United States or Iceland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Half of her friends he has bribed, or persuaded, to be of his opinion: the other half stoutly maintain her rationality; and, in fact, she herself is divided in her own opinion as to the case; for she is in the habit of drinking to a most unsentimental excess, and when the fit of intoxication is upon her, she confesses to the charge brought against her supplicates for mercy and brandy, and totters to bed with the air of a Magdalene; but when she recovers the next morning, the whole scene is changed; she is an injured woman, a persecuted saint, a female Sophocles declared to be mad only because she is a miracle.

These will not be found in Euripides or Plato any more than in Herodotus or Sophocles.

For this liberty I have the example of Aeschylus, the creator of tragedy, and Sophocles, the greatest master of his art. Another license it may be more difficult to excuse. I have blended together the Christian religion and the pagan mythology, and introduced recollections of the Moorish superstition.

They cannot be models in form any more than Sophocles and Euripides; but they are to be followed in making the drama, or any literature, expressive of its own time, while it is faithful to the emotions and feeling of universal human nature.

Thespis The Progress of Tragedy and Comedy Aeschylus The Epopée Homer Sophocles Euripides Grecian Mimes The First Athenian Theatre Scenery and Effects. All that the actors repeated between the songs of the chorus was called an episode, or additional part, consisting often of different adventures, which had no connexion with each other.

The one garment, drawn closely about the person, illustrates the inestimable good fortune enjoyed by the Greek sculptor, in contrast with the sculptor of to-day, in having to represent a costume so simple, so pliant, so capable of graceful adjustment. The head, however much it may contain of the actual look of Sophocles, must be idealized.

And yet the theory of retribution had not been without its influence upon Thucydides. It even forces the structure of his later books into the regularity of a tragedy, in which Athens is the protagonist, and a verse of Sophocles the theme.

His first notable publication was an esthetic-philosophic essay, in the ample style of Schiller's later discourses, Concerning the Study of Greek Poetry. He found in the Greeks of the age of Sophocles the ideal of a fully developed humanity, and exhibited throughout the discussion a remarkable mastery of the whole field of classical literature.

We know little of the private life of the greatest geniuses; but the little that we know of it what tradition has preserved, for example, of Sophocles, of Archimedes, of Hippocrates, and in modern times of Ariosto, of Dante, of Tasso, of Raphael, of Albert Duerer, of Cervantes, of Shakespeare, of Fielding, of Sterne, etc. confirms this assertion.

But when we use the quotation, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," our meaning, though not very definite, is a meaning which it would be hazardous to attribute to a black boy, or to Sophocles. The idea of the New Life appears to occur in Australian Mysteries: a tribesman is buried, and rises at a given signal. Confirmation, rather than conversion, is the analogy.