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In a lecture on the Supplices of Aeschylus, I have heard him say tout bonnement, "I can't construe that what do you make of it, A.B.?" turning to the supposed best scholar in the lecture; or, when an objection was started to his mode of getting through a difficulty, "Ah! I had not thought of that perhaps your way is the best."
First cooms t' choir lads i' their supplices, an' happen a peppermint ball i' their mouths; then t' choir men, tenors and basses; then t' curate, keekin' alang t' pews to see if squire's lasses are lookin' at him, an' at lang length cooms t' vicar hissen. Well, it's just t' same wi' t' birds. Skylarks wakkens up first, then curlews, then blackbirds, robins, throstles.
His power is revealed in the very stirring call he makes upon the emotions of pity and revenge; because of this Aristotle calls him the most tragic of the poets. The Supplices, written about 421, carries a little further the history of the Seven against Thebes.
Thus the Agamemnon of Aeschylus comprises the whole interval, from the destruction of Troy to his arrival in Mycenae, which, it is plain, must have consisted of a very considerable number of days; in the Trachiniae of Sophocles, during the course of the play, the voyage from Thessaly to Euboea is thrice performed; and again, in the Supplices of Euripides, during a single choral one, the entire march of an army from Athens to Thebes is supposed to take place, a battle to be fought, and the General to return victorious.
Interdum complicatis genubus supplices; interdum obverso incedentes tergo et modo retrogrado, in oppositum directo illi reverentiae quam nos praestare solemus. Quo facto, sacrificia daemoni faciunt multis modis. Saepe liberos suos ipsi offerunt.
The Supplices was, as we know, represented during the Peloponnesian war, after the conclusion of a treaty between the Argives and the Lacedaemonians; and was intended to remind the Argives of their ancient obligation to Athens, and to show how little they could hope to prosper in the war against the Athenians. The Heraclidae was undoubtedly written with a similar view in respect to Lacedaemon.
The Heraclidae and the Supplices are mere occasional tragedies, i.e., owing their existence to some temporary incident or excitement, and they must have been indebted for their success to nothing else but their flattery of the Athenians.
Among the plates produced shortly after his return is one called Les Supplices, in which is represented all the punishments inflicted throughout Europe upon criminals and legal offenders. In an immense square the revolting scenes are taking place, and innumerable little figures swarm about the streets and even upon the roofs of the houses. Yet the impression is neither confused nor painful.
He had avowedly taken little or no trouble to correct it, and the text is nearly as corrupt as that of the Supplices; nor does it seem that he took any trouble to make it "go off," nor that it did go off in any appreciable manner.
The former of these, by far the greater disgrace to civilization, was abolished in France on the 24th of August, 1780; the latter not until, 1788, and then only provisionally. Thus was one of the greatest of modern reforms accomplished before the Revolution. About the same time many ordinances were passed for the amelioration of French prisons. Desmaze, Supplices, 177. Desjardins, p. xx.
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