He gives us
the sense of Agave's gradual return to reason through many glimmering
doubts, till she wakes up at last to find the real face turned up
towards the mother and murderess; the quite naturally spontaneous
sorrow of the mother, ending with her confession, down to her last
sigh, and the final breaking up of the house of Cadmus; with a result
so genuine, heartfelt, and dignified withal in its expression of a
strange ineffable woe, that a fragment of it, the lamentation of
Agave over her son, in which the long-pent agony at last finds vent,
were, it is supposed, adopted into his paler work by an early
Christian poet, and have figured since, as touches of real fire, in
the Christus Patiens of Gregory Nazianzen.
NOTES
64. +Transliteration: autika ga pasa choreusei. E-text editor's
translation: "Straightway all the earth shall dance." Euripides,
Bacchae 114. Euripidis Fabulae, ed. Gilbert Murray, vol. 3.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913.
66. +Transliteration: poi dei choreuein; poi kathistanai poda; kai
krata seisai polion. Translation: "Where must I dance? Where must
I stand and shake my white locks?" Euripides, Bacchae 184-85.
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