Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/30

xxviii forgiving. There, from time to time, some pilgrim, burdened with the consciousness of guilt, would come, the suppliant's branch in his hand, and offer, according to an ancient and precise ritual, libations of pure water from the spring. There, so the local legends went, one great sufferer, the Theban King, whose name the boy of Colonos was afterwards to immortalise, had found the longed-for close of the many sorrows of his life in the calm sleep of a mysterious death.

Of the poet's father we know little more than the name, Sophillos. Whether he was, as earlier biographers said, a carpenter, or a brass-founder, or a sword -maker, working with his own hands, or, as later writers conjectured, a citizen of some wealth, employing his slaves in these trades, and living on their profits, as did the fathers of Isocrates and Demosthenes; or, as Pliny reported, one of the wealthier, if not nobler, class, this must remain uncertain. Against the notion of any low descent, is the fact that there are no traces of any reference to it in the rough, unsparing jesting of the older comedy; and that the poet was chosen as one of the Ten Generals in the war with Samos, a colleague with the great Pericles. In itself, indeed, in a state like Athens,