'The Revealer'—Mênûtes, identified with Heracles; but the real reason for his own worship becomes clear when we find in another connection that he had founded a 'Thiasos of the Muses,' a sort of theatrical club for the artists of Dionysus. He thus became technically a 'Hero-Founder,' like Plato and Epicurus, and doubtless was honoured with incense and an ode on his birthday. He was 'Dexiôn' merely as the original 'host.'
Sophocles was writing pretty continuously for sixty years, and an interesting citation in Plutarch[1] purports to give his own account of his development. That the words are really his own is rather much to believe; but the terms used show the criticism to be very ancient. Unfortunately the passage is corrupt. He began by having some relation—is it 'imitation' or is it 'revolt'?—towards the 'magniloquence of Æschylus'; next came 'his own harsh and artificial period of style';[2] thirdly, he reached more ease and simplicity, and seems to have satisfied himself. Bergk finds a trace of the 'Æschylean period' in some of the fragments; and it is a curious fact that ancient critics found in the pseudo-Euripidean Rhesus a 'Sophoclean character.' It is not like the Sophocles of our late plays, but does suggest a fourth-century imitation of Æschylus. One form of the 'artificial' tendency—it might as well be translated 'technical' or 'professional'—is expressed in the scenic changes with which Sophocles is particularly associated; though, of course, it must be borne in mind that the actual admission of 'three actors and scene-painting'[3] to the
