Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/55

Rh stories of the past, who himself united, like Sophocles, a real reverence for the forms of religious belief that surrounded him, with a dim sense of something higher and wider, that embraced them all. If we could accept the popular tradition, that Herodotos had read his history at Athens a few years before, their friendship may have been formed already. Traces of it are found in an epigram, which fixes the date and the age of Sophocles at the time, and yet more in striking parallelisms between passages in the works of the two writers. Some of these have been noticed in an interesting paper by Dr Donaldson in the Transactions of the Philological Society; but the case is much stronger even than he represents it, and the coincidences have so much interest as throwing light on the relations between the poet and the historian, that it seems worth while to bring them before readers, to some of whom, at least, they will probably be new.

(1.) In the speech which Herodotos (iii. 119) puts into the mouth of the wife of Intaphernes, as her apology for asking the life of her brother rather than of her husband and children, we find her saying, "Ο king, I might yet find, God willing, another husband and other children, if I should lose these, but now that my father and my brother have ceased to live, I can never have another brother." Compare this with Antig. 909–912.