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 at escaping from a savage and tyrannous monster, he surely did not mean that he had been a libertine, but that old age had removed him from temptations to which he may never have succumbed. In all antiquity there is not a purer-minded poet, and (as in the case of Virgil and Shakespeare) we may discredit and ignore the unsavoury gossip of Athenaeus and the scandal-mongers of a later age.

Since his death the fame of Sophocles has grown and never suffered eclipse. To Aristotle no less than to Aristophanes he is the greatest of dramatists, and in the Poetics the Oedipus Rex is held up as the model of a tragedy. To Virgil who freely imitated him “the buskin of Sophocles” is a synonym for dramatic perfection. Racine and Lessing prized him no less highly, and Sophocles was the volume that Shelley carried with him to his watery grave.

The Merope of Matthew Arnold is a far-off echo of the Electra of Sophocles, and no finer or truer tribute has been paid to a poet than the sonnet in which Arnold renders his special thanks to him

“Whose even-balanced soul,

From first youth tested up to extreme old age,

Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole,

The mellow glory of the Attic stage,

Singer of sweet Colonus and its child.”

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