queen to the burial of her daughter, she soliloquises whether she will appeal to him to aid her in avenging her new grief, the murder of Polydorus; and in this scene Agamemnon observes her soliloquy, and expresses impatience at it.
102. It is remarkable that though the poet had a reputation for great learning, his plays show remarkable carelessness in certain details, where we should not have expected it. Thus Strabo was struck with the random geographical statements of both Sophocles and Euripides; and we wonder, in several plays, at the complete confusion of such places as Argos and Mycenæ, which might easily have been distinguished by the mere study of the Homeric poems. But the instances of this confusion are obtrusive in the Orestes and Heracleidæ, and elsewhere, and are no doubt owing to the very ancient destruction of Mycenæ. Still its ruins were there, and any Argive visitor could have told him the truth.
Similarly in astronomy, though the authenticity of the Rhesus was suspected, on account of a blunder about the position of the Eagle (a constellation) in the heavens, we find, at the opening of the Iphigenia in Aulis, a still greater blunder; the Pleiades are put next to Orion in the sky, and the latter is placed high in the heavens at dawn, while the fleet is wind-bound at Aulis—a position which Sirius could only occupy late in October. But of course the armament assembled in spring, and allowing for some weeks' delay, we should have a dawn in May or June, and not in October, described. Again there is the historical blunder of making the Trojan captives (Troades, 221) speak of Sicily as a Hellenic land rivalling in splendour Thessaly, Sparta, and Athens. These carelessnesses, however, detract nothing from our enjoyment of his poetry, and prove an important point—that though a recluse and a student, he was no pedant. To use a simile of Cicero's, provided he had rightly drawn his Hercules, he cared little about the lion's skin and the Hydra.
