was disturbed by irrepressible emotion, and he left it as in the moments of his highest success he had left the theatre of Dionysos, amid loud clamours of applause. In the play itself we may trace, without too bold a conjecture, something both of the bitterness of these trials of his old age,[1] (Œd. Col., 1211–1238,) and of the reconciliation with the sons who had been so unfilial, (Œd. Col. 1280–1283.)[2]
So the life drew to its close. The occasion of a death at the age of ninety is not a matter of any great moment, and we need not discuss whether suffocation from swallowing a grape-stone, or over-exertion in reciting the Antigone, or over-excitement in again winning the tragic prize after Euripides and others had for some years been successful rivals, was the immediate cause of what must, a few months sooner or later, have been inevitable.[3] Something, it has well been said, may be inferred as to the calmness with which he looked forward to the end, as one that would come as tranquilly and harmoniously as his life, from the picture which he draws of such an end
- ↑ See also Fragm. 500, Dind.
- ↑ Vit. Anon. Cic., De Senect., c. 7. Diod. Sic., xiii.
- ↑ Vit. Anon. Here also, it may be, a tradition has grown out of a metaphor. To be faithful to his art and to Dionysos to the last, was to die, eating of the fruit of the sacred vine. So in the epitaph ascribed to the younger Simonides—
"Thy life was quenched, Ο aged Sophocles,
Thou flower of all that sing,
As thou wert gathering clusters ripe and full
Of grapes to Bacchos dear."—Anthol., vii. 20.
