Prometheus allegorical and divine personages interest themselves in that vast struggle between Man and Fate before which all the necessary littleness of personal humanity disappears. In the Persæ we can hardly count the ghost of Dareius as a personal character—it rather typifies the sunken sun of Persian conquest; and if Atossa and Xerxes are real human personages, they are also general types of Persian ostentation and pride; for the play, like some Chinese plays, rather points the moral of a great historical event than attempts to describe human character in individuals, and, as even Müller is forced to admit, "looks at first glance more like a lament over the misfortunes of the Persians than a tragic drama." Again, in the Seven against Thebes, Eteocles, Ismene, Antigone are no doubt human personages, but the "pivot upon which the whole piece turns"—Polynices' resolution to meet his brother in combat while recognising the fatal act as the effect of his father's curse—carries us back to the early life and morals of Attica as plainly as any abstract personage or the choral group itself. But it is needless to run through all the extant plays of Æschylus in our search for impersonal or, as modern critics would say, "undramatic" elements. No doubt even within his extant plays there are signs of a growing subordination of the chorus-that of the Choëphorœ, as Mr. Mahaffy observes,[1] is not only the confidant but the accomplice of the actors. But the fact that the chorus is the central character (if we may so apply a term long restricted to personal action by modern criticism) in the Suppliants, Persæ, and Eumenides would be alone sufficient to prove the prominence of the group on the stage of Æschylus.
In the drama of Sophocles the chorus is being sup-
- ↑ Hist. Class. Gk. Lit., vol. i. p. 269.
