We have now considered the nature of the legendary
material used in the
Trachiniae; the character of the treatment applied to it by the poet; and the principal features of the tragedy viewed as a work of dramatic art. An introduction to this play must also, however, take account of its style in a more limited sense,—the style of its poetical diction, the complexion of the language. For the details of this subject, reference must necessarily be made to the commentary on the text. But a few general observations may properly be offered here.
Successive phases in the style of Sophocles. |
It is a well-attested tradition, and one which can still be partially verified, that the style of Sophocles, like that of many other great poets, was developed through successive phases, belonging to successive periods of his life. He himself, according to Plutarch
1, distinguished three such phases. In the earliest, he had imitated the majesty, the pomp,—“
ὄγκος”,—of Aeschylus. Next came the style which, in Plutarch's notice, is described by the words, “
τὸ πικρὸν καὶ κατάτεχνον τῆς αὑτοῦ κατασκευῆς”. This was a style marked by subtle elaboration, and, as a result of it, by “
τὸ πικρόν”, ‘pungency,’ ‘incisiveness’; a style in which terse and polished force of expression drove home the ‘sting’ of word or phrase;—as Eupolis,—to borrow an illustration from a different, yet cognate, province,—said that the incisive and highly wrought oratory of Pericles left its ‘sting’ in the minds of those who heard him: “
τὸ κέντρον ἐγκατέλιπε τοῖς ἀκροωμένοις”. Such a style, with its affinities to an elevated and refined rhetoric, can be a source of great brilliancy and power in poetry; but its essential quality is not that which constitutes the highest excellence of drama: its defect, for the purposes of drama, is that it is too suggestive of conscious effort in the artist; its tendency is to image
his mind somewhat too strongly in the persons whom he wishes to make live upon the scene. Hence we readily comprehend the words in which Sophocles (according to Plutarch) defined the third, the final, phase of his style;—“
τὸ τῆς λέξεως εἶδος ὅπερ ἐστὶν ἠθικώτατον καὶ βέλτιστον”: ‘the kind of diction which is most expressive of character, and best’; that is, fittest to make each person of the drama seem a real human being; and best, therefore, for the purposes of a dramatist.
The first of these three phases, the Aeschylean, is not traceable in the extant work of Sophocles. Nor can it be said that any one of the seven tragedies represents the second style in a form which sharply distinguishes it from the third; that is, in a form from which the characteristic quality of the third style is absent. But, if the
Philoctetes, one of the very latest plays (409 B.C.), be taken as a standard of comparison, there, at least, is seen the perfection of the third style, the style which is ‘expressive of character’; while there is less of visible and masterful art in language, less of “
τὸ πικρὸν καὶ κατάτεχνον”, than appears, for example, in the
Antigone.
