the Iliad, we are not touched with the dying groans of the heroes. Our ideal hero is mute in suffering—he must have more of the nature of the Roman wolf-cub—
"He dies in silence, biting hard,
Amid the dying hounds."
But in this respect, the Philoctetes of Sophocles is not only at variance with modern tastes and sympathies; it stands also in strong contrast with an earlier Greek tragedy of a severer type, in which the hero is also represented in the extremity of physical suffering—the Prometheus of Æschylus. The Titan is brought upon the stage to be fastened to his rock, there to waste away for long years in sufferings compared with which those of Philoctetes are but ordinary: the adamantine rivets are driven through his chest, but he utters no cry of physical anguish. Nay, so long as his tormentors are present, he is mute altogether. When he utters his grand appeal to Earth, and Sky, and Sea,—it is against the injustice of his doom, rather than the bitterness of the torture. He launches defiance against his torturer, not complaints. Therefore, even across the gulf of centuries, we feel almost as an Athenian audience felt the grandeur of the conception. It is true enough, as has been said, that Sophocles is far more human in his tragic pathos than the elder poet; but there are phases of humanity, intensely natural, which are yet no fit subjects for dramatic representation; and it is surely not a decline but a development of critical taste, which reckons physical pain as one of them.
