John Pentland Mahaffy

“ The fate of Hippolytus is indeed tragic—a lofty and pure character destroyed by his own purity; but the spectator is partly reconciled to it, and the vengeance of the deity is palliated, by the bold and somewhat impious contempt for her which he expresses at the opening of the play. The aged servant who begs him to offer the customary sacrifice to Aphrodite, and not brave her anger, touches the proper string; the bold self-opinion of the hero gives a jarring sound. ”

“ There are, in the extant tragedies, only two really disagreeable women—Medea and Hermione (in the Andromache) —for the savage feelings of revenge in Alcmene (Heracleidæ) and in Hecuba are, so to speak, extorted from them by dreadful trials, and the injustice of fate. But Medea is no Greek, she is a foreigner from a wild and gloomy race, who is moreover deeply wronged in her ungovernable but therefore strong affections. She may be a human tigress, but she is a tigress with a mother's heart, and all her violence does not destroy our sympathy with her afflictions. ”

“ But no sooner has he appeared as their saviour, than a heaven-sent madness makes him their murderer, and his situation becomes more deeply tragic than that of Sophocles' Ajax. For the outburst of Ajax only brought him disgrace; Heracles is so crushed that there is no place for the display of iron resolve. He is discovered asleep, and fast bound, with his wretched father and the chorus watching him—a kindred scene to the watching of Electra over Orestes. ”

“ The peasant princess surprised with her pitcher upon her shoulder, the heedless hospitality of the honest great-hearted peasant, the anxiety of the housewife about supplying the sudden and noble visitors, the hurried borrowing of provisions from a good neighbour—here are scenes which may shock a Voltaire or a Schlegel, but which impress an English critic with a sense of the power and the love of human nature shown in our best tragedies. ”

“ Before such an audience what chance could a half-way politician have of success—a man who offended both sides by exposing their weaknesses, who perhaps offended them still more because he puzzled them by advocating portions of their policy with extraordinary force and clearness? So the great outsider would be cheered by opposite sides of the house, but make enemies everywhere, for never was party spirit more violent and uncompromising than among the people who thought, as Thucydides says, τὸ πρὸς ἅπαν συνετὸν, ἐπὶ πᾶν ἀργόν—to be clever at everything was to be good for nothing—in politics. ”

“ There is therefore a propriety in speaking of dramas of plot as a separate class of Greek tragedies, which might seem unmeaning to those only acquainted with modern literature.
The other two divisions are dramas of character and dramas of situation. In the former, the human will asserts itself against the power of destiny, and even when crushed in the conflict, asserts its inalienable dignity and liberty. This is the highest and the most essential kind of Greek tragedy, and one in which Æschylus and Sophocles were never equalled except by Shakspere in his greatest character plays. ”

“ But she never ceases to love life; unlike the slave Polyxena, or the exile Macaria, she has everything to lose, and hence she cannot go to her death, as they do, with calm resolve, but with that burning excitement which has sustained the most sensitive, and therefore the greatest martyrs. When Sophocles has given the same feature, this wild excitement at the approach of death, to his stronger and more masculine Antigone, he has not, I think, been so consistent in his drawing of character. ”