Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/80

lxxviii like those of Euripides, sententious, rhetorical declaimers.

It is difficult enough, in any case, to throw ourselves into the religious life of those whose lot has been cast under a different system from our own; but the difficulty rises to its height when we ask ourselves with what thoughts and emotions the word God, as distinct from any special names, Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, was connected in his mind, and that of other thinkers of his time. And yet we must not lose sight of the fact, that with him, as with the other great religious Greeks of his time, Herodotos and Socrates, the teaching of Anaxagoras seems to have so far affected his language, that the loftiest and noblest utterances of religious truths are always, or all but always, so set forth. It is God who is great in His own eternal laws; His providence watches over the good, and takes vengeance on the ungodly. Even the plural form, the Gods, and the received synonyms, Heaven, Olympos, and the like, suggest the grand, vague thought of an unseen, all-pervading Presence, (like the Supreme Reason of Anaxagoras,) rather than that of the many personal individualities of popular Greek mythology; and the great lesson which he teaches in every drama is that of reverence for this invisible Power. Whatever might be the truth or