Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/95

Rh been said to assign to Sophocles a higher place in the history of Greek literature, even than to Homer himself. If he has not the glory of being the first great poet, his greatness is of a higher type. He is the representative poet of a more advanced and cultivated age, and shows greater sympathy with the thoughts and questionings of such an age, with its hopes and fears, its problems and its strivings. In his estimate of human excellence there is a less exclusive admiration of the mere brute courage which passes into ferocity, and which even in Homer's noblest heroes is accompanied by acts of savage cruelty, and he thinks more of reverence, wisdom, skill in rule, filial devotion, faithfulness, and honour. No character in the Iliad approaches the pattern of chivalrous truth and generosity which we find in Theseus. Even Andromache, in her passionate love for Hector, must yield to the higher, more self-sacrificing love of Antigone for her father and her brother. In what bears on the growth and history of the society in which he lived, he is not content, as Homer was, with making his characters the mouthpieces of the commonplace declamation of kings and chiefs against the advancing freedom of the people, or caricaturing demagogues, as in the portraiture of Thersites, but aims, in the