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Telephus and Peleus, when they are both in poverty and exile, throw aside their rants and gigantic expressions if they have a mind to move the heart of the spectator with their complaint. It is not enough that poems be beautiful; let them be tender and affecting, and bear away the soul of the auditor whithersoever they please.
At first the poets recounted any legend that came in their way. Now, the best tragedies are founded on the story of a few houses, on the fortunes of Alcmaeon, Oedipus, Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, Telephus, and those others who have done or suffered something terrible. A tragedy, then, to be perfect according to the rules of art should be of this construction.
While his stunted heroes or heroines, such as Menelaus in the -Helena-, Andromache, Electra as a poor peasant's wife, the sick and ruined merchant Telephus, are repulsive or ridiculous and ordinarily both, the pieces, on the other hand, which keep more to the atmosphere of common reality and exchange the character of tragedy for that of the touching family-piece or that almost of sentimental comedy, such as the -Iphigenia in Aulis-, the -Ion-, the -Alcestis-, produce perhaps the most pleasing effect of all his numerous works.
O Lydia, when you commend Telephus' rosy neck, and the waxen arms of Telephus, alas! my inflamed liver swells with bile difficult to be repressed. Then neither is my mind firm, nor does my color maintain a certain situation: and the involuntary tears glide down my cheek, proving with what lingering flames I am inwardly consumed.
All I have to fear is that my knife may slip out of the line, and draw a drop or two from my fingers: but your kings would seem to sit down to dinner with Death, and to lead dogs' lives into the bargain. They go at last; and then they are more like play-actors than anything else like such a one as you may see taking the part of Cecrops or Sisyphus or Telephus.
He is reported to have known the language of birds; to have evoked the spirit of Achilles; to have dislodged a demon from a boy; to have detected an Empusa who was seducing a youth into marriage; when brought before Tigellinus, to have caused the writing of the indictment to vanish from the paper; when imprisoned by Domitian, to have miraculously released himself from his fetters; to have discovered the soul of Amasis in the body of a lion; to have cured a youth attacked by hydrophobia, whom he pronounced to be Telephus the Mysian.
Passing over the Mount Parthenius, amid whose wild recesses gloomed the antique grove dedicated to Telephus, the son of Hercules , the Athenian heard a voice call to him aloud, and started to behold that mystic god to whom, above the rest of earth, were dedicated the hills and woods of Arcady the Pelasgic Pan.
But these alone cannot account for his bringing forward so decidedly the Euripidean element in Euripides; for his neglecting the choruses still more than did his original; for his laying still stronger emphasis on sensuous effect than the Greek; nor for his taking up pieces like the -Thyestes- and the -Telephus- so well known from the immortal ridicule of Aristophanes, with their princes' woes and woful princes, and even such a piece as Menalippa the Female Philosopher, in which the whole plot turns on the absurdity of the national religion, and the tendency to make war on it from the physicist point of view is at once apparent.
When Telephus his youthful Charms, His rosie Neck and winding Arms, With endless Rapture you recite, And in the pleasing Name delight; My Heart, inflam'd by jealous Heats, With numberless Resentments beats; From my pale Cheek the Colour flies, And all the Man within me dies: By Turns my hidden Grief appears In rising Sighs and falling Tears, That shew too well the warm Desires, The silent, slow, consuming Fires, Which on my inmost Vitals prey, And melt my very Soul away.
II. Some say that Roma, who gave the name to the city, was the daughter of Italus and Leucaria, or of Telephus the son of Hercules, and the wife of Aeneas, while others say that she was the daughter of Ascanius the son of Aeneas.
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