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 The long life of the second greatest
dramatist of Athens extends over the whole period of her glory,
and ends just before her great collapse. He saw the Persian wars
and the Peloponnesian wars, the whole career of Themistocles,
Cimon, Pericles, and Nicias, the rise and perfection of all the
arts of poetry and form, and all the great Athenians between
Aristides and Plato.
SOPHOCLES, the son of Sophilus, was born at Colonus, a village
about one mile from Athens, in 495 B.C., five years before Marathon,
and fifteen before Salamis. He died just before the disastrous
close of the Peloponnesian war. He was by a generation younger
than Æschylus, and somewhat older than Euripides. His father,
a substantial man of business, gave him the best education. His
beauty, grace, skill, and charm, made him, as a youth, the mirror
of his time; and at the celebration of the victory of Salamis,
he was chosen, then aged 15, to lead the choir with his lyre.
At the age of 27, he defeated Æschylus for the tragic prize
in a memorable contest. From thenceforth till his death, more
than 60 years later, he continued to produce, it is said, 113
dramas, gaining the first prize 20 times. At the age of 55, he
was, with Pericles, one of the generals in command at Samos;
and at the age of 82 he was (probably) one of ten commissioners
who finally superseded the democracy. But his military and political
career were honorary, and we have no record of his ever being
more than a popular and honourable citizen. He died in his 90th
year, just before the catastrophe of his country, having long
been the model of the Attic culture and perfection of its highest
mark. He is famed for being the type of "sweetness and light,"
as conceived in the golden age of Athens, the man of "sweet
temper," of consummate grace, and of uniform balance of
mind.
Sophocles marks the passage from the drama as a religious
institution to the drama as a work of pure art. He made the great
step in advance of adding a third speaker to the second of Æschylus;
and this was, evidently, essential to the full development of
the dramatic ideal. The plot, and the elaborate evolution of
character and situation in his plays, are artistically a great
advance upon the simple conceptions of Æschylus; and, in
discarding the trilogy, he was able to make each drama
a highly complex and refined study of character in action.
Hence, by his contemporaries at Athens, and, perhaps, by the
ancients, Sophocles was regarded as the perfection of the tragic
poet. Oedipus the King was taken by Aristotle as the type
of true tragedy. And other critics have called it "the masterpiece
of Attic tragedy." As a work of consummate art, it is perhaps
the most perfect tragedy extant. In the same way, all the seven
plays of Sophocles which survive are examples of supreme skill
in painting character, and in the combination of tragic situations.
But the poet is no longer, as in the Trilogy, hero, prophet,
and preacher; he is simply the faultless artist.
Of the consummate beauty of Sophocles as a poet, of his unerring
feeling for truth and symmetry, of his nobility and dignity of
manner, of his exquisite mastery of himself and all his resources,
ancients and moderns are eloquent. In form, he has never been
surpassed by ancient or modern poet. It has been well said that
the beauty of form in him, as with Raphael and Mozart, seems
to conceal the strength and fire within. But withal, the strength
and the fire have not the sublime inspiration and the moral grandeur
of Æschylus.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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