law. He had the force both to make his own idea the ruling idea in all the intellectual activity of his age, and to give to his age the political rest demanded for this task of harmonizing the spiritual past and future of a people. Thucydides—a trustworthy witness for the leading thoughts if not for the words of Pericles—makes him dwell on the way in which two contrasted elements had come to be tempered in the life of Athens. After describing the intellectual tolerance, the flexibility and gladness of Athenian social life, Pericles goes on: "Thus genial in our private intercourse, in public things we are kept from lawlessness mainly by fear, obedient to the magistrates of the time and to the laws—especially to those laws which are set for the help of the wronged, and to those unwritten laws of which the sanction is a tacit shame[1]."
It is by this twofold characteristic—on the one hand, sympathy with progressive culture, on the other hand, reverence for immemorial, unwritten law—that Sophocles is the poet of the Periclean Age. There are two passages which, above all others in his plays, are expressive of these two feelings. One is a chorus in the "Antigone"; the other is a chorus in the "Œdipus Tyrannus." One celebrates the inventiveness of man; the other insists upon his need for purity.
In the "Antigone" the Chorus exalts the might of the gods by measuring against it those human faculties which it alone can overcome:—
