His minor poems, elegies, paeans, etc., have all perished ; and of his 1 oo and odd dramas only seven remain. These all belong to the period of his maturity (he had no decline) ; and not only the titles but some scanty fragments of more than 90 others have been preserved. Suidas says that "Sophocles began the practice of pitting play against play, instead of the tetralogy." If it were meant that Sophocles did not exhibit tetralogies, this statement would have simply to be rejected. For the word of Suidas (A.D. 95o) has no weight against quotations from the lists of tragic victories (oLoctaKaMat.), which there is no other reason for dis crediting. But it seems probable that the trilogy had ceased to be the continuous development of one legend or cycle of legends—if, indeed, it ever was so exclusively; and if a Sophoclean tetralogy was still linked together by some subtle bond of tragic thought or feeling, this would not affect the criticism of each play considered as an artistic whole. And these changes, or something like them, may have given rise to the statement of Suidas.
If the diction of Sophocles sometimes reminds his readers of the Odyssey, the subjects of his plays were more frequently chosen from those later epics which subsequently came to be embodied in the epic cycle, including probably, though there is no mention of such a thing, some early version of the Argonautic story. In one or other of these heroic poems the legends of all the great cities of Hellas were by this time embodied, and Sophocles drew from these the materials for his more concentrated art, much as Shakespeare made use of Hollingshed or Plutarch, or as the subjects of Tennyson's Idylls of the King were taken from Sir Thomas Malory.
The principle of selection seems to have been simply his per ception of the tragic possibilities of a particular fable. But to say that subsidiary or collateral motives were never present to Sophocles in the selection of a subject would be beyond the mark. His first drama, the Triptolemus, must have been full of local colouring; the Ajax appealed powerfully to the national pride; and in the Oedipus Coloneus some faint echoes even of oligarchi cal partisanship may be possibly discerned (see below). But even where they existed, such motives were collateral and sub sidiary; they were never primary. All else was subordinated to the dramatic, or, in other words, the purely human, interest of the fable. This central interest is even more dominant and per vading in Sophocles than the otherwise supreme influence of re ligious and ethical ideas. The idea of destiny, for example, was of course inseparable from Greek tragedy. Its prevalence was one of the conditions which presided over the art from its birth, and, unlike Aeschylus, who wrestles with gods, Sophocles simply ac cepts it, both as a datum of tradition and a fact of life. But in the free handling of Sophocles even fate and providence are adminicular to tragic art. They are instruments through which
sympathetic emotion is awakened, deepened, intensified. And, while the vision of the eternal and unwritten laws was holier yet, for it was not the creation of any former age, but rose and culmi nated with the Sophoclean drama, still to the poet and his Peri clean audience this was no abstract notion, but was inseparable from their impassioned contemplation of the life of man—so great and yet so helpless, aiming so high and falling down so far, a plaything of the gods and yet essentially divine.
Sophocles is often praised for skilful construction. But the secret of his skill depends in large measure on the profound way in which the central situation in each of his fables has been con ceived and felt. Concentration is the distinguishing note of tragedy, and it is by greater concentration that Sophocles is dis tinguished from other tragic poets. In the Septem contra Thebas or the Prometheus of Aeschylus there is still somewhat of epic enlargement and breadth; in the Hecuba and other dramas of Euripides separate scenes have an idyllic beauty and tenderness which affect us more than the progress of the action as a whole. But in following a Sophoclean tragedy we are carried steadily and swiftly onward, looking neither to the right nor to the left; the more elaborately any scene or single speech is wrought the more does it contribute to enhance the main emotion, and if there is a deliberate pause it is felt either as a welcome breathing space or as the calm of brooding expectancy.
The seven extant tragedies probably owe their preservation to some selection made for educational purposes in Alexandrian times. A yet smaller "sylloge" of three plays (Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus) continued current amongst Byzantine students and many more copies of these exist than is the case with the other four. Of these four the Antigone seems to have been the most popular, while an inner circle of readers were specially attracted by the Oedipus Coloneus.
No example of the poet's earliest manner has come down to us. The Antigone certainly belongs to the Periclean epoch. Modern readers have thought it strange that Creon, when convinced, goes to bury Polynices before attempting to release Antigone. It is obvious how this was necessary to the catastrophe, but it is also true to character, for Creon is not moved by compunction for the maiden nor by anxiety on Haemon's account, but by the fear of retribution coming on himself and the State, because of the sacred law of sepulture which he has defied. Antigone is the martyr of natural affection and of the religion of the family. But, as Kaibel pointed out, she is also the high-born Cadmean maiden, whose defiance of the oppressor is accentuated by the pride of race. She despises Creon as an upstart, who has done outrage not only to eternal ordinance, but to the rights of the royal house.