There is indeed one woman in the Æschylean Drama, Orestes’ nurse, who is of ordinary stature and might belong to any age. But she is of minor importance in the story, and does not move on the heroic plane. She is therefore beyond the range of that sublimating power of the poetic spirit which magnified the heroes and heroines to immense proportions. And as she stands in the clear daylight outside the enchanted circle she is just an old grey woman taken straight out of common life. But for that very reason there is a hearty, homely breath about her which is very refreshing. She is but a nurse: she is quaint and querulous in her talk, inept, wordy and reminiscent; and peevishly loyal. Yet in her very weakness and foolishness she is precious, for is she not a flash from the eyes of the Comic Spirit, naïvely unconscious of its august surroundings? We feel that we can actually see and hear her, as she gabbles about Orestes’ babyhood and how she tended him; being nurse, cook, foster-mother and washerwoman all combined. But she is unique among Æschylean women, and when we turn to look again on the figures of his heroines, a thought is suggested by the extreme contrast. Here is creative genius so strong that it has evoked on the one hand the grandeur of a Clytemnestra; and on the other, the biting reality of this old slave. But there does not seem to have been an equivalent artistic power which, controlling the fervid idealism and combining it with his keen insight, would have produced types more fully and completely human. Such types we find first when we come to the Drama of Sophocles. With Æschylus the ruling passion had been spiritual fervour. In Sophocles the artist reigned paramount. All the advance which his drama made, in plot, incident and character-building, was in the direction of a more perfect art. And although there was some inevitable loss—as for instance the curtailment of the lyrics by modifying the part of the Chorus; and their lower poetic flight—on the whole the gain is very great. In the matter of characterization, with which we are chiefly concerned, the change is one which brings us out of the region of demi-gods into the world of men and women. When we say that the persons of Sophocles’s drama are real people, that is not to say that they are ‘realistic’ in the narrow sense of the word which conveys only what is average and actual. But it does mean that with all their splendour and dignity and fine achievement they are subject to our common humanity. They are not immune from the defects of their virtues. The passions which have led them to great deeds are potent agents of their downfall. It is the flaw within which helps to betray them.