Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/65

Rh less than most poets have done from the caprices of popular favour. Sometimes a passing perversion of taste, or the attraction of a new style, might lead them to adjudge the first prize to Euripides (B.C. 442) or Euphorion, the son of Æschylos, (B.C. 432,) but Sophocles stood first in twenty contests, wrote, that is probably, eighty prize plays, and never occupied a lower place than the second, though exposed to the competition of sixteen or seventeen dramatists. The same distinction could not be claimed for the eighty tragedies of Æschylos, or the seventy-five of Euripides, nor yet for Iophon, the son of Sophocles, whom his father lived to see crowned with victory. It seemed too as if this, the autumn of his life, was also the season of his finest, as well as most abundant vintage. Assuming, as we may fairly do, that it was the surpassing excellence of the extant tragedies that led, directly or indirectly, to their preservation, when others were left to perish, it is noticeable that they belong most of them to this period. The noblest of all single passages was among the latest of all, when the decay of physical strength, and, it may be, his absorption in his art, gave occasion to the charge that he was sinking into the imbecility of age, and no