The scanty folds of his toga reveal the fine lines of his graceful figure. The pose shows the bodily vigor which his early athletic training gave him. He holds his head erect in a manner suggestive of his military life. The face is that of an idealist and a poet, a man who sees splendid visions. Yet it is not altogether dreamy in the ordinary sense; it has the alert, energetic aspect of one who would turn from vision to action. It is not hard to believe the tale of his one hundred and twenty-three dramas: such a man would fill his life with activity. The face has, too, the expression of genial kindliness which made the great poet so beloved of his fellow men. His must have been that calm, equable temperament not easily ruffled, which goes with the self-respecting nature. A receptacle at his side is filled with the scrolls of his tragedies. He stands in the attitude of a poet reciting his lines to an assembled audience.
The statue shows how sane was the Greek ideal of intellectual greatness. In those days genius did not mean eccentricity, but the rule of life was a sound mind in a sound body. It is a mistaken notion of our own times that bodily health must be sacrificed to the training of the brain. It is even supposed by some that oddities of dress and manner are signs of greatness.
The Greeks had no such delusions. Here is Sophocles, the greatest dramatic poet of antiquity, a magnificent specimen of symmetrically developed manhood. He is a man who has made the most of life's opportunities as he understood them. He enjoys perfect bodily vigor; he is as well a man of the world, at ease among men. There is evidently nothing of the recluse in his character. He wears his beard carefully trimmed as one who looks well to his personal appearance. Yet intellectual greatness is stamped on face and bearing: the noble countenance marks him as a poet.
There was a period in Greek history when it was a custom to adorn public buildings with statues of famous men, living or dead. Libraries were appropriately decorated with statues of poets, and we fancy that our statue of Sophocles was made for such a purpose. The original is supposed to have been set up by a certain Athenian statesman named Lycurgus in the fourth century B. C.
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Old soldiers tell us that sometimes in the thick of a battle men fight as though possessed by a spirit of fury. The excitement of the conflict seems to arouse an impulse of bloodthirstiness in them, and for the moment they seem to exult in the carnage. In the ancient methods of warfare, when a battle was literally a hand-to-hand conflict, this spirit of brutality was of course even more marked. In the wars among the early Greeks men fell upon one another with the violence of wild animals.