The cast at the Metropolitan Opera House's revival of the opera on November 15,1915, was as follows: Dalila, Mme.

Margarete Matzenauer; Samson, Signor Enrico Caruso; High Priest, Signor Pasquale Amato; Abimelech, Herr Carl Schlegel; An Old Hebrew, M.Leon Rothier; A Philistine Messenger, Herr Max Bloch; First Philistine, Pietro Audisio; Second Philistine, Vincenzo Reschiglian; conductor, Signor Polacco.
It would be a curious inquiry to try to determine the source of the fascination which the story of Manoah's son has exerted upon mankind for centuries.

It bears a likeness to the story of the son of Zeus and Alcmene, and there are few books on mythology which do not draw a parallel between the two heroes.

Samson's story is singularly brief.
For twenty years he "judged Israel," but the Biblical history which deals with him consists only of an account of his birth, a recital of the incidents in which he displayed his prodigious strength and valor, the tale of his amours, and, at the end, the account of his tragical destruction, brought about by the weak element in his character.
Commentators have been perplexed by the tale, irrespective of the adornments which it has received at the hands of the Talmudists.

Is Samson a Hebrew form of the conception personified by the Greek Herakles?
Is he a mythical creature, born in the human imagination of primitive nature worship--a variant of the Tyrian sun-god Shemesh, whose name his so curiously resembles?
[In Hebrew he is called Shimshon, and the sun shemesh.] Was he something more than a man of extraordinary physical strength and extraordinary moral weakness, whose patriotic virtues and pathetic end have kept his memory alive through the ages?
Have a hundred generations of men to whom the story of Herakles has appeared to be only a fanciful romance, the product of that imagination heightened by religion which led the Greeks to exalt their supreme heroes to the extent of deification, persisted in hearing and telling the story of Samson with a sympathetic interest which betrays at least a sub-conscious belief in its verity?
Is the story only a parable enforcing a moral lesson which is as old as humanity?
If so, how got it into the canonical Book of Judges, which, with all its mythical and legendary material, seems yet to contain a large substratum of unquestionable history?
There was nothing of the divine essence in Samson as the Hebrews conceived him, except that spirit of God with which he was directly endowed in supreme crises.