Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/52

l produced much the same impression on the minds of the Athenian people as Addison's Cato did on the Whigs and Tories of the days of Anne, each party claiming it as a witness to their views, and both uniting to applaud it to the skies. It was indeed conspicuously an attempt to assert the great principles which were held on either side, and to show how fatal was the issue when they were brought into collision with each other, what choice the lovers of truth and freedom must make when the collision became inevitable. Order was good, obedience to rulers right, but rulers who themselves forgot the reverence due to humanity, and made their power subservient to their passion, forfeited their claim to obedience. Above all conventional rules, above all duties of citizens to magistrates, were the eternal laws of right, "which were not of to-day or yesterday," Heaven-born, and stamped with the might and majesty of God.

A like tendency showed itself, as will be seen further on, in his relation to the religious questions which were then dividing men's minds. What we are now concerned with is the immediate effect of the Antigone. There may seem at first a strange incongruity between the merit and the honour with which it was rewarded. The author of a successful tragedy was elected as a general, and was sent (B.C.