The terror inspired by Niobe and by Laocoon, accusing with upturned eyes the destroying power; the pity inspired by their children, clinging to the shelter which cannot protect them: these are harmonized by the beauty, at once terrible and tender, of the whole. Just such is the harmony between the human and superhuman elements in the agony of Œdipus and of Heracles.
Again, it is chiefly because Sophocles had supremely this most Greek of instincts, the instinct of just proportion, that his mind was so perfectly attempered to the genius of Greek polytheism—a religion of which the piety was a reverent sense of beauty and of measure. He lived just when this religion had shed upon it the greatest strength of intellectual light which it could bear without fading; he is, perhaps, the highest type of its votary—the man for whom, more than for any other who could be named, the old national religion of Greece was a self-sufficing, thoughtful, and ennobling faith. Sophocles was, indeed, the perfect Greek ideal of a man who loved the gods and was loved by them—one, the work of whose life was their service under their direct inspiration; to whom they gave victory not followed by insolence, long years and opportuneness of death; and whom the most imaginative of satirists could not imagine, even among the boundless rivalries of the dead, less good-humoured than he had been upon earth.
