—­divests it of the personal, and robes it in a universal symbolic significance:  because he has built like a titan, you do not at first glance note that he has labored like a goldsmith, as someone has said.  But in Sophocles the goldsmithry is plain to see.  His character-painting is exquisite:  pathetic often; just and beautiful almost always.  I put in the almost in view of that about the “hard unloveliness” of Electra’s “daily wrangles” with her mother.  The mantle of the religious Egyptians had fallen on Aeschylus:  but Sophocles’ garb was the true fashionable Athenian chiton of his day.  He was personal, where the other had been impersonal; faultless, where the other had been sublime; conventionally orthodox, where through Aeschylus had surged the super-credal spirit of universal prophecy.

And then we come to third of the trio:  Euripides, born in 480.  “He was,” says Professor Murray, “essentially representative of his age, yet apparently in hostility to it; almost a failure of the stage—­he won only four prizes in fifty years of production—­ yet far the most celebrated poet in Greece.”  Athens hated, jeered at, and flouted him just as much as she honored and adored Sophocles; yet you know what happened to those Athenian captives at Syracuse who could recite Euripides.  Where, in later Greek writings, we come on quotations from the other two once or twice, we come on quotations from Euripides dozens of times.  The very fact that eighteen of his plays survive, to seven each of Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’, is proof of his larger and longer popularity.

He had no certain message from the Gods, as Aeschylus had; his intensely human heart and his mighty intellect kept him from being the ‘flawless artist’ that Sophocles was.  He questioned all conventional ideas, and would not let the people rest in comfortable fat acquiescence.  He came to make men ’sit up and think.’  He did not solve problems, but raised them, and flung them at the head of the world.  He must stir and probe things to the bottom; and his recurrent unease, perhaps, mars the perfection of his poetry.  Admetus is to die, unless someone will die for him; recollect that for the Greekish mob, death was the worst of all possible happenings.  Alcestis his wife will die for him; and he accepts her sacrifice.  Now, that was the old saga; and in Greek conventional eyes, it was all right.  Woman was an inferior being, anyhow; there was nothing more fitting that Alcestis should die for her lord.—­Here let me make a point plain:  you cannot look back through Greece to a Golden Age in Greece; it is not like Egypt, where the farther you go into the past, the greater things you come to;—­although in Egypt, too, there would have been rises and falls of civilization.  In Homer’s days, in Euripides’, they had these barbarous ideas about women; and these foolish exoteric ideas about death; historic Greece, like modern Europe from the Middle Ages, rises from a state