Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/135

 SOPHOCLES. 117 joy at being proclaimed tragic victor was too much for his decayed strength. His family burial-place was Decelea, and as that town was in the possession of the Lacedaemonians, it was not possible to bring him there until Lysander, having heard from the deserters that the great poet was dead, permitted his ashes to rest with those of his ancestors. There is a legend, that Bacchus appeared twice to Lysander in a dream, and enjoined him to allow the interment to take placed According to one account, they placed the image of a Siren over his tomb, according to another, a bronze swallow. Ister informs us that the Athenians decreed him an annual sacrifice. He wrote, besides Tragedies, an elegy, pseans, and a prose-work on the chorus, against Thespis and Cho^rilus. Only seven of his Tragedies have come down to us ; but an ingenious attempt has been made to show that the Rhesus^ which is generally attributed to Euripides, was the first of the plays of Sophocles^ With regard to the whole number of plays composed by Sopho- cles, we have the authority of Aristophanes, of Byzantium, that 130 were ascribed to liim, of which seventeen were spurious. It has been objected^ to this large number, that the Antigo7ie, which was acted in 440, was the thirty-second play; and as Sophocles began to exhibit in 468, and died in 405, he would have written eighty-one pieces in the last thirty-six years of his literary life, and only thirty-two in the first twenty-seven years ; whereas it is not likely that he would have written more in his declining years than in the vigour of his life : and it has been conjectured that he wrote only about seventy plays. Reasons have, however, been given'*, which incline us to believe that Aristophanes is correct in assign- ing to him 113 genuine dramas. For, in the first place, the mean- ing of the words, on which this objection is founded, is not suf- ficiently clear : it is not certain that the grammarian is not referring to Tragedies only, and in that case, even supposing that Sophocles wrote five separate plays in that time, we should have to add nine satyrical dramas to make up the Tetralogies, and thus we should 1 See Vita Anonym. Pausanias, i. 21, § i, gives a somewhat different story. A6'7e- TCt 5e 2o0o/c^oi'S TeXevTT^aavTOS €<rj3deiv els ttjv 'Kttlkt]v AaKedai/iovlovs, Kal ccpwv rhv ijyovfxevou Ihetv einaTdvTa oi Aiovvaou KeXeveiv TL[xah, 6'crat KadecrrriKaaLV eirl tols TedveQai, t^v 'LeLpriva. Tr]u 'Siav ri/xav. kuL oi rb 6vap llo(poKia Kal T7]v 'Zo<j)OKiovs TToi-qaiv icpalvero ^x^'^- 2 Gruppe, Ariadne, pp. 78-) — 305. ^ By Bockh, de Or. Trafj. Princip. pp. 107 — 109. ^ By Clinton, Phil. Museum, I. pp. 74 fol.