Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/41

Rh Within eight years after that victory, he had brought the discomfiture of Xerxes on the stage for the delight of those who had resisted him. Year after year he gained the highest prize among those who thus sought the applause of the people. It seemed almost as if he were looked upon as the only poet capable of writing tragedies.

No study of the life of Sophocles would be complete which did not take into account the influence probably exercised upon his mind by that wonderful genius, daring in its choice of subjects, its startling figures, its bold imagination, daring even in its use of the adjuncts of stage effects, of masks, and machinery, and dress, yet more daring in the way in which he dealt with the traditional religion of his countrymen. Passing, we know not under what guidance—it may be he hardly knew himself—to a far higher region than that of the Homeric Olympos, the Gods were not for him capricious, vindictive, boastful, below rather than above the level of human passions and goodness, with absolutely no ethical character entitling them to reverence, but strange mysterious beings, colossal in their greatness, dimly known by man. Strange thoughts of a succession of divine Powers, each supreme in its turn, doubts whether the Power whom men knew as Zeus were the impersonation of Might only, or of Might and Right in union—whether the conflict between that Might, as seen in nature on the one side,