turbs the unity and symmetry of the drama. The fate of Hercules is undoubtedly the point on which the interest of the play was meant to turn. To it our attention is directed from beginning to end. Compared with Hercules, Dejanira is a very insignificant person: not indeed in the eyes of a modern reader, of whom Hermann's remark may be perfectly true, that the sympathy of the spectators is directed more to her than to the hero. In her we find much to admire, to love, and to pity: in him we see nothing but a great spirit almost overpowered by the intensity of bodily suffering. But the question is, was this the light in which they were viewed by the spectators for whom Sophocles wrote. Now it seems clear that to them Hercules was more than a suffering or struggling hero: he was a deified person, who had assumed a blessed and immortal nature[1], had become an object of religious adoration, and was frequently invoked for aid and protection in seasons of difficulty and danger. It was from the funeral pile on the top of Œta that he ascended, as Sophocles elsewhere describes[2], all radiant with fire divine, to enjoy the company of the gods above. The image of his earthly career could never be contemplated by his worshippers without reference to this, its happy and glorious termination. And therefore it cannot be contended that the poet did not take this feeling into account, because in the play itself he has introduced no allusion to the apotheosis. It does not follow because there Hercules himself, according to Hermann's observation, is described as quitting life with reluctance, like one of Homer's heroes, whose soul descends to Orcus bewailing its fate, and the vigour and youth which it leaves behind[3], that therefore the spectators were expected to forget all their religious notions of him, or to consider him abstracted from the associations with which he was habitually connected in their thoughts. But in fact his blissful immortality is mani-
- ↑ Od. Λ. 602, αὐτὸς μετ᾽ αθανάτοισι θεοῖσιν Τέρπεται ἐν θαλίῃς, καὶ ἔχει καλλίσφυρον Ἥβην.
- ↑ Phil. 726. ἵν᾽ ὁ χάλκασπις ἀνὴρ θεοῖς πλάθει πᾶσιν, θείῳ πυρὶ παμφαής, Οἴτας ὑπὲρ ὄχθων.
- ↑ 1262. ὡς ἐπίχαρτον τελέουσ᾽ ἀεκούσιον ἔργον. "Quamvis enim fortis anima, tamen invita ad Orcum abit, ὃν πότμον γοόωσα, λιποῦσ᾽ ἁδρότητα καὶ ἥβην." Herm.
