they are worth; and it is difficult for any one who has read his plays, with all their purity of passion, their delicacy of feeling, their chivalrous principles of honour, to believe them, with Lord Lytton, to have been written by a "profligate" or a "renegade."[1]
He died full of years and honour, loved (as his biographer tells us) in every way by all men; and his fellow-citizens paid due reverence to the tomb of him who was truly "the prince of poets in his time." The god Bacchus, himself, the divine patron of the tragic drama, was said to have appeared to Lysander, whose armies were then beleaguering Athens, and to have demanded that a safe-conduct should be given to the poet's friends to bear his body beyond the city walls to Decelea, and there bury it in the sepulchre of his fathers.
Sacrifices were offered to his Manes, and a statue of bronze was erected to his memory; but "more enduring than brass or marble " has been the epitaph composed in his honour by Simmias of Thebes, thus gracefully translated by Professor Plumptre:—
"Creep gently, ivy, ever gently creep,
Where Sophocles sleeps on in calm repose;
Thy pale green tresses o'er the marble sweep,
While all around shall bloom the purpling rose.
There let the vine with rich full clusters hang,
Its fair young tendrils fling around the stone;
Due meed for that sweet wisdom which he sang,
By Muses and by Graces called their own."
We now pass to the inner life of Sophocles—to his
- ↑ Athens, ii. 520, note.
