"Sophocles" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Europe awoke men and unsealed men's eyes—unsealed the eyes of Englishmen in particular—to discover a literature, and the finest in the world, which habitually philosophised life: a literature which, whether in a chorus of Sophocles or a talk reported by Plato, or in a ribald page of Aristophanes or in a knotty chapter of Thucydides, was in one guise or another for ever asking Why? 'What is man doing here, and why is he doing it?' 'What ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... me of nothing. 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 of her, as I saw her first in the woodland, in her white gown, ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... prevailed most strongly through the period between the battle of Marathon and the battle of Chaeronea, and has left its monuments in such plays as the Persae and Eumeuides of AEschylus, the Antigone of Sophocles, the Clouds of Aristophanes, the History of Thucydides and the Orations of Demosthenes, its last embodiment being perhaps the famous oath of that orator on the souls of those who risked their lives at Marathon."—History of English Poetry, ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... break a lance with our author on the general merits of Roman literature, which, by a heresy not new with him, he sacrifices, in what appears to us a most unfair degree, on the score of its inferior originality to the Grecian. It is true the Romans had no Aeschylus nor Sophocles, and but a secondhand Homer, though this last was not only the most finished but even the most original of imitators. But where was the Greek model of the noble poem of Lucretius? What, except the mere idea, did the Georgics borrow from Hesiod? and whoever ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... librarian, a national library would be little more than a literary chaos; his well exercised memory and critical judgment are its best catalogue. One of the Ptolemies refused supplying the famished Athenians with wheat, until they presented him with the original manuscripts of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; and in returning copies of these autographs, he allowed them to retain the fifteen talents which he had pledged with them ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... evil-doer. But to learn also the good—lessons of piety, patriotism, 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 ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... he, forsooth! What 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; and we listen to him again and breathe the sweet ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... (though we would not make oath to that). It is a fine morning at Athens, and every one is astir, for it is the day of assembling together at Eleusis. Then, for company, we shall have Plato, now eighteen years old, Sophocles, an old man of eighty-four, Euripides, at sixty-nine, and Aristophanes, at forty-five. Socrates, who has his peculiar notions about things, is not one of the initiated, but will go with us, if we ask him. These are the elite of Athens. Then there are the Sophists and their young ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... writes 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 a Tartar woman, with water of the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 the ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... 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 raged afterwards through the second Empire. Not many days after ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... 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
... 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 of another Philip. Amidst these ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... at the retrospect, he is 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 ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... 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 a backward nod. From the striking effect produced by ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... music and exercised a 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 on a tanyard, the repulsive odour of which ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... 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 numerous, and reckoned as respectable, in point of talent, as those of ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... 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
... present bulk. Much of it, no doubt, was preserved in single copies, and only a narrow selection of authors was in constant use for educational purposes. Only three plays out of seven of AEschylus, for example, were read in the schools. The rest, with Sophocles and Apollonius Rhodius, practically depended for their survival on the famous copy now at Florence. Instances might be multiplied. The threads of transmission to which we owe most of the Euripidean plays, the Anthology, the History of Polybius, the ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... 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
... 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 put into the mouth ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... Racine glows finely in Esther. In the choruses, the inspirations of the Hebrew prophets, framed as it were in a Greek mould, give impressive relief to the dialogue, as in Sophocles and Aeschylus. It was played several times, and no favour was more envied at the Court than an invitation to the representations. The literature of the time has many allusions to them. The splendid world, in all its ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... means behindhand: Dante, Giotto, Brunelleschi, and Donatello were dead, but Ariosto, Raphael, Bramante, and Michael Angelo were now living. Rome, Florence, and Naples had inherited the masterpieces of antiquity; and the manuscripts of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had come (thanks to the conquest of Mahomet II) to rejoin the statue of Xanthippus and the works of Phidias and Praxiteles. The principal sovereigns of Italy had come to understand, when they let their eyes dwell upon the fat harvests, the wealthy villages, the flourishing manufactories, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... place, conducted by Adrastus, and the sons of those who had been slain. Thebes now falls, and Thereander, the son of Polynices, is made king. The legends of Thebes have furnished the great tragedians Sophocles and Euripides, with their finest subjects. In the fable of the Sphinx we trace a connection between ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... of ruin, at an age when no fruitful toil could be expected from his enfeebled faculties. But she was also anxious to control him without wounding his susceptibilities,—not wishing to imitate the children of Sophocles, in case her father neared the scientific result for which he had ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... 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 boys, ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... case of Aeschylus 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 translation ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... 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 ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... expect we find little evidence of affection between the Athenian husband and wife. The entire separation between their work and interests would necessarily preclude ideal love. Probably Sophocles presents the ordinary Greek view accurately, when he causes one of his characters to regret the loss of a brother or sister much more than that of a wife. "If a wife dies you can get another, but if a brother or sister dies, and the mother ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... his shoulder with somewhat of a theatrical air. “But a good time is coming; meanwhile, not having much to do here, I employ my time as well as I can. You shall see my little library;”—and he brought in some volumes, mostly classical, the Odyssey, Euripides, Sophocles, Æschylus, and Cornelius Nepos. After awhile he pulled out of his bosom, with some mystery, for he was still professedly a catholic, a small copy of Diodati's Italian version of the New Testament. “This,” he said, with emphasis, “is my greatest consolation; ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... being "the same subject continued," just here in 1890, one gets a curious nourishment and lift (I do) from all those grand old veterans, Bancroft, Kossuth, von Moltke—and such typical specimen-reminiscences as Sophocles and Goethe, genius, health, beauty of person, riches, rank, renown and length of days, all combining and centering in ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... interest in, and a sympathy for, the thought-visions of men like Charles Kingsley, Marcus Aurelius, Whit tier, Montaigne, Paul of Tarsus, Robert Browning, Pythagoras, Channing, Milton, Sophocles, Swedenborg, Thoreau, Francis of Assisi, Wordsworth, Voltaire, Garrison, Plutarch, Ruskin, Ariosto, and all kindred spirits and souls of great measure, from David down to Rupert Brooke,—if a study of the thought of such men creates a sympathy, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... completion of The Maid of Orleans Schiller was minded to try his hand on a tragedy "in the strictest Greek form." He had been deeply impressed by the art of Sophocles and wished to create something which should produce on the modern mind the effect of a Greek tragedy, with its simple structure, its few characters, and above all its chorus. But the choice of a subject was not easy, and for several months he occupied himself with ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... Sophocles; "the unwritten and unassailable statutes given to us by the gods." Sir Almroth had it in the ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... fountain of fatal influence. The Margaret of Goethe and Ophelia of Shakespeare had perforce to yield 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, ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Chthonian darkness 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 and ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... of Homer," says Volney, "I find the customs, discourse, and manners of the Iroquois, Delawares, and Miamis. The tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides paint to me almost literally the sentiments of the red men respecting necessity, fatality, the miseries of human life, and the rigor of blind destiny." (Volney's "View of ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... himself. He had read the 'Anabasis,' some Herodotus, three plays of Euripides, and was now making some desperate efforts on Aeschylus and Sophocles. Any Plato? David made a face. He had read two or three dialogues in English; didn't want to go on, didn't care about ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... English divine and scholar, born in London; was Dean of Wells; as a divine he wrote commentaries on books of both the Old and New Testaments, and as a scholar executed able translations in verse of Sophocles, AEschylus, and the "Commedia" of Dante, the last perhaps his greatest and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the Thessalians to adorn Achilles's grave. The rose, too, was very grateful; nor was the use of myrtle less common. In short, graves were bedecked with garlands of all sorts of flowers, as appears from Agamemnon's daughter in Sophocles:— ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... presently to 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 persecution, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... 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
... . . . 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 ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... SOPHOCLES.—Thespis was 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 ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... at an even greater disadvantage with AEschylus and Sophocles. The best characters of the piece are often the least employed, as in the instance of Macaria in the "Heraclidae," while the play is dwindled away with dull, heavy dirges, and the complaints of senile childishness. The chorus, as Aristotle[4] has remarked, is most unfortunately independent of ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... 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 their best accepted works from ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... Iliad. As time went on, other poets were associated with Homer in the work of education, such as Hesiod and the Tragedians. The majestic lessons concerning duty and religion, justice and providence, which occur in AEschylus and Sophocles, belong to a higher school than that of Homer; and the verses of Euripides, even in his lifetime, were so familiar to Athenian lips and so dear to foreign ears, that, as is reported, the captives of Syracuse gained their freedom ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... 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 of Italian singers, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... 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 ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... at the highest place, it is very honourable to arrive at the second or even the third rank. For in the poets there is room not only for Homer (to confine myself to the Greeks), or for Archilochus, or Sophocles, or Pindar, but there is room also for those who are second to them, or even below the second. Nor, indeed, did the nobleness of Plato in philosophical studies deter Aristotle from writing; nor did Aristotle himself, by his admirable ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... enim, valdeque vitiosum, in re severa, convivio dignum, aut delicatum aliquem inferre sermonem. Bene Pericles, quum haberet collegam in praetura Sophoclem poetam, hique de communi officio convenissent, & casu formosus puer praeteriret, dixissetque Sophocles, O pueram pulchrum Pericle! At enim, inquit Pericles, praetorem Sophoclem decet non solum manus, sed etiam oculus abstinentes habere. Atqui hoc idem Sophocles, si in athletarum probatione dixisset, justa reprehensione ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... in the 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 ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... ten days after Agnes Anne had left us for the old house of the Maitlands when she came to me at the school-house. My father had Fred Esquillant in with him, and the two were busy with Sophocles. I was sitting dreaming with a book of old plays in my hand when Agnes Anne ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... compare these last hours of one of the noblest women in English history to those of that rare and radiant Greek maiden, whom the genius of Sophocles has glorified in his immortal tragedy. The comparison is altogether in favour of the English heroine, for while Antigone went to her death bravely, yet her final words were those of bitter complaint and almost whining lamentation. Compare with these words the Christlike ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck
... Theognis compares marriage to cattle-breeding; Alcman, when he wishes to be complimentary to the Spartan girls, speaks of them as his "female boy-friends." AEschylus makes even a father assume that his daughters will misbehave if left to themselves. There is no sexual love in Sophocles, and in Euripides it is only the women who fall in love. Benecke concludes (p. 67) that in Greece sexual love, down to a comparatively later period, was looked down on, and held to be unworthy of public discussion and representation. It was in Magna Graecia ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... 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 ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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; ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Thebes; a Tragedy translated from Sophocles, with notes, translated in the year 1715, dedicated to ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... revolution smouldering throughout northern Greece now broke out into open flame, and the national-social party there sent to Perseus for help. If Hellenic nationality was to be saved only by such means, the question might well be asked, with all respect for Sophocles and Phidias, whether the object was worth ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... and even himself, as he afterwards told me; for, during the time he was at the school, he never had to use a dictionary once, though we read Dalzell's selections from Aristotle and Longinus, and several plays of Sophocles. He took his idea, so he said, from what De Quincy says of one of the Eton masters fagging the lesson, to the great amusement of the class, and, while waiting for the lesson, he used to read a newspaper. While acting as second master he seldom occupied the master's desk, but sat among the boys ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... poor scholar during his school days, the only thing he especially enjoyed being literature, mainly Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Aeschylus; and about the time the dramatic philosophies of these men filled his attention, he wrote a great drama in which there were forty-two characters, every one of whom was killed or died in ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... 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 it is scarcely needful to speak of it in detail. This statue is valuable ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... 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 in the ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... 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 of mutilated Pentateuchs ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... the Mode and meritless That quickens sense in shapes whom, thou hast said, Necessitation sways! A life there was Among these self-same frail ones—Sophocles— Who visioned it too clearly, even while He dubbed the Will "the gods." Truly said he, "Such gross injustice to their own creation Burdens the time with mournfulness for us, And for themselves with shame."[9]—Things mechanized By coils and pivots set to ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... have read, because his construction is so clear and beautiful. Only his long words, and local allusions, make him difficult, so far as I have seen. He has made me laugh heartily, and wonder: but as to your calling him greater than Aeschylus or Sophocles, I do not agree with you. I have read nothing else. What a nice quiet speech Charles Kemble made on quitting the stage: almost the best I can remember on such an occasion. Did Spedding hear him? My dear Allen, I should often wish to see you and him of ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... 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 I grant ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... Sophocles, Plato, Socrates, Gentlemen, Pythagoras, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Homer,—yea, Clement, Augustin, Origen, Burnt brightlier towards ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... the Oedipus Tyrannus,(169) 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 that her pedigree and status will remain unimpugned, ...
— On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay • Hugh E. Seebohm
... were published by the learned Morales, his nephew, some fifty years after his death. Among them are translations in prose of the Electra of Sophocles, and the Hecuba of Euripides. They may with more propriety be termed imitations, and those too of the freest kind. Although they conform, in the general arrangement and progress of the story, to their originals, yet characters, ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... 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. ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... a captive, and addressed by the vulgar with the language they seem to find most appropriate to such occasions,—that of thrusts and blows. Silently, his head averted, he ignored their existence, as Plotinus or Sophocles might that of a modern reviewer. Probably he listened to the voice of the cataract, and felt that congenial powers flowed free, and was consoled, though his own ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... A'JAX TEL'AMON. Sophocles has a tragedy called Ajax, in which "the madman" scourges a ram he mistakes for Ulysses. His encounter with a flock of sheep, which he fancied in his madness to be the sons of Atreus, has been mentioned at greater or less ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... I am hard driven by pressing need, if my friend is overtaken by want, if the mediocrity of my 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
... demigods, without resounding battle-shout and din of mighty conflict, had been an anachronism for which there could have been offered no apology. The splendid era of Pericles demanded the tragedy, and such a tragedy as only Aeschylus and Sophocles could originate; while the foibles of an earlier era made the comedy imperative. On like principles, the writings of Lucretius are not enigmatical, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... 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 ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... 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, those lacking to complete the number being chiefly ecclesiastical ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... the Pleiade, one—Jodelle—is remembered chiefly in connection with the history of the drama. Baif (1532-89), son of the French ambassador at Venice, translated from Sophocles and Terence, imitated Plautus, Petrarchised in sonnets, took from Virgil's Georgics the inspiration of his Meteores, was guided by the Anacreontic poems in his Passe-Temps, and would fain rival ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... continuous human experience. The consciousness of moral failure is terrible and universal. This consciousness requires neither definition nor illustration. Experience is a sufficient witness. Who has been able exhaustively to delineate the soul's humiliation? AEschylus and Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe, Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning have but skimmed the surface of the great tragedy of human life. Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Faust, and Wilhelm Meister, Beatrice Cenci, the sad, sad story of Guinevere, and the awful shadows of the Ring and the Book—how ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... aided by a memory of uncommon powers, he taught the classics, and particularly Greek, with much higher reputation than any other schoolmaster within a pretty extensive circuit. Two of his pupils read all the Iliad, and all or the greater part of Sophocles. After hearing a long sentence of Greek or Latin distinctly recited, he could generally construe and translate it with little or no hesitation. He was always much gratified by Telford's visits, which were not ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... contact with so masterful a force, it would become yet more emphatic, and so a thing arresting in itself would become yet more notable under its new dominion. And so it is. Fielding's architectural power is a yet more wonderful thing in Sophocles, where it is allied to poetic energy; Ruskin's moral fervour is, for all its nobility, less memorable than Wordsworth's and Ben Jonson defines character more pungently than Sheridan. These energies remain, nevertheless, distinct from the poetic energy. When, however, a poet is endowed not ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... frescoes and paintings, I less regret not having seen. Its Biblioteca Capitolare, which is said to be an unwrought quarry of historic and patristic lore, I should have liked to visit. There, too, the monks of the middle ages were caught tripping. "Sophocles or Tacitus," in the words of Gibbon, "had been compelled to resign the parchment to missals, homilies, and the golden legend." The "Institutes of Caius," which were the foundation of the Institutes of Justinian, were discovered ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... mother there, dusting and arranging the books. Besides the little shabby Oxford Homers there were an Aeschylus, a Sophocles, two volumes of Aristophanes, clean and new, three volumes of Euripides and a Greek Testament. On the table a well-preserved Greek Anthology, bound in green, with the owner's name, J.C. Ponsonby, stamped on it in gilt letters. She remembered Jimmy ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... woman with restless eyes who sat in state in the front parlour and received his visitors. The books in their cases gave evidence of little use for many years, although their character indicated the tastes of a man of culture. His Pliny, Caesar, Cicero, Tacitus, Sophocles, and Homer had evidently been read by a man who knew their beauties and loved them for ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... 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 me that they ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... by the striking out of all the Non-Christian Moralists, of all the Theology and Devotion, with the exception of Jeremy Taylor and the Pilgrim's Progress. The Nibelungenlied and Malory's Morte d'Arthur (which, by the way, is in prose) go out, as do Sophocles and Euripides among the Greek Dramatists. The Knights is struck out to make way for the three plays of Aristophanes mentioned above. Gibbon, Voltaire, Hume, and Grote all go, as do all the philosophers but Bacon. Cook's Voyages and Darwin's Naturalist ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... 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 poem with infinite skill, to whom, in fact, can be denied no ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... in the waves, but the waves recoil swollen with red blood, while the wailing of the hapless women echoes along the rocky strand. Among these heroic souls Shelley alone of modern poets—that Titan spirit in a maiden's form—may find a place, according to Carducci, caught up by Sophocles from the living ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... i: Hesiodus ergon kai hemeron lib. 1. D[e,]monas ait esse aera essamenous. The text cited, Hesiod's Works and Days, is not divided into books. The words occur in l. 125, bracketed in the Loeb edition. Footnote s: Sophocles in Trachinijs vocat drun poluglosson, quia ut eius Scholiastes interpretatur... The words occur in l. 1168. The scholia ...
— A Treatise of Witchcraft • Alexander Roberts
... 21, 1714. Articles signed by Mr. Theobald, to translate for B. Lintot the 24 books of Homer's Odyssey into English blank verse. Also the four Tragedies of Sophocles, called OEdipus Tyrannus, OEdipus Coloneus, Trachiniae, and Philoctetes, into English blank verse, with Explanatory Notes to the twenty-four Books of the Odyssey, and to the four Tragedies. To receive, for translating ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... "That reminds me of the German commentators who find in the Agamemnon of AEschylus or the OEdipus of Sophocles or the Hamlet of Shakespeare motives and purposes of which the authors could never have dreamed, and give us a metaphysical, beer-and-tobacco, High-Dutch Clytemnestra or Antigone or Lady Macbeth. No, my boy, More was a simple sailor, and had no ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... Ide, Or, to the sea, fleet Simois doth slide: And so shall Hesiod too, while vines do bear, Or crooked sickles crop the ripen'd ear. Callimachus, though in invention low, Shall still be sung, since he in art doth flow. No loss shall come to Sophocles' proud vein; With sun and moon, Aratus shall remain. While slaves be false, fathers hard, and bawds be whorish Whilst harlots flatter, shall Menander flourish. Ennius, though rude, and Accius's high-rear'd ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... themselves to search for and embrace that which may profit in that which pleaseth them, and rejecting and discarding that wherein they find nothing of this nature. For this discrimination is the first step to learning; and when this is attained, then, according to what Sophocles saith,— ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... them, then they can speak of it. Hence the hard saying of Plato is quite real to them, that the uninitiated sinks into the mire, and that only one who has passed through the mystical life enters eternity. It is only in this sense that the words in the fragment of Sophocles can be understood: "Thrice-blessed are the initiated who come to the realm of the shades. They alone have life there. For others there is only ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... plausible, are fainter by far than these. It is certainly not much less strange to come upon such passages in the work of Shakespeare as the speeches of Buckingham and Cranmer than it would be to encounter in the work of Sophocles a sample of the later and laxer style of Euripides; to meet for instance in the Antigone with a passage which might pass muster as an extract from the Iphigenia in Aulis. In metrical effects the style of the lesser English ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... imaginative faculty combined with the process of reason is most plainly seen in the conceptions of the three great poets of the fifth century, Pindar, AEschylus, and Sophocles. In the words of Pindar: "All things depend on God alone; all which befalls mortals, whether it be good or evil fortune, is due to Zeus: he can draw light from darkness, and can veil the sweet light of day in obscurity. No human action escapes him: happiness is ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... 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 ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... Latin and Italian writings and with all their translations. Among the Greek manuscripts the Fathers of the Church far outnumbered the rest; yet in the list of the classics we find all the works of Sophocles, all of Pindar, and all of Menander. The last codex must have quickly disappeared from Urbino, else the philologists would have ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... uneducated sister, bared her white arms above the elbow, and molded delicate pastry, and sealed and pickled and preserved as diligently and as deftly as if she had never demonstrated a problem in Euclid or heard of Sophocles. In what way had women become unfitted for their sphere by a liberal education? In no way whatever. If some highly educated women are inefficient housekeepers, and slatternly in their persons, so also are many who neither know how to read nor write; just as ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... is crying—"Room for the Prytanes." The general assembly is to meet. The people are swarming in on every side. Proclamation is made—"Who wishes to speak?" There is a shout, and a clapping of hands: Pericles is mounting the stand. Then for a play of Sophocles; and away to sup with Aspasia. I know of no modern university which has so excellent a ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 out to ...
— The Spartan Twins • Lucy (Fitch) Perkins
... the Greek tragedians, with which Pompey took leave of Cornelia [daughter of Metellus Scipio, and widow of P. Crassus] on entering the boat in which he was slain. [The verse, or verses, are said to be by Sophocles, and are quoted by Plutarch, in his Life of Pompey, c. 78, Vitae, 1814, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Doll's House and Ghosts dramatic 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 in ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... thought that to have produced As You Like It in an English forest would have satisfied the most ambitious spirit; but Mr. Godwin has not contented himself with his sylvan triumphs. From Shakespeare he has passed to Sophocles, and has given us the most perfect exhibition of a Greek dramatic performance that has as yet been seen in this country. For, beautiful as were the productions of the Agamemnon at Oxford and the Eumenides at Cambridge, their effects were marred in no small or unimportant ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... 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 attainments,—surely ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... 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, ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... mistake. 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 ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... thee, America, Old chants, Egyptian priests, and those of Ethiopia, The Hindu epics, the Grecian, Chinese, Persian, The Biblic books and prophets, and deep idyls of the Nazarene, The Iliad, Odyssey, plots, doings, wanderings of Eneas, Hesiod, Eschylus, Sophocles, Merlin, Arthur, The Cid, Roland at Roncesvalles, the Nibelungen, The troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, skalds, Chaucer, Dante, flocks of singing birds, The Border Minstrelsy, the bye-gone ballads, feudal tales, essays, plays, Shakespere, Schiller, Walter Scott, Tennyson, As some vast wondrous ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... 'Actions—actions,' I say, and not writing,—least of all, rhyme. Look at the querulous and monotonous lives of the 'genus;'—except Cervantes, Tasso, Dante, Ariosto, Kleist (who were brave and active citizens), Aeschylus, Sophocles, and some other of the antiques also—what a worthless, idle brood ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... 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 the serpent, in his old age, attesting some closer sense ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... called Scythes, go on board the boat before him. And as some of the crew with Achillas were reaching out their hands to help him, he turned about towards his wife and son, and repeated those iambics of Sophocles, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... and in Sophocles still more; but they have many more defects. One dares say that the beautiful scenes of Corneille and the touching tragedies of Racine surpass the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides as much as these two Greeks surpass Thespis. Racine was quite conscious ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... 'this one day we'll give—to heresy. Don't look so forbidding! In the first place, you won't see me; in the next, if you did, you would feel me as wax in your hands. I am like the man in Sophocles—always the possession of the last speaker! One day I am all for the church. A certain number of chances in the hundred there still are, you will admit, that she is in the right of it. And if so, why should I cut myself off ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... curious incident occurred. John happened 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. Scaife ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... was a great revival in Italy of the ancient classic drama, of which Poliziano was the most successful exponent. Both he and the later writers, however, made no attempt to found any National Italian drama—their works are entirely an imitation of the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, and the comedies ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... artistic friend at 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 and represented the internal thoughts, struggles, and emotions of the men ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... tragedians for years, 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
... "Exegi 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 their ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... without it, unless beak and claw are shown. And now the intruder into 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 needful ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... translating the moral sentences extracted by Stobaeus from the Greek tragedies; drawing 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... may deny the condemnation that weighed upon the soul of Herod or Judas, or the approval of conscience that transfigured the face of the martyred Stephen or Savonarola. For all happiness comes only through peace with one's self, one's record, and one's God. All the great, from AEschylus and Sophocles to Channing and Webster, have emphasized man's conscience as the oracle divine. Let the witnesses speak. Here is the Judge, famous in English history: It became his duty to sentence a servant for murdering his master. Suddenly, before the astounded onlookers, the Judge arose and took ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... 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 ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... heavenly purity and starlike loveliness of his Genoveva. Had the rest of Tieck's life kept pace with the fertility of the six years from 1798 to 1804, he must have been beyond all rivalry the second of German poets; and as Eschylus in the Frogs shares his supremacy with Sophocles, so would Goethe have invited Tieck to sit beside him on his throne. Unfortunately for those who would have feasted upon his fruits, the poet, during the last twenty years, has been so weighed down by almost unintermitting ill health, that he has published ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... fiery nature of Pelides, "strenuous, passionate, implacable, and fierce." And on this ground we may partly explain the unamiable light in which Odysseus appears in later Greek literature. Already in Pindar we find him singled out for disapproval. In Sophocles he has sunk still lower; and in Euripides his ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... any 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. By this being convinced ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... human nature is exalted by the simple recollection, that Isocrates [143] was the companion of Plato and Xenophon; that he assisted, perhaps with the historian Thucydides, at the first representation of the Oedipus of Sophocles and the Iphigenia of Euripides; and that his pupils Aeschines and Demosthenes contended for the crown of patriotism in the presence of Aristotle, the master of Theophrastus, who taught at Athens with the founders of the Stoic and Epicurean sects. [144] The ingenuous youth of Attica enjoyed ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... 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 and the emotions he excites ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... her, she confesses to the charge brought against her—supplicates for mercy and brandy, and totters to bed with the air of a Magdalene; but when she recovers the next morning, the whole scene is changed; she is an injured woman, a persecuted saint, a female Sophocles—declared to be mad only because she is a miracle. Poor Harry Darlington called upon her in town, the other day; he found her sitting in a large chair, and surrounded by a whole host of hangers-on, who were disputing by no means sotto voce, whether ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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
... private life, by the elder Cato, and yet Corvinus was then upwards of a hundred. Hippocrates, the best of physicians lived to an 104, but Asclepiades, a Persian physician, reached 150. Galen lived in undisturbed health to 104; Sophocles, the tragic poet, lived to 130; Democritus, the philosopher, lived to 104; and Euphranor taught his scholars at upward of 100; and yet what are these to Epiminedes of Crete, who, according to Theopompus, an unblemished historian, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... from recollection a book of accounts which had been accidentally destroyed) was in the habit of referring to book and chapter of an ancient author without consulting his notes. Nay, there is Professor Sophocles, of Harvard University, who, if you suddenly stop and interrogate him in the street, will tell you just how many times any given Greek word occurs in Thukydides, or in AEschylos, or in Plato, and will obligingly rehearse for you the context. If all extant copies of the Homeric ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... but Sturmius was not at home, and those two illustrious friends never saw each other. 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 ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... clothing the dead, and sometimes 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... depends substantially on the circumstance, that each of the contending powers is only conceived broadly and generally; the essential humanity in Prometheus and Agamemnon is but slightly tinged by poetic individualizing. Sophocles seizes human nature under its general conditions, the king, the old man, the sister; but not one of his figures displays the microcosm of man in all his aspects—the features of individual character. A high ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... 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 ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... 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 to the Agora, and there he will hear Lysias or Andocides ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... paused, or doubted. Thus it is that we find the idea of heroic duty filling so enormous a space in the tragedies of Corneille, that of absolute faith in the dramas of Calderon, that of the tyranny of destiny in the works of Sophocles. ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... works of Homer, Plato, Sophocles, etc. Her library catalogue shows also a goodly list of "Latyn Buikis," and classics. In a letter to Cecil, dated St. Andrews, 7th April 1562, Randolph incidentally states that Queen Mary then read daily after dinner "somewhat of ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... time, and not upon long or short, accented or unaccented syllables." His citation of Japanese poetry was also a case in point. Unquestionably, the lyrics and choruses of the Greek drama were thoroughly musical; Sophocles and Aeschylus were both teachers of the chorus. Many of the lyrics of the Elizabethan age were written especially for music, and more than one collector of these lyrics has bemoaned the fact that in later times there has been such a divorce between the two arts. Who will say that Coleridge's ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... owned by others, and which were much inferior to copies he could have purchased had he possessed money. He was early struck with the beauty of the Greek writers—and more especially the Greek tragedians. He wandered in the woods with Sophocles and Euripides in his hands, and many years after could recite their chief plays from memory. He got hold of the Greek romance of Theogines and Chariclea, but the priests would not tolerate such reading and committed the volume to the flames. He got another copy and it shared the same fate. He ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... lived?" writes 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 a Tartar woman, with water of the Amur, who wiped her earthen kettle with a horse-tail. I have ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... period five or six poets equal to the production of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Great poets appeared at long intervals. As he reckoned them, there had been but six given to the world—Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Sophocles and AEschylus. With the exception of the last two, there had been great spaces of time between these. Could it be supposed that at the very dawn of history there was a group, as it were, of men each in the highest degree gifted with "the vision and the faculty ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... who were to draft a 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 ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... perfection of 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 meet in a fashion which may be sought for in vain at others. These are the great periods ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... 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
... also called the Medicean, XXXII. 9, of the early eleventh century, the excellent MS. at Florence which contains Sophocles, Aeschylus and Apollonius Rhodius. This is far the best authority for the text ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... 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 face and head were of the Greek type. He ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... beautiful Greek portrait statue that we possess is the Lateran Sophocles (Fig 164). The figure has numerous small restorations, including the feet and the box of manuscript rolls. That Sophocles, the tragic poet, is represented, is known from the likeness of the head to a bust inscribed with ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... cunning 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, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... 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 Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... massive fronts of the respectable 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 in his lodging-house; ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf |
