The fame of Sophocles is scarcely less than that of Aeschylus.  He was twenty-seven years of age when he publicly appeared as a poet.  He was born in Colonus, in the suburbs of Athens, 495 B.C., and was the contemporary of Herodotus, of Pericles, of Pindar, of Phidias, of Socrates, of Cimon, of Euripides,—­the era of great men, the period of the Peloponnesian War, when everything that was elegant and intellectual culminated at Athens.  Sophocles had every element of character and person to fascinate the Greeks,—­beauty of face, symmetry of form, skill in gymnastics, calmness and dignity of manner, a cheerful and amiable temper, a ready wit, a meditative piety, a spontaneity of genius, an affectionate admiration for talent, and patriotic devotion to his country.  His tragedies, by the universal consent of the best critics, are the perfection of the Greek drama; and they moreover maintain that he has no rival, Aeschylus and Shakspeare alone excepted, in the whole realm of dramatic poetry.  It was the peculiarity of Sophocles to excite emotions of sorrow and compassion.  He loved to paint forlorn heroes.  He was human in all his sympathies, perhaps not so religious as Aeschylus, but as severely ethical; not so sublime, but more perfect in art.  His sufferers are not the victims of an inexorable destiny, but of their own follies.  Nor does he even excite emotion apart from a moral end.  He lived to be ninety years old, and produced the most beautiful of his tragedies in his eightieth year, the “Oedipus at Colonus.”  Sophocles wrote the astonishing number of one hundred and thirty plays, and carried off the first prize twenty-four times.  His “Antigone” was written when he was forty-five, and when Euripides had already gained a prize.  Only seven of his tragedies have survived, but these are priceless treasures.

Euripides, the last of the great triumvirate of the Greek tragic poets, was born at Athens, 485 B.C.  He had not the sublimity of Aeschylus, nor the touching pathos of Sophocles, nor the stern simplicity of either, but in seductive beauty and successful appeal to passion was superior to both.  In his tragedies the passion of love predominates, but it does not breathe the purity of sentiment which marked the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles; it approaches rather to the tone of the modern drama.  He paints the weakness and corruptions of society, and brings his subjects to the level of common life.  He was the pet of the Sophists, and was pantheistic in his views.  He does not attempt to show ideal excellence, and his characters represent men not as they ought to be, but as they are, especially in corrupt states of society.  Euripides wrote ninety-five plays, of which eighteen are extant.  Whatever objection may be urged to his dramas on the score of morality, nobody can question their transcendent art or their great originality.

With the exception of Shakspeare, all succeeding dramatists have copied the three great Greek tragic poets whom we have just named,—­especially Racine, who took Sophocles for his model,—­even as the great epic poets of all ages have been indebted to Homer.