Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/139

 SOPHOCLES. 121 Landor puts into his mouth express what appear to us to have been his general feelings ^ "I am," says he, in reference to the master- works at Athens, " on] j the interpreter of the heroes and divinities who are looking down upon me." He felt himself called upon to make an advance in the tragic art, corresponding to those improve- ments which Phidias had made upon the works of his immediate forerunners: he did so, and with reference to the same objects. The persons who figured in the old legends, and in the poems of the epic Cycle, were alone wortliy in liis ophiion of the cothurnus ; and if ever an inferior or ludicrous character appears in his Tra^-e- dies, he is but a slavish instrument in the poet's hands to work out the irony of the piece; a streak of bright colour thrown into the picture, in order to render more conspicuous its tragic gloom. Besides the addition of a TpiTaycjoviarr)^^, some other improve- ments are ascribed to this poet; he seems to have made the costumes more appropriate, to have introduced scene-painting, and to have altered the distribution of the chorus. The public character of Sophocles was, as we have seen, rather inconsistent. In the earlier years of his political life he was a partizan of Pericles, and his plays contain many passages evidently written with a view to recommend himself to that statesman. In the Antigone he advises the Athenians to yield a ready and implicit obedience to the man whom, for the time being, they had placed over themselves^; and if, as we believe, the (Edipus at Colonus was written just before the breaking out of the Pelopon- nesian war, it is more than probable that the refusal of Theseus to deliver up CEdipus, though a polluted person, has reference to the demand made by the confederates with regard to the expulsion of Pericles^. The private character of Sophocles was unfortunately very far from faultless. He was a notorious sensualist'^, and, in his later 1 Lander's Imaginary Conversations, ii. p. 142. 2 Which is also attributed to ^schylus (Themistius, p. 316). ^ 670. 'AX' bv TToXis aT7jcr€L€ rovde XP^ KXvecj/ Kal apLLKpa Kal dUaia koI Tduavria. See Introduction to the Antigone, p. xv. 4 Comp. (Ed. Col. 943 sqq. with Thucyd. I. 126, 127. Lachmann in the Rhein. Mus. for 1827, pp. 327 fol. 5 Cic. Offic. I. 40; de Senect. ^7j Athen. xii. p. 510; xiii. p. 592; xiii. p. 603; Plato, I. Resp. p. 329 b.