The Eumenides By Aeschylus. Scene on a vase made in Paestum by the artist Python, about 350-340B.C. The
fourth-century Greek vases of Italy often display scenes which seem to be inspired by stage presentations of
tragedies by Athenian poets. Here Athena (at left) comforts Orestes who has taken refuge before the tripod and
omphalos (navel-stone of the earth) at Delphi. Apollo stands at the right beside a snake-trimmed Fury (there is
another over the tripod) waiting to wreak vengeance on Orestes for the murder of his mother. Apollo will purify
Orestes, and Athena eventually rescue him while the Furies become the Kindly Ones (Eumenides).
Sophocles
Sophocles used to be thought of as the most truly classic of the three great poets, the incarnation of tragic wisdom,
a poet poised by a kind of controlled passion between the untrimmed grandeur of Aeschylus and the literary
inventiveness of Euripides. That is probably because Aristotle took King Oedipus as the perfect example of
tragedy. In Sophocles he thought the art of tragic poetry had 'attained its nature' and ceased to be capable of
genuine development. Aristotle was looking back over many years, and in view of the extravagance of later
productions and compositions it is not surprising that the clarity and austerity of structure of Sophocles' plays
attracted him by comparison. The structure of King Oedipus in particular is as lucid as the skeleton of a fish;
indeed its lucid structure contributes to its force. But the structures of the seven plays of Sophocles we have differ
remarkably, the verse style of Sophocles is mannered in iambic passages and in choral lyrics often compressed and