ideal of a tragic poet; Aristotle thought so too; so did the
Alexandrian critics, and most moderns with them. "Indeed," says
Mahaffy, "it is no unusual practice to exhibit the defects of
both Aeschylus and Euripides by comparison with their more
successful rival." Without trying to give you conclusions of my
own, I shall read you a longish passage from Gilbert Murray, who
is not only a great Greek scholar, but a fine critic as well,
and a poet with the best translations we have of Greek tragedy to
his credit; he has made Euripides read like good English poetry.
Comparing the _Choephori_ of Aeschylus, the second play in the
Oreseian Trilogy, with the _Electra_ of Sophocles, which deals
with the same matter, he says:

"Aeschylus... had felt vividly the horror of his plot; he
carries his characters to the deed of blood on a storm of
confused, torturing, half-religious emotion; the climax is of
course, the mother-murder, and Orestes falls into madness after
it. In the _Electra_ this element is practically ignored.
Electra has no qualms; Orestes shows no signs of madness; the
climax is formed not by the culminating horror, the matricide,
but by the hardest bit of work, the slaying of Aegisthos!
Aeschylus has kept Electra and Clytemnestra apart; here we see
them freely in the hard unloveliness of their daily wrangles.
Above all, in place of the cry of bewilderment that closes the
_Choephori_--'What is the end of all this spilling of blood for
blood?'--the _Electra_ closes with an expression of entire
satisfaction... Aeschylus takes the old bloody saga in an earnest
and troubled spirit, very different from Homer's, but quite as
grand. His Orestes speaks and feels as Aechylus himself would...
Sophocles... takes the saga exactly as he finds it. He knows