It must not be forgotten that the themes upon which Tragedy drew were, almost exclusively, the heroic or epic legends. One or two exceptions there are; the “Persæ” of Æschylus is one such, for reasons which I have already explained. Phrynichus also wrote a tragedy founded on contemporary history, “The Sack of Miletus,” an episode of the Ionian revolt. But such a theme came too near home, touched too closely on politics, and the poet was punished with a fine. Otherwise the dramatist had no scope for originality or for the element of the unexpected in the choice of his plot. It is as if [Illustration: PLATE LIV. THEATRE AT EPIDAURUS _English Photo Co., Athens_] our dramatists were restricted to the Bible for their choice of subjects instead of being entirely debarred from it. The audience knew the main outline of the story as soon as the play began. Thus the audience was often in the secret while the characters on the stage were not, and this fact gave scope for dramatic irony, which is especially connected with the name of Sophocles. Sophocles is for literature the supreme embodiment of the Athenian spirit at this its purest and highest period. The tragedies of Æschylus have the grandeur and incompleteness of archaic art. He wrestles with the most awful problems of human destiny and divine purpose. His style matches his themes; it is a whirlpool of foaming imagery in which great masses of poetry in phrase and metaphor appear and disappear continually. He continually baffles the transcriber and the modern interpreter, and it is only the most reverential spirit that can refrain from occasional sensations of ludicrous bathos. Euripides, on the other hand, is so fluent and easy in his craftsmanship that he often seems by contrast commonplace. He is probably the cleverest of all dramatists, and he often dealt with his religious themes in the spirit of an unabashed sceptic. Like Plato, he saw that the gods of anthropomorphic creation were very far from ideal; and he used all the craft and subtlety of the rationalist to exhibit them at their weakest. Æschylus is the poet of the religious men of Marathon; Euripides, “the human,” is the prophet of the New Age of the fourth century, liberal, cosmopolitan, restless and fearless in inquiry. Sophocles is the true exponent of Periclean Athens in the realm of literature. With his inflexible idealism, the poetry of Sophocles is sublimated almost beyond human ken. Moderns sometimes find him too perfect, too statuesque to be interesting. It is both their misfortune and their fault. The appreciation of Sophocles is a test of refined scholarship and an ear sensitive to the inner voices of poetry. This makes translation almost impossible, but Mr. Whitelaw, of Rugby, has come so near to achieving that impossible that I would venture, through his medium, to present a specimen of this poet’s exquisite art. This is the famous choric ode on Love from the “Antigone.” STROPHE