Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/54

lii and there was much in the character of each to draw out mutual admiration. In Pericles the spirit of progress was as yet unmarred by the coarse brawling of the demagogue. The welcome which he gave to the wider thoughts of the new philosophy of Anaxagoras had not as yet passed into mere sophistry and scepticism. The oratory of the one, as was the poetry of the other, (as was also, we may add, the sculpture of Pheidias,) was perfect in its freedom from lower passions, its lofty serenity, its earnest assertion of great principles, its intuitive recognition of the beauty of a self-balanced completeness. The policy of Pericles, too, led him to see in the dramatic representations of the four great festivals a true means of educating the people; and the strong conviction which made him wish to secure that education even to the poorest, at the cost of a heavy charge on the revenues of the state, becomes more intelligible when we remember that at that time Sophocles was the acknowledged monarch of the Athenian drama, and represented, as far as any poet could do, his own political and philosophical convictions.

The Samian expedition, in all probability, brought him into contact with yet another of the great names of Greece. There, before his final emigration to Thurii, was Herodotos, the man who had seen more of distant lands and strange forms of human life than any other Greek, whose mind was stored with many