The decorous Sophocles is reported to have enacted the part of Nausicaa, and played at ball with the handmaidens of the princess in a satyric story evidently taken from one of the most beautiful scenes in the Odyssey. But how the serene and majestic artist managed to comport himself under such circumstances we have still to wonder. All we know for certain about the Greek fourth play is, that it was intended to soothe and calm down the feelings of the spectators after they had been strained and agitated by the prophetic swan-song of Cassandra, by the wail of Jason for his murdered children, by the scene in which Orestes flies from the Furies, or that wherein the noble Antigone and the loving Hæmon are clasped together in their death-embrace.
Such relaxation of excited feeling was in the true spirit of Greek art in its best days, which required even in the hurricane of tragic passion a moderating element, and the means of returning to composure. Let not, however, the English reader imagine that, although the satyric drama was designed to send home the audience in a tranquil and even cheerful mood, it bore any resemblance to farce, much less to burlesque. Welcome as parodies of scenes or verses from "the lofty grave tragedians" were to Athenian ears, skilful as the comic writers were in such travesties, a Greek audience in the time of Euripides would have hurled sticks, stones, and hard-shelled fruit at the buffoons who committed such profanation. "Hamlet," if performed at Athens, would not have been followed by "a popular farce"! Perhaps there is no better definition of the satyric
