Clifton Wilbraham Collins

“ Sorrow shall come upon his own house; few and evil shall be the days that remain of his life. The sun shall not rise and set again before he shall repay blood for blood;—
⁠"For that thou
Hast to the ground cast one that walked on earth,
And foully placed within the sepulchre
A living soul; and now they wait for thee,
The sure though slow avengers of the grave,
The dread Erinyes of the mighty gods."— (P.)
There shall be wailing and lamentation in the palace of Thebes, and the cities round shall rise in arms against the polluter of the holiest and most universal law of nature. ”

“ Thus a Tyranny is the worst and most miserable State of all. Not only are the citizens in it reduced to slavery, and distracted by fear and grief, but the Tyrant himself, with all his power and splendour, never knows the blessings of peace and friendship. Like some great slave-master in a desert, he lives alone in a crowd: shunned and detested by those about him, tortured by remorse, and haunted by a lifelong terror, he himself the most pitiable slave of all.
The only pleasure that such a man ever knows is mere sensual enjoyment—in itself worthless and fleeting. ”

“ Wisdom will be the science of protection, possessed by our Guardians; and true Courage will be engrained in the hearts of our soldiers by law and education; and Temperance will be that social harmony pervading the State, and making all the citizens to be of one mind, like strings attempered to one scale. But where is Justice? Here at our feet, after all, for it can be nothing else than our original principle of division of labour: for a man is just when he does his own business, and does not meddle with his neighbour's. ”

“ The Athenian audience, with the joyous instincts of children—ever ready to "make believe"—gave themselves up to all the illusions of the scene and story, delighting, and freely expressing their delight, in the picturesque and ever-shifting series of graceful tableaux, so different from the still life of a statue or a painting. They were "as gods," knowing all the good and evil in the future of the play—such knowledge only increasing the expectancy with which they looked forward to Œdipus blinding himself, or Ajax falling on his sword. ”

“ It is only the mortal part of us (Socrates continues) that dies when earth returns to earth. The pure soul, herself invisible, departs to the invisible world—to the divine, the immortal, and the rational; where she dwells in bliss, in company with the gods, released from the errors and follies of men, their fears, their unruly passions, and all other evils of humanity. But the impure soul fears to go down to Hades, and haunts the earth for a time like a restless ghost. ”

“ But he has gained more than he has lost. Those powers of destiny which had tried him, as he thought, with such wanton and relentless cruelty in former days, are changed to beneficent spirits who guide him by the hand to the bourne of his earthly pilgrimage. Though stripped of his kingdom, he has acquired peace and serenity of mind. "The storm of passion has subsided, and left him calm and firm. He is conscious of a charmed life, safe from the malice of men and the accidents of nature, and reserved by the gods for the accomplishment of high purposes." ”

“ No fear that our souls will vanish like smoke, or that the dead sleep on for ever, like Endymion. Our souls are born again; and as life passes into death, so, in the circle of nature, the dead must pass into life; for if this were not so, all things must at last be swallowed up in death.
Again, we have in our minds latent powers of thought—ideas of beauty and equality—which are not given us at our birth, and which we cannot have learnt from experience. Such knowledge is but the soul's recollection of a previous state of existence. ”

“ All things, he says, are ready for the sacrifice. The sword that is to slay him—Hector's fatal gift, but his best friend now—is ready sharpened, and fixed where it may strike the surest blow. Then he invokes the gods, with whom he makes his peace by his blood. Let Zeus summon Teucer by a "swift rumour," that he may protect his body from the insults of his enemies; let Mercury guide his soul to a home of rest, after it has parted from his body "at one swift bound—without a struggle;" let the Furies avenge his wrongs, and "spare not the Greek host, but lap their fill of slaughter." ”

“ There, on a certain day, gods and demigods ascend the heavens—Zeus leading the way in a winged chariot—to hold high festival, and all who can may follow. The gods and the immortal souls, whose steeds have full-grown wings, are carried by a revolution of the spheres into a celestial world beyond, where all space is filled by a sea of intangible essence which the mind—"lord of the soul"—alone can contemplate: and here are the absolute ideas of Truth and Beauty and Justice. ”

“ Hæmon, Creon's son, betrothed to Antigone—and who is perhaps the only "lover" in all ancient tragedy, so widely different is the Greek drama from our own—comes now to plead for the life of his affianced bride. Then ensues a scene familiar in life and fiction, where two strong wills inevitably clash—the son eager and impassioned, the father hardened by that sense of duty never so keenly felt as when stimulated by a private pique. The first and foremost of all duties in the home and in the state, argues Creon, is obedience. The family must be one—united under the patria potestas. ”

“ The attractions of gold or of glory are of a nobler stamp; but the best and purest of all pleasures that a man can feel, and the ineffable sweetness of which the world can never realise, is that which the philosopher alone finds in the study and contemplation of existence. For he prunes close the hydra-headed passions by which the many are enslaved, and subjects the lion to the man, by making reason rule his soul. ”

“ Nothing can be added to increase the agony and remorse of Creon—left living, it is true, but more to be pitied than the dead themselves,—crushed and humbled in the dust, all joy in life, all domestic happiness, all peace of mind gone for ever. ”

“ Suddenly Chrysothemis runs eagerly in with what she conceives to be good news. She had found her father's tomb covered with flowers, and moist with freshly-poured libations, while on its summit lay a lock of hair, which she at once divines to be a token from Orestes. "My poor sister!" says Electra, "your Orestes is dead;"—and then she tells the story she has heard; but though he be dead, she continues, let us, women as we are, take upon ourselves the work of vengeance, and earn a glorious renown by slaying Ægisthus, our mother's paramour.
⁠"All men love to look
On deeds of goodness. ”

“ Socrates, in his own fashion, disproves these monstrous doctrines, and forces Callicles, though much against his will, to admit that pleasure and virtue are not always identical; that really Virtue is, or should be, the end of all our actions; that in the long-run the just and temperate man alone is happy; and that he who leads a robber's life is abhorred by gods and men while upon earth, and goes down to Hades with his soul branded with the sears of his crimes. There must come a day of judgment and retribution, when each man shall receive the just reward of his deeds. ”

“ Justice is thus the gain of the strong and the loss of the weak; for the just man's honesty is ruinous to himself, while the unjust man, especially if he can plunder wholesale like the tyrant, is happy and prosperous, and well spoken of; and thus Injustice itself is a stronger and lordlier thing than Justice.
To this barefaced sophistry Socrates replies that the unjust man may go too far; in overreaching his neighbours—just and unjust alike—he breaks all the rules of art, and proves himself an unskilful and ignorant workman, who has no fixed standard in life to act by. ”

“ It was outraged nature which made this appeal through the mouth of Antigone. Creon had, by his exposure of the body of Polynices, violated the first great law of humanity, and had committed an act which was at once impious and barbarous, detestable alike in the eyes of gods and men. To the Greek, reverence for the dead was the most sacred of all duties. In his national creed, the ghosts of Hades seem more than disembodied spirits;—they retain their bodily senses; they remember the joys and brood over the sorrows of their former life ”

“ Clearly, then, the real philosopher, who is to stand aloof from that wild beast's den which we call public life, has no place or lot among us as things are now. He is like some rare exotic, which, if transplanted to a foreign soil, would soon fade and wither; for he requires a perfect State to fulfil the perfection of his own nature—a State such as may perhaps have once existed in the countless ages that are passed, or even exists now "in some foreign clime far beyond the limits of our own horizon." ”

“ Mingled with this strong religious feeling in Sophocles was that melancholy supposed to be engendered only in the poets of the north. He is oppressed by his sense of the feebleness of human intellect and the impotence of human foresight, as compared with the omnipotent wisdom of an eternal being. Like some master-spirit, he views the actions and passions of the characters which he has created with a half-contemptuous pity. He heaps upon mankind every epithet of scorn—"phantoms," "shadows," "creatures of a day," "born to misery as the sparks fly upwards." ”