n in these two tragedians.
The aim of the first is to express a spiritual message, grand
thought. That of the second is to produce a work of flawless
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
adored Sophocles; yet you know what happened to those Athenian
captives at Syracuse who could recite Euripides. Where, in
later Greek writings, we come on quotations from the other
two once or twice, we come on quotations from Euripides dozens
of times. The very fact that eighteen of his plays survive,
to seven each of Aeschylus' and Sophocles', is proof of his
larger and longer popularity.

He had no certain message from the Gods, as Aeschylus had; his
intensely human heart and his mighty intellect kept him from
being the 'flawless artist' that Sophocles was. He questioned
all conventional ideas, and would not let the people rest in
comfortable fat acquiesce