ing, as we may well do, that the lost plays contained like allusions, it is not difficult to think of the old poet as using every opportunity to assert the policy and principles of Pericles, whom he had known and loved,[1] against the sceptical young oligarchs on the one side, and the rampant reactionary fanaticism, the rash, incautious ambition of the demagogues, on the other.
What is worthy of special notice throughout, is the fondness with which he clung to his country and his birthplace. Other poets might be tempted to seek elsewhere for greater honour or larger gifts, Æschylos closed his life in Sicily under the patronage of Hiero. Agathon and Euripides were attracted to Macedonia by the offers of Archelaos; and the lavish liberality of that king, in his efforts to bring a half
- ↑ Many other instances of this political element in the plays of Sophocles are brought forward by Schöll, but in not a few he rides his theory to death. We may, perhaps, admit that the Chorus in the Aias, (1185–1225,) in which his sailors complain of the miseries of their prolonged service, expressed the popular Athenian feeling as to their sufferings in the Peloponnesian war, or that the complaint of Tecmessa, (485–503.) and the discussion between Agamemnon and Odysseus as to the treatment of the dead, (1330–1370,) were meant as a protest against the brutality which that war engendered; but it is difficult to repress a smile when we are told to see in the seizure of Ismene and Antigone an allusion to the capture of Aspasia's handmaids by the Megarians, (p. 213,) and that the Athenian charioteer in the Electra (731) was drawn as a portrait of Alcibiades (p. 255.) I can hardly believe that the Chorus which speaks of the power of Aphrodite (Antig., 776) was aimed at the weakness of Pericles in submitting to it, (p. 136.)
in whom the Athenian character was represented in its highest form, even as Tennyson's "ideal knight" was, in part at least, a portraiture of the purity of life and true nobility of the Prince whose premature death led the English people to a right estimate of his goodness.
