Walls—the symbol of that greatness—levelled in the dust to the sound of Spartan music. He lived in an age of heroes. All round him were the very men who had made his country what it was, and with most of these men he was on terms of the most familiar intercourse. Doors were not then, as now, "barred with gold;" and Athenian society opened its arms to the graceful and engaging poet, so genial in his temper, so lively in conversation, so true a friend, so pleasant a guest. We can imagine Sophocles in his old age recalling the memories of his youth; recounting to his children, with pardonable pride, the historic names and scenes with which he had been so familiar: he would tell them how he had listened to the thunder of "Olympian Pericles;" how he had been startled by the chorus of Furies in the play of Æschylus; how he had talked with the garrulous and open-hearted Herodotus; how he had followed Anaxagoras, the great Sceptic, in the cool of the day among a throng of his disciples; how he had walked with Phidias, and supped with Aspasia.
Sophocles enjoyed a rare popularity in Athens. Even that prince of satirists, Aristophanes, can find neither flaw nor blemish in his moral armour against which to launch an arrow. He directs unsparing raillery against the bombast of Æschylus and the sophistry of Euripides; but he has nothing to say against this "good easy man"—"as gentle below the earth as he was gentle in his lifetime."[1] The scandalous anecdotes of Athenæus may be taken for what
