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