Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/60

lviii thus gained subservient to the highest purposes of his art.

Of the long period that followed our knowledge is but meagre. A few years after the Samian war, (B.C. 440,) his name appears as holding the office of Hellenotamias of the common fund of the Greek Confederacy, (Böckh, Staatsh., 456.) To this function and period we are probably to ascribe the story that when a golden patera had been stolen from the temple of Heracles, the offender was revealed to him in a dream by that hero, and that the poet, with the talent which he received for the discovery, built a shrine to Heracles the Detective, (.) One who had attained the age of sixty when the Peloponnesian war broke out, whose whole mind and character were alien to the factions, the demagogy, the restlessness of the new generation, might legitimately hold aloof from any active participation in the contest. So far as we connect his life at all with the history of the time, the relation is one of contrast. Through all the changes and chances of the war, through all the strife of parties, he holds on his course in a calmer and clearer atmosphere. If he were the Sophocles who was appointed (B.C. 413) as