Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/257

Rh and we hear of him at the age of sixteen leading a choir as harper in the thanksgiving for Salamis. His first victory was in 468, when he was eight and twenty. The play was perhaps the Triptolemus.* If so, it was a success to the patriotic drama on its first appearance; for Triptolemus was a local hero with no real place in the Homeric legend. Our account of the victory is embroidered by a strange anecdote: there were such hot factions in the theatre that the archon suddenly set aside the regular five judges, and called on the ten generals, who had just returned from campaigning, to provide a fresh board. The first defeat of Æschylus by a younger generation which knew not Marathon and Salamis, would produce the same bitterness as was felt in modern Greece and Italy against the first Prime Ministers who had not fought in the wars of independence.

One of Sophocles's very earliest plays was probably the Women Washing.* The scene, Nausicaa and her maidens on the sea-shore, seems meant for the old dancing-floor before the palace front had become a fixed tradition; and the poet himself acted Nausicaa, which he can only have done in youth. His figure in middle life was far from girlish, as even the idealised statue shows. The earliest dated play is the Antigone; it was produced immediately before the author's appointment as admiral in the Samian War of 440, and constituted in the opinion of wits his chief claim to that office. The poet Ion, who met him at Chios, describes him as "merry and clever over his cups," and charming in conversation; of public affairs he