wrong is accompanied with perjury. But this falls infinitely short of the Æschylean vision of equity and moral purity. The views of Æschylus are still simple, and still encrusted with traditions that are inconsistent with them. But like the Hebrew prophets, whom he resembles more than any other Greek, his inconsequent and rugged speech has inexhaustible meaning: while society exists, his profound feeling of the sacredness of the family hearth, his delineations of manliness, tenderness, and purity, of firm integrity and priceless self-devotion, must retain their value.
2. Not less interesting, and equally his own, is his view of these high things as a goal not yet attained, a progress not consummated. The righting of wrong is with him an eternal process rather than the revelation of the eternal fact. The divine justice in which he believes is the outcome of a never-ending struggle. Even the will of Zeus, which he regards as now identical with justice, is not believed by him to have been always at one with benevolence and wisdom. The moral cosmos is preceded by a moral chaos, out of which it grows.
This mental attitude is already typical of the place held by tragedy in the development of ethical reflection: a position intermediate between the dicta of early experience dashed with superstition, and the speculations of philosophy; and significant of a struggle of the human spirit at once with traditional shadows and with the more substantial problems of life.
III. Ethical ideas of Sophocles.—In Sophocles also the sense of divine justice is one of the inspiring notes of tragedy. With him it is already a tradition, but a tradition that has a living power. His manner of regarding the divine order is, however, different from that which characterised Æschylus. According to him, Right is all the while supreme, only men are unconscious of it, whence comes the sadness of their lives. And Fate, which still provides the framework and background of his tragedies,
