sacred precinct must have been due to a public enactment, and not to the private innovation of a poet.
Perhaps the most important change due to Sophocles himself took place in what the Greeks called the 'economy' of the drama. He used up all his myth material in one well-constructed and complex play, and consequently produced three separate plays at a time instead of a continuous trilogy.[1] But, in general, Sophocles worked as a conscious artist improving details, demanding more and smoother tools, and making up, by skilful construction, tactful scenic arrangement, and entire avoidance of exaggeration or grotesqueness, for his inability to walk quite so near the heavens as his great predecessor. The 'harsh and artificial' period is best represented by the Electra. The Electra is 'artificial' in a good sense, through its skill of plot, its clear characterisation, its uniform good writing. It is also artificial in a bad sense. For instance, in the messenger's speech, where all that is wanted is a false report of Orestes's death, the poet chooses to insert a brilliant, lengthy, and quite undramatic description of the Pythian Games. It is also 'harsh.' Æschylus in the Choëphoroi had felt vividly the horror of his plot: he carries his characters to the deed of blood on a storm of confused, torturing, half-religious emotion; the climax is, of course, the mother-murder, and Orestes falls into madness after it. In the Electra this element is practically ignored. Electra has no qualms; Orestes shows no sign of madness; the climax is formed, not by the culminating horror, the matricide, but by the hardest bit of work, the slaying of Ægisthus! Æschylus
- ↑ It was his contemporary Aristarchus of Tegea who first "made plays of their present length" (Suidas).
