Sophocles lived through the great years of Athens. Only sixteen years old when the battle of Salamis was fought, he must have been filled with all the enthusiasm of youth over the victory. It was said of Sophocles that he had "such charm of character that he was loved by everybody wherever he went." Life seems to have been happy and prosperous for him from the beginning. He won the first prize at the festival with his first play, and when he was only twenty-eight he won a prize over Aeschylus who was then nearly sixty.
The greatest plays of Sophocles are those which tell of the ancient legends of Thebes: of Oedipus as King, and then as Outcast, and of Antigone, who in one play—Oedipus at Colonus—goes forth with her exiled father, and in another, the great play that bears her name, was faced with the terrible problem of having to break either the laws of God or those of the state, and of deciding which she would do. By all who understand the real greatness of the Greek drama, Sophocles is accounted the greatest of the dramatists. He represents in literature the spirit that Athena Parthenos represented on the Acropolis: a spirit of reverence, of the serenity that comes when the conflict is over and the victory won, and of triumphant belief in all that is good and beautiful and true.
SOPHOCLES.
Lateran Museum, Rome
Very different from either Aeschylus or Sophocles was Euripides. According to tradition, he was born in the island of Salamis on the very day of the battle. As he grew up, he became a friend of Socrates, but for the most part he lived a solitary life, not very much liked, and taking as little part in public life as he could. He was essentially a student, and was one of the first Athenians to collect a library. Euripides lived in Athens during the Peloponnesian War, a period of restless questioning, of breaking away from old traditions and beliefs, of lowering of the old ideals. The war had brought a new spirit and Euripides represented it. He criticized customs and beliefs which he thought were unworthy of the best spirit in Athens, he questioned belief in the gods, and in one great play, the Trojan Women,[[31]] he showed the misery brought by war. He was the first poet to strip war of its glamour and to show it as it affected the conquered. In the Electra and in Iphigenia in Tauris,[[32]] Euripides deals with the familiar tragedy of Orestes, pursued by the Furies after the murder of his mother, and in the Alcestis he tells the old tale of how a noble woman was willing to sacrifice her life for that of a selfish husband, and of how she was brought back from the gates of Hades by Heracles.
The strength of Euripides lies in his wonderful portrayal of character. He judges his characters by the standards of the men and women of his own day and not by those of the gods and heroes, and he is a merciless critic. This makes his dramas most extraordinarily vivid and human, but it also accounts for some of the criticism and dislike he met with in his own day.
Aristophanes wrote comedies.[[33]] His plays are based on the daily life of his time, and, to understand them, one must know what were the political questions of his day, who were the leaders, who were the writers, the gossip of the Agora and the barber's shop, the likes and dislikes of the men amongst whom he lived. But to those who know enough of these things to follow his allusions, the plays of Aristophanes are full of interest, and we learn a great deal about life in Athens from them.
Aristophanes was younger than Euripides, but, unlike the older man, he was very conservative, and he disliked the new ways by which the Sophists were teaching the youths, for he believed that the new methods would make them irreverent, good at idle talk but at nothing else, shallow and effeminate. He constantly compared the young men of his own day with those of the generation that had fought at Marathon, and in comparing them he found them wanting, for to him the heroes of the age of Marathon represented all that was best in Athenian manhood.