"Philoctetes," Sophocles introduces, as an element of tragedy,
physical pain, though it is combined with moral suffering.

A popular entertainment was of course adapted to the tastes of the
people. Debate, both political and forensic, was almost the daily
bread of the people of Athens. The Athenian loved smart repartee and
display of the power of fencing with words. The thrust and parry of
wit in the single-line dialogues (_stichomythia_) pleased them
more than it pleases us. Rhetoric had a practical interest when not
only the victory of a man's opinions in the political assembly, but
his life and property before the popular tribunal, might depend on his
tongue. The Drama was also used in the absence of a press for
political or social teaching, and for the insinuation of political or
social opinions. In reading these passages we must throw ourselves
back twenty-three centuries, into an age when political and social
observation was new, like politics and civilised society themselves,
and ideas familiar to us now were fresh and struggling for expression.
The remark may be extended to the political philosophy which struggles
for expression in the speeches of Thucydides.

The trio of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides has been compared with
that of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher, and with that
of Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire. The parallel will hardly hold good
except as an illustration of the course of youth, perfection, and
decay through which every art or product of imagination seems to run,
unlike science, which continually advances. The epoch of the Athenian
three, like that of the Elizabethan three, like that of the great
Spanish dramatists, was one of national achievement, and their drama
was thoroughly national; whereas the French drama was the highly
artificial entertainment of an exclusive Court.