You must, of course, always allow for a personal equation in the viewpoint of any critic: you must here weight the "natural superhuman diction" against the "stiff magnificence" Professor Murray attributes to Aeschylus; and get a wise and general view of your own. What I want you to see clearly is, the descent of the influx from plane to plane, as shown in these two tragedians. The aim of the first is to express a spiritual message, grand thought. That of the second is to produce a work of flawless beauty, without regard to its spiritual import. What was to Aeschylus a secondary object; the purely artistic--was to Sophocles the whole thing. Aeschylus was capable of wonderful psychological insight. Clytemnestra's speech to the Chorus, just before Agamemnon's return, is a perfect marvel in that way. But the tremendous movement, the August impersonal atmosphere as ".... gorgeous Tragedy In sceptered pall comes sweeping by." --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.