It seems that the Triptolemus was his first play, produced in 468 B.C. when the poet was twenty-eight. It would then be one of the works with which he won his victory[385] over Æschylus, and it bore marks of the older writer’s influence. The theme is the mission of Triptolemus, who traversed the earth distributing to men corn, the gift of Demeter, and founded the mysteries at Eleusis. This topic gave room for a long geographical passage which recalls those of the Prometheus. Other early dramas were the Thamyras in which the dramatist himself took the name-part and played the cithara, and the Nausicaa or Women Washing wherein Sophocles acted the part of that princess and gained applause by his skill in a game of ball. The satyric drama Amphiaraus contained a curious scene wherein an illiterate man conveyed some name or other word to his hearers by a dance in which his contortions represented successive letters. Another satyric play The Mustering of the Greeks (Ἀχαιῶν Σύλλογος) or the Dinner-Party (Σύνδειπνοι) earned the reprobation of Cicero[386] apparently for its coarseness, which can still be noted in the fragments. In The Lovers of Achilles (Ἀχιλλέως ἐρασταί) there was a passage describing the perplexity of passion, which in its mannered felicity recalls Swinburne or the Sonnets of Shakespeare:—
Love is a sweet perplexity of soul,
Most like the sport of younglings, when the sky
In winter-clearness scatters frost abroad:
They seize a glittering icicle, filled a while
With joy and wonder; but ere long the toy
Melts, and they know not how to grasp it still,
Tho’ loth to cast it from them. So with lovers:
Their yearning passion holds them hour by hour
Poised betwixt boldness and reluctant awe.