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Moreover, few of them began life by being poets, and some, as Ennius and Plautus, did not apply themselves to poetry until they had reached mature years. With these facts the character of their genius as a rule agrees. We should not expect in such men the fine inspiration of a Sophocles, a Goethe, or a Shelley, and we do not find it.
Those who have eyes to see have always admitted, and always will, that the greatest civilization of Europe was that of Greece. And of that civilization not merely an accompaniment but the essential condition was slavery. Take away that and you take away Pericles, Phidias, Sophocles, Plato. Dismiss Greece, if you like. Where then will you turn? To the Middle Ages?
Repression, avoidance of extremes, dignity under provocation are the marks of the gentle Sophoclean type and it is a very high type indeed. For we have in him the very fountain of the whole classical tradition in drama. Sophocles is something far more important than a mere influence; he is an ideal, and as such is indestructible.
When Sophocles worked out the law of moral retribution for King Oedipus and Antigone, his daughter, the poet might well have gone on to note that if the Grecian army had sacked the Trojan cities the time would come when the Roman fleet would sack her cities and make her sons to toil as captives.
We view their statues in that abbey in the same manner as those of Sophocles, Plato, and other immortal personages were viewed in Athens; and I am persuaded that the bare sight of those glorious monuments has fired more than one breast, and been the occasion of their becoming great men.
Scholar, s. of a naval officer, ed. at Edin., Glasgow, and Oxf., took orders, and was Vicar of Milford, Hants, until 1863, when he was appointed Prof. of Greek at St. Andrews. He brought out ed. of Sophocles and other works on the Greek classics, and in conjunction with E. Abbott The Life and Letters of Prof. He also ed. the poems of Thomas Campbell, to whom he was related.
Thou who didst call the Furies from the abyss, And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss, For that unnatural retribution, just, Had it but been from hands less near, in this, Thy former realm, I call thee from the dust!" One of the most pathetic scenes in the ancient drama is that in which Sophocles represents the meeting of Orestes and Electra, on his return from Phocis.
The Electra is Sophocles' version of the revenge of Orestes which Aeschylus described in the Choephori and is useful as affording a comparison between the methods of the two masters. An aged tutor at early dawn enters the scene with Orestes to whom he shows his father's palace and then departs with him to offer libations at the dead king's tomb.
His most successful play was the 'Rival Queens', or the Death of Alexander the Great, produced in 1677. Next to it in success, and superior in merit, was his 'Theodosius', or the Force of Love, produced in 1680. He took part with Dryden in writing the very successful adaptation of 'OEdipus', produced in 1679, as an English Tragedy based upon Sophocles and Seneca. No. 40. Monday, April 16, 1711.
In the altercations between the two brothers, in Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, this conceit is employed; and it is remarkable, that so poor a conundrum could not be rejected by any of these three poets, so justly celebrated for their taste and simplicity. What could Shakspeare have done worse? Terence has his "inceptio est amentium, non amanthim."
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