The greatest work of Aeschylus was a Trilogy, (i.e., three consecutive plays bearing on the same subject): the _Agamemnon_, the greatest of all his plays; the _Libation-Bearers_, and the _Furies_. These tell the tale, so often told in the Greek drama, of the murder by his wife of Agamemnon on his return from Troy, of Orestes who avenged his father's death, of the Furies who followed him as a result of his deed, and of how in the end he found release. These plays are haunted throughout by the belief that over certain families hangs a curse, that the sins of their fathers are visited on their children, and that from this punishment there is no escape. Aeschylus was filled with the realization of the power of the great unseen forces that move the world, but he believed that if on one side there were the Furies demanding blood for blood, on the other were Apollo and Athena, symbols of the self-control that could overcome the heritage of anger and of passion. {392} Sophocles lived through the great years of Athens. Only sixteen years old when the battle of Salamis was fought, he must have been filled with all the enthusiasm of youth over the victory. It was said of Sophocles that he had "such charm of character that he was loved by everybody wherever he went." Life seems to have been happy and prosperous for him from the beginning. He won the first prize at the festival with his first play, and when he was only twenty-eight he won a prize over Aeschylus who was then nearly sixty. The greatest plays of Sophocles are those which tell of the ancient legends of Thebes: of Oedipus as King, and then as Outcast, and of _Antigone_, who in one play--_Oedipus at Colonus_--goes forth with her exiled father, and in another, the great play that bears her name, was faced with the terrible problem of having to break either the laws of God or those of the state, and of deciding which she would do. By all who understand the real greatness of the Greek drama, Sophocles is accounted the greatest of the dramatists. He represents in literature the spirit that Athena Parthenos represented on the Acropolis: a spirit of reverence, of the serenity that comes when the conflict is over and the victory won, and of triumphant belief in all that is good and beautiful and true. [Illustration: SOPHOCLES. Lateran Museum, Rome]