Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/399

* SOPHOCLES. 345 SOPHOCLES. old age fell to him in their season. At the cele- bration of the victory of Salamis (B.C. 480) he was selected to lead the chorus of dancing and singing youths. His grace and youthful beauty in the role of the Princess Nausicaa playisg ball with her attendant maidens were long remem- bered. In another part he served as the model of the painter Polygnotus for his ideal picture of the bard Thamyris. He composed the music of his beautiful choric odes, and in addition to his plays wrote many poems, including a Piean to .Esculapius, which was still sung in the third century a.d. He served his country in various capacities as ambassador, treasurer of the tri- bute, and general. He was noted for his piety, held a minor priesthood in his old age, and was worshiped with heroic honors after death. His cheerful temjier and agreeable manners made him a universal favorite, against whom even the scurrilous comedians found little to sa^'. He was the friend of Herodotus, who wrote an ode in his honor, and the associate and colleague of Pericles. His life is a verification of the Periclean boast that grace and versatility in varied service stamp the true Athenian. In the year 4tiS. at the age of twenty-eight, he produced his earliest play, the Triptolemus, which won the first prize against the veteran .Eschylus. For the remaining years of .Eschylus's life the two mighty rivals contended, -with varying suc- cess, each learning much from the art of the other. The first recorded contest with Euripides occurred in the year 438, when the younger poet's Alcestis won the second place. In the contests of the ne.xt thirty-two years Sophocles was gener- ally successful, bearing away the first prize about twenty times and never falling below the second place. He held public ofiice not as a professional poli- tician, but ■■like any other good Athenian." In the year 440 he was elected one of the board of generals for the Samian War with Pericles, ac- cording to the legend, because of the popularity or political wisdom of the Antiffoiir. The great poet as general was the theme of many anecdotes, some of which have lieen preserved by the writer of memoirs, Ion of Chios, who met him in Chian society and at a banquet, where he debated the proprieties of poetic diction with a pedantic schoolmaster and triumphantly displayed his 'strategy'' in the capturing of a kiss from a pretty child. His old age is said to have been clouded by the attempt of his son, lophon, to deprive him of the management of his estate on the ground of mental incapacity. The legend adds that Sophocles refuted the charge by reading to the jurors the magnificent chorus in praise of Colonus from the (E/Jipus at Colonns. his latest play, produced after his death by his grandson and namesake. If the tale is true it is strange that Aristophanes makes no allusion to it in the Frogs (B.C. 40.5). There the relations between father and son are so friendly that Dionysus is unwilling to bring b.ack Sophocles to the upper world until he has had an opportimity to test lophon's poetic powers when imaided by his father. On the death of Euripides in the spring of 406 Sophocles assumed mourning and ordered his chorus to appear without wreaths. A few months later he himself followed his younger rival. The chief changes in the external form of tragedy attributed to Sophocles are the raising of the number of members of the chorus from twelve to fifteen and the introduction of a third actor, which made possible the complication of the action and the more effective ])orlrayal of character by contrast and juxtaposition". He- also abandoned the -Eschylean fashion of compos- ing plays in groups of three about a cuntral myth or motive and made each play an independent psychological and dramatic unity. The chorus participates very slightly if at all in the plot, and the length of the choric odes relatively to the dialogue diminishes, though they never' become mere musical interludes, as is too often the case in Euripides. The Sophoclean cluirus is the ideal spectator and interpreter of the ethical and religious significance of the action. The great choric odes of the, Antigone and the CEdipiis- unite the grace of the Greek lyric to the moral earnestness of the Hebrew psalm. Sophocles composed about 120 plays, of which seven are preserved, together with fragments of eighty or ninety others. (1) Ayas-," brooding upon the dishonor done him by the award- ing of the arms of Achilles to Odysseus, is bereft of liis reason by Athena, whom he has ofi'ended by presumptuous speech. In his frenzy he wreaks his wrath upon the cattle of the C4reeks. At this point the action begins. Awakening to the in- tolerable humiliation of his position, he slays himself after a toucliing farewell to his infant son and a noble apostrophe to earth and sea and sky. The debate on the question of granting him honor- able burial, which fills the last third of the play, is an anticlimax to modern feeling, but effectively displays the conciliatory temper of the sagacious Odysseus and the vindictive spirit of Menelaus. (2) The Antigone, perhaps the first problem play in literature, presents the moral antinomy that arises from a conMict between political authority and the law of the individual conscience. Anti- gone, in obedience to Greek religious feeling and the dictates of her woman's heart, bestows the rites of burial upon her rebel brother Polynices in defiance of the edict of King Creon, and so brings about her own death, and, by tragic com- plication, that of her lover, Ha'nion, the King's son. (3) The Elcctra corresponds to the middle play of -Eschylus's trilogy the Oresteia, and to the Electra of Euripides. It treats of the slaying of Clytemnestra and her paramour, -Egisthus, by her children, Orestes and Electra, in revenge for the murder of their father, Aga- memnon. The psychological interest centres in the character of Electra. a sort of ancient Co- lomba, nerving her brother to the prosecution, of the blood feud. (4) The (Efliinis T/irannus is the most ingeniously constructed of Greek plays and a typical example of the so-called Sopho- clean or dramatic irony. The plot turns on the gradual inevitable revelation to CEdipus. through his own insistent inquiry, of the dreadful truth, already known to the audience, that he has un- wittingly fulfilled the oracle which doomed him to slay his father and live in incestuous mar- riage with his mother. (5) The Trachiniw, named from the Trachinian maidens of the chorus, treats of the poisoning of Hercules by the Xessus robe sent to him as a love charm by his jealous wife, Deianira, and his translation to heaven from the funeral pyre on Mount fEta. (6) The Pliiloctetes was produced in 409. Phi- loctetes, bitten by a serpent and afflicted with a.