"Sophocles" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 were equally ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... suspicion of this possible relationship between our classics and classical education seems to have pierced the antique walls of public schools. Philologists seem much more eagerly engaged in introducing Homer and Sophocles to the young souls of their pupils, in their own style, calling the result simply by the unchallenged euphemism: 'classical education.' Let every one's own experience tell him what he had of Homer and Sophocles at the hands of ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... following day, my impressions, looking back, seem to be all a variant on a well-known Greek chorus, which hymns the amazing—the "terrible"—cleverness of Man! Seafaring, tillage, house-building, horse-taming, so muses Sophocles, two thousand three hundred years ago; how did man ever find them out? "Wonders are many, but the most wonderful thing is man! Only against death has he ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and there is so much to do," a delicate girl said to me at the end of her first college year. And while her mother was in a far-off invalid retreat, she undertook the battle against fate with the same intelligence and courage which she put into her calculus problems and her translations of Sophocles. Her beautiful home and her rosy and happy children prove the measure of her hard-won success. Formerly the majority of physicians had but one question for the mother of the nervous and delicate girl, "Does she go to school?" And only one prescription, "Take her out of school." Never a suggestion ...
— Why go to College? an Address • Alice Freeman Palmer
... fallen from his high estate: Hall will have housed him! Punch will have taken a stationary stand at the Strand Theatre!! The last stroke will have been given to the only ancient drama remaining, except the tragedies of Sophocles, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... tragedy. But as the 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 ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... 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 estimation; for though there is no nation in the world that needs ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... of better instincts, if not as the reflection or embodiment of what is popularly called conscience. It can scarcely be doubted that the Erinnyes of Aeschylus were deities of remorse, and possess psychological significance as symbols of the primitive action of conscience.[2] Though Sophocles is less of a theologian than Aeschylus, and problems of Ethics count less than the human interest of his story, the law of Nemesis does find in him dramatic expression, and the noble declaration ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... the glory of our age. Society has come to remember that those in bonds are bound by them. Indeed, the application of this principle to the various departments of human life furnishes the historian with the milestones of human progress. The age of Sophocles was not shocked when the poet wrote the story of the child exposed by the wayside to be adopted by some passer-by, or torn in pieces by wild dogs, or chilled to death in the cold. When the wise men brought their gold and frankincense to the babe in the manger, men felt the ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... by the principles of dramatic writing, we shall instantly condemn them as monstrous. But if we forget the characters, and think only of the poetry, we shall admit that it has never been surpassed in energy and magnificence. Sophocles made the Greek Drama as dramatic as was consistent with its original form. His portraits of men have a sort of similarity; but it is the similarity not of a painting, but of a bas-relief. It suggests a resemblance; but it does not ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Sophocles apparently uses the expression "slave from the third mother" as implying that three descents were considered to confirm the position of the fourth generation as slave or citizen, or whatever the case might be. Oedipus assures Jokasta ...
— On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay • Hugh E. Seebohm
... sayest thou to Giorgione of Venice and his pupils, to this 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; ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... them in our theatre. As Deirdre says in Synge's great play, "It's a heartbreak to the wise that it's for a short space we have the same things only." We cannot, indeed, have everything. No one doubts that the plays of AEschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles are great dramas; the operas I have just referred to can also be admired in the closet and probably they will be. Even today no more than two works of Rossini, the most popular composer of the early Nineteenth Century, are to be heard. What has become of Semiramide, La Cenerentola, and ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... 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, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... the method of discussion, in the 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 ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... first place, he was of a chastity so inviolate that, after the loss of his wife he never indulged in any sexual pleasures, recollecting what is told in Plato of Sophocles the tragedian, that being asked when he was a very old man whether he still had any commerce with women, he said "No," with this further addition, that "he was glad to say that he had at all times avoided such indulgence as a tyrannous and ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... least of the speakers, he would manage differently. Very likely he will allege the example of the Greeks, as we have it recorded in the accounts of the banquet offered to Themistocles after the battle of Salamis, and the supper given to AEschylus on the hundredth performance of the OEdipus of Sophocles. ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Dante, the Spain of Cervantes, and the England of Shakespeare did not so much as exist. If the intelligence was not satisfied by Descartes, well! there was nothing for it but to go back to Plato, and if Racine did not sufficiently rouse the passions, they must be worked upon by Sophocles. In all this, the divines took a particularly prominent place because they alone presented something for which no definite parallel could be found in antiquity. It was the great theologians of the age with whom ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... O Sophocles!" he said, as he dropped a piece of money upon a plate, "shall I win my lawsuit ...
— Mother Goose in Prose • L. Frank Baum
... 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 on his memory." ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... movement was identically the same. Your remarks on the effects of viewing a sunset, etc., with the head inverted are very curious. (478/1. The letter dated September 3rd, 1874, is published in Mr. Thayer's "Letters" of Chauncey Wright, privately printed, Cambridge, Mass., 1878. Wright quotes Mr. Sophocles, a native of Greece, at the time Professor of Modern and Ancient Greek at Harvard University, to the effect that the Turks do not express affirmation by a shake of the head, but by a bow or grave nod, negation being expressed by ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... around her, but that her artistic temperament and her environment had kept her aloof from it all. The horrors of the Place de la Revolution made her shudder, but only in the same way as the tragedies of M. Racine or of Sophocles which she had studied caused her to shudder, and she had exactly the same sympathy for poor Queen Marie Antoinette as she had for Mary Stuart, and shed as many tears for King Louis as ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... on the college grounds was the old Greek professor, Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles; a genuine importation from Athens, whom the more imaginative sort of people liked to believe was descended from the Greek poet Sophocles of the Periclean age. He was much too honest himself to give countenance to this rumor, and if you inquired of him concerning ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... the great period of Athenian literature and art: of the Parthenon and Phidias; of AEschylus, the soldier of Marathon; then Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes; finally, of Socrates, not himself an author, but the inspirer of Plato, and the founder of ethical science; according to popular ideas, the typical Sophist, but in fact ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... the period, corresponding to those whose signs one sees at the entrances of our own large cemeteries. Still we may be sure that the ordinary Athenian citizen who adjudged prizes between AEschylus and Sophocles, and to whom Pericles addressed the oration which only exceptional culture nowadays thoroughly appreciates, found plenty of individuality in the decoration of the Parthenon, and was perfectly conscious ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... with my true love 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 ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... 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 the ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... which must arrest our attention. Lucretius is thinking mainly of progress in the arts, and especially of the arts as they affect man's happiness. There is no mention of increase in knowledge or in love. As in the famous parallel passage in Sophocles' Antigone, it is man's strength and skill which most impressed the poet, and his skill especially as exhibited in the arts. Compared with what we shall see as typical utterances of later times, it is an external view of the subject. The absence of love as an element of progress carries ...
— Progress and History • Various
... lamentation, when we remember what 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 poems of his youth, we might with equal plausibility have ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... to be going up the fine flight of steps that leads to the Old Schools. He was carrying some books and papers. Scaife, running down the steps, charged into him. By great good fortune, no damage was done except to a nicely-bound Sophocles. John, however, felt assured that Scaife had deliberately intended to knock him down, seized, possibly, by an ecstasy of blind rage not uncommon with him. ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... him, every copper coin, and dost thou know, lady, how he repaid me? On the road from Naples to Rome he thrust a knife into my body, and my wife, the beautiful and youthful Berenice, he sold to a slave-merchant. If Sophocles knew my history—but what do I say? One better than Sophocles ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... unable to speak Slavonic. To the ancient Byzantine chroniclers the Germans were known under the same name. Cf. Muralt's Essai de Chronogr. Byzant., sub anno 882: 'Les Slavons maltraites par les guerriers Nemetzi de Swiatopolc' (King of Great Moravia, 870-894). Sophocles' Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine periods from B.C. 146 to A.D. 1100: 'Nemitzi' Austrians, Germans. This name is met also in the Mohammedan authors. According to the Masalak-al-Absar, of the first half of the 14th century (transl. by Quatremere, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... "The Mysterious Mother," has not even that degree of importance which secures his romance a niche in literary history. The subject was too unnatural to admit of stage presentation. Incest, when treated in the manner of Sophocles (Walpole justified himself by the example of "Oedipus"), or even of Ford, or of Shelley, may possibly claim a place among the themes which art is not quite forbidden to touch; but when handled in the prurient and crudely melodramatic fashion of this particular artist, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Pet's love nest had the right to look in, and to pull him out, neck and crop, unless he sat there legally. Whether birds discharge fraternal duty is a question for Notes and Queries even in the present most positive age. Sophocles says that the clever birds feed their parents and their benefactors, and men ascribe piety to them in fables, as a ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the land were present at a banquet in honor of Charles Kean, is evidence enough that no puerile or uncultivated taste is this which relishes the theatre. Goethe presiding over the playhouse at Weimar, Euripides and Sophocles writing tragedies, the greatest genius of the English language acting in his own productions at the Globe Theatre, people like Siddons and Kean and Cushman and Macready illustrating this art with the resources of their fine intellects and great ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... taste. Out he goes; and, leaving the tumble-down town behind him, he mounts the 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 ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... simplicity, childishness, or barbarity of those ivy-clad ruins, the forms of which can scarcely be discerned, they must be subjected to a closer inspection; and if there were no other, this one consideration would be enough to incline us to it: while in the theatre of Bacchus the tragedies of Sophocles were played once and no more, the Christian drama, remodelled from century to century, was represented for four hundred years before immense multitudes; and this is a unique phenomenon ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... 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 ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... Poet. He was the father of the drama as well as the epic; not of tragedy only, but of comedy also; for his Margites, which is deplorably lost, bore, says Aristotle, the same analogy to comedy as his Odyssey and Iliad to tragedy. To him, therefore, we owe Aristophanes as well as Euripides, Sophocles, and my poor Aeschylus. But if you please we will confine ourselves (at least for the present) to the Iliad, his noblest work; though neither Aristotle nor Horace give it the preference, as I remember, to the Odyssey. First, then, as ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... poetry, to sound the depth of all the passions; what they are in themselves, and how they are to be provoked: And in this science the best poets have excelled. Aristotle raised the fabric of his poetry from observation of those things, in which Euripides, Sophocles, and AEschylus pleased: He considered how they raised the passions, and thence has drawn rules for our imitation. From hence have sprung the tropes and figures, for which they wanted a name, who first practised them, and succeeded in them. Thus ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... space of time; as it happens in the case of animals of different kinds, which, confined in a close place, nevertheless, each selects its own class, and those of a kindred race separate themselves from the rest. A single age sufficed to illustrate Tragedy, in the persons of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides: ancient comedy under Cratinus, Aristophanes, and Eumolpides, and in like manner the new comedy under Menander, Diphilus, and Philemon. There appeared few philosophers of note after the days of Plato and Aristotle, and whoever has made himself acquainted with Isocrates and his ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... acceptance with the people, while drunken sots, mariners, and illiterate fellows were heard, and had the hustings for their own. "You say true, Demosthenes," replied Satyrus, "but I will quickly remedy the cause of all this, if you will repeat to me some passage out of Euripides or Sophocles." When Demosthenes had pronounced one, Satyrus presently taking it up after him, gave the same passage, in his rendering of it, such a new form, by accompanying it with the proper mien and gesture, that to Demosthenes it seemed quite another thing. ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... that Mr. Longfellow's example will be followed, and that from time 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... consolation from the ethics and philosophy of the ancient dramatists, whom he had always admired, especially the tragedies of Euripides; he formed a complete moral anthology from that poet and from the works of Sophocles, Menander, and others, which he translated into fluent Dutch verse. Becoming more and more interested in the subject, he executed a masterly rhymed translation of the 'Theban Brothers' of Euripides, thus seeking distraction from his own tragic doom in the portraiture of antique, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... chances, that he was always in the wrong; and it 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 ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... more pleasure in a design by . . . William Blake . . . than in the more strictly artistic drawing of some revered classicist; more enjoyment in the weird or dramatic Scottish ballad than in Pindaric or Horatian ode; and he would certainly rather have had Shakspere than Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides put together." ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... serious Sports as might prove nothing less instructing than the gravest Lessons. I doubt not but it might be made some of their Favourite Plays, to contend which of them should recite a beautiful Part of a Poem or Oration most gracefully, or sometimes to join in acting a Scene of Terence, Sophocles, or our own Shakespear. The Cause of Milo might again be pleaded before more favourable Judges, Caesar a second time be taught to tremble, and another Race of Athenians be afresh enraged at the Ambition ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... on 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
... the future, especially not so when the person in question was a naturalist. But that there was at this time a general tendency to reject the art of divination is evident from the fact that Herodotus as well as Sophocles, both of them contemporaries of Pericles and Anaxagoras, expressly contend against attempts in that direction, and, be it remarked, as if the theory they attack was commonly held. Sophocles is in this connexion so far the more interesting ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... "Wasn't it Sophocles," he asked, "who prayed for the time when he would be delivered from the wild beast of passion that devoured ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... showed extraordinary skill in the difficult enterprise of communicating the charm and cadences of the antique masterpieces. It is a heroic drama, severe in style and character as the Antigone of Sophocles. Then in 1865 came Chastelard, conceived and partly written, as Mr. Swinburne has told us, when he was yet at Oxford, a play in which he turns from the Greek tragedians to rejoin the historical dramatists. The turn is abrupt, for no character could have been more alien to the Greek notions ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... 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 ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... brotherhood that is independent of nationalities; that is akin to the spirit which in any land and in every age has produced imperishable monuments of the ardent human soul. The tribe of Oxford is the tribe from whose heart sprang the Psalms of David; Homer and Sophocles, Plato and Virgil, Dante and Goethe are all of the same divine company. It may be said that John Bull, the sturdy angel of England, turns his back slightingly upon such influences; that he regards Oxford as an incidental ornament of his person, ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... It was natural, therefore, that he should ask the young angler if he knew Hebrew, having confessed, according to "Lavengro," that he himself could not read Dante. This is clearly wrong, for writing to Thomas Fowell Buxton, in 1808, he mentions that he is reading Sophocles, some Italian, Livy, etc., and in the following year he informs his sister, Hannah Buxton, that he is engaged, inter alia, on Apollonius Rhodius, the ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... swords shine and the armour rings, and all is life though but a broken frieze. Next came Plato (it took me a long time to read Plato, and I have had to unlearn much of him) and Xenophon. Socrates' dialectic method taught me how to write, or rather how to put ideas in sequence. Sophocles, too; and last, that wonderful encyclopaedia of curious things, Athenaeus. So that I found, when the idea of the hundred best books came out, that between seventy and eighty of them had been my companions almost from boyhood, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... father died"). Prof. Hales, however, thinks that some particular vale is here alluded to, and argues, with much acumen, that the poet referred to the woodlands close by Athens to the north-west, through which the Cephissus flowed, and where stood the birthplace of Sophocles, who sings of his native Colonus as frequented by nightingales. The same critic regards the epithet 'violet-embroidered' as a translation of the Greek iostephanos ( crowned with violets), frequently applied by Aristophanes to Athens, of which Colonus was ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... of Sophocles, just before the death of Antigone and her lover, the chorus sings an ode which makes one wonder at its extravagant expression. When the catastrophe occurs, the mystery is explained. Sophocles meant the sacrifice of Antigone to come home with its full force; and well ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... Germans in despair are turning the theatre into a circus. Their idea of a modern Hellenic revival. Crowds, horses, clowns.... Sophocles in a circus!' ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... college man recalls two characteristic anecdotes about a well-known Harvard professor, Sophocles, or "Sophy," as he was generally called. He was an excellent teacher, but he had his favorites, whom he would never allow to fail in recitation. One day the question under discussion was the dark color of the water of a certain ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... was this multiform aspect that led the world to compare him with a medley host of personages: "within nine years," as he playfully records, "to Rousseau, Goethe, Young, Aretino, Timon of Athens, Dante, Petrarch, Satan, Shakespeare, Buonaparte, Tiberius, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Harlequin, Henry VIII., Mirabeau, Michael Angelo, Diogenes, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... monumentum aere perennius," said Horace, gloriously. "Sum pius AEneas" is Virgil's expression, put into the mouth of his hero. "Ipse Menaleas," said Virgil himself. Homer and Sophocles introduce ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... struggle in Clytemnestra's mind. Agamemnon's doom is sealed from the outset, and she merely carries out a pre-arranged plot. There is contest indeed in the succeeding plays of the trilogy; but it will scarcely be argued that the Agamemnon, taken alone, is not a great drama. Even the Oedipus of Sophocles, though it may at first sight seem a typical instance of a struggle against Destiny, does not really come under the definition. Oedipus, in fact, does not struggle at all. His struggles, in so far as that word can be applied to his misguided efforts ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... 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 meet in a fashion which may be sought for in vain at others. These are the great periods of literature, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... as 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
... fortune is not enough to give my children what is necessary for their education, I will sell my books; but thou shalt remain to me, thou shalt remain on the same shelf with Moses, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles! ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... gesture. And how effective such "unnaturalness" can be in evoking natural passion only those will understand who have realised how ineffective for that purpose is our "naturalness" when we are concerned with Sophocles or Shakspere. The Japanese have in their No dance a great treasure. For out of it they might, if they have the genius, develop a modern poetic drama. How thankful would hundreds of young men be, starving for poetry in England, if we had ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... victorious, he found that his mother, with her protector Dictys, had taken refuge at the altars of the Deities, against the violence of Polydectes; on which Perseus changed him into stone. The story of Perseus afforded abundant materials to the ancient poets. AEschylus wrote a Tragedy called Polydectes, Sophocles one called Danae, while Euripides composed two, called respectively Danae and Dictys. Pherecydes also wrote on this subject, and his work seems to have been a text book for succeeding poets. Polygnotus painted the return of Perseus with the head of Medusa, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... 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 and suggestion of ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... the power which had been given, and a new order arose,—deaconesses who were not allowed marriage. Neither widows nor deaconesses could teach, the Church being especially jealous in this respect and in substantial agreement with Sophocles, who said, "Silence is ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... of Sophocles' Antigone: how, when two brothers disputed the throne of Thebes, one, Polynices, was driven out and brought a foreign host against the city. Both brothers fall in battle. Their uncle takes up the government and publishes an edict that no one shall give ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... 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 speeches of Demosthenes ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... hands, of Satan! O execrable art of singing, have you not wrought mischief enough in the past, degrading so much noble genius, corrupting the purity of Mozart, reducing Handel to a writer of high-class singing-exercises, and defrauding the world of the only inspiration worthy of Sophocles and Euripides, the poetry of the great poet Gluck? Is it not enough to have dishonored a whole century in idolatry of that wicked and contemptible wretch the singer, without persecuting an obscure young composer of our days, whose only wealth is his love ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... hay hartos'), so that he does not particularize. He wants his Homer (in Greek and Latin) bound in sheep's-skin, and with red edges; it will be found in the shelves where the works of St. Justin are.[169] Again, besides the works of St. Leo, bound in parchment, he asks for his Sophocles in black calf; for a Pindar (in Greek and Latin), bound partly in black leather, with gilt edges; and for Le prose dil Bembo, a volume in small quarto with a parchment binding.[170] This throws light on Luis de Leon's progress as a linguist. An imprisoned man who asks ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... may be founded on domestic life or on some historic scene. Sometimes the history of a province of the Chinese Empire is the theme. The plays are mostly comedy. There are no grand tragedies like those of the old Greek poets. The Chinese have had no such writers as Sophocles or Euripides, no such creators of plays as Shakespeare, and they have no such actors as a Garrick or an Irving. We were invited to seats on the stage—which had no curtains, everything being done openly. In order to reach the stage the guide conducted ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... perfect instrument of literary expression; and, in his own literature, models of every kind of literary excellence. If an Englishman cannot get literary culture out of his Bible, his Shakespeare, his Milton, neither, in my belief, will the profoundest study of Homer and Sophocles, Virgil and Horace, give it ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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 or ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... her uncle. He put down his pipe, placed his book on one side, and rose and led her slowly round the room, holding her by the arm. "Plato," he said, laying one finger on the first of a row of small dark books, "and Jorrocks next door, which is wrong. Sophocles, Swift. You don't care for German commentators, I presume. French, then. You read French? You should read Balzac. Then we come to Wordsworth and Coleridge, Pope, Johnson, Addison, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... history is furnished by the same authors, who tell us, that Sophocles was a genius; that nothing could withstand the eloquence of Demosthenes; that Themistocles was a hero; that Socrates was the wisest of men; and it was in the time of the most famous of the Greeks that even upon those highly privileged souls, in sight of irreproachable witnesses, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... lips as he lay in his mother's arms. Less supernatural, but hardly more historical, is the statement in the Life that the poet left Athens for Sicily in consequence of his defeat in the dramatic contest of 468 by Sophocles; or the alternative story of the same authority that the cause of his chagrin was that Simonides' elegy on the heroes slain at Marathon was preferred to his own. Apart from the inherent improbability of such pettiness in such a ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 masterpiece 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 disencumbered myself from rhyme. Not that I condemn ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... transported back to the interesting moment; he counts the fearful odds of the contending hosts; his interest for the result overwhelms him; he trembles, as if it were still uncertain, and seems to doubt whether he may consider Socrates and Plato, Demosthenes, Sophocles, and Phidias, as secure, yet, to himself and to ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... because they touch (as a Greek would say) upon almost every side of "the true, the beautiful, and the good," it is obvious that the outward conditions under which this Athenian genius developed deserve our respectful attention. For assuredly such personages as Sophocles, Plato, and Phidias were not isolated creatures, who developed their genius apart from, or in spite of, the life about them, but rather were the ripe products of a society, which in its excellences and weaknesses presents some of the most interesting ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... "Prometheus Unbound". The Greek tragedians were now his most familiar companions in his wanderings, and the sublime majesty of Aeschylus filled him with wonder and delight. The father of Greek tragedy does not possess the pathos of Sophocles, nor the variety and tenderness of Euripides; the interest on which he founds his dramas is often elevated above human vicissitudes into the mighty passions and throes of gods and demi-gods: such fascinated the ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... the times and to follow the fashion. "All men," says Ascham, less displeased with this novelty than with the travelling propensities of his compatriots, "covet to have their children speake latin"; and "Sophocles and Euripides are more familiar now here than Plautus was formerly."[52] Dazzled by what he saw and heard, Erasmus was announcing to the world in enthusiastic letters that "the golden age" was to be born again in this fortunate island.[53] His only regret was that he ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... 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, ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... Hence, whenever we meet with an idle account of a navel, we may be 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 of ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... in a Gothic cathedral, as in a prospect from a mountain's top, there is, indeed, a unity, an awful oneness;—but it is, because all distinction evades the eye. And just such is the distinction between the 'Antigone' of Sophocles and ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... Homer, Sophocles, AEschylus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and the Works of Alexander the Great; the manners, habits, customs, usages, and the meditations of the Grecians; the Greek Digamma resolved, Prosody, Composition, both in prose and verse, and Oratory, in English, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... austerity, these epitaphs are in a sense the perfection of literature, and yet in another sense almost lie outside its limits. For the workmanship here, we feel, is unconscious; and without conscious workmanship there is not art. In Homer, in Sophocles, in all the best Greek work, there is this divine simplicity; but beyond it, or rather beneath it and sustaining it, there is ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... reasonably be 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 science? ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... 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 ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... familiar and sensible imagery; Shelley loved to idealize the real,—to gift the mechanism of the material universe with a soul and a voice, and to bestow such also on the most delicate and abstract emotions and thoughts of the mind. Sophocles was his great master in this species of imagery." The heroine of the "Epipsychidion" is an imagination; a creature, like Raphael's Galatea, copied from no living model, but from "una certa idea"; a thing originally ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... the vigour and decisiveness of the police in regard to hired vehicles[133] in those last days of the Orleans monarchy. At the Bibliotheque Royale we were much interested by seeing, among many other priceless treasures, Gutenberg's types, Racine's notes in his copy of Sophocles, Rousseau's music, and Voltaire's note upon Frederick of Prussia's letter. Nor should I omit that in what Dickens then told me, of even his small experience of the social aspects of Paris, there seemed but the same disease which ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... delightful characters and humorists connected with Harvard was Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, tutor in Greek. He was a native of Thessaly, born near Mount Pelion and educated in the convent of the Greek Church on Mount Sinai. It is said, although such instances are rare, that he was of the purest Greek blood. At any rate, his ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... 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, and I think I have been able to bring ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... 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. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Lucy in Benson's charge paid her duty to the Sophocles of the Lateran Museum, and, armed with certain books lent her by Manisty, went wandering among the art and inscriptions of Christian Rome. She came home, inexplicably tired, through a glorious Campagna, splashed with poppies, embroidered with ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... other instances of similar apparitions which occurred in sleep; one is of Sophocles, the other of Simonides. The former saw Hercules in a dream, who told him the name of a robber who had taken a golden patera from his temple. Sophocles neglected this notice, as an effect of disturbed sleep; but Hercules appeared to him a second time, and repeated to him the same ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... some of our greatest men the Poet now indites— Old Mark and Henry Mayhew, two of Punch's brightest lights— (The first beats Aristotle blue; the second, Sophocles): Then enter Douglas Jerrold's self, our greatest wit and tease— Who treats his friends like Paddy Whack, his love for them to prove; And Tully great, whose talent flows in just as great a groove; Then Hodder, of the "Morning Herald," sheds the light he brings, And ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... 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; ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... galleries of rare paintings, ten for each that Athens had. Rome should be so great, so rich, so gorgeous, that Greece should be as nothing beside her; Egypt should dwindle to littleness, and the memory of Babylon should be forgotten. Greece had her Homer, her Sophocles, her Anacreon; Rome ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... 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
... 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 lustre ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... shown, exclusively of such poems as "Mycerinus" and "The Strayed Reveller," where the subjects are taken from antiquity, rather in the framing than in the ground work, as in the titles "A Modern Sappho," "The New Sirens," "Stagyrus," and "In utrumque paratus." It is Homer and Epictetus and Sophocles who "prop his mind;" the immortal air which the poet breathes is "Where Orpheus and where Homer are;" and he addresses "Fausta" ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... used to be a popular one with some of the greatest tyrants, who abused it into a pretext for unlimited usurpation of power. Dion, Caligula, and Domitian were particularly fond of it, and, in an extended form, we find the maxim propounded by Creon in the Antigone of Sophocles. See some important remarks of Heeren, "Ancient Greece," ch. ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... he 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 ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— The Schoolmaster • Roger Ascham
... 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, of ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... enough to write in reply that it is happy for her and all readers ... sua si bona norint ... if during some half hour which otherwise might have been dedicated by Mr. Burges to patting out the lights of Sophocles and his peers, he was satisfied with the humbler devastation of E.B.B. upon Nonnus. You know it is impossible to help being amused. This correcting is a mania with that man! And then I, who wrote what I did from the 'Dionysiaca,' with no respect for 'my author,' ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... "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
... Athenians proceeded to man forty ships to send to them, thinking that the war in Sicily would thus be the sooner ended, and also wishing to exercise their navy. One of the generals, Pythodorus, was accordingly sent out with a few ships; Sophocles, son of Sostratides, and Eurymedon, son of Thucles, being destined to follow with the main body. Meanwhile Pythodorus had taken the command of Laches' ships, and towards the end of winter sailed against the Locrian fort, which Laches had formerly taken, and returned ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... and Racine, 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 the excellence of the drama, he ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... modern poet, one says, because even poetry is now affected by the division of labour. We do not look to the poet for a large share in the practical activities of existence: we do not expect him, like AEschylus and Sophocles, Theognis and Alcaeus, to take a conspicuous part in politics and war; or even, as in the Age of Anne, to shine among wits and in society. Life has become, perhaps, too specialised for such multifarious activities. Indeed, even in ancient days, as a Celtic proverb and as the picture of life ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... to the young man about the golden mean and the pinchbeck mean, adding, "You know the Greeks aren't broad church clergymen. They really aren't, in spite of much conflicting evidence. Boys will regard Sophocles as a kind of enlightened bishop, and something tells ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... questioning each newly arriving soul for tidings from above. When the soul of Achilles is told of the glorious deeds of Neoptolemus, "he goes away taking mighty steps through the meadow of asphodel in joyfulness, because he had heard that his son was very illustrious."2 Sophocles makes the dying Antigone say, "Departing, I strongly cherish the hope that I shall be fondly welcomed by my father, and by my mother, and by my brother."3 It is important to notice that, according to the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... 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 in his lodging-house; ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... and I can only repeat that he seemed to recall Langethal's method and awaken many things which the latter had given me, and which, as it were, had fallen asleep during the interval. He again aroused in my soul the love for the ancients, and his interpretations of Horace or Sophocles were of great service ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... understand a spiritual agency, or thinks that the best of ancient men were not dominated by any such, the understanding of the very alphabet of history will be endangered. It would tend greatly to salvation from arid formalism, if ministers would teach that Plato, Sophocles, Browning, Carlyle, are all apostles of religion. A living word from an intuitionist like the last-named not unfrequently vivifies with new force the dark sayings of a Hebrew seer, in much more direct fashion than half-a-score ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... that," says the professor. "It looks as though your time were near. In Sophocles' time ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... and neglects the dictation of his Tutor. Moreover, I have to spend the later part of the afternoon in reading the Cr—, I should say, the admirable and scholarly version of Professor Jebb—to three Commoners who are taking up Sophocles for Honour Moderations." ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... 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
... opportunity for Protagoras, without his needing to seek it. "Is Euripides greater than Aeschylus and Sophocles?" he asked. ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... much 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 ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... open door to the development of the mind and to knowledge of all sorts. The unfolding of a Greek myth leads directly to art, to love of beauty, to knowledge of history, to an understanding of ourselves. But whatever the beginning is, whether a classic myth, a Homeric epic, a play of Sophocles, the story of the life and death of Socrates, a mediaeval legend, or any genuine piece of literature from the time of Virgil down to our own, it may not so much matter (except that it is better ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the interment itself, the hair of the deceased person was hung upon the door, to signify the family was in mourning. It was sometimes laid upon the dead body, sometimes cast into the funeral pile, and sometimes placed upon the grave. Electra in Sophocles says, that Agamemnon had commanded her and Chrysothemis to pay him ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • 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 of torment besieging him on the humiliating evidence of the ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... To a Friend, praising Homer and Epictetus and Sophocles, for it seems to some to have a smatch of priggishness. Nor am I one of those who think very highly of the much longer Sick King in Bokhara which (with a fragment of an Antigone, whereof more hereafter) follows, as this ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... poets and prophets of the world have seized unerringly upon that melancholy undertone. Who ever better understood the futility and helplessness of unaided man, the certain doom that tracks down his pride of insolence, or his sin, than the Greek tragedians? Sophocles, divided spirit that he was, heard that note of melancholy long ago by the AEgean, wrote it into his somber dramas, with their turbid ebb and flow of human misery. Sometimes the voices of our humanity as they rise blend and compose into one great cry that is lifted, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... AEschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Homer, with Terence, Tacitus, Virgil, Horace and Ovid, were constantly pillaged for thoughts to piece out the theatrical robes and blank verse eloquence of playwrights who only received for ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... hours, they enjoy each his own supernatural powers. This is all very 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 many days send each other a cord of anonymous bays. Each piling his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... under earth where the seed awaits new life in the new year. The creed is practical as the folk-lore of sympathetic magic, which half expects to bring good harvest luck by various mummeries; and the creed is mystical as the hidden things and words unknown which assured Pindar and Sophocles of secure felicity in this ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... is from a fresco at Herculaneum. It will be noticed that each roll is furnished with a ticket (titulus). At the feet of the statue of Demosthenes already referred to, and of that of Sophocles, are capsae, both of which show ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... 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 ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... certain parts of our modern heritage which are not Greek either by origin or by affinity. These will not be found in Euripides or Plato any more than in Herodotus or Sophocles. But some developments of religion which our Hellenists particularly dislike, and are therefore anxious to disclaim as alien to Greek thought and practice, such as asceticism, sacramental magic, religious ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Major, Paradoxes, Scipio's Dream, Letter to Quintus. Cicero On Oratory and Orators. Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, The Nature of the Gods, and The Commonwealth. Juvenal. Xenophon. Homer's Iliad. Homer's Odyssey. Herodotus. Demosthenes. 2 Vols. Thucydides. AEschylus. Sophocles. Euripides. 2 ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... poet Sophocles, the rival and survivor of Euripides—for he lived to extreme old age—on being accused by his own son of insanity on the ground that the advance of age had destroyed his wits, is said to have produced that matchless tragedy, ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... Sophocles, Plato, Socrates, Gentlemen, Pythagoras, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Homer,—yea, Clement, Augustin, Origen, Burnt brightlier ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... was still more varied and remarkable. Even the great masterpieces of Sophocles and Euripides, were regarded by contemporaries as inferior to many tragedies utterly ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... 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. Criticism ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... gaining prizes for his tragedies, till 468, when, after being thirteen times first, he was excelled by another Athenian named Sophocles, and was so much vexed that he withdrew to the Greek colonies in Sicily. It is not clear whether he ever came back to Athens for a time, but he certainly died in Sicily, and in an extraordinary way. He was asleep on the sea-shore, ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in all his productions. The Paradise Lost is almost in every page an imitation of Virgil, or Homer. The Lycidas treads closely in the steps of the Daphnis and Gallus of Virgil. The Sampson Agonistes is formed upon the model of Sophocles. Even the little pieces, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso have their source in a song of Fletcher, and two beautiful little ballads that are ascribed to Shakespeare. But the classical model upon which Comus was formed has not ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... in his own day and afterwards was of the 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 ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... These lines represent the subjects of tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the great ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... During the course of this embassy, Ascham undertook to improve Morisine in Greek, and, for four days in the week, explained some passages in Herodotus every morning, and more than two hundred verses of Sophocles, or Euripides, every afternoon. He read with him, likewise, some of the orations of Demosthenes. On the other days he compiled the letters of business, and in the night filled up his diary, digested his remarks, and wrote private letters to his friends in England, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... and Sophocles the numbering of lines agrees with that in the translations of Plumptre and in the original. In the plays from Euripides the numbering is that of the lines in the cheap ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... 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 ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... before by the late D. A. Talboys, of Oxford. The answer I received was, that the manager had then too much on his hands to admit of his giving time to such an undertaking, which I still think might be a successful one (as is the case with the "Antigone" {251} of Sophocles, so often represented at Berlin), and such as to ensure the favourable attention of an English audience, particularly as the subject turns so much upon the danger and uselessness of the meteoric or visionary education, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... Pantheon is 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 great and admirable in its kind, although the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... 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 ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... An Athenian tragic poet, who exhibited plays as early as 524 B.C. He was said to have competed with Aeschylus, Pratinas and even Sophocles. According to F.G. Welcker, however, the rival of Sophocles was a son of Choerilus, who bore the same name. Suidas states that Choerilus wrote 150 tragedies and gained the prize 13 times. His works are all lost; only ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... only partially polished minds. Both in the selection of their models and in the freedom of treating them they showed that good sense which was characteristic of the nation. As a rule, instead of trying to familiarise the people with Aeschylus and Sophocles, poets who are essentially Athenian, they generally chose the freethinking and cosmopolitan Euripides, who was easily intelligible, and whose beauties did not seem so entirely to defy imitation. What Euripides was to Greek tragedy Menander was to comedy. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... 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 ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... written in a tongue incomprehensible to you. You look at the covers you may even flutter the leaves and look at the pictures but you cannot tell what they are all about. You are like people bored and yawning at a performance of a tragedy by Sophocles, because the actors speak in Greek. So dreadful and moving a thing as a man's sudden death may happen before your eyes, but you do not know enough of what it means to be moved by it. For you it is not really a man who ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... the "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" did some other desirable work; but Professor Moulton quotes this paragraph from a popular life of Fitzgerald, published in Dublin: "Not Greece of old in her palmiest days—the Greece of Homer and Demosthenes, of Eschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, of Pericles, Leonidas, and Alcibiades, of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, of Solon and Lycurgus, of Apelles and Praxiteles—not even this Greece, prolific as she was in sages and heroes, can boast such a lengthy bead-roll as Ireland can of names immortal in history!" But "this was for Irish consumption." ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... which remains from the Greeks is that of Sophocles, of which we give a picture (Fig. 68). It was not found until about 1839, and was presented to Pope Gregory XVI. by Cardinal Antonelli; it is in the museum of the Lateran. This engraving from it shows its beauties so well that ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... language of course enabled the Greeks to carry this art to a far higher degree of perfection than can be attained by any modern Europeans. Jebb, for instance, takes twelve words—"Well hath he spoken for one who giveth heed not to fall"—to express a sentiment which Sophocles (OEd. Tyr. 616) is able to compress into four—[Greek: kalos elexen eulaboumeno pesein]. Moreover, albeit under the stress of metrical and linguistic necessity the translator must generally indulge in paraphrase, let him beware lest in doing so he sacrifices that quality in ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... then, no 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 chorus sings, according ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... Euripus, for grief and shame drowned himself: Caelius Rodigimus antiquar. lec. lib. 29. cap. 8. Homerus pudore consumptus, was swallowed up with this passion of shame [1676] "because he could not unfold the fisherman's riddle." Sophocles killed himself, [1677]"for that a tragedy of his was hissed off the stage:" Valer. max. lib. 9. cap. 12. Lucretia stabbed herself, and so did [1678]Cleopatra, "when she saw that she was reserved for a triumph, to avoid the infamy." Antonius the Roman, [1679]"after he was overcome ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... took his brother Andrew into partnership, and the firm quickly became famous for the beauty and correctness of their classics, beginning with the edition of Horace, which, from the fact of its having only six errors in the text, was christened the immaculate. Other attractive books were the Sophocles of 1745, quarto; Cicero in twenty volumes, small octavo; the small folio edition of Callimachus, which took the silver medal offered in Edinburgh for the finest book of not fewer than ten sheets; the magnificent Homer, which Reed in his Old English Letter Foundries describes as 'for accuracy ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... lies in idleness by the streams in breathless summer, comforted by a bath just taken, or when in the middle of the night he is worn out by revising endless exercises, underlining the mistakes in red and allotting marks, or weighed down by the wise men of old—Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, the ideas of Plato, wiles of Pindar, fearfully corrupt strophe of chorus, wondrous guesses of Teutons and fancies of philologists, when men swoon in the inexplicable wanderings of the endless examination of Homer, when the brain reels among ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... seven Argive chiefs, by the principles of dramatic writing, we shall instantly condemn them as monstrous. But if we forget the characters, and think only of the poetry, we shall admit that it has never been surpassed in energy and magnificence. Sophocles made the Greek drama as dramatic as was consistent with its original form. His portraits of men have a sort of similarity; but it is the similarity, not of a painting, but of a bass-relief. It suggests a resemblance; but it does not produce an illusion. Euripides ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... other hand, we must not venture to assert that the quality of interest is not to be found in masterpieces of literature. We have it in Schiller's dramas in an appreciable degree, and consequently they are popular; also in the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles. Amongst masterpieces of description, we find it in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso; nay, an example of a high degree of interest, bound up with the beautiful, is afforded in an excellent novel by Walter Scott—The ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... her comprehension. He knows that he need not adapt himself to a feebler mind: "You understand," he says again and again. At length he comes, in his narration, to the end of their feast that night, and tells how, rising from the banquet interrupted by the entrance of Sophocles with tidings of Euripides dead, he had cried to his friends that they must ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne |
