Greek Lyric Tragedy in Dramas of Swinburne 9 
Drawn up about my face that I may weep 
And the king wake not; and my brows and lips 
Tremble and sob in sleeping like swift flames 
That tremble, or water when it sobs with heat 
Kindled from under.?® 
Other human touches are given when she tells how she bent 
over the child when the Fates had told her how she might save 
him: 
Wherefore I kissed and hid with my hands, 
And covered under arms and hair, and wept, 
And feared to touch him with my tears, and laughed ;36 
So she had kept the brand for years, and Meleager had grown 
to manhood. But the gods have sent her new dreams, and she 
can not tell whither the fates draw her.*? 
After an ode by the chorus, Meleager enters and stands by his 
mother viewing the forces that are gathering for the hunt. In 
perfect sympathy they watch the moving band, commenting on 
this hero and that. When Althaea’s brothers appear Meleager 
says :38 
Next by the left unsandalled foot know thou 
The sail and oar of the Aetolian land, 
Thy brethren, Toxeus and the violent-souled 
Plexippus, over-swift with hand and tongue; 
For hands are fruitful, but the ignorant mouth 
Blows and corrupts their work with barren-breath. 
This leads to controversy that is carried on in stichomythia. 
In genuine Greek fashion Swinburne makes use of the parallel 
dialogue, suggestive of debate, that so delighted the forensic- 
loving Athenians. Althaea warns Meleager that whoever fol- 
lows the ways fixed by the gods prospers, but the fates pursue the 
85 Cf. Greek rheses, set rhetorical speeches. There are seven of these in 
Atalanta and three in Erechtheus, averaging one hundred lines each. Com- 
pare Sophocles, Ajax, ll. 815-865, Euripides, Daughters of Troy, ll. 1156- 
1200. 
36 Atalanta in Calydon, p. 256. 
37 [bid., p. 257. 
38 [bid., p. 263. 
349 
