Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/51

Rh central and left doors. To these we may add (7.) the division of a line of verse (the iambic trimeter) between two speakers, in the more impassioned verses of the play,—as, e.g., in Œd. King, 626–629, and Electr., 1220–1225.

To this period, however, we may refer a more important act in the poet's personal history. Living chiefly as he must have done in it, for the art to which he had devoted himself, he was still an Athenian citizen, and could not but take some share in the struggle then going on between the party of progress and that which was simply conservative. In the question which more than any other was the battle-field of the two parties, the limitation of the jurisdiction of the Areopagos, Æschylos, in the last play of his greatest Trilogy, had declared himself against the Reformers and Philosophers, and had endeavoured to rouse all feelings of reverence and awe in support of the time-honoured institution. Whether Sophocles took any active part in that controversy, is left unrecorded. Later on in life, however, he too had something to say through the medium of his art as to the Areopagos, and it is at least significant that he puts a panegyric on that tribunal into the mouth, not of Theseus, the hero and lawgiver of Athens, but of Creon, the tyrant and the hypocrite. One drama, at any rate, the Antigone, belongs to this period, and it appears to have