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 appointed a member of the or Committee of Public Safety. The pretty story told by Cicero in the De Senectute of his last appearance in public in extreme old age and his triumphant acquittal by the jury is too familiar to be repeated, and is probably a fiction, but it serves as evidence of his popularity to the very end. He had seen the rise of Athens and identified himself with her glory, and he was spared by a happy death from witnessing her final fall at the battle of Aegospotami (405 ).

“His life was gentle.” Gentle is the word by which critics ancient and modern have agreed to characterize him. The epitaph is Shakespeare’s, and Ben Jonson applies it to Shakespeare himself, but it fits even more aptly the sweet singer of Colonus, in whom “the elements were so mixed” as to form what the Greeks expressed by. In the famous line of Aristophanes:

The one aspersion on his character is that in his younger days he was a passionate lover, but the charge rests on a passage in the opening scene of the Republic of Plato which will bear a milder interpretation. When Sophocles, as there reported, expressed his satisfaction ix