophoclean drama is always intensely personal,
and is almost always centred in an individual destiny. In other words,
it is not historical or mythical, but ethical. Single persons stand
out magnificently in Aeschylus. But the action is always larger than
any single life. Each tragedy or trilogy resembles the fragment of a
sublime Epic poem. Mighty issues revolve about the scene, whether this
is laid on Earth or amongst the Gods, issues far transcending the fate
of Orestes or even of Prometheus. In the perspective painting of
Sophocles, these vast surroundings fall into the background, and the
feelings of the spectator are absorbed in sympathy with the chief
figure on the stage, round whom the other characters--the members of
the chorus being included--are grouped with the minutest care.
2. In this grouping of the persons, as well as in the conduct of the
action, Sophocles is masterly in his use of pathetic contrast. This
motive must of course enter into all tragedy--nothing can be finer
than the contrast of Cassandra to Clytemnestra in the Agamemnon,--but
in Sophocles it is all-pervading, and some of the minor effects of it
are so subtle that although inevitably felt by the spectator they are
often lost upon the mere reader or student. And every touch, however
transient, is made to contribute to the main effect.
To recur once more to the much-abused analogy of statuary:--the work
of Aeschylus may be compared to a colossal frieze, while that of
Sophocles resembles the pediment of a smaller temple. Or if, as in
considering the Orestean trilogy, the arrangement of the pediment
affords the more fitting parallel even for Aeschylus, yet the forms
are so gigantic that minute touches of characterization and of
contrast are omitted as superfluous. Whereas in Sophocles, it is at
once the finish of the chief figure and the studied harmony of the
whole, which have led his work to be compared with that of his
contemporary Phidias. Such comparison, however, is useful by way of
illustration merely. It must never be forgotten that, as Lessing
pointed out to some who thought the Philoctetes too sensational,
analogies between the arts are limited by essential differences of
material and of scope. All poetry represents successive moments. Its
figures are never in repose. And although the action of Tragedy is
concentrated and revolves around a single point, yet it is a dull
vision that confounds rapidity of motion with rest.
3. Sophocles found the subjects of his dramas already embodied not
only in previous tragedies but in Epic and Lyric poetry. And there
were some fables, such as that of the death of Oedipus at Colonos,
which seem to have been known to him only through oral tradition. For
some reason which is not clearly apparent, both he and Aeschylus drew
more largely from the Cyclic poets than from 'our Homer'. The inferior
and more recent Epics, which are now lost, were probably more
episodical, and thus presented a more inviting repertory of legends
than the Iliad and Odyssey.
Arctinus of Lesbos had treated at great length the story of the House
of Thebes. The legend of Orestes, to which there are several
allusions, not always consistent with each other, in the Homeric
poems, had been a favourite and fruitful subject of tradition and of
poetical treatment in the intervening period. Passages of the Tale of
Troy, in which other heroes than Achilles had the pre-eminence, had
been elaborated by Lesches and other Epic writers of the Post-Homeric
time. The voyage of the Argonauts, another favourite heroic theme,
supplied the subjects of many dramas which have disappeared. Lastly,
the taking of Oechalia by Heracles, and the events which followed it,
had been narrated in a long poem, in which one version of that hero's
multiform legend was fully set forth.
The subjects of the King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonos, and Antigone,
are taken from the Tale of Thebes, the Aias and the Philoctetes are
founded on incidents between the end of the Iliad and the taking of
Troy, the Electra represents the vengeance of Orestes, the crowning
event in the tale of 'Pelops' line', the Trachiniae recounts the last
crisis in the life of Heracles.
4. Of the three Theban plays, the Antigone was first composed,
although its subject is the latest. Aeschylus in the Seven against
Thebes had already represented the young heroine as defying the
victorious citizens who forbade the burial of her brother, the rebel
Polynices. He allowed her to be supported in her action by a band of
sympathizing friends. But in the play of Sophocles she stands alone,
and the power which she defies is not that of the citizens generally,
but of Creon, whose will is absolute in the State. Thus the struggle
is intensified, and both her strength and her desolation become more
impressive, while the opposing claims of civic authority and domestic
piety are more vividly realized, because either is separately embodied
in an individual will. By the same means the situation is humanized to
the last degree, and the heart of the spectator, although strained to
the uttermost with pity for the heroic maiden whose life when full of
brightest hopes was sacrificed to affection and piety, has still some
feeling left for the living desolation of the man, whose patriotic
zeal, degenerating into tyranny, brought his city to the brink of
ruin, and cost him the lives of his two sons and of his wife, whose
dying curse, as well as that of Haemon, is denounced upon him.
In the Oedipus Tyrannus, Sophocles goes back to the central crisis of
the Theban story. And again he fixes our attention, not so much on the
fortunes of the city, or of the reigning house, as on the man Oedipus,
his glory and his fall.--
'O mirror of our fickle state
Since man on earth unparalleled!
The rarer thy example stands,
By how much from the top of wondrous glory,
Strongest of mortal men,
To lowest pitch of abject fortune thou art fallen[2].
The horror and the pity of it are both enhanced by the character of
Oedipus--his essential innocence, his affectionateness, his
uncalculating benevolence and public spirit;--while his impetuosity
and passionateness make the sequel less incredible.
The essential innocence of Oedipus, which survives the ruin of his
hopes in this world, supplies the chief motive of the Oedipus at
Colonos. This drama, which Sophocles is said to have written late in
life, is in many ways contrasted with the former Oedipus. It begins
with pity and horror, and ends with peace. It is only in part founded
on Epic tradition, the main incident belonging apparently to the local
mythology of the poet's birthplace. It also implies a later stage of
ethical reflection, and in this respect resembles the Philoctetes; it
depends more on lyrical and melodramatic effects, and allows more room
for collateral and subsidiary motives than any other of the seven. Yet
in its principal theme, the vindication or redemption of an
essentially noble spirit from the consequences of error, it repeats a
note which had been struck much earlier in the Aias with great force,
although with some crudities of treatment which are absent from the
later drama.
5. In one of the Epic poems which narrated the fall of Troy, the
figure of Aias was more prominent than in the Iliad. He alone and
unassisted was there said to have repulsed Hector from the ships, and
he had the chief share, although in this he was aided by Odysseus, in
rescuing the dead body of Achilles. Yet Achilles' arms were awarded by
the votes of the chieftains, as the prize of valour, not to Aias, but
to Odysseus. This, no doubt, meant that wisdom is better than
strength. But the wisdom of Odysseus in these later Epics was often
less nobly esteemed than in the Iliad and Odyssey, and was represented
as alloyed with cunning.
Aias has withdrawn with his Salaminians, in a rage, from the fight,
and after long brooding by the ships his wrath has broken forth into a
blaze which would have endangered the lives of Odysseus and the
Atridae, had not Athena in her care for them changed his anger into
madness. Hence, instead of slaying the generals, he makes havoc
amongst the flocks and herds, which as the result of various forays
were the common property of the whole army. The truth is discovered by
Odysseus with the help of Athena, and from being next to Achilles in
renown, Aias becomes the object of universal scorn and hatred. The
sequel of this hour of his downfall is the subject of the Aias of
Sophocles. After lamenting his fate, the hero eludes the vigilance of
his captive bride Tecmessa, and of his Salaminian mariners, and, in
complete solitude, falls upon his sword. He is found by Tecmessa and
by his half-brother Teucer, who has returned too late from a raid in
the Mysian highlands. The Atridae would prohibit Aias' funeral; but
Odysseus, who has been specially enlightened by Athena, advises
generous forbearance, and his counsel prevails. The part representing
the disgrace and death of Aias is more affecting to modern readers
than the remainder of the drama. But we should bear in mind that the
vindication of Aias after death, and his burial with undiminished
honours, had an absorbing interest for the Athenian and Salaminian
spectator.
Philoctetes also is rejected by man and accepted by Destiny. The
Argives in his case, as the Thebans in the case of Oedipus, are blind
to the real intentions of the Gods.
The Philoctetes, like the Oedipus at Colonos, was a work of Sophocles'
old age; and while it can hardly be said that the fire of tragic
feeling is abated in either of these plays, dramatic effect is
modified in both of them by the influence of the poet's contemplative
mood. The interest of the action in the Philoctetes is more inward and
psychological than in any other ancient drama. The change of mind in
Neoptolemus, the stubborn fixity of will in Philoctetes, contrasted
with the confiding tenderness of his nature, form the elements of a
dramatic movement at once extremely simple and wonderfully sustained.
No purer ideal of virtuous youth has been imagined than the son of
Achilles, who in this play, though sorely tempted, sets faithfulness
before ambition.
6. In the Electra, which, though much earlier than the Philoctetes, is
still a work of his mature genius, our poet appears at first sight to
be in unequal competition with Aeschylus. If the Theban trilogy of the
elder poet had remained entire, a similar impression might have been
produced by the Oedipus Tyrannus. It is best to lay such comparisons
aside, and to consider the work of Sophocles simply on its own merits.
The subject, as he has chosen to treat it, is the heroic endurance of
a woman who devotes her life to the vindication of intolerable wrongs
done to her father, and the restoration of her young brother to his
hereditary rights. Hers is the human agency which for this purpose
works together with Apollo. But the divine intention is concealed from
her. She suffers countless indignities from her father's enemies, of
whom her own mother is the chief. And, at length, all her hopes are
shattered by the false tidings that Orestes is no more. Even then she
does not relinquish her resolve. And the revulsion from her deep
sorrow to extremity of joy, when she finds Orestes at her side and
ready to perform the act of vengeance in his own person, is
irresistably affecting, even when the play is only read.
Sophocles is especially great in the delineation of ideal female
characters. The heroic ardour of Antigone, and the no less heroic
persistence and endurance of Electra, are both founded on the strength
of their affection. And the affection in both cases is what some
moderns too have called the purest of human feelings, the love of a
sister for a brother. Another aspect of that world-old marvel, 'the
love of women,' was presented in Aias' captive bride, Tecmessa. This
softer type also attains to heroic grandeur in Dêanira, the wronged
wife of Heracles, whose fatal error is caused by the innocent working
of her wounded love.
It is strange that so acute a critic as A.W. Schlegel should have
doubted the Sophoclean authorship of the Trachiniae. If its religious
and moral lessons are even less obtrusive than those of either Oedipus
and of the Antigone, there is no play which more directly pierces to
the very heart of humanity. And it is a superficial judgement which
complains that here at all events our sympathies are distracted
between the two chief persons, Dêanira and Heracles. To one passion of
his, to one fond mistake of hers, the ruin of them both is due. Her
love has made their fates inseparable. And the spectator, in sharing
Hyllus' grief, is afflicted for them both at once. We may well
recognize in this treatment of the death of Heracles the hand of him
who wrote--
[Greek:
su kai dikaiôn adikous
phrenas paraspas epi lôba,
..., ...
amachos gar empaizei theos Aphrodita[3].]
7. It is unnecessary to expatiate here on the merits of construction
in which these seven plays are generally acknowledged to be
unrivalled; the natural way in which the main situation is explained,
the suddenness and inevitableness of the complications, the steadily
sustained climax of emotion until the action culminates, the
preservation of the fitting mood until the end, the subtlety and
effectiveness of the minor contrasts of situation and character[4].
But it may not be irrelevant to observe that the 'acting qualities' of
Sophocles, as of Shakespeare, are best known to those who have seen
him acted, whether in Greek, as by the students at Harvard[5] and
Toronto[6], and more recently at Cambridge[7], or in English long ago
by Miss Helen Faucit (since Lady Martin[8]), or still earlier and
repeatedly in Germany, or in the French version of the Antigone by MM.
Maurice and Vacquerie (1845) or of King Oedipus by M. Lacroix, in
which the part of OEdipe Roi was finely sustained by M. Geoffroy in
1861, and by M. Mounet Sully in 1881[9]. With reference to the latter
performance, which was continued throughout the autumn season, M.
Francisque Sarcey wrote an article for the _Temps_ newspaper of August
15, 1881, which is full of just and vivid appreciation. At the risk of
seeming absurdly 'modern', I will quote from this article some of the
more striking passages.
'Ce troisième et ce quatrième actes, les plus émouvants qui se
soient jamais produits sur aucune scène, se composent d'une suite
de narrations, qui viennent l'une après l'autre frapper au coeur
d'OEdipe, et qui ont leur contrecoup dans l'âme des spectateurs.
Je ne sais qu'une pièce au monde qui soit construite de la sorte,
c'est l'_École des Femmes_. Ce rapprochement vous paraîtra
singulier, sans doute.... Mais ... c'est dans le vieux drame grec
comme dans la comédie du maître français une trouvaille de
génie....
'Sophocle a voulu, après des émotions si terribles, après des
angoisses si sèches, ouvrir la source des larmes: il a écrit un
cinquième acte....
'Les yeux crevés d'OEdipe ne sont qu'un accident, ou, si vous
aimez mieux, un accessoire, Le poète, sans s'arrêter à ce détail,
a mis sur les lèvres de son héros toute la gamme des sentiments
douloureux qu'excite une si prodigieuse infortune....
'À la lecture, elle est un pen longue cette scène de
lamentations. Au théâtre, on n'a pas le temps de la trouver
telle: on pleure de toute son âme et de tous ses yeux. C'est
qu'après avoir eu le coeur si longtemps serré comme dans un étau,
on épreuve comme un soulagement à sentir en soi jaillir la source
des larmes. Sophocle, qui semble avoir été le plus malin des
dramaturges, comme il est le plus parfait des écrivains
dramatiques, a cherché là un effet de contraste dont l'effet est
immanquant sur le public.'
These and other like remarks of one of the best-known critics of the
Parisian stage show that the dramatic art of Sophocles is still a
living power.
I am well aware how feeble and inadequate the present attempted
reproduction must appear to any reader who knows the Greek original.
There is much to be said for the view of an eminent scholar who once
declared that he would never think of translating a Greek poet. But
the end of translating is not to satisfy fastidious scholars, but to
make the classics partially accessible to those whose acquaintance
with them would otherwise be still more defective. Part of this
version of Sophocles was printed several years ago in an imperfect
form. The present volume contains the seven extant plays entire. As
the object has been to give the effect of each drama as a whole,
rather than to dwell on particular 'beauties' (which only a poet can
render), the fragments have not been included. But the reader should
bear in mind that the seven plays are less than a tithe of the work
produced by the poet in his lifetime.
It may very possibly be asked why verse has been employed at all. Why
not have listened to Carlyle's rough demand, 'Tell us what they
thought; none of your silly poetry'? The present translator can only
reply that he began with prose, but soon found that, for tragic
dialogue in English, blank verse appeared a more natural and effective
vehicle than any prose style which he could hope to frame. And with
the dialogue in verse, it was impossible to have the lyric parts in
any sort of prose, simply because the reader would then have felt an
intolerable incongruity. These parts have therefore been turned into
such familiar lyric measures as seemed at once possible and not
unsuitable. And where this method was found impracticable, as
sometimes in the _Commoi_, blank metres have again been used,--with
such liberties as seemed appropriate to the special purpose. The
writer's hope throughout has been, not indeed fully to transfuse the
poetry of Sophocles into another tongue, but to make the poet's
dramatic intention to be understood and felt by English readers. One
more such endeavour may possibly find acceptance at a time when many
causes have combined to awaken a fresh interest at once in dramatic
literature and in Hellenic studies.
The reader who is hitherto unacquainted with the Greek drama, should
be warned that the parts assigned to the 'Chorus' were often
distributed among its several members, who spoke or chanted, singly or
in groups, alternately or in succession. In some cases, but not in
all, _Ch. 1_, _Ch. 2_, &c., have been prefixed, to indicate such an
arrangement.
Footnotes:
1 [Sir John Seeley's] _Natural Religion_, p. 79.