Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete

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[ He does indeed charge Sophocles with avarice, but he atones for it very handsomely in the “Frogs.”

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[ M. Schlegel is pleased to indulge in one of his most declamatory rhapsodies upon the life, “so dear to the gods,” of this “pious and holy poet.” But Sophocles, in private life, was a profligate, and in public life a shuffler and a trimmer, if not absolutely a renegade. It was, perhaps, the very laxity of his principles which made him thought so agreeable a fellow. At least, such is no uncommon cause of personal popularity nowadays. People lose much of their anger and envy of genius when it throws them down a bundle or two of human foibles by which they can climb up to its level.

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[ It is said, indeed, that the appointment was the reward of a successful tragedy; it was more likely due to his birth, fortune, and personal popularity.

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[ It seems, however, that Pericles thought very meanly of his warlike capacities.—See Athenaeus, lib. 13, p. 604.

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[ Oedip. Tyr., 1429, etc.

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[ When Sophocles (Athenaeus, i., p. 22) said that Aeschylus composed befittingly, but without knowing it, his saying evinced the study his compositions had cost himself.

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[ “The chorus should be considered as one of the persons in the drama, should be a part of the whole, and a sharer in the action, not as in Euripides, but as in Sophocles.”—Aristot. de Poet., Twining’s translation. But even in Sophocles, at least in such of his plays as are left to us, the chorus rarely, if ever, is a sharer in the outward and positive action of the piece; it rather carries on and expresses the progress of the emotions that spring out of the action.

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[ —akno toi pros s’ aposkopois’ anax.—Oedip. Tyr., 711.

This line shows how much of emotion the actor could express in spite of the mask.

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[ “Of all discoveries, the best is that which arises from the action itself, and in which a striking effect is produced by probable incidents. Such is that in the Oedipus of Sophocles.”—Aristot. de Poet., Twining’s translation.

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[ But the spot consecrated to those deities which men “tremble to name,” presents all the features of outward loveliness that contrast and refine, as it were, the metaphysical terror of the associations. And the beautiful description of Coloneus itself, which is the passage that Sophocles is said to have read to his judges, before whom he was accused of dotage, seems to paint a home more fit for the graces than the furies. The chorus inform the stranger that he has come to “the white Coloneus;”

“Where ever and aye, through the greenest vale
Gush the wailing notes of the nightingale
From her home where the dark-hued ivy weaves
With the grove of the god a night of leaves;
And the vines blossom out from the lonely glade,
And the suns of the summer are dim in the shade,
And the storms of the winter have never a breeze,
That can shiver a leaf from the charmed trees;
For there, oh ever there,
With that fair mountain throng,
Who his sweet nurses were, [Footnote the nymphs of Nisa:
Wild Bacchus holds his court, the conscious woods among!
Daintily, ever there,
Crown of the mighty goddesses of old,
Clustering Narcissus with his glorious hues
Springs from his bath of heaven’s delicious dews,
And the gay crocus sheds his rays of gold.
And wandering there for ever
The fountains are at play,
And Cephisus feeds his river
From their sweet urns, day by day.
The river knows no dearth;
Adown the vale the lapsing waters glide,
And the pure rain of that pellucid tide
Calls the rife beauty from the heart of earth.
While by the banks the muses’ choral train
Are duly heard—and there, Love checks her golden rein.”

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[ Geronta dorthoun, phlauron, os neos pesae. Oedip. Col., 396.

Thus, though his daughter had only grown up from childhood to early womanhood, Oedipus has passed from youth to age since the date of the Oedipus Tyrannus.

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[ See his self-justification, 960-1000.

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[ As each poet had but three actors allowed him, the song of the chorus probably gave time for the representative of Theseus to change his dress, and reappear as Polynices.

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[ The imagery in the last two lines has been amplified from the original in order to bring before the reader what the representation would have brought before the spectator.

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[ Mercury.

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[ Proserpine.

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[ Autonamos.—Antig., 821.