in a way which makes the language of all other poets grow pallid: /ad
quod cum iungerent purpuras suas, cineris specie decolorari videbantur
ceterae divini comparatione fulgoris/.[7]

{eraman men ego sethen, Atthi, palai pota--}[8]

such simple words that have all sadness in their lingering cadences;

{Oion to glukumalon ereuthetai--
Er eti parthenias epiballomai;
Ou gar en atera pais, o gambre, toiauta--}[9]

the poetry of pure passion has never reached further than this.

But with the vast development of Greek thought and art in the fifth
century B.C., there seems to have come somehow a stiffening of Greek
life; the one overwhelming interest of the City absorbing individual
passion and emotion, as the interest of logic and metaphysics absorbed
history and poetry. The age of Thucydides and Antipho is not one in
which the emotions have a change; and at Athens especially--of other
cities we can only speak from exceedingly imperfect knowledge, but
just at this period Athens means Greece--the relations between men and
women are even under Pericles beginning to be vulgarised. In the great
dramatic poets love enters either as a subsidiary motive somewhat
severely and conventionally treated, as in the Antigone of Sophocles,
or, as in the Phaedra and Medea of Euripides, as part of a general
study of psychology. It would be foolish to attempt to defend the
address of the chorus in the Antigone to Eros,[10] if regarded as the
language of passion; and even if regarded as the language of
criticism, it is undeniably frigid. Contrasted with the great chorus