writings, from first to last, maintaining their calm and pure serenity, unmarred by any low thoughts or even sensuous imagery, the indirect testimony of the friendship of Nikias and Herodotos, of the admiration and reverence of the people. Few dramatic poets, even of those who have lived under happier influences, have left so little they would wish to blot. It had been well if the writings of Shakespeare, Lessing, Goethe, (not to speak of other names among the dramatists of modern Europe,) had been as free from the alloy of baser metal. We may well rest in the belief that the name of Sophocles stands as clear and unblemished as that of one against whom like charges were brought in the very recklessness of slander, the noble and true-hearted Socrates.[1]
VIII. Moral and Religious Teaching.[2]
The name of Socrates reminds us of the fact, that the lives of the two men just brought together ran on,
- ↑ If we may assume the identity of the Sophocles mentioned by Aristotle, (Rhet., iii. 18,) the motives of the slanderers were probably the same in both cases. Those who felt their own vices rebuked by him, threw dirt in the hope that some of it would stick.
- ↑ In addition to the masterly essay by Dronke already quoted, (p. lxxi.,) I may refer to another treatise of like character though inferior power, Die Sophokleische Theologie und Ethik, by F. Lübker; and to two papers on the Theology of Sophocles, by Professor Tyler, in an American Review, the Bibliotheca Sacra, vols. xvii. xviii.
(Peace, 681,) probably means nothing more than that the two poets made money by their writings, and were frugal. It would be hard to fix the brand of meanness on Scott because Byron had called him "Apollo's venal son."
