Sophocles (Storr 1912)/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
Salamis, one of the decisive battles of the world, which saved not only Greece but western civilization, is a connecting link between the three great Attic tragedians. Aeschylus, then in his prime, fought himself and celebrated the victory in his Persae; Sophocles, a boy of fifteen, was chosen for his beauty and musical skill as leader of the youthful choir who danced and sang a paean round the trophy; and Euripides, according to tradition, was born on the very day of the battle.
In his art, no less than in his age, Sophocles stands half way between the primitive faith and large utterance of Aeschylus, the “superman,” and the lyric pathos, “the touch of all things human,” of Euripides the Rationalist.
Of his private life, if we neglect later myth and gossip, there is little to tell. As Phrynicus wrote shortly after his death, “Thus happily ended a life without one mishap.” He was born at Colonus (495 B.C.), that deme of Athens which he afterwards immortalized in what Cicero pronounced the sweetest of all lyrics, and his father Sophilus, a well-to-do Athenian (probably a master-cutler) gave him the best education of the day in music, dancing, and gymnastics. Endowed with every gift of nature, both physical and mental, from the very first, he carried all before him. When he began to dramatize we know not, but in 468 he won the first prize, probably with the Triptolemus, a lost play, and there is no reason to doubt the story that it was awarded to him by Cimon, the successful general to whom the Archon Eponymus of the year deferred the decision.
The year 440 B.C. was to Sophocles what 1850 A.D. was to Tennyson, the grand climacteric of his life. After, and partly at least in consequence of his Antigone, which took the town by storm, he was appointed one of the ten strategi sent with Pericles to reduce the aristocratic revolt in Samos. If the poet won no fresh laurels in the field he did not forfeit the esteem and admiration of his countrymen, who conferred on him various posts of distinction, just as the age of Queen Anne rewarded Addison and Prior with secretaryships, or as the United States sent us Lowell as ambassador. He was President of the Ἑλληνοταμίαι or Imperial Treasurers of the tribute. After the Sicilian disaster in 413 he was appointed a member of the Πρόβουλοι or Committee of Public Safety. The pretty story told by Cicero in the De Senectute of his last appearance in public in extreme old age and his triumphant acquittal by the jury is too familiar to be repeated, and is probably a fiction, but it serves as evidence of his popularity to the very end. He had seen the rise of Athens and identified himself with her glory, and he was spared by a happy death from witnessing her final fall at the battle of Aegospotami (405 B.C.).
“His life was gentle.” Gentle is the word by which critics ancient and modern have agreed to characterize him. The epitaph is Shakespeare’s, and Ben Jonson applies it to Shakespeare himself, but it fits even more aptly the sweet singer of Colonus, in whom “the elements were so mixed” as to form what the Greeks expressed by εὔκολος. In the famous line of Aristophanes:
ὁ δʹ εὔκολος μὲν ἐνθάδʹ, εὔκολος δʹ ἐκεῖ.
Sweet-tempered as on earth, so here below.
The one aspersion on his character is that in his younger days he was a passionate lover, but the charge rests on a passage in the opening scene of the Republic of Plato which will bear a milder interpretation. When Sophocles, as there reported, expressed his satisfaction at escaping from a savage and tyrannous monster, he surely did not mean that he had been a libertine, but that old age had removed him from temptations to which he may never have succumbed. In all antiquity there is not a purer-minded poet, and (as in the case of Virgil and Shakespeare) we may discredit and ignore the unsavoury gossip of Athenaeus and the scandal-mongers of a later age.
Since his death the fame of Sophocles has grown and never suffered eclipse. To Aristotle no less than to Aristophanes he is the greatest of dramatists, and in the Poetics the Oedipus Rex is held up as the model of a tragedy. To Virgil who freely imitated him “the buskin of Sophocles” is a synonym for dramatic perfection. Racine and Lessing prized him no less highly, and Sophocles was the volume that Shelley carried with him to his watery grave.
The Merope of Matthew Arnold is a far-off echo of the Electra of Sophocles, and no finer or truer tribute has been paid to a poet than the sonnet in which Arnold renders his special thanks to him
“Whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;
Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole,
The mellow glory of the Attic stage,
Singer of sweet Colonus and its child.”
For a discussion of the genius of Sophocles as a dramatist and a poet, his relation to his older and younger contemporary, his religious and political creed, we must be content to refer our readers to the Bibliography, but a few words may be permitted on his language as it affects the translator. Dr. Warren has pronounced Sophocles “the least translatable and the least imitable of the Greeks,” and it is in the second epithet that the translator may find his best excuse for attempting the impossible. Greek critics assigned to Sophocles in his maturity “the common or middle diction,” that is, a diction halfway between the pomp of Aeschylus and the language of everyday prose, and Wordsworth might have taken him to illustrate the canon laid down in his Preface to “Lyrical Ballads.” Coleridge might no less have chosen Sophocles to refute that canon. The words themselves are familiar in men’s ears, but in Sophocles they have gained a new significance, sometimes simply from their collocation, sometimes by a reversion to their first meanings, oftener because (as in Virgil) they denote one thing and connote others. It is no paradox to say that the ease, the simplicity, the seeming transparency of the language, constitute the translator’s main difficulty. In the present instance he is painfully conscious of his failure to preserve this simplicity and transfer these latent meanings, but he has sought to be faithful and the prospect of the text facing him has been a righteous terror. At the same time he has held as a first principle that, whatever else it is, a translation must be English, that is to say, it must be intelligible and enjoyable without a knowledge of the original.
One or two instances may be given from the Oedipus Rex. Line 67 is literally rendered by Jebb, “I have gone many ways in the wanderings of thought,” but to a Greek scholar it is no less sublime than, in another style, Milton’s “thoughts that wander through eternity.” To convey this sublimity in another tongue is as hard as it would be to render in French “Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.” Lines 736–7 are the turning point, the climax, as it were, of the play, but in language they hardly differ from prose:—“As I heard you speak just now, lady, what wandering of the soul, what upheaval of the mind, have come upon me!”
The second point may be illustrated from a recent version of the play by an eminent Professor. He begins,
“Fresh brood of bygone Cadmus, children dear,
What is this posture of your sessions here
—Betufted on your supplicating rods?”
We defy any Englishman without a knowledge of the Greek to make any sense of the third line. So with the Choruses. To preserve in rhyme the correspondence of Strophe and Antistrophe (Turn and Counterturn they are here called), is at best an exhibition of tight-rope dancing.
These seven plays are all that are left to us of some 120, except in fragments and a considerable portion of a Satyric Drama, the Ἱχνευταί or Trackers. The order in which they were composed and produced is largely a matter of conjecture. All we know for certain is that the Antigone was the first (some, however, put the Ajax before it), and the Oedipus Coloneus, produced by the poet’s grandson, three years after the death of Sophocles, was the last of the seven. The following may be taken as an approximation:—Antigone, Elecira, Ajax, Oedipus Rex, Trachiniae, Philoctetes, Oedipus Coloneus.
The Greek text is based on Dindorf (latest edition), but this has been carefully collated with Jebb’s edition and in most cases the English has been preferred to the German editor.
It remains to express my deep obligations not only to the text but to the commentary and prose translation of the great scholar who for more than forty years honoured me with his friendship. I have not consciously borrowed from his rendering, but there is hardly a line in which I am not indebted to him for a fuller appreciation of the meaning and significance.
To three other life-long friends, all three rival translators of Sophocles in whole or in part, I am indebted for generous help and counsel. Sir George Young, Mr. E. D. A. Morshead, and Professor Gilbert Murray read and freely criticized my first essay which has been kept for more than the statutory nine years oi Horace, and it was their encouragement that made me persevere in what has proved the pleasantest of all holiday tasks.