But to return to our muttons, which is Greece; and now to the literature again:—­

After Aeschylus, Sophocles.  The former, a Messenger of the Gods, come to cry their message of Karma to the world; and in doing so, incidentally to create a supreme art-form;—­the latter, a “good easy soul who lives and lets live, founds no anti-school, upsets no faith.”—­thus Browning sums him up.  A “faultless” artist enamored of his art; in which, thinks he (and most academic critics with him) he can improve something on old Aeschylus; a man bothered with no message; a beautiful youth; a genial companion, well-loved by his friends—­and who is not his friend?—­all through his long life; twenty times first-prize winner, and never once less than second.—­Why, solely on the strength of his Antigone, the Athenians appointed him a strategos in the expedition against Samos; with the thought that one so splendidly victorious in the field of drama, could not fail of victory in mere war.  But don’t lose hope!—­upon an after-thought (perhaps) they appointed Pericles too; who suggested to his poet-colleague that though master of them all in his own line, he had better on the whole leave the sordid details of command to himself, Pericles, who had more experience of that sort.  What more shall we say of Sophocles?—­A charming brilliant fellow in his cups—­of which, as of some other more questionable pleasures, report is he was too fond; a man worshiped during his life, and on his death made a hero with semi-divine honors;—­does that sound like the story of a Messenger of the Gods?

He was born at Colonos in Attica, in 496; of his hundred or so of dramas, seven come down to us.  His age saw in him the very ideal of a tragic poet; Aristotle thought so too; so did the Alexandrian critics, and most moderns with them.  “Indeed,” says Mahaffy, “it is no unusual practice to exhibit the defects of both Aeschylus and Euripides by comparison with their more successful rival.”  Without trying to give you conclusions of my own, I shall read you a longish passage from Gilbert Murray, who is not only a great Greek scholar, but a fine critic as well, and a poet with the best translations we have of Greek tragedy to his credit; he has made Euripides read like good English poetry.  Comparing the Choephori of Aeschylus, the second play in the Oreseian Trilogy, with the Electra of Sophocles, which deals with the same matter, he says: 

“Aeschylus... had felt vividly the horror of his plot; he carries his characters to the deed of blood on a storm of confused, torturing, half-religious emotion; the climax is of course, the mother-murder, and Orestes falls into madness after it.  In the Electra this element is practically ignored.  Electra has no qualms; Orestes shows no signs of madness; the climax is formed not by the culminating horror, the matricide, but by the hardest bit of work, the slaying of Aegisthos!  Aeschylus has kept Electra