"Sophocles" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... immediate struggle of contraries supposes an arena common to both, so both were alike ideal; that is, the comedy of Aristophanes rose to as great a distance above the ludicrous of real life, as the tragedy of Sophocles above its tragic events and passions,—and it is in this one point, of absolute ideality, that the comedy of Shakespeare and the old comedy of Athens coincide. In this also alone did the Greek tragedy and comedy unite; in every thing else they were exactly opposed to each other. Tragedy ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... than that of a poet. Dalberg writes: "Influence on mankind" (for this he knew to be Schiller's highest ambition) "depends on the vigor and strength which a man throws into his works. Thucydides and Xenophon would not deny that poets like Sophocles and Horace have had at least as much influence on the world as they themselves." When the French invasion threatened the ruin of Germany and the downfall of the German sovereigns, Dalberg writes again, in 1796, with perfect serenity: "True courage must ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... is probable, as he was human, that he always thought himself in the right. But as the other party to the misunderstanding, being also human, would necessarily think himself in the right, such secret benefits would be, as Sophocles says, 'the gifts of foeman and unprofitable.' The secret would leak out, the benefits would be rejected, the misunderstanding would be embittered. This reminds me of an anecdote which is not given in Mr Graham Balfour's biography. As a little delicate, lonely boy in Edinburgh, Mr Stevenson ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... to invite subsequent tragedians to meddle with contemporary events. To three serious dramas, or a trilogy—at first connected together by a sequence of subject more or less loose, but afterwards unconnected and on distinct subjects, through an innovation introduced by Sophocles, if not before—the tragic poet added a fourth or satyrical drama; the characters of which were satyrs, the companions of the god Dionysus, and other historic or mythical persons exhibited in farce. He thus made up a ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... positive evidence of this passage having ever been attributed, by any competent scholar, to Euripides. Indirect proof that it could not have been written by him is thus shown:—In the Antigone of Sophocles (v. 620.) the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... heroism, justice, mercy, self-sacrifice, and all that comes out of the hearts of men and women not dragged below, but raised above themselves; and behind all—at least in the nobler and earlier tragedies of AEschylus and Sophocles, before Euripides had introduced the tragedy of mere human passion; that sensation tragedy, which is the only one the world knows now, and of which the world is growing rapidly tired—behind all, I say, lessons of the awful and unfathomable mystery ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... thing only, it proves many things. Life is large, unlimited, and incessant; and the lessons of the finest art are those of life itself; they are not single but multiple. Who can declare what is the single moral contained in the "OEdipus" of Sophocles, the "Hamlet" of Shakespeare, the "Tartufe" of Moliere? No two spectators of these masterpieces would agree on the special morals to be isolated; and yet none of them would deny that the masterpieces are profoundly moral because of their essential truth. Morality, ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... wrought the frieze of the Parthenon, counted among his wonderful creations the colossal sitting statue of Zeus at Olympia. It was the blossoming season of the Greek intellect, as regards literature and the fine arts. The drama reached its perfection in the masterly tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and in the comedies of Aristophanes. The Athenian community, through its political eminence, its intellectual character, so original and diversified, its culture,—such that almost every citizen was qualified for civil office,—has no parallel in history. It is the elevation, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... The striving after poetic fame does not remain with our poet within the usual, normal limits but becomes much more a peculiar neurotic characteristic. No less a hope for instance had Heinrich von Kleist than with an unheard of creation to strike at Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe and concerning the last named he uttered this audacious sentiment, "I will rend the crown from his brow!" Since he fails to attain this goal in spite of repeated most earnest ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... not more different from Westminster Abbey or the church of St. Stephen at Vienna, than the structure of a tragedy of Sophocles from a drama of Shakspeare. The comparison between these wonderful productions of poetry and architecture might be carried still farther. But does our admiration of the one compel us to depreciate the other? May we not admit that each is ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Acropolis to the right, or he turns to the Areopagus on the left. He goes to the Parthenon to study the sculptures of Phidias; to the temple of the Dioscuri to see the paintings of Polygnotus. We indeed take our Sophocles or Aeschylus out of our coat-pocket; but, if our sojourner at Athens would understand how a tragic poet can write, he must betake himself to the theatre on the south, and see and hear the drama literally in action. Or let him go westward to the Agora, and there he ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... determine whether they did not flock as eagerly to the representation of many pieces of contemporary Authors, wholly undeserving to appear upon the same boards. Had there been a formal contest for superiority among dramatic writers, that Shakespeare, like his predecessors Sophocles and Euripides, would have often been subject to the mortification of seeing the prize adjudged to sorry competitors, becomes too probable, when we reflect that the admirers of Settle and Shadwell were, in a later age, as ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... lines to that famous passage of Sophocles where the lamentations of the dying Oedipus are interrupted by the impatient summons of an unseen accompanying god. In both places the effect is the same; to present to us with striking brevity the contrast between the visible and the invisible ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... elements! O God of the golden crown, the three fair Graces And the Nine Sisters of the Song gave me The gift of tranquil visions beautiful! I filled me with the foam-begotten beauty Of all! I hear the nightingales' sweet song In answer to the song of Sophocles! The woes of Aeschylus resound prophetic, Ocean-born! Face to face with me, as swift As glance, green-clad Atlantides rise forth From the abyss and sink in ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... computed that the price of books was a hundredfold their present value. Copies were slowly multiplied and cautiously renewed: the hopes of profit tempted the sacrilegious scribes to erase the characters of antiquity,[26] and Sophocles or Tacitus were obliged to resign the parchment to missals, homilies, and the Golden Legend. If such was the fate of the most beautiful compositions of genius, what stability could be expected for the dull and barren works of an obsolete ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... educators of humanity. Tutors and professors instruct princes and kings, but poets (and all genuine artists are poets) educate nations. Take from Greece Homer and Phidias, and Sophocles and Scopas, and the planner of the Parthenon, and you efface Greece from history. Wanting them, she would not have been the great Greece that we know; she would not have had the vigor of sap, the nervous vitality, to have continued to live ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... later Greek phases paiderastia was associated less with war than with athletics; it was refined and intellectualized by poetry and philosophy. It cannot be doubted that both AEschylus and Sophocles cultivated boy-love, while its idealized presentation in the dialogues of Plato has caused it to be almost identified with his name; thus in the early Charmides we have an attractive account of the youth who gives his name to the dialogue ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and said, too, with some plausibility, that the narrow-minded man is at bottom the happiest, even though his fortune is unenviable. I shall make no attempt to forestall the reader's own judgment on this point; more especially as Sophocles himself has given utterance ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... philosophers? Or again, if Ennius,(8) Pacuvius, Accius, and many others who have given us, I will not say the exact expressions, but the meaning of the Greeks, delight their readers; how much more will the philosophers delight them, if, as the poets have imitated AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, they in like manner imitate Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus? I see, too, that any orators among us are praised who imitate ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... Greek origin. The best Latin epic poetry is the feeble echo of the Iliad and Odyssey. The best Latin eclogues are imitations of Theocritus. The plan of the most finished didactic poem in the Latin tongue was taken from Hesiod. The Latin tragedies are bad copies of the masterpieces of Sophocles and Euripides. The Latin philosophy was borrowed, without alteration, from the Portico and the Academy; and the great Latin orators constantly proposed to themselves as patterns the ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... efflorescence of loveliness, to our statuaries and our builders, to our goldsmiths and musicians? Ah, we have rediscovered the secret of Greece. It is Homer that we love, it is Plato, it is the noble simplicity of Sophocles; our Dante lied when he said it was Virgil who was his guide. The poet of Mantua never led mortal to those dolorous regions. He sings of flocks and bees, of birds and running brooks, and the simple loves of shepherds; and we listen to him again and breathe the sweet country ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... he is right,—within limits. But may not a healthy laborer find in the startling effects of the younger Cobb refreshment as precisely adapted to idealize his life, and divert his thoughts from a hard day's work, as that for which the college-professor seeks a tragedy of Sophocles or a romance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... historic page, which twenty centuries have not been able to eclipse or dim. The names of Solon and Pericles; of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; of Isocrates and Demosthenes; of Myron, Phidias, and Praxiteles; of Herodotus, Xenophon, and Thucydides; of Sophocles and Euripides, have shed an undying ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... probably bring to light the whole shell of the theatre. Plato affirms it was capable of containing thirty thousand persons. It contained statues of all the great tragic and comic poets, the most conspicuous of which were naturally those of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, among the former, and those of Aristophanes and Menander among the latter. On the southwest side of the Acropolis is the site of the Odeum, or musical theatre of Herodes Atticus, named by him the theatre of Regilla, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... and Portuguese, within these nine years, to Rousseau, Goethe, Young, Aretine, Timon of Athens, Dante, Petrarch, 'an alabaster vase, lighted up within,' Satan, Shakspeare, Buonaparte, Tiberius, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Harlequin, the Clown, Sternhold and Hopkins, to the phantasmagoria, to Henry the Eighth, to Chenier, to Mirabeau, to young R. Dallas (the schoolboy), to Michael Angelo, to Raphael, to a petit-maitre, to Diogenes, to Childe Harold, to Lara, to ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... bar, he promised as fair to make a figure in that profession, as any of his cotemporaries, if the love of the Belles Lettres, and that of poetry in particular, had not stopped him in his career. To him there appeared more charms in Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschilus, than in all the records of antiquity, and when he came to discern the beauties of Shakespear and Milton, his soul was captivated beyond recovery, and he began to think with contempt of all other excellences, when put in the balance with the enchantments ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... highest; there were those who ranked him above Phidias. Thus Xenophon represents [Footnote: Memorabilia I., 4, 3 (written about 390 B. C).] an Athenian as assigning to Polyclitus a preeminence in sculpture like that of Homer in epic poetry and that of Sophocles in tragedy; and Strabo[Footnote: VIII., page 372 (written about 18 A. D.).] pronounced his gold and ivory statues in the Temple of Hera near Argos the finest in artistic merit among all such works, though inferior to those of Phidias in size and costliness. But probably the more ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... As Sophocles and Euripides preceded the historians and moralists of Greece, not only Naevius and Ennius, who wrote the Roman history in verse, but Lucilius, Plautus, Terence, and we may add Lucretius, were prior to Cicero, Sallust, or ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... to do with the generation of the romantic spirit, and [250] although this spirit, with its curiosity, its thirst for a curious beauty, may be always traceable in excellent art (traceable even in Sophocles) yet still, in a limited sense, it may be said to be a product of special epochs. Outbreaks of this spirit, that is, come naturally with particular periods—times, when, in men's approaches towards art and poetry, curiosity may be noticed to take the lead, when men come to art and ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... subject of this piece has been celebrated by several ancient and modern dramatists. Of seven tragedies of Sophocles which have reached our times, two are founded on the history of OEdipus. The first of these, called "OEdipus Tyrannus," has been extolled by every critic since the days of Aristotle, for the unparalleled art with which the story is managed. The dreadful secret, the existence of which is ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... retired from the lists at last or still kept the field; and he cared very little, though he had sometimes reflected that whereas Balzac had written of the Woman of Thirty, the 'woman of forty' was still to be studied by a clever novelist; unless, indeed, Sophocles had made an end of her for ever when Jocasta hanged herself. One thing, however, was clear: the Princess had not sought him out with any idea of casting upon him the spell of a flirtation to make him ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... same kind of composition he was followed, nine hundred years after, by Virgil, in the Eneid; by Tasso, after another fifteen hundred years, in the 'Jerusalem Delivered.' The Greeks also boasted of their Pindar and Anacreon in lyric poetry; and of Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles, and Eschylus, ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... head of himself? What finer than the Pericles, the Marcus Aurelius of the Capitol, the Demosthenes of the Vatican, Chantrey's Scott, Houdon's Voltaire, Powers's Jackson?—Heroic? what more heroic than the Lateran Sophocles, the Venetian Colleoni, or Rauch's statue of Frederick the Great?—Poetical? What picture more sweetly poetical than Raphael's head of himself in the Uffizi, or Giotto's Dante in the Bargello? What ideal statue surpasses ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... another, which it has itself helped to produce by its own one-sidedness; only to reconquer its opponent later, when it has learned from her, when it has been purified, corrected, and deepened by the struggle. But the elder contestant is no more confuted by the younger than the drama of Sophocles by the drama of Shakespeare, than youth by age ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... longer the style at court. Elizabeth herself set the example in the study of Greek. Books and manuscripts were eagerly sought after, Scholars became conversant with Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the great tragic poets Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus; and translations for the many of Vergil, Ovid, Plautus, Terence, and Seneca poured forth from the printing-presses of London. The English mind was strongly tempered by the idealistic philosophy ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... constitution based on the ancestral laws of the State. The following were chosen to act on this committee:—Polychares, Critias, Melobius, Hippolochus, Eucleides, Hiero, Mnesilochus, Chremo, Theramenes, Aresias, Diocles, Phaedrias, Chaereleos, Anaetius, Piso, Sophocles, Erastosthenes, Charicles, Onomacles, Theognis, Aeschines, Theogones, Cleomedes, Erasistratus, Pheido, Dracontides, Eumathes, Aristoteles, Hippomachus, Mnesitheides. After these transactions, Lysander set sail for Samos; and Agis withdrew the land force from Deceleia and disbanded the troops, ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... "Iliad" are put into the mouths of real personages who appear in sight of the audience and represent with fitting gestures and costumes the characters of the story. The dialogue is interspersed with songs or odes, which reach their perfection in the choruses of Sophocles. ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... character. They are great and free, and have grown up on the soil of their own individuality, creating themselves out of themselves, and moulding themselves to what they were, and willed to be. The age of Pericles was rich in such characters; Pericles himself, Pheidias, Plato, above all Sophocles, Thucydides also, Xenophon and Socrates, each in his own order, the perfection of one remaining undiminished by that of the others. They are ideal artists of themselves, cast each in one flawless mould, works of art, which stand before us as an immortal ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... the transcendent creations of human genius; the poetry, the statues, the temples, of Greece. It produces and represents as they did whatever is most beautiful in the spirit of man and often expresses what is most profound. And who are the great composers, who hereafter will rank with Homer, with Sophocles, with Praxiteles, or with Phidias? They are the descendants of those Arabian tribes who conquered Canaan, and who by favour of the Most High have done more with less means even than ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... illusion has never gone. And the irony of the ideas that work these living puppets has now become their life-blood. It is the tragic irony of a playwright who is the greatest master of technique since Sophocles, but who is only the playwright ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Addison's Spectator fell into his hands. He turned at once from French and Italian culture to admire English classics. The first German to appreciate Milton and Shakespeare (the latter he called the English Sophocles), he never wavered in his devotion to the English school. With his faithful friend, Johann Jakob Breitinger, a conscientious scholar, he started in Zuerich a critical weekly paper on the plan of the Spectator. It was called Discoursen der Mahlern (Discourses of the Painters), ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... most ancient Virgil which the French stole in 1804. Here is Petrarch's Horace and a Dante transcribed by Villani; and, best of all, the only ancient codex in the world of what remains to us of Aeschylus, of what is left of Sophocles. It is in such a place that we may best recognise the true greatness of the abused Medici. Tyrants they may have been, but when the mob was tyrant it satisfied itself with destroying what they with infinite labour had gathered together for the advancement of learning, the civilisation of the world. ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... is this: that when you have got hold of what you feel is a really powerful idea you find suddenly that you have been forestalled by some earlier writer—Sophocles or Shakspeare or George R. Sims. Then you have to think again. This frequently happens to me upstairs; and downstairs poor Johnny will find to his horror one day that his great work has already been given to the world by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... anew the science and literature of an older world. The exiled Greek scholars were welcomed in Italy; and Florence, so long the home of freedom and of art, became the home of an intellectual Revival. The poetry of Homer, the drama of Sophocles, the philosophy of Aristotle and of Plato woke again to life beneath the shadow of the mighty dome with which Brunelleschi had just crowned the City by the Arno. All the restless energy which Florence had so long thrown into the cause of liberty she flung, ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... me for putting inarticulate sounds in a dialogue as above, I answer, with all the insolence I can command at present, "Hit boys as big as yourself"—bigger, perhaps, such as Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes; they began it, and I learned it of them ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... of a master," he said in a lecture, "it is impossible to understand him or to take the beauty of his works to heart. When Sophocles repeats himself—the Electra is but a feeble study for the Antigone, or possibly a feeble copy of it—we get near the man; the limitations of his outlook are characteristic: when he deforms his Ajax with a tag of political ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... even the heathen knew." Perfect familiarity with the great Greek tragedians was still the mark of a gentleman, and then Sidonius quoted from Sophocles— ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Poeta nascitur non fit." We cannot avoid the difficulties of the question by attributing the poet's imagination to "genius." Whether genius is a neurosis, as some think, or whether it is sanity at perfection, makes little difference here. Both a Poe and a Sophocles are equally capable of producing ideal syntheses. Nor does the old word "inspiration" help much either. Whatever we mean by inspiration—a something not ourselves, supernatural or sub-liminal—a "vision" of Blake, the "voices" of Joan ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... of—But I am treading on dangerous ground. It was for this that the seafaring Greek lad was taught to find his ideal in Ulysses; while his sister at home found hers, it may be, in Nausicaa. It was for this, that when perhaps the most complete and exquisite of all the Greeks, Sophocles the good, beloved by gods and men, represented on the Athenian stage his drama of Nausicaa, and, as usual, could not—for he had no voice—himself take a speaking part, he was content to do one thing in which he specially excelled; and dressed and masked as a girl, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... never be satisfying that self which is the Public!" And he thought: "I am lost. For, to satisfy that normal self, to give the Public what it wants, is, I am told, and therefore must believe, what all artists exist for. AEschylus in his 'Choephorae' and his 'Prometheus'; Sophocles in his 'OEdipus Tyrannus'; Euripides when he wrote 'The Trojan Women,' 'Medea,'—and 'Hippolytus'; Shakespeare in his 'Leer'; Goethe in his 'Faust'; Ibsen in his 'Ghosts' and his 'Peer Gynt'; Tolstoy in 'The Powers of Darkness'; all—all in those great works, must ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the emblematical lessons it was employed to teach; but I must not dwell on them. Nor need I say how it was equally honoured by Greeks and Romans. As a plant which produced an abundant and necessary crop of fruit with little or no labour (phyteum' acheiroton autopoion, Sophocles; "non ulla est oleis cultura," Virgil), it was looked upon with special pride, as one of the most blessed gifts of the gods, and under the constant protection of Minerva, to ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... Onchestius his.—Ver. 605. But Hyginus says that Neptune was the father of Megareus, or Macareus, as the Scholiast of Sophocles calls him. Neptune being the father of Onchestius, Hippomenes was the fourth from Neptune, inclusively. Onchestius founded a city of that name in Boeotia, in honour of Neptune, who had a temple there; in the time of Pausanias the place was in ruins. That author tells us that Megareus aided ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Mysteries represented in their religious dramas with such convincing enthusiasm that even Pindar could say "Happy is he who has seen them (the Mysteries) before he goes beneath the hollow earth: that man knows the true end of life and its source divine"; and concerning which Sophocles and Aeschylus ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... conceal after all their secret code; or why so impermeable? And then, doffing one's own headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment some one's—any one's—to be a man of valour who has ruled the Empire; to refer while Brangaena sings to the fragments of Sophocles, or see in a flash, as the shepherd pipes his tune, bridges and aqueducts. But no—we must choose. Never was there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain, more certain disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile: Whittaker ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... or for a brief interval raised the curtain which veiled it. Hence the subordinate part which women play upon the Greek stage in all but some half dozen cases. In the paramount tragedy on that stage, the model tragedy, the (OEdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles), there is virtually no woman at all; for Jocasta is a party to the story merely as the dead Laius or the self-murdered Sphinx was a party, viz., by her contributions to the fatalities of the event, not by anything she does or says spontaneously. In fact, the Greek poet, if a wise poet, could ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... dark-bearded man, big for the North-West Police. He had two hobbies. One was trouble in the Balkans, which he was always prophesying. The other was a passion for Sophocles, which he read in the original from a pocket edition. Start him on the chariot race in "Elektra" and he would spout it while he paced the cabin and gestured with flashing eyes. For he was a Rugby and an Oxford man, though born with the ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... I remember everything. She was like the dayspring from on high. When I think of Greece, I think not of Plato and Sophocles, but of things more delicate and shy; of the tender hedge- flowers of the Anthology, of Tanagra and its maidens in reedy gowns, of all of this in a sweet clean light, as she was, and is, and must be. Ah, and I think ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... galaxy of great men: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Socrates, Thucydides, Phidias, Ictinus, and others. Greek government reached its culmination and society had its fullest life in this age. The glory of the period extended on through the Peloponnesian ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... original, and, asking him how he came to know it so well, Carteret told him "that when he was envoy in Denmark, he had been for a long time confined to his chamber, partly by illness, and partly by the severity of the weather; and having but few books with him, he had read Sophocles over and over so often as to be almost able to repeat the whole verbatim, which impressed it ever after indelibly ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... themselves with. Cf. II, ii, 13. What men are chiefly concerned about is how long they can draw out their little period of mortal life. Cf. Sophocles, Ajax, 475-476: "What joy is there in day following day, as each but draws us on towards or keeps us back from death?"—J. ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... another in their arms, and kissing each other's cheeks, and then the tumult subsided. And the cry immediately spread through the whole kingdom, and, I suppose over all Europe, 'How charming it was to see Solon and Sophocles embrace.'" ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... a similar passage, may have been employed proverbially in the time of Sophocles. See l. 632. et seq. of the Antigone (ed. Johnson. Londini. 1758. 8vo.); on which passage there is ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... for Greek poetry? That is asking a question, you will say, and not answering it. Well, then, I answer by a 'Yes' the one you put to me. I had two volumes of Euripides with me in Devonshire, and have read him as well as Aeschylus and Sophocles—that is from them—both before and since I went there. You know I have gone through every line of the three tragedians long ago, in the way ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... the great Athenian. His blood ran faster as he spoke of him, and his cheeks flushed. He felt that one who lived constantly in such company could do nothing base. But he found all he needed, put together with a power that seemed almost divine, within the two covers that bound his Sophocles. The mere look of the Greek letters filled him with exultation. Here was all he wanted, strength and simplicity, and the greatness of ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... end but a means to an end. All the literary criticism ever uttered would be useless as such if it did not evince a desire to further the development of literary art. The Iliad and the Oedipus were written long before Aristotle's Poetics, and it is not likely that either Homer or Sophocles would have been a greater poet if he could have read the Stagirite's treatise. Yet the Poetics, as a summary of the essential features of that art, served an important purpose in later ages and exerted far-reaching influences. ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... those days, if it had more wit in it than the present, had somewhat less decency: the ancient "moralities" were not over moral, and the "mysteries" rather Babylonish. So far we have had no great loss. Whether the judicious getting up of a tragedy of Sophocles or Aeschylus, or even a comedy of Terence—classically managed—as it could be done in Oxford—and well acted, would be more unbecoming the gravity of our collected wisdom, or more derogatory to the dignity of our noble "theatre," than the squalling ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... out-shine, Or sporting Kid or Marlowes mighty line. And though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke, From thence to honour thee, I would not seeke For names; but call forth thund'ring schilus, Euripides, and Sophocles to vs, Paccuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead, To life againe, to heare thy Buskin tread, And shake a stage : Or, when thy sockes were on, Leave thee alone, for the comparison Of all, that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... ignorant immigrants from other parts of southeastern Europe, welcome an occasion to present Greek plays in the ancient text. With expert help in the difficulties of staging and rehearsing a classic play, they reproduced the Ajax of Sophocles upon the Hull-House stage. It was a genuine triumph to the actors who felt that they were "showing forth the glory of Greece" to "ignorant Americans." The scholar who came with a copy of Sophocles in hand and followed the play with real enjoyment, did not in the least realize ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... losse, Theopompus and Eph[orus]: In Poetrie schylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and somwhat of Menander, Demosthenes sister sonne. Now, let Italian, and Latin it self, Spanishe, French, Douch, and Englishe bring forth their lerning, // Learnyng, and recite their Authors, Cicero onelie excepted, // chiefly con- and ...
— The Schoolmaster • Roger Ascham
... who was the master mind at Athens from 459 to 431 B.C. During the fifth century B.C. such names as Themistocles and Pericles in government, Phidias and Myron in art, Herodotus and Thucydides in historical narrative, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in tragic drama, and Aristophanes in comedy, ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... feel that verses only can give me relief." The quality does not seem to have been essential, provided they were sufficiently flattering. Sainte-Aulaire wrote madrigals for her. Malezieu, the learned and versatile preceptor of the Duc du Maine, read Sophocles and Euripides. Mme. du Maine herself acted the roles of Athalie and Iphigenie with the famous Baron. They played at science, contemplated the heavens through a telescope and the earth through a microscope. In their eager search for novelty they improvised fetes that rivaled in magnificence the ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... the Greek historian clearly supplied not merely the thought but also the form of the reference in lines 909-912 of Sophocles' "Antigone." In Campbell's English translation of the Greek play, the passage, which is put into the mouth of ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... we all like to think and dream about is there, and if you have been so fortunate as to visit the Athens of to-day, that chapter, so great is the author's constructive imagination, carries you back and makes you for the moment live in the Athens of Pericles, of Sophocles, ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... purified by a poetic, if not a philosophic, idealism. But while AEschylus suggests "a deeply brooding mind, tinged with mysticism, grappling with dark problems of life and fate,"[2] and so was, in some ways, remote from the clarity and definition of sculptural form, Sophocles "invests the conceptions of popular religion with a higher spiritual and intellectual meaning; and the artistic side of the age is expressed by him in poetry, much as in architecture and sculpture it is interpreted by the remains of the Parthenon; ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... get the prize" when its author was competing with Sophocles. "But Euripides has had his reward: in the sympathies which he has stirred; in the genius which he has inspired. His ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... was to classic Greece, the land of Solon and Lycurgus, Pericles and Pisistratus, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Demosthenes—the land of Byron and Shelley—the land of poetry and patriotism, of the myths of gods and the histories of heroes—the land which Art and Nature have fondly combined to enrich with their choicest treasures. ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... are there any persons whom you value on account of their merit?" He answered, "Yes, certainly." "Tell me their names," added Socrates. Aristodemus replied: "For epic poetry I admire Homer as the most excellent; for dithyrambics, Melanippides; Sophocles for tragedy; Polycletes for statuary; and Zeuxis for painting." "Which artists," said Socrates, "do you think to be most worthy of your esteem and admiration: they who make images without soul and motion, or they who make animals that move of their own accord, and are ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the charm of one of Plato's or Aristotle's definitions, strictly like that of the Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... whose fate that of the surrounding people is only loosely connected. Then, the chorus is subordinate, and the figures of the princes and heroes stand preeminent in all their exclusive magnificence. This I consider the beautiful style. The pieces of Sophocles stand on this plane. Since the crowd is forced merely to look on at the heroes and at fate, and can have no effect on either their special or general nature, it takes refuge in reflection and assumes the office of an able and welcome spectator. In the fourth ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... characters than interest in their opinions; he was neither laborious, nor obviously self-denying, nor very copious in alms-giving, and his theology, you perceive, was lax. His mental palate, indeed, was rather pagan, and found a savouriness in a quotation from Sophocles or Theocritus that was quite absent from any text in Isaiah or Amos. But if you feed your young setter on raw flesh, how can you wonder at its retaining a relish for uncooked partridge in after-life? And Mr. Irwine's recollections of young enthusiasm and ambition were all associated with poetry ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... Sophocles have been variously arranged. In the order most frequently adopted by English editors, the three plays of the Theban cycle, Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus Coloneus, and Antigone, ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... form of Racine and Pope; he likes the massive vigour of the French and English sixteenth centuries, and the alembicated exquisiteness of Catullus and Carew; he does not dislike Webster because he is not Dryden, or Young because he is not Spenser; he does not quarrel with Sophocles because he is not AEschylus, or with Hugo because he is not Heine. But at the same time it is impossible for him not to recognise that there are certain periods where inspiration and accomplishment ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... sifted their dust over the immortal figures seated on the marble bench within the precincts consecrated to the Eumenides, but in deathless tenacity, the rich aroma of Sophocles' narcissus, and the soft crocus light linger there still; while from thickets of olive, nightingales break their hearts in song, as thrilling as the melody that smote the ears of doomed ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... quote Sophocles, but she said to herself, 'Only this little bit of pretence and vanity, and then I will be quite good, and make myself quite safe ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... failure to recognize in every rational being a possible source of that truth which all need. It is a stupid forfeiture or waste of the resources of intelligence possessed by one's fellows. The King Creon of Sophocles's Antigone is a masterly representation of the futility of this pride of opinion. Creon angrily resents every impeachment of his wisdom, insisting on instant and unquestioning obedience. But his son Haemon thus attempts to save him ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... civilization at the seat of empire. Literature and art had been carried to the utmost perfection possible to human genius. Art was represented by the inimitable creations of Phidias and Polygnotus. The drama was illustrated by the incomparable tragedies of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and by the comedies of Aristophanes, while the writing of the world's annals had become an art in ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... the second. Indeed, Winthrop seems to have deliberately chosen the localities of his story with the special purpose of showing that passions almost as terrible as those which are celebrated in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles may rage in the ordinary lodging-houses of New York. He has succeeded in throwing an atmosphere of mystery over places which are essentially commonplace; and he has done it by the intensity with which he has conceived ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... degrading to a free man. Hence the love of boys was spoken of like that of women (Plato: Phaedrus; Repub. vi. c. I9 and Xenophon, Synop. iv. 10), e.g., "There was once a boy, or rather a youth, of exceeding beauty and he had very many lovers"—this is the language of Hafiz and Sa'adi. AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were allowed to introduce it upon the stage, for "many men were as fond of having boys for their favourites as women for their mistresses; and this was a frequent fashion in many well-regulated ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... tragic poet, had written a tragedy on Tereus, which was simply a plagiarism of the play of the same name by Sophocles. Philocles is the son of Epops, because he got his inspiration from Sophocles' Tereus, and at the same time is father to Epops, since he himself ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... people of Attica, he comes from Boeotia, a country of northern marsh and mist, but from whose sombre, black marble towns came also the vine, the musical reed cut from its sedges, and the worship of the Graces, always so closely connected with the religion of Dionysus. "At Thebes alone," says Sophocles, "mortal women bear immortal gods." His mother is the daughter of Cadmus, himself marked out by [24] many curious circumstances as the close kinsman of the earth, to which he all but returns at last, as ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... of seating an audience of six thousand, and was covered with a cedar roof. Now the roof is completely gone and the seats are in partial ruin. Beyond this smaller theatre are the ruins of a larger one called the Theatre of Bacchus. Here the masterpieces of Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, in the golden days of Grecian glory, gave delight to great audiences. This theatre, accommodating thirty thousand spectators, contained a semi-circle of marble seats built up against the ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... are the only modern writers of Tragedy, that we can venture to oppose to Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The first is an author so uncommon and eccentric, that we can scarcely try him by dramatic rules. In strokes of nature and character, he yields not to the Greeks: in all other circumstances that constitute ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... call yourselves Athenians, while you know nothing that the Athenians thought worth knowing, and dare not show your noses before the civilised world in the practice of any one art in which they were excellent. Modern Athens, sir! the assumption is a personal affront to every man who has a Sophocles in his library. I will thank you for ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... progress. The Aryan idea, so far as we know anything of it, was probably to worship nature. The Greek idolatry was a step beyond that, substituting intelligent beings for it. Far higher was the Hebrew spiritualism, and worship of One Supreme, and far higher is Isaiah than Homer, David than Sophocles; and no Hebrew prophet ever said, "Offer a cock to Esculapius." So is Christianity far beyond Buddhism; and far beyond Sakya Muni, dim and obscure as he is, are the concrete realities of the life of Jesus. Whether anything further is to come, I tremble to ask; and yet ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... latter, taste and sentiment. You are more absorbed in the plays of Corneille; you are more shaken and more softened in those of Racine. Corneille is more moral; Racine, more natural. The one appears to make Sophocles his model; the other owes ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... epic, the Dervishiade, which met with great success. A poem of the same kind is Jegyupka, the Gipsy, by Andreas Giubronavich, printed at Venice 1559. Dominic Zlatarich (ob. 1608) translated Tasso and the Electra of Sophocles, and was himself ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... will follow Shakespeare in modelling into forms of beauty the inheritance which has come down to them of the actions of their own race. So most faithfully, if least directly, they will be treading in the steps of those great poets of Greece whom they desire to imitate. Homer and Sophocles did not look beyond their own traditions and their own beliefs; they found in these and these only their exclusive and abundant material. Have the Gothic annals suddenly become poor, and our own quarries ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... whole less conspicuous. Writing for success on the Elizabethan stage, he seldom attempted to reduce its romantic licenses to the perfection of an absolute standard. 'Romeo and Juliet, 'Hamlet,' and indeed most of his plays, contain unnecessary scenes, interesting to the Elizabethans, which Sophocles as well as Racine would have pruned away. Yet when Shakspere chooses, as in 'Othello,' to develop a play with the sternest and most rapid directness, he proves essentially the equal even of ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... be of no avail, I submit, to point out to Sophocles, as Spencer pointed out to Kant, that a knowledge of the early condition of man would have made short work of these sublimities, that the cosmical man was before the ethical man, in whom we discover very little evidence of these majestic laws of such universal and undeniable validity. ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... imagine what she might have been, if only she had been given a chance. The form of a possible good rises up from under the actual evil. The story of oppression becomes the praise of freedom; the picture of death, a vision of life. I know of no finer example of this in all literature than Sophocles' Ajax. Ajax has offended Athena, so he, the hero of the Grecian host, is seized with the mad desire to do battle with cattle and sheep. In lucid intervals he laments to his wife the shameful fate which has befallen ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... and from the pit of the theatre royal in Drury Lane, an appeal lay to the two great national seats of taste and learning. Plays which had been enthusiastically applauded in London were not thought out of danger till they had undergone the more severe judgment of audiences familiar with Sophocles and Terence. [283] ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... works of later Poets among the Ancients, we find that even those of them who are most exceptionable in other circumstances, have yet in a great measure corrected this mistake of their predecessors. In the lyric Odes of Euripides and Sophocles, the metaphors made use of are generally short, expressive, and fitted to correspond with great accuracy to the point which requires to be illustrated[68]. Pindar is in many instances equally happy in the choice of his images, ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... and pure in life; but do not forget, my beloved, all that the heathen have done for us. Be temperate in all things; avoid excess of zeal; for thus, and thus only, can we be just. 'It is not to hate, but to love each other that we are here.' It was not a Christian but Sophocles, one of the greatest of the heathen, who uttered those words, and he speaks them still ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a story instinct with an irony like that of the infatuation of King Oedipus in the drama of Sophocles. Every step that the warrior has taken to snatch at victory increases the completeness of the disaster. The Emperor Francis, scared by the approach of the French horsemen, and not wishing to fall into the hands of his son-in-law, has withdrawn with ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... pretty sure that there is some allusion to an oracle. In respect to Delphi, they presumed that it was the umbilicus, or centre of the whole earth. The poets gave into this notion without any difficulty; Sophocles calls it [730][Greek: mesomphala Ges manteia]: and Euripides avers that it was the precise centre ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... the earliest known to us who took rudimentary tragedies from town to town in Attica. Then came Aeschylus, whose tragedy, already rigid and hieratical, was very powerful, imbued with terrible majesty; then came Sophocles, a religious philosopher, having a feeling for the old religion and the art of giving it a moral character, great lyrical poet, master of dialogue, eloquent, moving, knowing how to construct and carry on a dramatic ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... their tragedies on known fables. Thus, Augustus Caesar wrote an "Ajax," which was not the less his own, because Euripides had written a play before him on that subject. Thus, of late years, Corneille writ an "OEdipus" after Sophocles; and I have designed one after him, which I wrote with Mr Lee; yet neither the French poet stole from the Greek, nor we from the Frenchman. It is the contrivance, the new turn, and new characters, which alter the property, and make it ours. The materia poetica is ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... paradise. Wakefield quotes Sophocles, Ajax, 554: [Greek: En toi phronein gar meden hedistos bios] ("Absence of thought ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... habit of scientific tolerance. We are saved by it from uselessly fretting ourselves because of the ungodly and the inevitable; from mourning over the decline of Gothic architecture into Perpendicular aridity and flamboyant feebleness, over the passage of the scepter from Sophocles to Euripides or from Tasso to Marino, over the chaos of Mannerism, Eclecticism and Naturalism into which Italian painting plunged from the height of its maturity. This toleration and acceptance of unavoidable change need not imply want of discriminative perception. We can ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... when almost all the lyric poets took their grandest flights in the choral odes of their dramas. These odes, however, do not fall within the province of our comparison. The lyrical efforts both of AEschylus and Sophocles were inwoven with the structure of their plays, the chorus in AEschylus being generally one of the actors; and they have their modern representatives, not in the songs of the people, but in the arias of operas. Setting these ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... once: 'Friend, hast thou considered the "rugged all-nourishing Earth," as Sophocles well names her; how she feeds the sparrow on the house-top, much more her darling, man? While thou stirrest and livest, thou hast a probability of victual. My breakfast of tea has been cooked by a Tartar woman, with water of the Amur, who wiped her earthen kettle with a horse-tail. ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... in the classic spirit was absorbed and eagerly assimilated by him, and imparted to the work of his best day that rhythm, that gentle gravity, and that noble plenitude of form, which are its stamp, and proclaim him the brother of Mozart and of Sophocles." ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... had a clear and sagacious eye for the discovery of truth. But let us remember that when Thespis spoke from his car, the world had also wise men. Homer had sung his immortal songs, and yet a new form of genius appeared, to which a Sophocles and Aristophanes gave birth; the Sagas and mythology of the North were as an unknown treasure to the stage, until Oehlenschlaeger showed what mighty forms from thence might be made ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... Even for those who are not guided by principle, self-restraint comes as the result of habit, and none of us in this age of the world assert the right of emotion to vent itself in utterance. The Philoctetes of Sophocles might shriek to high heaven, and Mars vent the anguish of his wounds in cries and sobs, but we have changed all that. Even the muse of tragedy is self-possessed in modern days; good breeding has conquered even the fierce impulse of passion to ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... these scenes, one feels that it may, indeed, be said of him as Matthew Arnold said of Sophocles, that he sees life steadily, and sees it whole. What a masterly handling is his of the facts of the universe, giving his reader the truths of the scientist touched with an idealism such as is only known to the poet's soul! A friend, ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... (1830-1908).—Scholar, s. of a naval officer, ed. at Edin., Glasgow, and Oxf., took orders, and was Vicar of Milford, Hants, until 1863, when he was appointed Prof. of Greek at St. Andrews. He brought out ed. of Sophocles and other works on the Greek classics, and in conjunction with E. Abbott The Life and Letters of Prof. Jowett (q.v.), with whom he had collaborated in editing the Republic of Plato. He also ed. the poems of Thomas Campbell, to whom ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... original. The Indian plays are written in mingled prose and verse; and the verse portion forms so large a part of the whole that the manner in which it is rendered is of much importance. Now this verse is not analogous to the iambic trimeter of Sophocles or the blank verse of Shakspere, but roughly corresponds to the Greek choruses or the occasional rhymed songs of the Elizabethan stage. In other words, the verse portion of a Sanskrit drama is not narrative; it is sometimes descriptive, but more commonly ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... there are many sorts of transfiguration, and a man who has come to be worthy of all gratitude and reverence may have had his swinish period, wallowing in ugly places; but suppose it had been handed down to us that Sophocles or Virgil had at one time made himself scandalous in this way: the works which have consecrated their memory for our admiration and gratitude are not a glorifying of swinishness, but an artistic incorporation of the highest ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... manner those who are near relations, are called by Sophocles [Greek: oi pros aimatos]. And hence the term consanguinity, employed to denote nearness of relation. Virgil uses ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... turned aside from Euripides for a moment and attempted a translation of the great stage masterpiece of Sophocles, my excuse must be the fascination of this play, which has thrown its spell on me as on many other translators. Yet I may plead also that as a rule every diligent student of these great works can add something to the discoveries of his predecessors, ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... and I think I shall never lose them wholly again. I began to read the poets, starting with the comedies of Old Holberg the Dane, and passing to Schiller and Goethe and Heine. I read all plays of Shakespeare (in Danish translation, then). I studied "Oidipous Tyrannos," Sophocles' awful tragedy, in the original, and read Plautus and Terentius as other ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... foremost among them the children recognized Pericles. Near him walked Anaxagoras the Philosopher, with Phidias, the great sculptor, and Ictinus, the architect of the new temple of which the Stranger had told the Twins on the spring evening so long before. There were also Sophocles the dramatist and Euripides the poet. Melas recognized them all, for they were known to every one and he had seen them at the house of Pericles or walking about the Agora on previous journeys. He pointed them ...
— The Spartan Twins • Lucy (Fitch) Perkins
... to time other great poets will arise, who; not content with enriching literature with original productions, will acknowledge it as a part of what they owe the world, to do for Homer and Virgil and AEschylus and Sophocles what he has done for Dante. It is pleasant to think that our children will sit at the feet of these great masters, and, listening to them in English worthy of the tongues in which they first spake, be led to enter more fully into the spirit of the abundant Greek and the majestic Latin. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... tears of Oedipus in the crises. I am compelled to believe that Sophocles erred as regarded nature; for in cases so transcendent as this Greek nature and English nature could not differ. In the great agony on Mount Oeta, Hercules points the pity of his son Hyllus to the extremity ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Lascares, for I did not carry Theodorus with me; nor have they any dictionaries but Hesichius and Dioscerides. They esteem Plutarch highly, and were much taken with Lucian's wit and with his pleasant way of writing. As for the poets, they have Aristophanes, Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles of Aldus's edition; and for historians, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Herodian. One of my companions, Thricius Apinatus, happened to carry with him some of Hippocrates's works and Galen's Microtechne, which they hold in great ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... 1840 with "Colomba". Sainte-Beuve calls it a perfect story and points out various analogies between Sophocles' "Electra" and Mrime's heroine. It was published in book form in 1841, together with the "Vnus d'Ille" and "Les Ames du purgatoire", which had, like "Colomba", first appeared in the "Revue des Deux Mondes", the former in 1837 and the latter in 1834. As the days of romanticism ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... "Few, I fancy, know how much harder it is to write a Tragedy than to realize or be one. Every man has in his heart and lot, if he pleases, and too many whether they please or no, all the woes of OEdipus and Antigone. But it takes the One, the Sophocles of a thousand years, to utter these in the full depth and harmony of creative song. Curious, by the way, how that Dramatic Form of the old Greek, with only some superficial changes, remains a law not only ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... a comedie larmoyante which was interesting and well given; but the voice of the prompter was occasionally too loud. Tragedies are very seldom played; the language of Alfieri could never, I will not say be given with effect, but even conceived by the modern actors. It would be like a tragedy of Sophocles performed by boys at school. There is another reason too why these tragedies are not given; they abound too much in republican and patriotic sentiments to be grateful to the ears of the Princes who reign in Italy, all of whom being ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... character as any of the French lovers in Marmontel's Tales would be tete-a-tete with a Roman or a Grecian matron—as much at a loss as one of the fine gentlemen in Congreve's plays might find himself, if condemned to hold parley with a heroine of Sophocles ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... meekly to fate, for they were so feeble that each gesture they witnessed seemed fate's own gesture to them. But yet, had they only possessed some fragment of Antigone's strength—the Antigone of Sophocles—would they not then have transformed the destinies of Hamlet and Faust as well as their own? And if Othello had taken Corneille's Pauline to wife and not Desdemona, would Desdemona's destiny then, all else remaining unchanged, have dared to come within reach of the enlightened love ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Ide, Or to[221] the sea swift Simois shall[222] slide. 10 Ascraeus lives while grapes with new wine swell, Or men with crooked sickles corn down fell. The[223] world shall of Callimachus ever speak; His art excelled, although his wit was weak. For ever lasts high Sophocles' proud vein, With sun and moon Aratus shall remain. While bondmen cheat, fathers [be] hard,[224] bawds whorish, And strumpets flatter, shall Menander flourish. Rude Ennius, and Plautus[225] full of wit, Are both ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... out to the colonies. Whoever aspired to become a leader in politics, in art, in literature, or in philosophy, made his way to the capital, and so, with almost bewildering suddenness, there blossomed the civilization of the age of Pericles; the civilization which produced aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, and Thucydides; the civilization which made possible the building of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... are regular, they are too little for English tragedy; which requires to be built in a larger compass. I could give an instance in the "Oedipus Tyrannus," which was the master piece of Sophocles; but I reserve it for a more fit occasion, which I hope to have hereafter. In my style, I have professed to imitate the divine Shakespeare; which that I might perform more freely, I have disincumbered myself from rhyme. Not that I condemn my former ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... they were the best of their day, and being written in a language no longer subject to change, may be taken as an universal standard by which all civilised nations may measure their thoughts and the mode of expressing them. The frieze of the Parthenon and the dramas of Sophocles, the forms of the marble and the conceptions of the great poet, still speak to our imagination and our understanding: we recognise, in both, the beauty of proportion, the simplicity and truth of design; ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... AEschylus, the thunderous! How he drove the bolted breath Through the cloud, to wedge the ponderous In the gnarled oak beneath. Oh, our Sophocles, the royal, Who was born to monarch's place, And who made the whole world loyal, Less by kingly power than grace. Our Euripides, the human, With his droppings of warm tears, And his touches of things common Till they rose to touch the spheres! Our Theocritus, our Bion, And our Pindar's shining ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... Jenkin was an equally clear and graphic writer. He read the best literature, preferring, among other things, the story of David, the ODYSSEY, the ARCADIA, the saga of Burnt Njal, and the GRAND CYRUS. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Boccaccio, Scott, Dumas, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, were some of his favourite authors. He once began a review of George Eliot's biography, but left it unfinished. Latterly he had ceased to admire her work as much as before. He was a rapid, ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... real as in your drawing room at home) is that it is unconvincing; whilst the imaginary scenery with which the audience provides a platform or tribune like the Elizabethan stage or the Greek stage used by Sophocles, is quite convincing. In fact, the more scenery you have the less illusion you produce. The wise playwright, when he cannot get absolute reality of presentation, goes to the other extreme, and aims at atmosphere ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... enthusiastic crowd; so they fell into each other's arms, and kissed, after the continental mode. Great was the fervor aroused in the breasts of the classic people of France as they proudly saw upon their soil a new "Solon and Sophocles" in embrace. Who shall say that Franklin's personal prestige in Europe had not ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... constructions, yet on the whole he managed to get through a good deal, and one evening, for the first time since his quarrel with Hardy, felt a sensation of real comfort—it hardly amounted to pleasure—as he closed his Sophocles some hour or so after hall, having just finished the last of the Greek plays which he meant to take in for his first examination. He leaned back in his chair and sat for a few minutes, letting his thoughts ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... good influence over me in that respect, in spite of the utter degradation of my life at that time, kept arousing in me an ever fresh desire for scientific studies. I took private lessons in Greek from a scholar, and read Sophocles with him. For a time I hoped this noble poet would again inspire me to get a real hold on the language, but the hope was vain. I had not chosen the right teacher, and, moreover, his sitting-room in which we pursued our studies looked out ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... people? It was their primitive religion; it was a dim recollection of the common allegiance they owed from time immemorial to the great father of gods and men; it was their belief in the old Zeus of Dodona in the Pan-Hellenic Zeus."[155] "There is, in truth, but one," says Sophocles, "one only God, who made both heaven and long-extended earth and bright-faced swell of seas and force of winds." Xenophanes says: "'Mongst gods and men there is one mightiest God not mortal or in form or thought. Entire he sees and understands, and without labor governs all by ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... this extraordinary combination of power necessary to the formation of a great dramatic poet, which has rendered the masterpieces of this art so general an object of devout admiration, to men of the greatest genius who have ever appeared upon earth. Euripides wept when he heard a tragedy of Sophocles recited at the Isthmian games; he mourned, but his own subsequent greatness proved without reason, the apparent impossibility of rivalling his inimitable predecessor. Milton, blind and poor, found a solace for all the crosses of life in listening, in old age, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... the long lives of a Bach and Titian, a Michelangelo and Goethe, held in reserve for their maturity and age. It is of no use to persuade ourselves, as some have done, that we possess the best work of men untimely slain. Had Sophocles been cut off in his prime, before the composition of "Oedipus"; had Handel never merged the fame of his forgotten operas in the immortal music of his oratorios; had Milton been known only by the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... orators were heard in the rostrum in preference to him, the celebrated actor SATYRUS, in order to show him how much grace, dignity, and action add to the celebrity of a public man, repeated to him several passages from Sophocles and Euripides, which so delighted and astonished Demosthenes that he always afterwards formed his elocution and action on the models of the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles Wrote his grand OEdipus, and Simonides Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers, When each had numbered more than fourscore years; And Theophrastus at fourscore and ten Had but begun his "Characters of Men;" Chaucer ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... yesterday. Paradise Lost. Dined with the bishop. Cards at night. I like them not, for they excite and keep me awake. Construing Sophocles. ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... pretty and pleasant, but then suppose our two urchins, have grown into men, and both have turned authors,—one says to his brother, 'Let's play we're the American somethings or other,—say Homer or Sophocles, Goethe or Scott (only let them be big enough, no matter what). Come, you shall be Byron or Pope, which you choose: I'll be Coleridge, and both shall write mutual reviews.' So they both (as mere strangers) before ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Greeks conveyed all their wisdom into their theatre,- -their stages were churches and parliament-houses; but what was false prevailed over what was true. They had their own wisdom, the wisdom of the foolish. Who is Sophocles, if compared to Doctor Hammersley of Oriel? or Euripides, if compared to Doctor Prichard of Jesus? Without the Gospel, light is darkness; and with ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... will not stain speech with a lie."[2] So, again, when his appeal to a divinity is: "Thou that art the beginning of lofty virtue, Lady Truth, forbid thou that my poem [or composition] should stumble against a lie, harsh rock of offense."[3] In his tragedy of the Philoctetes, Sophocles makes the whole play pivot on the remorse of Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, over his having lied to Philoctetes (who is for the time being an enemy of the Greeks), in order to secure through him the killing of Paris and the overthrow of Troy. The lie was told at the ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... poet was probably induced, by the following line in Ovid, to assign to Nessus the task of conducting them over the ford: Nessus edit membrisque valens scitusque vadorum. Metam, l. ix. And Ovid's authority was Sophocles, who says of this Centaur— [GREEK HERE] Trach.570 He in his arms, Evenus' stream Deep flowing, bore the passenger for hire Without or sail or billow ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante |
