Coloneus, Sophocles glanced at the relations of Athens to Thebes, and perhaps also at home politics, these were exceptional divergences from the main direction of their art. And yet, indirectly, it is conceivable that the Antigone reflects the feeling of a time when there seemed to be a danger of the "rule of the first citizen" becoming too despotic, and that the pathos of the Œdipus Tyrannus may have been deepened for some of those who saw it by the remembrance of the popular ruler, whose meridian glory was eclipsed by family troubles, who was of the accursed family, whose children had been declared illegitimate under the law which he himself had made, and who was cut off by the plague.[1]
The true national significance of Greek tragedy, however,—a chief cause of that vital reality in which it is pre-eminent—lies not in contemporary allusions, but in the broad fact that it is instinct with the beliefs, the memories, the aspirations, the moral convictions of the Athenian people, when in the full tide of their career; and also that its greatest works were produced while the pride of Athens was still consistent with the hope of Hellenic unity—a hope to which the dramatist, both as poet and as votary of Dionysus, still clung, even when its knell had been sounded in the triumph of Sparta. For it is to be observed that the worshippers of Zeus, of Apollo, of Hera and Artemis, of Dionysus and Demeter, were members of a communion that extended far beyond their party or their city; and this, in Athens at least, must have combined with other humanising influences, to cherish Pan-Hellenic sentiment. Religion helped to counteract the narrowing effects of national and political bias.
- ↑ These statements about Pericles are taken from Plutarch's Life.
