r. Twice he took part in the action, once as
the blind old Thamyris playing on the harp, and once in his own lost
tragedy, the "Nausicaa." There in the scene in which the Princess,
as she does in Homer's "Odyssey," comes down to the sea-shore with
her maidens to wash the household clothes, and then to play at ball--
Sophocles himself, a man then of middle age, did the one thing he
could do better than any there--and, dressed in women's clothes,
among the lads who represented the maidens, played at ball before the
Athenian people.

Just sixty years after the representation of the "Antigone," 10,000
Greeks, far on the plains of Babylon, cut through the whole Persian
army, as the railway train cuts through a herd of buffalo, and then
losing all their generals by treacherous warfare, fought their way
north from Babylon to Trebizond on the Black Sea, under the guidance
of a young Athenian, a pupil of Socrates, who had never served in the
army before. The retreat of Xenophon and his 10,000 will remain for
ever as one of the grandest triumphs of civilisation over brute
force: but what made it possible? That these men, and their
ancestors before them, had been for at least 100 years in _training_,
physical, intellectual, and moral, which made their bodies and their
minds able to dare and suffer like those old heroes of whom their
tragedy had taught them, and whose spirits they still believed would
help the valiant Greek. And yet that feat, which looks to us so
splendid, attracted, as far as I am aware, no special admiration at
the time. So was the cultivated Greek expected to behave whenever he
came in contact with the uncultivated barbarian.

But from what had sprung in that little state, this exuberance of
splendid life, physical, aesthetic, intellectual, which made, and
will make the name of Athens and of the whole cluster of Greek
republics for ever admirable to civilised man? Had it sprung from
long years of peaceful prosperity? From infinite making of money and
comfort, according to the laws of so-called political economy, and
the dictates of enlightened selfishness? Not so. But rather out of
terror and agony, and all but utter ruin--and out of a magnificent
want of economy, and the divine daring and folly of self-sacrifice.

In Salamis across the strait a trophy stood, and round that trophy,
forty years before, Sophocles, the author of "Antigone," then sixteen
years of age, the loveliest and most cultivated