class="fnanchor pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">[2] The pride of wealth in the first instance swells the heart, and inclines its possessor to ungodly thoughts. This leads to impiety (τὸ δυσσεβές), and in the energetic language of the Agamemnon[3] the arrogant man kicks with his heel against the altar of Justice. A state of presumptuous insolence (ὕβρις) is the result of the original unholiness. And now the man, who has been corrupted in his soul, is ready for the commission of some signal crime. Ate, or a blindness of the reason, which prevents him from foreseeing the consequences of his acts, is the child of this presumption. Inspired by Ate, he sheds the blood of his brother, or defiles his sister's bed; and from this moment the seed is sown which will spring up and breed fresh mischief for each successive generation. After the spilling of blood the affair passes into the hands of the Erinnyes, whose business it is to beset the house of the guilty doer. They form the bloody revel, which, though glutted with gore, refuse to quit the palace of Atreus. They leap upon it from above, and rack it like a tempest. Yet from their power there is escape. The curse of the house works; but it works only through the impure. Should a man arise capable of seeing rightly and living purely, he may work off the curse and become free. Such a man was Orestes. The leading thought in this system of morality is that pride begets impiety, impiety produces an insolent habit of mind, which culminates in blindness; the fruit of this blindness is crime, breeding crime from sire to son. It is only when the righteous man appears, who performs an act of retributive justice, in obedience to divine mandates, and without the indulgence of any selfish passion, that the curse is stayed.

Such is a crude sketch of the Æschylean theory of Nemesis, as set forth in the great trilogy. To Æschylus, the presentation of the moral law conceived by him is of even more importance than the exhibition of the characters of men controlled by it. This is not the case with Sophocles. He fixes our attention upon the ἁμαρτία, or error of the guilty man, interests us in the qualities by which he was betrayed into sin, and makes us feel that suffering is the inevitable consequence of arrogant or wilful acts. The weakness of the offender is more prominent in Sophocles than the vengeance of the outraged deity. Thus, although there is the sternest religious background to all the tragedies of Sophocles, our attention is always fixed upon the humanity of his heroes. The house of Labdacus is involved in hereditary guilt. Laius, despising an oracle, begets a son by Jocasta, and is slain by that son. Œdipus, in his youthful recklessness, careless of oracular warnings, kills his father and weds his mother. Jocasta, through her levity and impiety, is hurried into marriage with the murderer of her husband, who is also her own son. All this αὐθαδία, or headstrong wilfulness, is punished by the descent of a fearful plague on Thebes; and Œdipus, whose heat of temper and self-reliance are his only serious crime, is overpowered by the abyss of misery into which these faults have plunged his people and his family. The utter prostration of Œdipus—when his eyes have been opened to the tissue of horrors he has woven round himself, his mother, his nation, and his children—is the first step in his moral discipline. He abdicates in favor of the insolent Creon, and goes forth to wander, an abhorred and helpless blind man, on the face of the earth. When, at the conclusion of his pariah life, the citizens of Colonus refuse him harborage, he only cries: "My deeds were rather sufferings than crimes." His old heroic haughtiness and headstrong will are tempered to a noble abhorrence of all baseness, to a fiery indignation. He has been purged and lessoned to humility before the throne of Zeus. Therefore, in return for his self-annihilation, the gods at last receive him to their company, and constitute him a blessed dæmon in the place of his disgrace. It was the highest triumph of tragic art to exhibit that new phase in the character of Œdipus which marks the conclusion of the Tyrannus and is sustained in the Colonëus. In both of these plays, Œdipus is the same man; but circumstances have so wrought upon his temper as to produce a great change. Still, the change is only commensurate with the force of the circumstances. We comprehend it, while at the same time we are forced to marvel at the profound skill of the poet, who, in the first tragedy, has presented to our eyes the hot-tempered king reduced to abject humiliation, and in the second has shown us the same man dignified, and purified by the dealings of the heavy hand of God. Set aside by his calamity, and severed from the common lot of men, Œdipus has submitted to the divine will and has communed with unseen powers. He is therefore now environed with a treble mystery—with the mystery of his awful past, the mystery of his god-conducted present, the mystery of his august future. It was by such masterly delineation of character that Sophocles threw the old Æschylean dogma of Nemesis into the background, and moralized his tragedy without sacrificing an iota of its religious force. Aristotle, speaking of the highest tragic art, says that its object is to represent an ἦθος, a permanent habit of moral temper. Careless or bad art allows impossible incongruities in the delineation of character, whereas the true poet maintains identity throughout. If this be so, Sophocles deserves the title of ἠθικώτατος in the very highest sense. As a further illustration of the divergence of Sophocles from the Æschylean dogma of Nemesis, it is worth while to mention the Antigone. This play takes us beyond the region of hereditary guilt into the sphere of moral casuistry; its tragic interest depends not upon the evolution of an ancestral curse, although Antigone is incidentally involved in the crime of her brothers, but upon the conflict of duties in a single heart. Antigone, while obeying the law of her conscience, is disobeying the command of her sovereign. She acted rightly; yet her offence was sufficient to cause her legal death, and this death she chose with open eyes. It is in the person of Creon that the old moral of Nemesis is drawn. Like Œdipus, he treats the warnings of Teiresias with scorn, and persists in his criminal persecution of the dead Polyneices. Shaken at last by the seer's vaticinations, he rescinds his orders, but too late. Antigone has hanged herself in prison; Hæmon curses his father, and stabs himself upon her corpse; Eurydice, maddened with grief, puts an end to her own life; and thus the house of the tyrant is left unto him desolate. It is quite impossible by any phrases of mere criticism to express the admiration which every student of Sophocles must feel for the profundity of his design, for the unity of his art, and for the firmness with which he has combined the essential religious doctrines of Greek tragedy with his own ethical philosophy.

In passing to Euripides we feel how much we have lost. The religious foundation has been broken up; the clear intuitive morality of Sophocles has been exchanged for sophistry, debate, hypothesis, and paradox. In the delineation of character he wavers; not because he could not create well-sustained types, since Medea, Hippolytus, and many other Euripidean personages display sublime and massive unity; but because, apparently owing to the rapid development of the dramatic art and the speculative ferment of the age in which he lived, he was more interested in the creation of