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Updated: May 28, 2025
When Sophokles produced his first play, being then very young, Aphepsion, the archon, seeing that party feeling ran high among the spectators, would not cast lots to decide who were to be the judges, but when Kimon with the other nine generals, his colleagues, entered to make the usual libation to the god, he refused to allow them to depart, but put them on their oath, and forced them to sit as judges, they being ten in number, one from each of the ten tribes.
The same defect which we feel more or less present in all poets of antiquity least of all perhaps in Virgil and Sophokles, but even in them somewhat a certain want of widely sympathetic tenderness, this is unquestionably present in Pindar.
He ignores or flatly denies tales that bring discredit on the gods; he will only bow down to them when they have the virtues he respects in man. Yet he, like Aeschylus and Sophokles, does so bow down, sincerely and without hesitation, and that poets of their temper could do so was well indeed for poetry.
The days of experimenting have passed; the danger now threatening German art is not from abroad, but is within itself, from those of its own body who, just when the only hope lies in sobriety and self-restraint, are goading it on the career of intoxication. There remain the Hellenic and the Spanish dramas. Wagner's true spiritual progenitors were Sophokles and Calderon.
But the entry of Sophocles "an old pale-swathed majesty," at the supper which followed the performance of the play, is another of those passages to find which in situ is a sufficient reward for reading many laborious pages that might almost as well have been thrown into an imaginary conversation in prose: Then the grey brow sank low, and Sophokles Re-swathed him, sweeping doorward: mutely passed 'Twixt rows as mute.
The vast intellectual power of Plato and Sokrates did not prevent them from sharing this universal enthusiasm. Poets like Sophokles, and statesmen like Alexander, thought it not beneath their dignity to engage publicly in gymnastic sports. Their conceptions of divinity were framed in accordance with these general habits.
To realize its possibilities musically is to give proof enough of the very highest order of genius, a genius akin to that of Sophokles. It may be said that in general Paine has completely fulfilled his opportunities. Mendelssohn also set two Greek tragedies to music, Sophokles' "Oedipus in Kolonos" and his "Antigone."
Somewhat the same lesson as that of the Oresteia is taught later, with more of sweetness and harmony, but not with more force, in the Oedipus Coloneus of Sophokles. And in Pindar we see the same tendencies inchoate. Like Aeschylus he does by implication subordinate to morality both politics and religion.
The realism of Euripides was hateful to Sophokles. Those droppings of warm tears had no music for him. Milton, with his sense of the grand style, could not understand the method of Shakespeare, any more than could Sir Joshua the method of Gainsborough. Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice.
A magistrate or lawgiver might well address an old man who marries a young girl in the words of Sophokles: "Poor wretch, a hopeful bridegroom you will be;" and if he found a young man fattening like a partridge in the house of a rich old woman, he ought to transfer him to some young maiden who is without a husband. So much for this subject.
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