Divergent views of the Trachiniae. Difficulty of judging it rightly.

§ 1. It has been the fortune of the Trachiniae to provoke a singular diversity of judgments. Dissen and Bergk refer the play to a period when the powers of Sophocles were not yet fully matured. Bernhardy regards it as a mediocre production of declining age. Schlegel, in his Lectures on Dramatic Literature, goes further still; he pronounces the piece unworthy of its reputed author, and wishes that the responsibility for it could be transferred from Sophocles to some feebler contemporary,—his son, for instance, the ‘frigid’ Iophon. Yet there has never been a lack of more favourable estimates. In the very year when Schlegel was lecturing at Vienna (1808), Boeckh pointed out the strong family likeness between this and the other six plays; A. Jacob made a direct reply to Schlegel's censures; and Godfrey Hermann said that, whatever faults the work might have, at any rate both the spirit and the diction were unmistakably those of Sophocles. During the last half century, with the growth of a better aesthetic criticism in relation to all things Hellenic, a sense of the great beauties in the Trachiniae has decidedly prevailed over the tendency to exaggerate its defects; indeed, the praise bestowed upon it, in these latter days, has sometimes perhaps been a little too indiscriminate.