[369] M. Schlegel rather wantonly accuses Deianira of "levity"--all her motives, on the contrary, are pure and high, though tender and affectionate. [370] Observe the violation of the unity which Sophocles, the most artistical of all the Greek tragedians, does not hesitate to commit whenever he thinks it necessary. Hyllus, at the beginning of the play, went to Cenaeum; he has been already there and back--viz., a distance from Mount Oeta to a promontory in Euboea, during the time about seven hundred and thirty lines have taken up in recital! Nor is this all: just before the last chorus--only about one hundred lines back--Lichas set out to Cenaeum; and yet sufficient time is supposed to have elapsed for him to have arrived there--been present at a sacrifice--been killed by Hercules--and after all this, for Hyllus, who tells the tale, to have performed the journey back to Trachin. [371] Even Ulysses, the successful rival of Ajax, exhibits a reluctance to face the madman which is not without humour. [372] Potter says, in common with some other authorities, that "we may be assured that the political enmity of the Athenians to the Spartans and Argives was the cause of this odious representation of Menelaus and Agamemnon." But the Athenians had, at that time, no political enmity with the Argives, who were notoriously jealous of the Spartans; and as for the Spartans, Agamemnon and Menelaus were not their heroes and countrymen. On the contrary, it was the thrones of Menelaus and Agamemnon which the Spartans overthrew. The royal brothers were probably sacrificed by the poet, not the patriot. The dramatic effects required that they should be made the foils to the manly fervour of Teucer and the calm magnanimity of Ulysses. [373] That the catastrophe should be unhappy! Aristot., Poet., xiii. In the same chapter Aristotle properly places in the second rank of fable those tragedies which attempt the trite and puerile moral of punishing the bad and rewarding the good. [374] When Aristophanes (in the character of Aeschylus) ridicules Euripides for the vulgarity of deriving pathos from the rags, etc., of his heroes, he ought not to have omitted all censure of the rags and sores of the favourite hero of Sophocles. And if the Telephus of the first is represented as a beggar, so also is the Oedipus at Coloneus of the latter. Euripides has great faults, but he has been unfairly treated both by ancient and modern hypercriticism. [375] The single effects, not the plots.