Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/136

 118 SOPHOCLES. ' not liave a very disproportionate number of trilogies for the remain- ing thirty-six years. Besides, we have a list of 114 names of dramas attributed to Sophocles, of which ninety-eight are quoted more than once as his, and it is exceedingly unlikely that many of these should have been written by his son lophon, or his grandson, the younger Sophocles. It will be recollected too, that, in the earlier part of his life, Sophocles was much engaged in public af- fairs ; he was a general, at least once^, and went on several embas- sies 2; this, in addition to the greater facility in writing, which he might have acquired by long practice, would account for his pen being more prolific in the latter part of his life. He obtained the first prize eighteen^, twenty'*, or twenty-four times ^, and it is not probable that his first and second prizes taken together were much fewer than thirty. Now it seems that about twenty-four of the dramas, the names of which have come down to us, were satyrical : we may suppose that he wrote about twenty-seven satyrical dramas on the whole : this would give us twenty-seven Tetralogies, or 108 plays, and there remain five single plays to satisfy the statement of Suidas, that he contended with drama against drama. This state- ment we shall now proceed to examine. It certainly does not im- ply that he never contended with Trilogies, for it is known that he wrote satyrical dramas, which in his time were never acted by themselves. One of the conjectures, which have been proposed with respect to the meaning of the words of Suidas, is, that Sopho- cles opposed to the Trilogies of ^schylus three Tragedies, not inti- mately connected with one another, like the -/Eschylean plays, but each complete in itself^. This presumes, however, that Suidas un- derstood the word rerpaXoyla in a technical sense, as expressing the distinguishing peculiarity of the JEschylean Trilogy with its ac- companying satyric drama. We cannot believe that the gram- marian had any such accurate perception of the real nature of the trilogy. Nevertheless, the fact may have been such, although Suidas did not know it : for nothing is more likely than that the custom of contending with single plays, which Sophocles, perhaps 1 Justiu says (lib. in. 6) that he served against the Lacedaemonians. 3 Kal iv irpea^eiais i^r)Td^eTO. Vit. Anonym. 3 Diodor. xin. 103. ^ Nt/cas fKajSev dnoaiv ws (prjai Kapvcmos' iroWaKis 5^ Kal devTepeta Aa/9e. VU. A nonym. 5 Suidas. " Welcker, ly'thjgie, p. 51.