Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/68

lxvi in the play which gathers up all the experience and the feelings of his latest years. As with the discrowned king, who is the central figure of the "Œdipus at Colonos," so with him, death, if it came as he expected it, may have come with no pang of agony or failing reason. To one who rose beyond the popular belief, which yet he reverenced, the functions of the priesthood, which in his old age he accepted in the shrine of a local hero, probably also his initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries, (Fragm. 719,) may have been subservient to a higher religious life; and in the epithet "most devout," which later tradition gave him, and the belief that he received divine revelations of the will of the Gods, we may see a token of a temper which entitles us to class him with those among the Greeks most distinguished for a true reverence, with those who were his contemporaries, and two of whom we know to have been his friends, with Nikias and Herodotos and Socrates. Calmly he too may have passed away, not without awe, not without such hope in "some far-off divine event," as belonged to the times of ignorance: