home covered with shame and confusion. If firm
reliance can be placed on the authority of Lucian, the sons were, by the
Areopagus, voted madmen for having accused their father.

Like Aeschylus, Sophocles was a high military character, and was ranked
among the foremost defenders of his country. He commanded an army in the
war which the Athenians (by the desire of the renowned Pericles, who so
willed it at the instance of his mistress Aspasia) waged against the
inhabitants of Samos; and he returned from it triumphant.

Great men are seldom let to die like ordinary people: a man like
Sophocles of course must be provided with one or more modes of death
unlike those which take off other men. Some have said that on the
extraordinary success of one of his tragedies, he expired with extreme
joy;--an effect rather extreme for one who had for more than sixty years
been accustomed to such successes. Others have asserted that he dropped
dead in consequence of holding in his breath, while reading his tragedy
of Antigonus, so long that the action of his lungs ceased--an event not
at all probable. Another (Lucian) says he was choked by a grape-stone.
These various rumours destroying each other, not only by their
contradiction but by their improbability, leaves the cause of his death
in that uncertainty in which it might hitherto, and may forever remain,
without any injury to the subject. Men of ninety-five are likely enough
to go off suddenly, without violent joy--violent exertion, or even
grape-stones. The story of the grape-stone is told also of Anacreon.
Perhaps in both cases it was a poetical fiction to mark the love of wine
which distinguished these two personages; for Sophocles is accused by
Athenaeus of licentiousness and debauchery, particularly when he
commanded the Athenian army. In like manner it is asserted by Pausanias
that Bacchus appeared to Aeschylus under the shadow of a vine, and
ordered him to write tragedies, thereby figuratively alluding to the
well known truth that that poet drank wine excessively, and composed his
tragedies while he was drunk.

The public influence of Sophocles was so great that, at his instance,
the people of Athens went to the most unbounded expense in the
construction and decoration of their theatres. The additional
magnificence they derived from him is scarcely credible. In fact the
expense was carried so far that it became a reproach to the country,
and it was said that the Athenians lav