[126] It should be said that the subject-matter of the Prometheus Unbound has to be gathered partly from fragments of the play, partly from prophecies in the Prometheus Bound, and partly from later versions of the legend.
[127] "Him who leads men in the ways of wisdom, who has ordained that suffering should teach."
[128] See Supplices, 524-599.
CHAPTER XIII.
SOPHOCLES.
The Personal Beauty of Sophocles: his Life; Stories about Him.—Athens in the Age of Pericles.—Antique Criticism on his Style: its Perfect Harmony.—Aristotle's Respect for Sophocles.—Character in Greek Tragedy.—Sophocles and Æschylus.—The Religious Feeling of Sophocles.—His Ethics.—Exquisite Proportion observed in his Treatment of the Dramatis Personæ.—Power of Using Motives.—The Philoctetes.—Comparison of the Choëphorœ and the Electra.—Climax of the Œdipus Coloneüs.—How Sophocles led onward to Euripides.—The Trachiniæ.—Goethe's Remarks on the Antigone.—The Tale of Thebes.—Œdipus Tyrannus, Œdipus Coloneüs, and Antigone do not make up a Trilogy.—Story of Laius.—The Philosophy of Fate contained in it.—The Oracle.—Analysis of Œdipus Tyrannus.—Masterly Treatment of the Character of Œdipus.—Change of Situation in the Coloneüs.—Emergence of Antigone into Prominence.—Analysis of the Antigone.—The Character of Antigone: its Beauty.—Contrast afforded by Ismene and by Creon.—Fault in the Climax of the Antigone.—The Final Solution of the Laian Curse.—Antigone is not subject to Nemesis.
Sophocles, the son of Sophilus, was born at Colonus, a village about one mile to the north-west of Athens, in the year 495 B.C. This date makes him thirty years younger than Æschylus, and fifteen older than Euripides. His father was a man of substance, capable of giving the best education, intellectual and physical, to his son; and the education in vogue at Athens when Sophocles was a boy was that which Aristophanes praised so glowingly in the speeches of the Dikaios Logos. Therefore, in the case of this most perfect poet, the best conditions of training (τροφή) were added to the advantages of nature (φύσις), and these two essential elements of a noble manhood, upon which the theorists of Greece loved to speculate, were realized by him conjointly in felicitous completeness. Early in life Sophocles showed that nature had endowed him with personal qualities peculiarly capable of conferring lustre on a Greek artist of the highest type. He was exceedingly beautiful and well-formed, and so accomplished in music and gymnastics that he gained public prizes in both these branches of a Greek boy's education. His physical grace and skill in dancing caused him to be chosen, in his sixteenth year, to lead the choir in celebration of the victory of Salamis. According to Athenian custom, he appeared on this occasion naked, crowned, and holding in his hand a lyre:
εἴθε λύρα καλὴ γενοίμην ἐλεφαντίνη,
καί με καλοὶ παῖδες φέροιεν Διονύσιον ἐς χορόν.[129]
These facts are not unimportant, for no Greek poet was more thoroughly, consistently, and practically εὐφυής, according to the comprehensive meaning of that term, which denotes physical, as well as moral and intellectual, distinction. The art of Sophocles is distinguished above all things by its faultless symmetry, its grace and rhythm, and harmonious equipoise of strength and beauty. In his own person the poet realized the ideal combination of varied excellences which his tragedies exhibit. The artist and the man were one in Sophocles. In his healthful youth and sober manhood, no less than in his serene poetry, he exhibited the pure and tempered virtues of εὐφυία. We cannot but think of him as specially created to represent Greek art in its most refined and exquisitely balanced perfection. It is impossible to imagine a more plastic nature, a genius more adapted to its special function, more fittingly provided with all things needful to its full development, born at a happier moment in the history of the world, and more nobly endowed with physical qualities suited to its intellectual capacity.
In 468 B.C. Sophocles first appeared as a tragic poet in contest with Æschylus. The advent of the consummate artist was both auspicious and dramatic. His fame, as a gloriously endowed youth, had been spread far and wide. The supremacy of his mighty predecessor remained as yet unchallenged. Therefore the day on which they met in rivalry was a great national occasion. Party feeling ran so high that Apsephion, the Archon Eponymus, who had to name the judges, chose no meaner umpires than the general Cimon and his colleagues, just returned from Scyros, bringing with them the bones of the Attic hero Theseus. Their dignity and their recent absence from the city were supposed to render them fair critics in a matter of such moment. Cimon awarded the victory to Sophocles. It is greatly to be regretted that we have lost the tragedies which were exhibited on this occasion; we do not know, indeed, with any certainty, their titles. As Welcker has remarked, the judges were called to decide, not so much between two poets as between two styles of tragedy; and if Plutarch's assertion, that Æschylus retired to Sicily in consequence of the verdict given against him, be well founded, we may also believe that two rival policies in the city were opposed, two types of national character in collision. Æschylus belonged to the old order. Sophocles was essentially a man of the new age, of the age of Pericles and Pheidias and Thucydides. The incomparable intellectual qualities of the Athenians of that brief blossom-time have so far dazzled modern critics that we have come to identify their spirit with the spirit itself of the Greek race. Undoubtedly the glories of Hellas, her special geist in art and thought and state-craft, attained at that moment to maturity through the felicitous combination of external circumstances, and through the prodigious mental greatness of the men who made Athens so splendid and so powerful. Yet we must not forget that Themistocles preceded Pericles, while Cleon followed after; that Herodotus came before Thucydides, and that Aristotle, at a later date, philosophized on history; that Æschylus and Euripides have each a shrine in the same temple with Sophocles. And all these men, whose names are notes of differences deep and wide, were Greeks, almost contemporaneous. The later and the earlier groups in this triple series are, perhaps, even more illustrative of Greece at large; while the Periclean trio represent Athenian society, in a special and narrow sense, at its most luminous and brilliant, most isolated and artificial, most self-centred and consummate point of αὐτάρκεια or internal adequacy. Sophocles was the poet of this transient phase of Attic culture, unexampled in the history of the world for its clear and flawless character, its purity of intellectual type, its absolute clairvoyance, and its plenitude of powers matured, but unimpaired, by use.