Page:Sophocles (Classical Writers).djvu/16

10 the versatile graces of which Pericles boasts in his countrymen, passing through rough and smooth hours imperturbably, and indulging perhaps somewhat freely in pleasure unreproved.

5. And to set off against the description of his gayer moments (men like Ion were not witnesses of his graver moods), we have the authority of Plato for a story of his later years, which in an interesting manner reflects to us the sober colouring of

To one who rallied him on having outlived the pleasures of love, he said, with something of severity, "Nay, but in escaping from that I have left the tyrannical service of a mad master." (Cp. Ant. 781 foll., Trach, 441 foll.)

6. His old age was spent at Athens, perhaps in Colonus, his native district, whose flora he has immortalised as Shakespeare has done that of Stratford. (Had Sophocles a "New Place" by the Cephisus?)

The poet was eighty-two years old when the precinct of Poseidon at Colonus was made the scene of the oligarchical revolution of the Four Hundred, by which, in the spring of B.C. 411, Athenian democracy was temporarily suppressed. As one of the older generation, whose natural tendency was to blame the demagogues for the disasters of the State, he may, in common with other persons of weight, have hoped some public benefit from this change, and the name of "Sophocles" occurs amongst those of the ten probuli, or special counsellors, who had been appointed after the Syracusan calamity to provide that the commonwealth should take no harm; in Roman language, "ne quid respublica detrimenti acciperet." It may well have been that Antiphon, Pisander and their