me." Antigone is condemned to be buried alive "in a rocky vault."

There is a love interest in the play. Antigone is betrothed to Hæmon the son of Creon. Hæmon pleads to his father for her, but in vain. The dialogue in the scene between father and son is particularly vivid and extraordinarily modern. Creon is equally deaf to the advice of Teiresias, the blind prophet. The blind man warns the king that swift punishment will follow his obstinacy:

Thou shalt not live through many more courses of the sun's swift chariot, ere one begotten of thine own loins shall have been given by thee, a corpse for corpses; because thou hast thrust children of the sunlight to the shades, and ruthlessly lodged a living soul in the grave.

And it does. Hæmon hangs himself by the side of Antigone's tomb, and his mother, Eurydice, stabs herself in sorrow for the death of her son. Creon, “a rash and foolish man," is left to mourn alone. The moral of the play is summed up by the Chorus:

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness; and reverence towards the gods must be inviolate. Great words of prideful men are ever punished with great blows, and in old age, teach the chastened to be wise.

It will be seen that there is a far greater humanity in Sophocles's tragedy than can be found in Eschylus, but in all the Sophocles plays men remain "the playthings of the gods." To quote Gilbert Murray's translation of the full chorus in Edipus the King:

Ye citizens of Thebes, behold; 'tis Edipus that passeth here,

Who read the riddle-word of Death, and mightiest stood of mortal men, And Fortune loved him, and the folk that saw him turned and looked

again.

Lo, he is fallen, and around great storms and the out-reaching sea!

Therefore, O Man, beware, and look toward the end of things that be, The last of sights, the last of days; and no man's life account as gain Ere the full tale be finished and the darkness find him without pain.

Sophocles lived to a tranquil old age. His epitaph was written in the famous lines:

Euripides

Thrice happy Sophocles! In good old age,

Praised as a man, and as a craftsman praised,
He died: his many tragedies were fair,

And fair his end, nor knew he any sorrow.

§ 5

Æschylus was a soldier; Sophocles was a patriotic Athenian, taking more than a dilettante interest in the public affairs of his city. Euripides, the third and youngest of the great Greek dramatists, was a recluse, out of tune with the times, detesting the moods of the Athenian mob, professing to prefer the simple life of the country to the life of the town. As an artist he was an innovator, and his innovations, his breaking with tradition, made him the butt of Aristophanes, a Tory of Tories who hated all changes. Euripides was a sour-tempered man and loathed being laughed at:

My spirit loathes

Those mockers whose unbridled mockery

Invades grave themes.

The poet's temper was probably made the sourer by the fact that he had two wives, both of whom were unfaithful to him. Towards the end of his life he left Athens in disgust to live in Macedonia, where he wrote his last play, the Baccha. His favour with the king roused the jealousy of certain courtiers, who plotted that he should be attacked and killed by savage dogs.

When Euripides began to write, the Athenians had ceased to believe in the gods, whose existence and ever-present power

The ruthless wife of Agamemnon who is one of the great figures of the Tragedies of Eschylus.

UNI

OF

ICH

were the basis of the plays of Eschylus. The age of faith had passed. Euripides was compelled to use the elaborate method of the Greek stage, but he chose men and women, not gods, for his dramatis personæ, and, for this reason, he is regarded as the father of romantic drama.

While in many respects the poet was out of tune with his age, he shared its scepticism. His unbelief had a moral basis. To him, the legends were immoral. If they were true, then gods were worthy of neither worship nor respect. If they were untrue, the whole fabric of the ancient Greek religion fell to pieces. He was tolerant of the ancestor worship, common in ancient Greece as in China. He appears to have had no definite belief or disbelief in immortality, nor was he able to accept the existence of "the eternal, not ourselves, making for righteousness." Aristophanes called him an atheist, and the charge was not unjust. But he insists that the absence of belief in God or the gods does not affect morality. Remember that Euripides was a Greek. To him virtue was attractive because it was beautiful. Apart altogether from any consideration of rewards or punishments, happiness or unhappiness, virtue was to be followed and admired for the sake of its beauty.

In the plays of Euripides, there is an acute analysis of character, particularly of the character of women, and this complete understanding of women caused Mr. Gilbert Murray to call the poet "the classic Ibsen."

The Plays of Euripides

Euripides wrote at least seventy-five plays, of which eighteen are in existence. Perhaps the best known of them, the Medea, has been described by Mr. Gilbert Murray as a tragedy of character and situation. It is one of the poet's earliest works, and it expresses the youth of a writer who is "a sceptic and a devotee of truth." The story of Jason and Medea has been partly told in these pages. The play begins when Jason has grown weary of