SOPHOCLES.
CHAPTER I.
LIFE OF SOPHOCLES.
The creations of a great tragic writer are but remotely connected with the events of his life. What is sometimes asserted of all poets is especially true of him, that his circumstances, even when thoroughly known, throw but a faint and distant light upon his writings. For the dramatist, even more than the epic poet, points us away from his individual being; and tragedy is a result out of all proportion to the external influences, even could we know them perfectly, which were operative on the author's mind. Intense participation in a great cause, as in Dante and Milton, may assist creative imagination in some forms, but such preoccupations are but little favourable to purely dramatic art. And if the tragic genius is once present in its fulness, every life contains enough of sadness to give it ample food. The tragic artist could not himself have told us whence this or that portraiture was drawn. The data of personal experience are transmuted by him far more completely than by the subjective lyric poet. Hence it is more important, if not more interesting, to know particulars of the life of Sappho or of Shelley than of Sophocles or Shakespeare. Of that of Sophocles we know very little.
1. Early life and training.—He is said to have been about fifteen at the time of the battle of Salamis, when he was chosen, on account of his beauty and his skill in music, to lead a choral procession in honour
