gistic form, in so far at least as the continuity of subject was concerned. In obedience to the established custom at the Dionysiac festivals, Sophocles appears generally to have brought forward three tragedies and a satyric drama together; but the subjects of these four plays were entirely distinct, and each was complete in itself.[1]
Among the merely mechanical improvements introduced by Sophocles, the most important is that of scene-painting, the invention of which is ascribed to him. (See Agatharchus.)
All these external and formal arrangements had necessarily the most important influence on the whole spirit and character of the tragedies of Sophocles; as, in the works of every-first rate artist, the form is a part of the substance. But it remains to notice the most essential features of the art of the great tragedian, namely, his choice of subjects, and the spirit in which he treated them.
The subjects and style of Aeschylus are essentially heroic; those of Sophocles are human. The former excite terror, pity, and admiration, as we view them at a distance; the latter bring those same feelings home to the heart, with the addition of sympathy and self-application. No individual human being can imagine himself in the position of Prometheus, or derive a personal warning from the crimes and fate of Clytemnestra; but every one can, in feeling, share the self-devotion of Antigone in giving up her life at the call of fraternal piety, and the calmness which comes over the spirit of Oedipus when he is reconciled to the gods. In Aeschylus, the sufferers are the victims of an inexorable destiny; but Sophocles brings more prominently into view those faults of their own, which form one element of the ἄτη of which they are the victims, and is more intent upon inculcating, as the lesson taught by their woes, that wise calmness and moderation, in desires and actions, in prosperity and adversity, which the Greek poets and philosophers celebrate under the name of σωφροσύνη. On the other hand, he never descends to that level to which Euripides brought down the art, the exhibition of human passion and suffering for the mere purpose of exciting emotion in the spectators, apart from a moral end. The great distinction between the two poets is defined by Aristotle, in that passage of the Poëtic (6. §§ 12, foll.) which may be called the great text of aesthetic philosophy, and in which, though the names of Sophocles and Euripides are not mentioned, there can be no doubt that the statement that "the tragedies of most of the more recent poets are unethical" is meant to apply to Euripides, and that the contrast, which he proceeds to illustrate by a comparison of Polygnotus and Zeuxis in the art of painting, is intended to describe the difference between the two poets, for in another passage of the Poëtic (26. § 11) he quotes with approbation the saying of Sophocles, that "he himself represented men as they ought to be, but Euripides exhibited them as they are;" a remark, by the bye, which as coming from the mouth of Sophocles himself, exposes the absurdity of those opponents of aesthetic science, who sneer at it as if it ascribed to the great poets of antiquity moral and artistic purposes of which they themselves never dreamt. It is quite true that the earliest and some of the mightiest efforts of genius are to a great extent (though never, we believe, entirely) unconscious; and even such productions are governed by laws, written in the human mind and instinctively followed by the poet, laws which it is the task and glory of aesthetic science to trace out in the works of those writers who followed them unconsciously; but such productions, however magnificent they may be, are never so perfect, in every respect, as the works of the poet who, possessing equal genius, consciously and laboriously works out the great principles of his art. It is in this respect that Sophocles surpasses Aeschylus; his works are perhaps not greater, nay, in native sublimity and spontaneous genius they are perhaps inferior, but they are more perfect; and that for the very reason now stated, and which Sophocles himself explained, when he said, "Aeschylus does what is right, but without knowing it." The faults in Aeschylus, which Sophocles perceived and endeavoured to avoid, are pointed out in a valuable passage preserved by Plutarch (de Prof. Virt. p. 79, b.). The limits of this article will not permit us to enlarge any further on the ethical character of Sophocles, which is discussed and illustrated at great length in some of the works referred to above, and also in Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Criticism, where the reader will find an elaborate comparison between the three great tragic poets (Lect. 5). We will only add, in conclusion, that if asked for the most perfect illustration of Aristotle's definition of the end of tragedy as δι᾽ ἐλέου καὶ φόβου περαίνουσα τὴν τῶν τοιούτων παϑημάτων κάϑαρσιν (Poët. 6. § 2), we would point to the Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles, and we would recommend, as one of the most useful exercises in the study of aesthetic criticism, the comparison of that tragedy with the Eumenides of Aeschylus and the Lear of our own Shakspere.
iv. The Works of Sophocles.—The number of plays ascribed to Sophocles was 130, of which, however, according to Aristophanes of Byzantium, seventeen were spurious. He contended not only with Aeschylus and Euripides, but also Choerilus Aristias, Agathon, and other poets, amongst whom was his own son Iophon; and he carried off the first prize twenty or twenty-four times, frequently the second, and never the third. (Vit. Anon.; Suid. s. v.) It is remarkable, as proving his growing activity and success, that, of his 113 dramas, eighty-one were brought out in the second of the two periods into which his career is divided by the exhibition of the Antigone, which was his thirty second play (Aristoph. Byz. Argum. ad Antig.); and also that all his extant dramas, which of course in the judgment of the grammarians were his best, belong to the latter of these two periods. By comparing the number of his plays with the sixty-two years over which his career extended, and also the number belonging to each of the two periods, Müller obtains the result that he at first brought out a tetralogy every three or four years, but afterwards every two years at least; and also that in several of the tetralogies the satyric drama must have been lost, or never existed, and that, among those 113 plays there could only have been, at the most, 23 satyric dramas to 90 trage-
- ↑ No blunder can be more gross than to speak of the Oedipus Tyrannus, the Oedipus at Colonus, and the Antigone as a trilogy. They have no dramatic continuity whatever; they were composed at three different and distinct periods, and the last was the first exhibited.
