rather querulous, which runs through his plays gives them, in one respect, a tone strange to Attic tragedy. An Athenian dramatist at the festivals was a citizen addressing fellow-citizens; not only a religious but a certain political sympathy was supposed to exist between them, Æschylus and Sophocles, in their different ways, both make this political sympathy felt as part of their inspiration; Euripides has little or nothing of it. He shares the pride of his fellow-citizens in the historical or legendary glories of the city; as for the present, he is a critic standing apart.
More thoroughly than Æschylus in the first period or Euripides in the third, is Sophocles a representative poet in the second period of the century. The years from about 460 to about 430 B.C. have been called the Age of Pericles. The chief external characteristic of the time so called is plain enough. It was the age of the best Athenian culture; a moment for Greece such as the Florentine renaissance was for Europe; the age especially of sculpture, of architecture, and of the most perfect dramatic poetry. But is there any general intellectual characteristic, any distinctive idea, which can be recognized as common to all the various efforts of that age? The distinctive idea of the Periclean age seems to have been that of Pericles himself; the desire to reconcile progress with tradition. Pericles looked forward and backward: forward, to the development of knowledge and art; backward, to the past from which Athens had derived an inheritance of moral and religious
