Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/64

lxii barbarous court to the standard of Hellenic civilisation, drew round him a host of minor poets and philosophers. Like offers from these and other princes were made to Sophocles, but he refused them all. He was faithful to his beloved Athens, to the country upon which he looked, as Pericles had looked, with an idealising and passionate attachment,—whose legends he had raised to the height of the noblest poetry, from whose people he had received so much sympathy and honour. Like his great contemporary, Socrates, he seems never to have quitted the city except at her call and in her service. It might almost seem in his case, as in that of Dante, as if the sense of belonging to a city, which, in the history of the Greek and Italian republics, took the place of belonging to a country, was capable of inspiring a more concentrated, and therefore more passionate attachment. The state-city was mightier than the fatherland.

Devotion to his art may have combined with, or, it may be, formed part of this love of Athens. Out of the 113 plays assigned to him, not less than 81 belonged to this period, and this, with all that it involved, implies an almost unremitting labour. It is to the honour of the Athenian people that he