pean wall. I have little doubt that portions of the Pelasgic wall will come to light, when the northern slope of the Akropolis is cleared of débris and rubbish.

It follows, of course, from the above demonstration, that the northern wall of the Akropolis now standing is later than the time of Kimôn; but this conclusion is rendered extremely probable by grounds entirely independent of any connected with the Pelasgic wall.

OIDIPOUS TYRANNOS.

THAT the oldest and most influential university in New England should have brought out, with distinguished success, in her own theatre, an ancient Greek tragedy in the original language, with all the proper equipments of stage, scenery, costume and music, is, in several ways, a most noteworthy event. Educationally considered, it means that the study of ancient Greek, so long a dry, barren encumbrance of the ground, has at last borne fruit, fit to enter as sustenance into the intellectual, moral, and artistic life of the more favoured members of the community. From a literary point of view, it means the revival of an intelligent interest in the robust, earnest, soulstrengthening works of the grand old masters, as opposed to the feeble, pampering, alcoholic love-lore, on which so many mere rhymers and story-tellers nowadays base their lofty titles of poets and men of letters. Lastly, it means that the old supercilious spirit, which regarded paganism as a mere cloud of error, dispelled by the pure light of Christian truth, is giving way to a kindly appreciation of the human as human, of the good and the true, wherever they are

found. If such exhibitions are frequently repeated at Cambridge and initiated at other great seats of learning and education, we may hope that in a short time there will issue from our universities a succession of scholarly, philosophical artists, capable of finding for the glad, generous, but only half-grasped ideas, which shape American life, forms as original, perfect, and eternal as those in which Sophoklês and his brethren cast the gloomy beliefs that ran through Hellenic life. When that time comes, we shall have a literature as much nobler than that of the Greeks as free love of the good, as good, is nobler than servile fear of God as omnipotent and irresponsible.

In undertaking to place before a highly cultivated audience a work which should exhibit at once the essential character and the perfection of Greek tragic genius and the nature of the themes which found a ready response in the heart of the Hellenic people, the Greek department of Harvard University could hardly have made a better selection than the Oidipous Tyrannos of Sophoklês. The bard of Kolônos is the most perfect of all the poetic artists of Greece, not to say of the world, equally removed from the half-hewn, Odinic sublimity of the adamantine Aischylos and the half-squeezed, spongy realism of the impressible Euripidês. His works are self-contained wholes, as thoroughly organized, as gracefully balanced, as nobly human, and as free from sensuous exuberance or ascetic gracility as the statues of Praxitelês, the marble glisten of whose shaded surfaces is matched

by the sharp, silvery resonance of the poet's harmonious verse. His plots, chosen from mythical or legendary history, are so handled as to bring out what was at all times a ruling conviction in the Greek mind, namely, man's dependence upon the gods and utter helplessness in their hands; to illustrate, so to speak, the sentiment which he puts into the mouth of Oidipous (O. T., vv. 280, 281)—

"To constrain the gods

To what they will not, not one man hath skill.”

In the time of Sophoklês, this often latent religious sentiment was deepened in the hearts of all profoundly religious men, and roused to distinct self-assertion, through the opposition offered to it by the new rationalistic philosophies, which were already precociously threatening to clear the universe of gods, assert the independence of man, and replace the diffusive mysteriousness of religion by the bounded clearness of mere science. In the Knights of Aristophanês (v. 32), Demosthenês only formulates a question that then was rising spontaneously in many minds, when he asks the timid, superstitious Nikias: "Do you really believe in gods?" and the latter only expresses the feelings of many more, when he answers: “Of course, because it is to gods that I am an enemy is not that fair reasoning?" Demosthenês feels the force of it!

In truth, the popular religion of the Greeks, usually regarded as so full of joy and gladness, because its

public ceremonies gave opportunity for the display of healthy natural feeling, was at bottom one of the gloomiest forms of Oriental pessimism or monistic fatalism. So long as the Greeks remained in the purely religious or receptive stage of consciousness, this fatalism, dark enough even in the latter books of the Iliad, found a relieving offset in the assumed freedom of the numerous gods of their disorderly pantheon. Indeed, so long as they did not examine and compare their different beliefs, so long the notions of infinite, blind fatalism and individual, intelligent, moral freedom could co-exist in their minds without clashing; but no sooner did intrusive reason, in the form of logic, confront these beliefs with each other, than their incompatibility became apparent, shaping itself into the dilemma of the One and the Many: If there be one omnipotent Fate, if all the power in the universe be in the hands of one Being, then none other is free; all are manifestations of it, abstractions from it. If, on the contrary, there be many gods endowed with freedom, then Fate is a mere abstraction—a delusion, if taken for anything else. The attempts to escape from this dilemma, which seemed to involve the sacrifice either of Fate or of the gods-in either case, gross impiety—were as numerous in those early days as they are in our own, and well-nigh as ineffectual. Some thinkers, like the Eleatics, decided in favour of the One, plainly stigmatizing the Many as a delusion; others, like the Abderite atomists, chose the Many in its most pro